I swear sometimes I can feel that stone in my head. A palpable presence, an unwelcome thing that I want to squeeze out of my skull like a plum pip, using nothing but the sheer pressure of thought and concentration. If I just think hard enough…
That stone was my father’s legacy to me, his keepsake. Beneath his genial surface, somewhere in the depths, I would sometimes catch a glimpse—of a smooth, bone-colored stone. A stone made of calcified guilt and shame.
We were tugboats in the river of history, my father and I, pulling in opposite directions. He needed to forget. I need to remember. For him, only the present moment would set him free. For me, the key lies buried in the past. The only way forward is back.
I had never seen a photograph of a real dead body. A murdered body. Lying face down was something that looked like an old bundle of torn clothing. But there seemed to be a hand attached to it. And another hand, unconnected, a few inches away. What appeared to be a head was lying face down and had a hole the size of a fifty-cent piece in the back of it. But it was the body I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t there.
There was a dark side to my Marcia Brady madness. I knew that I liked her in a way that was different from the other kids. I didn’t just want to be her friend. I wanted to kiss her. […] And, without being told, I knew this was not ‘normal.’ Somehow I knew that I posed what researchers call a ‘social identity threat’ to myself.
It was not just Germans who hated the Jews—it was Poles as well. Betraying them, selling them, profiteering and collaborating in their destruction.
[…]
It was as if someone had plunged a red-hot iron into my sympathetic nervous system. Pain shot through my whole body. I lay on my bed trembling. The Poles were not just the good people. We were also the bad people. We had not helped the Jews. Had my father hurt the Jews?
It was from [his] arrested and idealized adolescent memory […] that my father’s […] standards of excellence were born, like Pallas Athena out of the head of Zeus. There was always something strangely Leni Riefenstahl-ish about my father’s veneration of sporting prowess. I recoiled from it instantly and forcefully: the moment I became proficient at a sport I began to feel like a Nazi and would stop.
I both wanted and didn’t want Kerry to know how I felt about her. I wanted to kiss her […] but I was afraid she would think I was the most reviled and despised thing: a lezzo. My tender feelings were like a jammed signal, unable to escape my furiously beating heart. I was paralyzed, like a hysterical mute, wanting to tell her but desperate to hide my true nature. So it was that the moment of my gay adolescence was delayed at take-off and has, I fear, been stuck on the runway ever since.
While it was me, it didn’t feel like it was me. I felt as though I were possessed by some evil spirit. No one knew very much about weight loss back then. The consensus was: eat less. But I didn’t seem to be able to do that. I was plagued with questions that I could not answer, except as condemnations. I called myself cruel names: weak, greedy, lazy.
How could I explain what I hadn’t even begun to understand myself? That I was locked in the Jedi mind trick of my father’s denial? That I was the victim of a victim. All I knew was what I feared—that I was not like other human beings and I was devoid of normal emotion. And there was no way I was going to let these [friends], kind and patient as they were, see that.
Now I would say it was survivor’s guilt. By a fluke my father had made it out of Poland and so his children had been spared all of this. I wanted to make it up to my Polish family for all they had suffered. But how? There was no plan. And no relief.
I decided I must be some kind of sexual traitor, who had colluded in order to enjoy the benefits of a straight life. […] I didn’t understand that I was acting out a psychodrama. My role was written. I was predetermined and I didn’t even know it.
The pasteurization of my personality did not help with my comedy writing. Comedy is all about finding your voice. […] Your voice is best when it is formed where it is found. But what if you are trying to be what you are not? What if you don’t know who you are?
In the following months, as it gathered pace, I started to feel like I was strapped to a rocket. Magazine covers, interviews, endorsements. Suddenly I really was a household name, dogged by the horrible hollow feeling that the wrong ‘me’ had shot to fame. At night I dreamed that I was hanging on to the outside rail of a runaway train.
He was reproaching her—for what? Her weakness?—and he was recasting her response as self-indulgent. A useless thing that was no help to anyone.
As a man his job was not to feel. It was to act, to do something. Maybe Izabella’s father was right—feelings are what get people killed.
But dear God, if you cannot weep at Auschwitz?
I was thirty-one years old. I was a brave Pole. I felt the expectation to man up, and my emotions fell into step with my father’s. They floated off like vapor. I felt, at that moment, nothing except irritation with my mother’s weakness.
Fame never saved anyone. More than anything Hollywood sat directly on the fault line of all my insecurities. I suspect it would not have been a good idea for someone like me, with so many cracks and fissures, to live in an earthquake zone. […] Some small, quiet, healthy part of me knew that if I stayed in Hollywood things would not go well for me. The gulf between my real self and my false self would grow ever wider.
The crucial difference between Lesbian Gay Transgender Bi-Sexual Intersex and Questioning people and other minorities is this: in every other minority group the family shares the minority status. In fact it is often something that unites them. But gay people are a minority within the family. A minority of one. […] All through our growing up, from the instant we realize we are gay, we live with the gnawing fear that our parents’ love could turn to hatred in an instant.
Growing up I had glimpsed [Peter’s] capacity for cold-bloodedness. I was never afraid of my father but I began to wonder how much I was the child of his darkness as well as his light. It wasn’t what my father did or said or told me. It was what he felt. At times it emanated from him like a force field. I was irradiated with his guilt. Whatever it was he had done I had to make my own peace with it.
[Peter] squints into the distance as though he might find…what? Answers? Justice? Wisdom?
‘How would I react?’ he asks straight at the camera. ‘You see you don’t know your reaction until you are actually there, until you are confronted with the circumstances. There were people swearing what they wouldn’t do. And when it came to the crunch…they bloody well did it.’
My father knew that even in his war, a just war where Hitler had to be stopped, the balance of good and evil was no simple thing.
[…]
‘I was good at it. Good at organizing the aktions.’ And there it was. The bastard emotion. Hard, shining, gleaming pride.
Was it the stone of madness? His pride in his efficiency as a killer? It seemed he was simultaneously proud and ashamed of what he had done. Maybe that was what he couldn’t forgive himself for.
Would my altered external experience change my inner reality so much that my soul would have a different vibration?
[…]
Aside from the catcalls, the messages from fans were mixed. ‘Congratulations on your weight loss, Magda!’ they cried. ‘But don’t lose too much weight!’ they hastily cautioned. ‘You’ll still be funny, won’t you?’
I felt like some kind of public utility. People had a stake in me. Clearly the link between fat and jolly is still alive and well in the public imagination. The question was, did I still believe it?
Was this the gift of my Irish inheritance—the ability to survive loss but at the cost of loving easily? […] when I began to sob uncontrollably—inexplicably—it was for my family. For my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents and beyond. And for Mary Jane’s ten nameless children buried in the cold Irish earth. And maybe also for myself. Because I wondered, in that moment, if this was why I have never had children of my own.
Was I too soft, too privileged? Yet again I was unsure which was the mad response—feeling or not feeling. And which response was more useful—mindfulness or denial.
When [Peter] went into that sewer he was a man with a country, a family, a future. When he climbed out he had lost everything.
[Peter] was trying to cure me of weakness. In order to help me survive he thought he needed to expunge normal human frailty. […] He tried to make us strong like him because if we succumbed there was only one possible course of action. He would have to do his duty. He would have to kill us.
He was toughening me up so that he wouldn’t have to kill me.
This, then, is the stone of his madness.
And I think: this is what war is. It is a universe in which doing the right thing is almost always simultaneously doing the wrong thing. And that is madness.
‘That’s what I believe is real heroism. People who are afraid, have their pants full, and yet—they go and do something. Then you say, By God! It took courage to do that! But if you’re not afraid, it’s easy.’
And it dawns on me: that’s me. [Peter] is describing me. That is what I have just done.
