Nine — Things I Achieved That He Found a Way Around

Nine — Things I Achieved That He Found a Way Around

I will make a list. Not for self-pity — I want to say this first. For record. For the same reason Kafka kept the letter: because the keeping is a form of insisting that the things happened, that they were real, that they deserved something.

At twelve: the recitation competition. First place, fourteen schools. He said recitation would not get me a job.

At thirteen: I was selected for the school debate team. We reached the district finals. He said debating was a skill for politicians and lawyers, and did I want to be a politician or a lawyer, because if not, what was the point.

At fifteen: I wrote a short story that was published in the school literary magazine. A real publication, with a cover, with my name in the table of contents. I showed it to him. He read the first paragraph. He said: the writing is good but writers don't eat.

At sixteen: I scored the highest in my class on the mid-year examination. The teacher called my mother to tell her. He did not call. When my mother told him, he said: mid-year means nothing, what matters is the final. The final came. I scored well on the final. He said: let's see what the board exams bring.

The board exams came. I did well on the board exams. He said: now comes college, and college is different, and let's not celebrate too early.

There was no too early. There was no early at all. There was only the horizon, moving. Every achievement I reached arrived to find the horizon already moved, the bar already raised, the terms of sufficiency already renegotiated.

At seventeen: I was made class representative. A small thing, I know. But I had been voted in by the other students — not appointed, voted — which meant that the people who sat next to me every day, who knew me without the performance, had decided I was worth choosing. I told him at dinner. He said: class representative is a distraction, keep your focus on studies.

I stopped telling him things after that. Not all at once. Gradually. The way rivers change course.

But I kept achieving. This is the thing I find, in retrospect, most complicated. I kept achieving, even after I stopped telling him about it. The habit of effort had become mine by then, independent of its original source. I was working for myself, by the time I was seventeen, eighteen — or at least I told myself I was. Whether I was also still working for him, still producing evidence for the never-convening jury, still maintaining the motion of the bucket down the sealed well — this I cannot say with certainty.

The seal and the habit of lowering became, eventually, impossible to separate.