Pleasure: a Novel in Stories

By Eva Marer

Mimis mother is the German daughter of a reluctant Third Reich infantry conscript. Her father is the Hungarian Jewish son of concentration camp survivors. Haunted by ghosts from their ravaged European past, the family settles in the arcadia of a Midwestern American suburb where, no matter what they do, they will never quite fit in.
In Eva Marers posthumous novel, the eerily sensitive child narrators navigation of three cultures American, German and Hungarian is complicated by her capacity to remember things she herself never lived. Among Marers papers was this description of the book:

History demands that we never forget, and yet we have forgotten. But some remember what they have never seen. This is the conundrum faced by the novel's seven-year-old protagonist, Mimi, who, as the narrative opens, is unable even to articulate her conflict: What is it to live a memory that is not your own?

In a strikingly original take on the classic immigrant tale, love infuses history in such a way that, rather than being blunted or subdued with time, it takes on new life in the febrile mind of a overly imaginative child whose impassioned empathy for her father makes her feel his past suffering even more fervently than her own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483626611

Eva Marer

Eva Marer (1969 – 2009) spent her childhood in Bloomington, Indiana. Daughter of a German mother and a Hungarian father, she grew up navigating three cultures. An accomplished journalist, her passion was fiction. An excerpt of her posthumous novel-in-stories, Pleasure, was published in the Summer 2009 issue of the literary magazine, “Open City.”

Book preview

Pleasure

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A Novel in Stories

Eva Marer

Copyright © 2013 by Eva Marer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 04/26/2013

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Contents

Foreword to Pleasure

Pleasure

Ultimo

The German Lesson

Story of a Marriage

Mal de pays

Living/Dead

Nagymama

In That Garden

Changes

Foreword to Pleasure

I met Eva in Paris in 1991. She was from Indiana, I was from Pennsylvania. We were both twenty-two and wanted to be writers. Eva was tiny, her dark brown hair cut very short against her well-shaped head. She talked a mile a minute in various languages, including French, which she, like me, was apparently just learning. But the abyss between her French and mine was ridiculous. Your friend must be desperate, a guy at a party said to Eva, referring to the discrepancy in our language skills. Eva’s answer was quick: Of course not, there are other things she does better than me. She was used to being the brilliant one in her family and of being protective of her beloved older sister. She quickly found a job teaching the SATs to French people. Her own scores had been near perfect.

Living at first in Pigalle, just a few blocks from the Moulin Rouge, she then moved north to the Goutte d’Or, an immigrant neighborhood. Every once in a while, there was a police raid and the bulk of the population went scattering. She was reading Musil, seeing different men. She was beautiful, but didn’t seem to focus too much on that, as if beauty were static and her mind couldn’t put up with much stasis for long. Fast-talking, she could also be sharp-tongued. She made some people nervous, this tiny, brilliant, jabbering creature who wasn’t afraid to contradict them. When men said things to her on the street, she always had a quick comeback. One morning standing with her on the curb in Pigalle, a guy made a comment I typically didn’t catch, to which she shot back, Are you stupid every day or just on Tuesdays?

While others marveled at Eva, she marveled too. She had all kinds of friends, was much more catholic in her appreciation than I was at that time. She would sometimes grow enamored with certain people, men and women, admire them disproportionately, it seemed to me, which made me feel protective of her.

She had dark circles under her eyes. Her occasional causticity was rivalled by her sweetness. She left sweet messages on your answering machine, her voice happy, playful: Hello, darling, I miss you. She called you sweet names, told you you looked beautiful, said I love you easily, naturally, none of which I, with my Waspy New England background, was remotely used to.

She left Paris, then I did. By 2000, we were living in the same city again, New York. Eva had received her degree in journalism at Columbia University and was working as a journalist. She was living with roommates in Brooklyn, taking medication to temper her inherited manic-depression, which had manifested itself a few years prior. She was also still writing her own work, though she was adamant about not wanting to write a book about her experience of manic depression, which would have been the obvious choice. Her passion was literature.

As in the Paris days, we were both in our corners, working away or trying to, dreaming literary dreams. We met and talked about books and writing, but rarely shared the material itself. Flamboyant in some ways, Eva was very private in others.

Eva got married and hosted clothing swaps in her and her husband Dan’s Chelsea apartment, breezy affairs involving booze and food, cigarettes, and sometimes joints, blown out cracked windows, the gaggle of women standing around half-naked, confessions and fashion consultations mixed in with discussions about the issues of the day. Eva’s contributions were typically inimitable—If anyone has nipples placed slightly low and to the right, this halter top would be perfect.

In 2007, Eva was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. A year and a half later, just shy of her 40th birthday, she was gone.

A few weeks before she died, we met in Roanoke, Virginia where her mother was taking care of her, to discuss her unpublished fiction, above all, the novel she’d been writing for years. Not to have finished it was her biggest regret, she said. As always, it was difficult for her to show work she didn’t deem ready, but she finally did give me a CD with the stipulation that, apart from the pieces she considered finished—Pleasure, The German Lesson—I wouldn’t read the rest until she was gone.

I was grateful to have something to do in the wake of her death. I sat down with the CD and began opening files one after the other. Excercises in character description, earliest memory. Notations of dreams, a litany of inanimate objects, the stray poem. Reading lists in different categories: first novels, mystery, biography, history, religion, a list of topics to research. In short, a writer at work, searching for her voice. I opened files from the Paris days, some of which rang a distant bell from conversations we’d had, youthful, quirky, as yet unresolved. And then I opened another file and read:

Outside a cool breeze coursed through the open window, carrying with it the prayers of crickets. Now it was cicada season too and their pulsations were like a throbbing headache without pain. Every morning, their father fished their spent shells out of the swimming pool with a long-handled net and threw them over the wood fence. He shivered, for he hated anything that teemed: insects, rodents, even crowds. Gertrud told the children they must not make fun of his phobias, which likely arose from his having spent the War years in the Budapest Ghetto, mashed up against suppurating bodies ridden with lice and crabs and fleas, and trying to sleep while rats and cockroaches scurried across his face and legs. They must, in a sense, be forgiving of him, as was she, a German, who had dedicated her life to somehow making up for the War, though they had both been children then and faultless. Gertrud had inherited from her father, a gardener and reluctant Third Reich infantry conscript, a green thumb, and she had turned the swimming area into a private idyll, a pasha’s garden where ivy, clematis, wisteria and magnolia covered the wooden slats of the high fence, and the pool’s environs were jeweled with shrubs, dwarf pines, and blossoming Japanese cherry trees that came alive in spring. Oddly, she herself never swam, only pottered and watered and pruned.

I felt something of the thrill that Eva must have felt when she wrote this paragraph. Here it was, what she had been searching for, the voice in which to tell the story she needed to tell: an immigrant family, haunted by ghosts from a ravaged European past, settling in the arcadia of a Midwestern American suburb where, no matter what they do, they will never quite fit in.

I read on. Here was a distillation of the sensibility I knew, undiluted by shyness or social manners, expanding over pages: the child narrator’s eerie awareness, acute beyond usefulness, the black humor that ran like the veins of a black mineral through the family minefields, the gusto of the physical and psychological portraits, the irony set off by an entirely disarming sweetness, above all, relating to family life. In a touching reversal of the classic childhood narrative, where the child pities herself for having to deal with her parents, Eva’s narrator feels great pity for her parents, especially her mother, for having to deal with her.

Other things surprised me: the formal elegance of the prose, the scope of Eva’s ambition. Most novels, and especially first ones, are highly ambitious and then assume more modest proportions out of necessity in order to be written. Eva, in her stubborness and patience, appeared to have been unwilling to let this happen. Her mental illness also surely slowed her down, wreaking havoc, taking up stores of energy and time. Although, on the other hand, this illness contributed to the work, making her aware and appreciative, and even sometimes celebratory, of dazzlingly complex states of mind.

As I settled down to work, I discovered the lacunae in the manuscript that Eva had mentioned, the mapping out of plot portions that had been left unwritten, scenarios set up that never occurred. Yet it also appeared that those parts of the imagined book that had been left unwritten had been left unwritten for a reason—precisely because they bore less charge. Moreover, it appeared that, with the two polished story-chapters Eva had shown me, she herself had been in the process of reshaping the book, less as a drama that hurtles forwards through time than as a series of vaguely chronological meditations on her themes: the absurdist conundrums of the immigrant experience, the transmission of memory and betrayal, mal de pays, a child’s despair at having to grow up, adolescence, the first flowering of mental illness, the inexorable sweetness of family life.

I went back to the text, reread and reread until I had the whole corpus vivid in my mind. A remarkable, and very funny, third story, Ultimo, about the tension-filled convening of three Hungarians in the Cornbelt town to play the cryptic Hungarian card game of that name, was also practically finished. As were large portions of Story of a Marriage, about the parents’ meeting and courtship in Florida, the state from which such perversions routinely arise, and In That Garden, a haunting visit to the German grandparents’ house in Heidelberg. Elsewhere, Eva’s predominant form was the fragment. I began placing fragments side by side, following her lead, linking them through subject matter, style or mood, taking as models the chapters she’d finished. Everything would be in her voice with only the addition of an occasional shaping