North Korean workers in Middle East and Europe

Stalin-style gulag in modern day Poland?

Bogdan Zaryn

Insight Central Europe 31.3.2006

Gdansk Shipyard, the cradle of Solidarity, which toppled communist rule in Poland, has a group of North Korean workers busy on the site. Shipyard officials say that the North Korean welders are filling vacancies left open by Polish workers who have left for greener pastures in the EU. But the team is said to be working in a gulag environment. Apparently, the repressive North Korean government is pocketing their wages, while the workers are constantly being watched by North Korean communist party members.

Press reports say that North Korean welders are kept under guard by communist party members brought in from North Korea. Their families are literally held hostage if they refuse to work long hours. Eye witness reports say that the workers have been in Gdansk for roughly 12 months and keep pretty much to themselves. They are driven to and from hangar KI, the largest working facility in the shipyard. Insiders say that the North Korean welders work 12 to 16 hours a day. This North Korean welder has been working at the Gdansk shipyard for the past 12 months.
"If this situation doesn't clear up, we will not work here. More people from North Korea are waiting to come here and work to fill vacancies'.
Over the past five years 75 North Koreans have worked in the area. But this employee from the Democratic People's republic embassy in Warsaw denies press reports.
"75 people working there NO way. Fact is, our people are working there and what the papers wrote about the conditions they are working in isn't entirely true."
According to press reports, the North Korean welders are kept under scrutiny by Selene, a personnel company that has employed them. After several dozen phone calls I managed to get hold of shipyard administrative Director Bogdan Oleszek who argues that the workers were not hired by the shipyard.
"The truth is that the Gdansk shipyard has hired a company to employ the Koreans. So the shipyard itself doesn't employ the Koreans directly.'
The yard has survived free market reforms, but Poland's accession to the European Union two years ago has led to a drain of skilled workers. Many welders and other qualified workers have jumped ship in search for better paid jobs in other countries of the Union.
"There is a lack of welders and assembly men. Most of our people have left Poland to work for better paying jobs elsewhere in the Union'
Market analyst Robert Strybel from the Polish American Journal says that the situation at the yard is ironic. According to him, the Solidarity past of the plant belies what's going on there right now.
"It's on the one hand ironic that the cradle of the Solidarity movement that led to the collapse of communism across the continent is employing people from one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes that exists today. However this is basically an economic issue because Poland is loosing may of its skilled workers who are going to the West"
Gdansk shipyard officials say that the North Koreans have all the requirements needed to carry out their duties. Meanwhile, press reports suggest that Polish security agents often visit the yard and ask workers whether the newcomers have been caught doing something else that just welding.

North Koreans in Czech jobs: Slave labor?

Mindy Kay Bricker

International Herald Tribune 8 November 2006

NACHOD, Czech Republic: At a time when North Korea is under fire for its nuclear weapons program, nearly 400 North Korean women are quietly helping the motherland by working at humble jobs in Czech Republic and sending their wages home.
The women, mainly seamstresses, are now themselves at the center of debate, with some critics contending that their work amounts to state-imposed forced labor. Vaclav Havel, the former president, is among those who have said that the Czech Republic should not be used as a base for filling North Korea's coffers.
Although the Czech government stopped issuing new work visas for North Koreans in June, those who entered previously are still employed at various sites, including the Snezka textile factory here in Nachod, where they sew headrests and armrests for BMWs, Mercedes, Renaults and other cars sold in Western Europe.
Miloslav Cermak, general manager at Snezka, says that 82 of his 750 employees are North Korean. Aged 20 to 28, they came to this town near the Polish border on three- to four-year contracts.
The women are paid by the piece, with top workers stitching as many as 350 headrests a day, Cermak said, and earning monthly salaries of up to 25,556 koruna, or $1,165, well above the country's minimum wage of 7,955 koruna. The lowest paid North Korean worker earns 8,200 koruna, a common salary for new employees, he said.

"If someone calls it slavery," Cermak said, "I'm not the person responsible for that."
But some do. The situation of such women, said Petra Burcikova, director of La Strada, a leading Czech anti-trafficking organization, "could remind one of state-imposed forced labor."
Since 2004, the year this formerly Communist country joined the European Union, Czech officials have been monitoring the working conditions of North Koreans employed here.
Currently, 408 workers of whom 392 are women are employed in the country. Labor inspectors have found no gross violations of labor law, Deputy Labor Minister Petr Simerka said in a telephone interview.
But unofficial information gathered by the Czech police indicates that the North Koreans deposit nearly 80 percent of their salaries into one collective bank account, according to Lenka Simackova of the Interior Ministry's strategy and analysis unit.
Officials suspect that these salaries are delivered to the North Korean government or its embassy in Prague rather than to the workers' families in North Korea, as these women have maintained to investigators.
"To prove human trafficking or forced labor, we would need testimony from the potential victims, which we didn't get," said Jakub Svec, deputy head of the Interior Ministry's strategy and analysis unit.
"They all say that they are satisfied, and that they are much better off than they were back in North Korea," he said. "We don't know how to motivate these women to testify against their embassy, or their country, actually."
Without testimony, Svec said, officials cannot begin an investigation to gather bank information. He said Prague had stopped issuing visas to North Korean workers at least until the end of this year.
"It's not forever," he said. "But it's our reaction to the problem."
Prague imposed its visa ban after the European Parliament heard testimony in March from Kim Tae San, a former North Korean diplomat who was stationed in Prague before defecting to South Korea in 2002. While at the embassy, Kim brought North Korean women here to work, he said.
"Almost their entire monthly salaries," Kim testified, "are deposited directly in an account controlled by the North Korean government."
He said that 55 percent was skimmed from the top of the women's salaries as a "voluntary" contribution to North Korea. After additional deductions - for accommodation and items like birthday gifts for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il - the women were left with around $20 to $30 a month, he said.
Nonetheless, human rights activists say, the opportunity to work abroad is enticing for North Koreans.
"They probably weren't brought against their will," said Kay Seok, the North Korea supervisor for Human Rights Watch, in a telephone interview from Seoul. "They probably chose to go, and would choose to stay."
"What we want," she added, is to ensure "that they get paid appropriately and that they can do what they want outside work hours."
Investigators have been unable to ascertain the extent of the North Koreans' personal freedoms, like speech and movement, Svec said.
In Nachod, the North Korean workers socialize with their foreign co-workers at the Snezka factory. They speak Czech and talk about work, but never socialize after work hours, colleagues said, and they are watched over by a translator who most often answers for them.

Without having the freedom to speak, "that means that they don't have any freedom at all on the ground of a democratic country," said Willy Fautre, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers. "This is just more evidence that the women are hostages of North Korean officials."
Some Czech officials defend the practice of hiring North Koreans.
Asked whether the program would be halted definitively, Simerka replied, "We don't think about it at all." The fact that the North Koreans "work in a democratic country and see different working conditions" and a different way of thinking, he added, could be of benefit when they return home and "talk about how different it is."
Pyongyang has sent workers out to a wide variety of countries, according to rights activists, among them Bulgaria, China, Kuwait, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Yemen. Most of the male workers are employed in the timber industry in Siberia, Fautre said.
Last month, Istvan Szent-Ivanyi, deputy chairman of the European Parliament's delegation for relations with the Korean Peninsula, proposed that the delegation officially look at the issue by the end of this year.
"The problem is that their personal liberties are severely limited here in the European Union," he said. "We have to provide not only for our own citizens, but for everyone, the same freedom."

North Koreans Toil Abroad under Grim Conditions

Barbara Demick

Los Angeles Times 27 December 2005

Women provide badly needed labor in Czech towns and elsewhere. Pyongyang keeps a tight rein on them and takes most of their wages.
Zelezna, Czech Republic - The old schoolhouse stands alone at the end of a quiet country road flanked by snow-flecked wheat fields. From behind the locked door, opaque with smoked glass, comes the clatter of sewing machines and, improbably enough, the babble of young female voices speaking Korean.
The elementary school closed long ago for lack of students. The entire village 20 miles west of Prague has only about 200 people.
The schoolhouse is now a factory producing uniforms. Almost all the workers are North Korean, and the women initially looked delighted to see visitors. It gets lonely working out here, thousands of miles from home. They crowded around to chat.
"I'm not so happy here. There is nobody who speaks my language. I'm so far from home," volunteered a tentative young woman in a T-shirt and sweatpants who said she was from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
But as she spoke, an older woman with stern posture and an expressionless face - a North Korean security official - passed by in the corridor. The young women scattered wordlessly and disappeared into another room, closing and bolting the door behind them.
Hundreds of young North Korean women are working in garment and leather factories like this one, easing a labor shortage in small Czech towns. Their presence in this recent member of the European Union is something of a throwback to before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when Prague, like Pyongyang, was a partner in the Communist bloc.
The North Korean government keeps most of the earnings, apparently one of the few legal sources of hard currency for an isolated and impoverished government believed to be living off counterfeiting, drug trafficking and weapons sales. Experts estimate that there are 10,000 to 15,000 North Koreans working abroad in behalf of their government in jobs ranging from nursing to construction work. In addition to the Czech Republic, North Korea has sent workers to Russia, Libya, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Angola, defectors say.
Almost the entire monthly salary of each of the women here, about $260, the Czech minimum wage, is deposited directly into an account controlled by the North Korean government, which gives the workers only a fraction of the money.
To the extent that they are allowed outside, they go only in groups. Often they are accompanied by a guard from the North Korean Embassy who is referred to as their "interpreter." They live under strict surveillance in dormitories with photographs of North Korea's late founder Kim Il Sung and current leader Kim Jong Il gracing the walls. Their only entertainment is propaganda films and newspapers sent from North Korea, and occasional exercise in the yard outside.
"This is 21st century slave labor," said Kim Tae San, a former official of the North Korean Embassy in Prague. He helped set up the factories in 1998 and served as president of one of the shoe factories until he defected to South Korea in 2002.
It also was Kim's job to collect the salaries and distribute the money to workers. He said 55% was taken off the top as a "voluntary" contribution to the cause of the socialist revolution. The women had to buy and cook their own food. Additional sums were deducted for accommodation, transportation and such extras as flowers for the birthdays of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
The women even had to pay for the propaganda films they were forced to watch. By the time all the deductions were made, each received between $20 and $30 a month. They spent less than $10 of it on food, buying only the cheapest local macaroni.
"They try to save money by not eating," said Kim, the former embassy official. He says that his wife, who accompanied him on visits to the factory, was concerned that women's menstruation stopped, their breasts shriveled and many experienced acute constipation. "We were always trying to get them to spend more on food, but they were desperate to bring money home to their families."
Kim said that Czechs often mistook the North Korean women for convict laborers because of the harsh conditions. "They would ask the girls, 'What terrible thing did you do to be sent here to work like this?' "
In fact, the women usually come from families deemed sufficiently loyal to the government that their daughters will not defect. With salaries at state-owned firms in North Korea as low as $1 per month, the chance to work abroad for a three-year stint is considered a privilege.
Having shed its own communist dictatorship, the Czech Republic is sensitive to human rights issues. On the other hand, the country has to employ about 200,000 guest workers, largely to replace Czechs who have left to seek higher wages in Western Europe.
At the beginning of December, there were 321 North Korean garment workers in six locations in the country, according to the Czech Labor Ministry. The North Koreans declined to speak publicly about the factories.
"It is not in our interest to provide information. This is a private thing and nobody should care about it," said a North Korean Embassy employee supervising factory workers in Nachod, a town near the Polish border.
Czech officials say the North Koreans are model workers.
"They are so quiet you would hardly know they are here," said Zdenek Belohlavek, labor division director for the district of Beroun, which encompasses Zelezna and Zebrak, a larger town where about 75 North Korean seamstresses stitch underwear.
Belohlavek displayed a thick dossier of photos and vital statistics of the women, most of whom were born between 1979 and 1981. All their paperwork is in perfect order, and the factories appear to be in full compliance with the law, he said.
Belohlavek acknowledged that labor investigators had only communicated with the workers through an interpreter from the North Korean Embassy. He said they were troubled by the women's apparent lack of freedom.
"They have guards. I don't know why. It's not like anybody would steal them," he said.
Another labor investigator, Jirina Novakova, who has visited the factories, also complained that the women's salaries were deposited into a single bank account in the name of a North Korean Embassy interpreter.
"Frankly, we have some difficulty with that," she said. "But if they do it voluntarily, there is not much we can do about it."
Jiri Balaban, owner of the Zelezna factory, said it was none of his business what the workers did in their free time or how they spent their money. "My business is that they work," he said.
In theory, the women could escape. Although the doors are locked from the inside in Zelezna, the windows are not barred. But where would they go?
Few speak any language other than Korean. Zelezna has one pay phone, a mayor's office that is open once a week for two hours and a general store so small that you have to order bread a day in advance.
In Zebrak, the North Koreans only go downtown to the supermarket in groups on Fridays between 4 and 6 p.m. They live in a pleasant-looking, lemon-yellow dormitory that was recently constructed across the parking lot from their factory. Blinds are kept drawn and the doors locked. Deliverymen must leave packages on the front stoop.
The Baroque town square in Nachod, its Christmas lights, Chinese restaurant and movie theater showing "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and "March of the Penguins," was off-limits for the 40 North Korean women who stitch leather suitcases and belts along with guest workers from Vietnam, Mongolia and Ukraine.
"They can't go anywhere. You can't talk to them," security guard Antonin Janicek said. "The other women go to the pub and the cinema. Some get married here. But not the Koreans."
Last year, when a Czech television crew attempted to film a shoe factory in Skutec, a group of irate North Koreans broke their camera. After the incident, the factory decided it would no longer employ North Koreans because of bad publicity and human rights concerns.
"They oftentimes do not even have enough [money] for food," Vaclav Kosner, financial director of the factory, was quoted as telling the CTK news agency. "They are sometimes truly hungry."
The seamstresses were first sent abroad at the height of North Korea's famine to raise money to buy raw materials for North Korean shoes and clothing. North Korea officially was a partner in the factories through two trading companies, but former diplomat Kim said that this was a front to cover the government's embarrassment about having to send workers abroad. The factories are mostly Czech-owned, but the underwear factory in Zebrak is owned by an Italian company.
By far the largest number of North Koreans working outside their country are in Russia, where they do mostly logging and construction in military-style camps run by the North Korean government. When the camps were set up in the early 1970s, the workers were North Korean prisoners. But as the North Korean economy disintegrated in the late 1980s, doing hard labor in Siberia came to be seen as a reward because at least it meant getting adequate food.
Kim Yong Il, who got a job in mine construction in the 1990s because of his brother's political connections, said he and a dozen other men were kept in a house with bars on the windows and a padlock on the door. He received no money, but his family in North Korea received extra food rations. He defected in 1996 and now lives in Seoul. He is one of about 50 North Koreans who escaped the camps in Russia and are now living in South Korea, according to the Christian North Korean Assn., a defector group in Seoul.
There have been no such incidents with the seamstresses in the Czech Republic. The fact that they come from Pyongyang, home only to the most loyal North Koreans, means that their families have privileges that could be taken away in an instant if a relative were to defect.
"If they were to run away, their families would vanish into thin air and they would never see them again," said Kim, the former diplomat.
In 2002, the diplomat and his wife defected in Prague and sought asylum from South Korea. Soon afterward, their adult son and daughter were taken away. He believes they were sent to a prison camp.
Kim, 53, recently asked a contact in North Korea to gather some information about relatives. "Even my wife's relatives, down to the second cousins, have disappeared," he said. "We couldn't find a trace of them."

Russia's energy power

Russia strong-arms energy-hungry West
Energy riches make Kremlin impervious

Steven Lee Myers

International Herald Tribune 26 December 2006

MOSCOW: Inside the Kremlin last week, the executives of three major international companies — Royal Dutch Shell, Mitsubishi and Mitsui — heaped praise on the man whose government had effectively forced them to cede control of the world's largest combined oil and natural gas development.
"Thank you very much for your support," Jeroen van der Veer, Shell's chief executive, told President Vladimir Putin during a meeting that ended a six-month regulatory assault on the project, Sakhalin-2, at the cost of granting control to the state energy giant, Gazprom. "This was a historic occasion," he said.
It was also a telling one, with lessons that extend beyond energy policy to include such disparate matters as the murders of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent in London, and Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent journalist.
Putin's Russia, buoyed by its oil and gas riches, has become so confident — so arrogant, its critics say — that it has become impervious to the criticism that once might have modified its behavior. And those who might have once criticized, from investors to foreign governments, have largely acquiesced to the new reality confronting them.
The Kremlin is now dictating its terms with greater assertiveness than it has at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which took place 15 years ago this coming Monday. Many had hoped that the Russian presidency of the Group of 8 industrial nations this year would temper Putin's diplomacy, but it has not.
Russia began 2006 by making good on a threat to cut off natural gas supplies to Ukraine to get a higher price for Gazprom. The shut-off, though brief, provoked a storm of concern and fear in Europe about dependency on Russian energy, and Russia is ending 2006 by warning Belarus of the same fate.
The criticism that has been directed against the Kremlin has had little effect. Vice President Dick Cheney of the U.S. leveled the harshest criticism to date when he accused the Kremlin of using oil and gas as "tools of intimidation or blackmail."
That was in May, and U.S. policy toward Russia has changed imperceptibly, with one significant exception: The Bush administration struck a deal to allow Russia's long-coveted membership in the World Trade Organization.
"Russia since last year has been enjoying some feeling of euphoria, that feeling that we have so much money, so many resources that we can do what we want," said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.
The reality is that the United States and Europe have little leverage beyond persuasion. And persuasion no longer works, as the Kremlin campaign against Sakhalin-2, the largest foreign investment project in Russia, showed.
The campaign was so transparent that it seemed comical, beginning with the surprise inspections by a colorful and hitherto little-known environmental inspector, Oleg Mitvol, who threatened to fine Sakhalin-2's developers for every tree they cut down.
As the campaign unfolded, analysts issued warnings. Governments protested. But in the end, the Kremlin got what was clearly the goal from the start: state control of a lucrative project that opens the gas market in Asia.
And the three companies with the most to lose said nothing critical as they sold 50 percent plus one share of Sakhalin-2 for what some analysts called a discounted price, $7.45 billion. Putin declared instantaneously that the project's environmental problems could "be considered resolved."
"Experience has disappointed many foreign investors in Russia," said Valery Nesterov, an energy analyst at Troika Dialog, an investment firm in Moscow.
And yet, when it comes to energy or other investments, it does little to deter them. "The attraction is so large," Nesterov said, adding that companies like Shell still held out hope of winning access to other Russian fields.
The Sakhalin affair has revived memories of the government's assault on Yukos Oil and its founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in 2003 and 2004, a case that was also seen as selective at best. So has the result.
The company is now a rump of its former self, under bankruptcy receivership and with its major assets belonging to the state oil company, Rosneft. Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, remains in a Siberian prison, reportedly facing a new round of criminal charges that could keep him there.
The effect on investors was most revealing. Russia's stock market plunged 21 percent in the month following his arrest, with the Russian Trading System Index dipping below 500. It is now above 1,800; Yukos is a painful memory only for those who paid dearest.

The connection to the murders of two prominent Kremlin critics — Litvinenko in self-exile in London and Politkovskaya here in Moscow — might seem tangential, but the response to them also underscores the new reality of a newly confident Russia.
There is as yet no evidence directly linking anyone in Russia to the killings, even if critics have been quick to do so, reviving some of the worst fears about the country Russia has become.
After Litvinenko's murder, The Daily Telegraph in Britain declared flatly, "Russia is rotten to its heart." A recent cover of The Economist showed Putin dressed like a gangster, holding a gasoline nozzle as a machine gun. The British government, by contrast, has said nothing even remotely so critical.
Critics warn that Russia is ignoring the consequences of its behavior, and that the monopolistic policies of Gazprom, the erosion of political competition and the easy dismissal of critics as Russia-haters all blind the Kremlin to the dangers of the overly centralized system Putin has created.
Mikhail Kasyanov, Putin's prime minister from 2000 until 2004 and now one of his biggest critics, said that the foreigners rushing to join Russia's boom were equally complicit. "Investors are very shortsighted," he said in an interview.
Even in the long term, though, history may be on Russia's side.
"It pains a lot of people here to admit that Russia is not 'like us,'" Katinka Barysch, chief economist of the Center for European Reform, a research group in London, wrote in an electronic message, saying that Europe's energy interests would trump other concerns about Russia. "But unless the country slides into full-scale dictatorship or chaos, we will put our interests first."

Russians keep up pressure over energy

Andrew E. Kramer

International Herald Tribune December 26, 2006

Gazprom, the Russian energy monopoly, threatened Tuesday to halt natural gas supplies to Belarus if that country did not agree to a large price rise by Monday.
The strong Russian position suggests that Moscow is turning aggressive in energy pricing even with countries that have been close allies.
Belarus now has the cheapest gas in the former Soviet Union, other than Russia itself. Gazprom, which has more energy reserves than any other company in the world, is insisting that Belarus more than double the price it pays, though that would still remain below world levels.
Gazprom warned that Belarus was behaving "irresponsibly" in the talks over both pricing and a Russian demand to surrender control of a key export pipeline, saying this resistance was putting Belarus's energy supply at risk.
The threat came almost exactly a year after Gazprom cut off fuel supplies to Ukraine, another key country, causing intense supply jitters in Western Europe. After a din of criticism, Gazprom turned the gas back on after three days.
But in the energy markets now, the Kremlin is dictating terms with greater assertiveness than it has at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even those who might have once criticized the government, from investors to foreign governments, have largely acquiesced to the new reality confronting them. (News analysis, Page 3)
Gazprom already owns one of the two major export pipelines that run through Belarus and is negotiating for a share in the second, a move that would tighten the company's bear hug on European supplies.
Gazprom said exports to Poland and Germany through two pipelines that pass through Belarus were not at risk.
The company spokesman, Sergei Kupriyanov, said Gazprom had been stockpiling gas in underground reservoirs in Western Europe to ensure uninterrupted supplies further down the pipeline, even if Belarus were to be switched off.
"Time is flying," Gazprom's chief executive, Aleksei Miller said in remarks carried on Russia's NTV television.
"Responsibility for what has taken shape today lies with the Belarussian side," he said, addressing a Belarussian delegation led by a first deputy prime minister, Vladimir Semashko.
"Gazprom and the Russian Federation met you halfway on all issues," Miller said. "We offered the most preferential regime. We think these conditions are more than good."
Gazprom's tough negotiating suggested an unraveling of the special relations between Russia and Belarus, which are joined in a loose if dysfunctional union state. Russia is one of the last allies in Europe of the Belarussian dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenko.
"The demand shows Putin is abandoning any myth of the union state," Lilia Shevtsova, an associate at the Carnegie Center in Moscow, said in an interview by telephone. "Lukashenko is desperate and backed into a corner."
Still, Gazprom's final asking price for Belarus is among the lowest offered to Russia's neighbors: $105 to $110 per 1,000 cubic meters, in a combination of cash and shares in the national pipeline operator, Beltransgaz. But that would more than double Belarus's current price of $46.68 per 1,000 cubic meters.
Gazprom said Belarus wanted to pay rates in line with those paid in the neighboring Russian province of Smolensk, or about $40 for residential consumers and $54 for industrial customers, citing a treaty related to the union state.
Gazprom says it is intent on filling out its bottom line by raising prices throughout the former Soviet Union, putting an end to a decade of subsidies.
Belarus uses about 21 billion cubic meters a year, about a third of the demand in neighboring Ukraine. It exports another about 30 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Poland and Germany, compared with the 100 billion cubic meters of gas exported via Ukraine.
The chief negotiator for Belarus, Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Semashko, left talks in Moscow without a deal Tuesday. "We still have time until the 31st of December," he said.
Gazprom has slowly raised prices in neighboring countries while trading special deals for footholds in the local gas distribution business or access to the skein of export pipelines that is essential to its hugely profitable business.
Ukraine, for example, will pay $135 per 1,000 cubic meters in 2007 while Gazprom won a concession to distribute gas through a joint venture, RosUkrEnergo.
By comparison, Georgia last week agreed to short-term supplies at a price of $235 until it secures an alternative. Georgia refused to sell its pipelines to Gazprom.
Armenia, a traditional Russian ally in the south Caucasus, secured a deal to pay $110 until 2009 but surrendered a strategic segment of pipeline linking that country with Iran, another big gas supplier.
Moldova agreed Tuesday to pay $170 and allow Gazprom a larger role in its domestic companies that distribute natural gas.
In the bargaining, Gazprom said that if Belarus insisted on keeping the pipeline, it would have to pay $200 per 1,000 cubic meters, an offer that Belarus refused.
In a combined deal, Gazprom demanded $75 and $80 in cash and $30 worth of shares in Beltransgaz, for 1,000 cubic meters.

Freud unrepressed

Hotel log hints at desire that Freud didn't repress

Ralph Blumenthal

International Herald Tribune 27 December 2006

Maybe it was just a Freudian slip. Or a case of hiding in plain sight.
Either way, Sigmund Freud, scribbling in the pages of a Swiss hotel register, appears to have left the answer to a question that has titillated scholars for much of the last century: Did he have an affair with his wife's younger sister, Minna Bernays?
Rumors of a romantic liaison between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds, have long persisted, despite staunch denials by Freud loyalists. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud's disciple and later his archrival, claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed to an affair to him. (The claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung's part.) And some researchers have even theorized that she may have become pregnant by Freud and have had an abortion.
What was lacking was any proof. But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud's own psychology.
A yellowing page of the leather-bound ledger shows that they occupied Room 11. Freud signed the book, in his distinctive Germanic scrawl, "Dr Sigm Freud u frau," abbreviated German for "Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife."

"By any reasonable standard of proof, Sigmund Freud and his wife's sister, Minna Bernays, had a liaison," wrote Franz Maciejewski, a sociologist formerly at the University of Heidelberg and a specialist in psychoanalysis, who tracked down the record in August.
Freud's wife, Martha, knew about his trip with Miss Bernays, if not its nature. The same day Freud signed the hotel ledger, he sent his wife a postcard rhapsodizing about the glaciers, mountains and lakes the pair had seen. In the card, published in Freud's collected correspondence, he described their lodgings as "humble," although the hotel appears to have been the second-fanciest in town.
The evidence is persuasive enough for Peter Gay, the Freud biographer and longtime skeptic on what he called "the Minna matter," to say that he is now inclined to revise his work accordingly.
"It makes it very possible that they slept together," he said. "It doesn't make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct."
The revelation is also likely to reignite a longstanding debate about Freud's personal life. The father of psychoanalysis, whose 150th birthday was celebrated this year, plumbed the darkest sexual drives and secrets of the psyche. But scholars still argue about how scrupulous Freud was in his own behavior.
Peter L. Rudnytsky, a former Fulbright/Freud Society Scholar of Psychoanalysis in Vienna and the editor of the psychoanalytic journal American Imago, said the disclosure was hardly a "so what?" matter because "psychoanalysis has such a close relationship to the life of Freud."
"Psychoanalysis has invested a great deal in a certain idealized image of Freud," said Dr. Rudnytsky, a professor of English at the University of Florida. "Freud dealt with issues considered suspect — sexuality — things that made people uncomfortable, so Freud himself had to be a figure of impeccable integrity."
In any case, he said: "Things that happen in people's intimate lives are important. It's very Freudian."
Freud himself was cryptic, writing to the American neurologist James J. Putman in 1915: "I stand for a much freer sexual life. However I have made little use of such freedom."
Peter Swales, a historian and researcher who has spent decades uncovering details of Freud's relationship with his sister-in-law, hailed the discovery as recognition of what he called "Minna Bernays's central, fundamental and profound place in Freud's intellectual biography."
How Dr. Maciejewski discovered the hotel ledger in itself seems strangely Freudian. He spent August 2005 retracing the Swiss idyll taken by Freud and Miss Bernays for a book, published this year, on Freud's long fixation on Moses.
While in Switzerland with Miss Bernays, Freud had trouble remembering a name. Dr. Maciejewski theorized that the lapse involved some secret guilt of Freud's, but he could not get to the bottom of it. However, while reading the proofs of his book last spring, he said, "a feeling of you forgot something crept over me."
In August, he returned to Maloja, and asked at the Schweizerhaus if the original guest book still existed. It did, and there, on a page from 1898, he found Freud's entry.
Dr. Maciejewski said he came away convinced that "they not only shared a bed, they were even up to misrepresenting their relationship to strangers as that of husband and wife, a subterfuge they surely then maintained whenever feasible during subsequent holidays together in faraway places."

Dr. Maciejewski published an article about his find in a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Rundschau, in September. An English version will appear in American Imago next month. Freud helped found the quarterly, now published by Johns Hopkins University Press, in 1939, shortly before his death in London, where he lived after fleeing the Nazis. Minna Bernays died in London in 1941.
Jürg Wintsch, proprietor of the Schweizerhaus, confirmed the existence of the ledger entry, which he said Dr. Maciejewski had first brought to his attention. He described Room 11, now called 24, as one of the largest in the hotel and said its structure was substantially unchanged since Freud's visit. He said he had been hoping to keep Freud's stay there a secret until the hotel's 125th anniversary next June.
The triangle of Freud, his wife and her sister has long been irresistible to scholars, including Dr. Gay, who noted in a 1989 essay, "As every biographer of Freud must ruefully acknowledge, that great unriddler of mysteries left behind some tantalizing private mysteries of his own."
The most riveting among them, he wrote, were the rumors of a love affair with Miss Bernays. But, he added, scant evidence of any romance could be found in the published correspondence between Freud and his sister-in-law, although some letters were intriguingly missing.
From the moment Freud fell in love with Martha Bernays in 1882, he was also drawn to her "intelligent, caustic" younger sister, Minna, whose fiancé died of tuberculosis in 1886, the year the Freuds married, Dr. Gay wrote in the essay. In 1896, Miss Bernays moved in with the Freuds, helping with household chores and child rearing. She lived with them, it turned out, for 42 years.

In 1953, Ernest Jones, Freud's student and first biographer, tried vigorously to dispel stray gossip about Freud's "second wife." He dismissed what he called "strange legends" and described Freud as "monogamic in a very unusual degree."
Mr. Jones wrote, "His wife was assuredly the only woman in Freud's love life, and she always came first before all other mortals."
This idyllic portrait largely held sway until 1969, when John M. Billinsky, a psychologist at the Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts, published an interview he conducted with Jung in Switzerland in 1957. Recounting a visit with his wife to Freud in Vienna in 1907, Jung told Dr. Billinsky that Freud had said, "I am sorry I can give you no real hospitality; I have nothing at home but an elderly wife."
In contrast, Jung described Miss Bernays as "very good looking" — although later photographs show her rather dour and stolid — and said that in private she confessed that "she was very much bothered by her relationship with Freud and felt guilty about it."
"From her I learned that Freud was in love with her and that their relationship was indeed very intimate," Jung continued.
When Jung and Freud traveled to America in 1909, Jung said, Freud confided some dreams about Mrs. Freud and Miss Bernays, but then abruptly ended the discussion, saying, "I could tell you more, but I cannot risk my authority."
Jung's account was attacked as unreliable by, among others, Dr. Kurt R. Eissler, the longtime director of the Sigmund Freud Archives who, as recently as 1993, six years before his death at 90, wrote in a published essay, "In one respect Freud was undeniably superior to Jung: his sexual record was lily white."
Dr. Eissler said that Freud's theory "of course was obscene, with its eternal harping on sex, but the conduct of the man who originated it was beyond reproach."
What Dr. Eissler did not say was that four years before the Billinsky interview, he had heard many of the same things about Freud and Miss Bernays firsthand in an interview with Jung in Zurich in 1953. But Dr. Eissler and the Freud Archives placed an embargo on the transcript of the interview for 50 years and then ordered the papers sealed for an additional 10 years, until 2013. A German transcript, stamped "Confidential," in the Library of Congress was made available in 2003 for reading only at the library, although a copy was obtained by The New York Times.
In 1981, Dr. Eissler was at the center of an uproar at the Archives when his designated successor as director, Jeffrey M. Masson, was fired after breaking ranks with orthodox Freudians over interpretations of psychoanalytic theory and Freud's character.

In the 1953 Jung interview, which Dr. Eissler apparently never cited publicly, Jung said he thought Miss Bernays had developed a psychological attachment to Freud but that when he had broached the subject, Freud turned unresponsive.
"Every man has his secrets," Jung concluded, adding that when it came to Freud himself, "the unconscious was something which one should not touch."
Jung theorized to Dr. Eissler that Freud had experienced some disappointment in love, sublimating it into a drive for power and developing a neurosis expressed in fear of losing control of his bladder.
"It could be precisely that he got into this conflict which in marriage is all too frequent, right?" Jung said. "The young woman, the other woman."
Jung said that he vaguely recalled something about "a possible pregnancy," but quickly added, "That can all be a stupid assumption."
Hardly so to Mr. Swales. In a 1982 journal article, he argued that Freud's story of a young man's episode of forgetfulness in his 1901 book, "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," was actually thinly disguised autobiography, exposing Freud's own alarm over an inconvenient pregnancy.
Since then, Mr. Swales said, he has traced a 1900 trip by Freud and Miss Bernays to the Austrian town of Meran where she may have had an abortion, falling mysteriously ill after returning to Vienna.
Freud, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, said that Miss Bernays was suffering from a lung ailment, but, Mr. Swales said, "The jury is still out."

God and death: Julian Barnes

THE PAST CONDITIONAL

JULIAN BARNES

New Yorker 25 December 2006

What Mother would have wanted.

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I once asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

The person to begin with is my maternal grandmother, Nellie Louisa Scoltock, née Machin, who was a schoolteacher in Shropshire until she married my grandfather Bert Scoltock. Not Bertram, not Albert, just Bert: so christened, so called, so buried. He was a headmaster with a certain mechanical dash to him: a motorcycle-and-sidecar man, then the owner of a Lanchester, then, in retirement, the driver of a rather pompously sportif Triumph Roadster, with a three-person bench seat in front and two bucket seats when the top was down. By the time I knew my grandparents, they had retired and come south to be near their daughter. My grandmother went to the Women’s Institute: she pickled and bottled; she plucked and roasted the chickens and geese my grandfather raised. She was petite, outwardly unopinionated, with the thickened knuckles of old age; she needed soap to get her wedding ring off. Their wardrobe was full of home-knitted cardigans, Grandpa’s tending to feature more masculine cable-stitch. They were of that generation advised by dentists to have all their teeth out in one go. This was a normal rite of passage then: from being rickety-gnashered to fully porcelained in one leap, to all that buccal sliding and clacking, to social embarrassment and the foaming glass on the bedside table.

The change from teeth to dentures struck my brother and me as both grave and ribald. But my grandmother’s life had contained another enormous change, never alluded to in her presence. Nellie Louisa Machin had been brought up a Methodist. (The Scoltocks were Church of England.) At some point in her young adulthood, my grandmother had lost her faith and, in the smooth narration of family lore, found another: Socialism. I have no idea how strong or weak her religious faith had been, or what her family’s politics were; all I know is that she once stood for the local council as a Socialist and was defeated. By the time I knew her, in the nineteen-fifties, she had long since progressed to being a Communist. She must have been one of the few old-age pensioners in suburban Buckinghamshire who took the Daily Worker and—so my brother and I insisted to each other—fiddled the housekeeping money to send donations to the newspaper’s Fighting Fund.

In the late fifties, the Sino-Soviet Schism took place, and Communists were obliged to choose between Moscow and Peking. For most of the European faithful, this was not a difficult decision; nor was it for the Daily Worker, which received money, as well as directives, from Moscow. My grandmother, who had never been abroad in her life, who lived in genteel bungalowdom, decided for undisclosed reasons to throw in her lot with the Chinese. I welcomed her decision with self-interested enthusiasm: her newspaper was now supplemented by a monthly prayer book called China Reconstructs, posted directly from the distant continent, and she saved me the stamps from the biscuity envelopes. These stamps tended to celebrate industrial achievement—bridges and hydroelectric dams being much in evidence—or show various breeds of peaceful dove in mid-flight.

My brother did not compete for such offerings, because some years previously there had been a Stamp-Collecting Schism in our home. He had decided to specialize in the British Empire. I, to assert my difference, had announced that I would therefore specialize in a category that I named, with what seemed like logic to me, Rest of the World. The category was defined solely in terms of what my brother didn’t collect. I can no longer remember if this move was aggressive, defensive, or merely pragmatic. All I know is that it led to some occasionally baffling exchanges in the school stamp club, among philatelists only recently out of short trousers: “So, Barnesy, what do you collect?” “Rest of the World.”

My grandfather was a Brylcreem man, and the antimacassar on his Parker Knoll armchair—a high-backed number with wings for him to snooze against—was not merely decorative. His hair had whitened sooner than my grandmother’s; he had a clipped military mustache, a metal-stemmed pipe, and a tobacco pouch that distended his cardigan pocket. He also wore a chunky hearing aid, another aspect of the adult world—or, rather, the world on the farther side of adulthood—which my brother and I liked to mock. “Beg pardon?” we would shout satirically at each other, cupping our hands to our ears. Both of us used to wait and hope for the prized moment when my grandmother’s stomach would rumble loudly enough for Grandpa to be roused from his deafness with the inquiry “Telephone, Ma?” Then they would both go back to their newspapers. Grandpa, in his male armchair, his deaf-aid occasionally whistling, his pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over the Daily Express, which described to him a world where truth and justice were constantly imperilled by the Communist Threat. In a softer, female armchair—in the red corner—Grandma would tut-tut away over her Daily Worker, which described to her a world where truth and justice, in their updated versions, were constantly imperilled by Capitalism and Imperialism.

Grandpa, by this time, had reduced his religious observance to watching “Songs of Praise” on television. He gardened; he grew his own tobacco and dried it in the garage loft, where he also stored dahlia tubers and old copies of the Daily Express, bound with hairy string. He favored my brother, taught him how to sharpen a chisel, and left him his chest of carpentry tools. I can’t remember him teaching (or leaving) me anything, though I was once allowed to watch while he killed a chicken in his garden shed. He took the bird under his arm, stroked it into calmness, then laid its neck on some kind of wringing machine screwed to the wall, and brought the handle down, while holding the bird’s body ever more tightly to control its final convulsions.

My brother remembers a ritual—never witnessed by me—that he calls the Reading of the Diaries. According to him, Grandma and Grandpa each kept diaries, and in the evenings would sometimes read out loud to each other what they had recorded five years earlier. The entries were apparently of stunning banality but frequent disagreement. Grandpa would propose, “Friday. Fine day. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.” Grandma would reply, “Nonsense,” and counter-cite, “Rained all day. Too wet to work in the garden.” My brother also remembers that once, when he was very small, he went into Grandpa’s garden and pulled up all his onions. Grandpa beat him until he howled, then turned uncharacteristically white, confessed everything to our mother, and swore that he would never again raise his hand against a child. Actually, my brother doesn’t remember this, either the onions or the beating; he was just told the story repeatedly by our mother. And, indeed, if he were to remember it he might well be wary of it: he believes that many memories are false, “so much so that, on the Cartesian principle of the rotten apple, none is to be trusted unless it has some external support.” I am more trusting, or self-deluding, however, so shall continue as if all my memories were true.



Our mother, an only child, was christened Kathleen Mabel. She hated the Mabel, and complained about it to Grandpa, who replied that he “had once known a very nice girl called Mabel.” I have no idea about the progress or regress of her religious beliefs, though I own her prayer book, bound together with “Hymns Ancient and Modern” in soft brown suède, each volume inscribed in surprising green ink with her name and the date: “Dec: 25t.h 1932.” (I admire the punctuation: two full stops and a colon, with the stop beneath the “th” placed exactly between the two letters. You don’t get punctuation like that nowadays.) In my childhood, the three unmentionable areas were the usual ones: politics, religion, and sex. By the time I came to discuss these matters with her—the first two, that is, the third being permanently off the agenda—she was “true blue” in politics, a Tory, as I would guess she had always been. As for religion, she told me firmly that she didn’t want “any of that mumbo-jumbo” at her funeral. So when the time came, and the undertaker asked if I wanted the “religious symbols” removed from the crematorium wall, I told him that I thought this was what she would have wished.

The past conditional, by the way, is a tense of which my brother is highly suspicious. Waiting for the funeral to start, we had not an argument (which would have been against family tradition) but an exchange which demonstrated that, if I am a rationalist by my own standards, I am a fairly feeble one by his. When my mother was first incapacitated by a stroke, she happily agreed that my brother’s daughter C. should have the use of her car. This was the last in a long sequence of Renaults, the marque to which our mother had maintained a Francophiliac loyalty over four decades. So, as we waited in the crematorium car park, I was looking out for the familiar outline when, to my surprise, my niece arrived at the wheel of her boyfriend R.’s car. I observed—mildly, I am sure—“I think Ma would have wanted C. to come in her car.” My brother, just as mildly, took logical exception to this. He pointed out to me that there are the wants of the dead—i.e., things that people now dead once wanted; and there are hypothetical wants—i.e., things that people would or might have wanted. “What Mother would have wanted” was a combination of the two: a hypothetical want of the dead. It was therefore doubly questionable. “We can only do what we want,” he said, and to indulge the maternal hypothetical would be as irrational as if he were now to pay attention to his own past desires. I proposed in reply that we should try to do what our mother would have wanted (a) because we had to do something, and that something (unless we simply left her body to rot in the back garden of her bungalow) involved making choices; and (b) because we hope that when we die others will do what we in turn would have wanted.

I see my brother infrequently, and so I am often surprised by the ways in which his mind works, but he is quite genuine in what he says. In the car on the way back to London, we had an—to me—even more peculiar exchange about my niece and her boyfriend. They had been together a long time, though there was one period of estrangement, during which C. appeared with another man. My brother and his wife had found this interloper a wimp—indeed, my sister-in-law had taken a mere ten minutes to sort him out. I did not ask the manner of the sorting out. Instead, I asked, “But you approve of R.?”

“It’s irrelevant,” my brother replied, “whether or not I approve of R.”

“No, it’s not. C. might want you to approve of him.”

“On the contrary, she might want me not to approve of him.”

“But, either way, it’s not irrelevant to her whether or not you approve or disapprove.”

He thought this over for a moment. “You’re right,” he said.

You can perhaps tell from these exchanges that he is the older brother.



My mother had expressed no views about the music she wanted at her funeral. I chose the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in E-Flat Major, K. 282. It seemed to last about fifteen minutes, rather than the promised seven, and I found myself wondering at times if this was yet another Mozartean repeat, or if the crematorium’s CD player was skipping backward. The previous year, I had appeared on a radio program called “Desert Island Discs”; the Mozart I had chosen for that occasion was the Requiem. Afterward, my mother telephoned me and brought up the fact that during the program I had referred to myself as an agnostic. She told me that this was how my father used to describe himself, whereas she was an atheist. She made it sound as if being an agnostic were a wishy-washy liberal attitude, as opposed to the truth-and-market-forces nature of atheism. “What’s all this about death, by the way?” she continued. I explained that I didn’t like the idea of it. “You’re just like your father,” she replied. “Maybe it’s your age. When you get to my age, you won’t mind so much. I’ve seen the best of life anyway. And think about the Middle Ages—then life expectancy was really short, but nowadays we live seventy, eighty, ninety years. . . . People only believe in religion because they’re afraid of death.” My mother, as you can tell, was a clear-minded and opinionated woman who did not have much time for opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.

After her cremation, I retrieved my Mozart CD from the “organist,” who, I found myself reflecting, was probably being paid his full organist’s fee for putting on and taking off a single CD track. My father, Albert Leonard Barnes, had been dispatched five years earlier, and at a different crematorium, by a working organist earning his money honestly, with Bach. Was this “what he would have wanted”? I don’t think he would have objected: he was a gentle, liberal-minded man who wasn’t much interested in music. In this, as in most things, he deferred—though not without many an ironic aside—to his wife. His clothes, the house they lived in, the car they drove—such decisions were hers. When I was an unforgiving adolescent, I judged him weak. Later, I found him compliant. Later still, clear in his views, but mostly disinclined to argue for them.

He died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final hours by a nurse, after medical science had prolonged his life to the point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive. My mother had visited him a few days previously, but had then gone down with shingles. On that final visit, she had said to him (quite characteristically), “Do you know who I am? Because the last time I was here you didn’t know what I was.” My father had replied (just as characteristically), “I think you’re my wife.”

I drove my mother to the hospital, where we were given a black plastic bag and a creamy holdall. She sorted through both very quickly, knowing exactly what she wanted and what was to be left for—or, at least, with—the hospital. It was a shame, she said, that he’d never got to wear the big brown slippers with Velcro fastenings that she’d got him a few weeks earlier; mysteriously to me, she took these home with her. She had a horror of being asked if she wanted to see her husband’s body. When Grandpa died, she told me, Grandma had been “useless” and had left her to do everything. But at the hospital Grandma, out of some wifely or atavistic need, had insisted on seeing the body, and could not be dissuaded. My mother had accompanied her. When Grandpa’s corpse was shown to them, Grandma turned to her daughter and said, “Doesn’t he look awful?”

The first time I went to church with my family—for a cousin’s wedding—I watched in amazement as my father dropped to his knees in the pew, then covered his forehead and eyes with one hand. Where did that come from, I asked myself, before—as far as I remember—making some halfheartedly imitative gesture of piety, which probably involved a certain amount of squinting around or through my fingers. It was one of those moments when your parents surprise you—not because you have learned something new about them but because you have discovered a further area in which you are ignorant. Was my father merely being polite? Did he worry that if he simply plonked himself down he would be taken for a Shelleyan atheist? I have no idea.

When my mother died, the undertaker, from a nearby village, asked if the family wanted to see the body. I said yes; my brother no. Actually, he said (to me, when I passed on the question), “Good God, no. I agree with Plato on that one.” I didn’t have the text he was referring to immediately in mind. “What did Plato say?” I asked. “That he didn’t believe in seeing dead bodies.” When I turned up at the undertaker’s—which was more like the rear extension to a haulage business—the funeral director said apologetically, “I’m afraid she’s only in the back room at the moment.” I looked at him questioningly, and he expanded: “She’s on a trolley.” I found myself replying, “Oh, she didn’t stand on ceremony,” though I couldn’t claim to know whether she would, or wouldn’t, have wanted to do so in the present circumstances.

She lay in a small, clean room with a cross on the wall; she was indeed on a trolley, with the back of her head toward me as I went in, thus avoiding an instant face-to-face. She seemed, well, very dead: eyes closed, mouth slightly open, and more so on the left side than on the right, which was just like her—she used to hang a cigarette in the right corner of her mouth and talk out of the other side. I tried to imagine her awareness, such as it might have been, at the moment of extinction. This had occurred a couple of weeks after she was moved from hospital to a residential home (a term that used to make me wonder what an “unresidential home” might be). She was quite demented by then, a dementia of alternating kinds: one in which she believed herself still in control of things, and constantly ticked off the nurses for imaginary mistakes; the other, acknowledging that she had lost control, in which she became a child again, with all her dead relatives still alive, and what her mother or grandmother had just said of pressing importance. Before her dementia, I had frequently found myself switching off during her solipsistic monologues; suddenly, she had become painfully interesting. I kept wondering where all this stuff was coming from, how her brain was producing this counterfeit reality. Nor could I feel any resentment now that she wanted to talk only about herself.

I was told that two nurses had been with her at the moment of death, and were engaged in turning her over when she had just “slipped away.” I like to imagine—because it would have been characteristic, and people should die as they have lived—that her last thought was addressed to herself, and was something like Oh, get on with it, then. But this is sentimentalism—what she would have wanted (or, rather, what I would have wanted for her)—and perhaps, if she was thinking anything, she was imagining herself as a child again, being turned in some fretful fever by her long-dead mother.

At the undertaker’s, I touched her cheek several times, then kissed her at the hairline. No, she didn’t look awful: there was nothing overpainted about her, and her hair, she would have been pleased to know, was looking good. (“Of course, I never dye it—it’s all natural,” she once boasted to my brother’s wife.) Was she so cold because she’d been in the freezer, or because the dead are naturally cold? Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly curiosity than from filial feeling, but there was a bidding farewell to be done, for all my long exasperation with her. “Well done, Ma,” I murmured. She had, indeed, done the dying “better” than my father. He had endured a series of small, then larger, strokes, his decline stretching over years; she had gone from first attack to death altogether more efficiently and speedily. When I picked up her bag of clothes from the residential home, it felt heavier than I thought it should. First I discovered a full bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream, and then, in a square cardboard box, an untouched birthday cake, shop-bought by village friends who had visited her on her final, eighty-second birthday.

My father had died at the same age. I had always imagined that his would be the harder death for me, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the other way round: what I had expected to be the lesser death proved more complicated, more hazardous. His death was just his death; her death was their death. And the subsequent house-clearing turned into an exhumation of what we had been as a family—though we were really one only for about the first thirteen or fourteen years of my life. Now, for the first time, I went through my mother’s handbag. Apart from the usual stuff, it contained a cutting from the Guardian listing the twenty-five greatest postwar English batsmen (though she never read the Guardian) and a photograph of our childhood dog, Max, a golden retriever. It was inscribed on the back in an unfamiliar hand, “Maxim, le chien,” and presumably taken by one of my father’s French assistants back in the early nineteen-fifties. Max had either run away or, more probably, been stolen, shortly after the picture was taken, and, wherever he had gone, he must have been dead himself for fifty-odd years. Though my father would have liked it, my mother would never have another dog after that.



Given this family background of fading religious belief, I might, as part of adolescent rebelliousness, have become devout. But my father’s agnosticism and my mother’s atheism were never fully expressed, let alone presented as exemplary attitudes, so perhaps their discreet non-beliefs didn’t seem to justify revolt. I might, I suppose, if it had been possible to choose, have become Jewish. I went to a school where, out of about nine hundred boys, a hundred and fifty or so were Jewish. On the whole, they seemed cleverer, and both socially and sartorially more advanced; they had better shoes (one contemporary even had a pair of elastic-sided Chelsea boots) and they knew about girls. They also got extra holidays, which seemed an advantage. And it would have usefully shocked my parents, who had the low-level anti-Semitism of their time and class. (As the credits rolled at the end of a TV play and a name like Aaronson occurred, one or the other of my parents might comment wryly, “Another Welshman.”) Not that they behaved any differently to my Jewish friends, one of whom was named, rightly, it seemed to me, Alex Brilliant. He was reading Wittgenstein at sixteen, and writing poetry that rippled with ambiguities—double, triple, quadruple, like heart bypasses. He took a scholarship to Cambridge, after which I lost sight of him; but I would occasionally think of him down the years, assuming that he had forged ahead in one of the liberal professions. I was over fifty when I learned that for more than half my life I had been thinking of someone as alive who was in fact dead. Brilliant had killed himself in his twenties, for no reason my informant could determine.

So I had no faith to lose, only a resistance (which felt more heroic than it was) to the mild regimen of God-referring that an English education entailed: Scripture lessons, morning prayers and hymns, and an annual Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Giving thanks for what? Life, another year, exam results, the founding of the school?) And that was it, apart from the role of second shepherd in a nativity play at my primary school. I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, marriages, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons, and—more widely—to get a sense of what Englishness once was.

My brother had slightly more liturgical experience than I did. As a Wolf Cub, he went to a couple of regular church services. “I seem to recall being mystified, an infantile anthropologist among the anthropophagi,” he writes. When I ask about his own de-Christianization, he replies, “Loss of faith? I never lost it, since I never had it to lose. But I realized it was all a load of balls on 7 Feb 1952, at 9.00. Mr. Ebbets, headmaster of Derwentwater Primary School, announced that the King had died, that he had gone to eternal glory and happiness in Heaven with God, and that in consequence we were all going to wear black armbands for a month. I thought that there was something fishy there, and How Right I Was. No scales fell from my eyes, there was no sense of loss, of a gap in my life, etc. etc. Nor have I ever had any religious inklings. I hope,” he adds, “that this story is true. It is certainly a very clear and lasting memory; but you know what memory is.”

My brother would have been just nine at the time of George VI’s death. My own final letting go of the remnant, or possibility, of religion happened at a more advanced age. As an adolescent, hunched over some book or magazine in the family bathroom, I used to tell myself that God couldn’t possibly exist, because the notion that he might be watching me with disapproval while I masturbated was absurd; even more absurd was the notion that all my dead ancestors might be lined up and watching, too. This wasn’t exactly a strong argument, more a mild yet convincing feeling. And it was, of course, self-interested: the thought of Grandma and Grandpa observing what I was up to would have seriously put me off my stroke.

As I record this now, however, I wonder why I didn’t think through more of the possibilities. Why did I assume that God, if He was watching, necessarily disapproved of how I was spilling my seed? Why did it not occur to me that, if the sky did not fall in as it witnessed my zealous and unflagging self-abuse, it was perhaps because the sky did not think it a sin? Nor did I have the imagination to conceive of my dead ancestors equally smiling on my actions: Go on, my son, enjoy it while you’ve got it; there won’t be anything like that when you’re a disembodied spirit; we wish we’d done more of it in our time, so have another one for us. Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth, given me an uncharacteristic wink, and murmured complicitly, “I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel.”

God and death: Julian Barnes

THE PAST CONDITIONAL

JULIAN BARNES

New Yorker 25 December 2006

What Mother would have wanted.

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I once asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

The person to begin with is my maternal grandmother, Nellie Louisa Scoltock, née Machin, who was a schoolteacher in Shropshire until she married my grandfather Bert Scoltock. Not Bertram, not Albert, just Bert: so christened, so called, so buried. He was a headmaster with a certain mechanical dash to him: a motorcycle-and-sidecar man, then the owner of a Lanchester, then, in retirement, the driver of a rather pompously sportif Triumph Roadster, with a three-person bench seat in front and two bucket seats when the top was down. By the time I knew my grandparents, they had retired and come south to be near their daughter. My grandmother went to the Women’s Institute: she pickled and bottled; she plucked and roasted the chickens and geese my grandfather raised. She was petite, outwardly unopinionated, with the thickened knuckles of old age; she needed soap to get her wedding ring off. Their wardrobe was full of home-knitted cardigans, Grandpa’s tending to feature more masculine cable-stitch. They were of that generation advised by dentists to have all their teeth out in one go. This was a normal rite of passage then: from being rickety-gnashered to fully porcelained in one leap, to all that buccal sliding and clacking, to social embarrassment and the foaming glass on the bedside table.

The change from teeth to dentures struck my brother and me as both grave and ribald. But my grandmother’s life had contained another enormous change, never alluded to in her presence. Nellie Louisa Machin had been brought up a Methodist. (The Scoltocks were Church of England.) At some point in her young adulthood, my grandmother had lost her faith and, in the smooth narration of family lore, found another: Socialism. I have no idea how strong or weak her religious faith had been, or what her family’s politics were; all I know is that she once stood for the local council as a Socialist and was defeated. By the time I knew her, in the nineteen-fifties, she had long since progressed to being a Communist. She must have been one of the few old-age pensioners in suburban Buckinghamshire who took the Daily Worker and—so my brother and I insisted to each other—fiddled the housekeeping money to send donations to the newspaper’s Fighting Fund.

In the late fifties, the Sino-Soviet Schism took place, and Communists were obliged to choose between Moscow and Peking. For most of the European faithful, this was not a difficult decision; nor was it for the Daily Worker, which received money, as well as directives, from Moscow. My grandmother, who had never been abroad in her life, who lived in genteel bungalowdom, decided for undisclosed reasons to throw in her lot with the Chinese. I welcomed her decision with self-interested enthusiasm: her newspaper was now supplemented by a monthly prayer book called China Reconstructs, posted directly from the distant continent, and she saved me the stamps from the biscuity envelopes. These stamps tended to celebrate industrial achievement—bridges and hydroelectric dams being much in evidence—or show various breeds of peaceful dove in mid-flight.

My brother did not compete for such offerings, because some years previously there had been a Stamp-Collecting Schism in our home. He had decided to specialize in the British Empire. I, to assert my difference, had announced that I would therefore specialize in a category that I named, with what seemed like logic to me, Rest of the World. The category was defined solely in terms of what my brother didn’t collect. I can no longer remember if this move was aggressive, defensive, or merely pragmatic. All I know is that it led to some occasionally baffling exchanges in the school stamp club, among philatelists only recently out of short trousers: “So, Barnesy, what do you collect?” “Rest of the World.”

My grandfather was a Brylcreem man, and the antimacassar on his Parker Knoll armchair—a high-backed number with wings for him to snooze against—was not merely decorative. His hair had whitened sooner than my grandmother’s; he had a clipped military mustache, a metal-stemmed pipe, and a tobacco pouch that distended his cardigan pocket. He also wore a chunky hearing aid, another aspect of the adult world—or, rather, the world on the farther side of adulthood—which my brother and I liked to mock. “Beg pardon?” we would shout satirically at each other, cupping our hands to our ears. Both of us used to wait and hope for the prized moment when my grandmother’s stomach would rumble loudly enough for Grandpa to be roused from his deafness with the inquiry “Telephone, Ma?” Then they would both go back to their newspapers. Grandpa, in his male armchair, his deaf-aid occasionally whistling, his pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over the Daily Express, which described to him a world where truth and justice were constantly imperilled by the Communist Threat. In a softer, female armchair—in the red corner—Grandma would tut-tut away over her Daily Worker, which described to her a world where truth and justice, in their updated versions, were constantly imperilled by Capitalism and Imperialism.

Grandpa, by this time, had reduced his religious observance to watching “Songs of Praise” on television. He gardened; he grew his own tobacco and dried it in the garage loft, where he also stored dahlia tubers and old copies of the Daily Express, bound with hairy string. He favored my brother, taught him how to sharpen a chisel, and left him his chest of carpentry tools. I can’t remember him teaching (or leaving) me anything, though I was once allowed to watch while he killed a chicken in his garden shed. He took the bird under his arm, stroked it into calmness, then laid its neck on some kind of wringing machine screwed to the wall, and brought the handle down, while holding the bird’s body ever more tightly to control its final convulsions.

My brother remembers a ritual—never witnessed by me—that he calls the Reading of the Diaries. According to him, Grandma and Grandpa each kept diaries, and in the evenings would sometimes read out loud to each other what they had recorded five years earlier. The entries were apparently of stunning banality but frequent disagreement. Grandpa would propose, “Friday. Fine day. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.” Grandma would reply, “Nonsense,” and counter-cite, “Rained all day. Too wet to work in the garden.” My brother also remembers that once, when he was very small, he went into Grandpa’s garden and pulled up all his onions. Grandpa beat him until he howled, then turned uncharacteristically white, confessed everything to our mother, and swore that he would never again raise his hand against a child. Actually, my brother doesn’t remember this, either the onions or the beating; he was just told the story repeatedly by our mother. And, indeed, if he were to remember it he might well be wary of it: he believes that many memories are false, “so much so that, on the Cartesian principle of the rotten apple, none is to be trusted unless it has some external support.” I am more trusting, or self-deluding, however, so shall continue as if all my memories were true.



Our mother, an only child, was christened Kathleen Mabel. She hated the Mabel, and complained about it to Grandpa, who replied that he “had once known a very nice girl called Mabel.” I have no idea about the progress or regress of her religious beliefs, though I own her prayer book, bound together with “Hymns Ancient and Modern” in soft brown suède, each volume inscribed in surprising green ink with her name and the date: “Dec: 25t.h 1932.” (I admire the punctuation: two full stops and a colon, with the stop beneath the “th” placed exactly between the two letters. You don’t get punctuation like that nowadays.) In my childhood, the three unmentionable areas were the usual ones: politics, religion, and sex. By the time I came to discuss these matters with her—the first two, that is, the third being permanently off the agenda—she was “true blue” in politics, a Tory, as I would guess she had always been. As for religion, she told me firmly that she didn’t want “any of that mumbo-jumbo” at her funeral. So when the time came, and the undertaker asked if I wanted the “religious symbols” removed from the crematorium wall, I told him that I thought this was what she would have wished.

The past conditional, by the way, is a tense of which my brother is highly suspicious. Waiting for the funeral to start, we had not an argument (which would have been against family tradition) but an exchange which demonstrated that, if I am a rationalist by my own standards, I am a fairly feeble one by his. When my mother was first incapacitated by a stroke, she happily agreed that my brother’s daughter C. should have the use of her car. This was the last in a long sequence of Renaults, the marque to which our mother had maintained a Francophiliac loyalty over four decades. So, as we waited in the crematorium car park, I was looking out for the familiar outline when, to my surprise, my niece arrived at the wheel of her boyfriend R.’s car. I observed—mildly, I am sure—“I think Ma would have wanted C. to come in her car.” My brother, just as mildly, took logical exception to this. He pointed out to me that there are the wants of the dead—i.e., things that people now dead once wanted; and there are hypothetical wants—i.e., things that people would or might have wanted. “What Mother would have wanted” was a combination of the two: a hypothetical want of the dead. It was therefore doubly questionable. “We can only do what we want,” he said, and to indulge the maternal hypothetical would be as irrational as if he were now to pay attention to his own past desires. I proposed in reply that we should try to do what our mother would have wanted (a) because we had to do something, and that something (unless we simply left her body to rot in the back garden of her bungalow) involved making choices; and (b) because we hope that when we die others will do what we in turn would have wanted.

I see my brother infrequently, and so I am often surprised by the ways in which his mind works, but he is quite genuine in what he says. In the car on the way back to London, we had an—to me—even more peculiar exchange about my niece and her boyfriend. They had been together a long time, though there was one period of estrangement, during which C. appeared with another man. My brother and his wife had found this interloper a wimp—indeed, my sister-in-law had taken a mere ten minutes to sort him out. I did not ask the manner of the sorting out. Instead, I asked, “But you approve of R.?”

“It’s irrelevant,” my brother replied, “whether or not I approve of R.”

“No, it’s not. C. might want you to approve of him.”

“On the contrary, she might want me not to approve of him.”

“But, either way, it’s not irrelevant to her whether or not you approve or disapprove.”

He thought this over for a moment. “You’re right,” he said.

You can perhaps tell from these exchanges that he is the older brother.



My mother had expressed no views about the music she wanted at her funeral. I chose the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in E-Flat Major, K. 282. It seemed to last about fifteen minutes, rather than the promised seven, and I found myself wondering at times if this was yet another Mozartean repeat, or if the crematorium’s CD player was skipping backward. The previous year, I had appeared on a radio program called “Desert Island Discs”; the Mozart I had chosen for that occasion was the Requiem. Afterward, my mother telephoned me and brought up the fact that during the program I had referred to myself as an agnostic. She told me that this was how my father used to describe himself, whereas she was an atheist. She made it sound as if being an agnostic were a wishy-washy liberal attitude, as opposed to the truth-and-market-forces nature of atheism. “What’s all this about death, by the way?” she continued. I explained that I didn’t like the idea of it. “You’re just like your father,” she replied. “Maybe it’s your age. When you get to my age, you won’t mind so much. I’ve seen the best of life anyway. And think about the Middle Ages—then life expectancy was really short, but nowadays we live seventy, eighty, ninety years. . . . People only believe in religion because they’re afraid of death.” My mother, as you can tell, was a clear-minded and opinionated woman who did not have much time for opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.

After her cremation, I retrieved my Mozart CD from the “organist,” who, I found myself reflecting, was probably being paid his full organist’s fee for putting on and taking off a single CD track. My father, Albert Leonard Barnes, had been dispatched five years earlier, and at a different crematorium, by a working organist earning his money honestly, with Bach. Was this “what he would have wanted”? I don’t think he would have objected: he was a gentle, liberal-minded man who wasn’t much interested in music. In this, as in most things, he deferred—though not without many an ironic aside—to his wife. His clothes, the house they lived in, the car they drove—such decisions were hers. When I was an unforgiving adolescent, I judged him weak. Later, I found him compliant. Later still, clear in his views, but mostly disinclined to argue for them.

He died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final hours by a nurse, after medical science had prolonged his life to the point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive. My mother had visited him a few days previously, but had then gone down with shingles. On that final visit, she had said to him (quite characteristically), “Do you know who I am? Because the last time I was here you didn’t know what I was.” My father had replied (just as characteristically), “I think you’re my wife.”

I drove my mother to the hospital, where we were given a black plastic bag and a creamy holdall. She sorted through both very quickly, knowing exactly what she wanted and what was to be left for—or, at least, with—the hospital. It was a shame, she said, that he’d never got to wear the big brown slippers with Velcro fastenings that she’d got him a few weeks earlier; mysteriously to me, she took these home with her. She had a horror of being asked if she wanted to see her husband’s body. When Grandpa died, she told me, Grandma had been “useless” and had left her to do everything. But at the hospital Grandma, out of some wifely or atavistic need, had insisted on seeing the body, and could not be dissuaded. My mother had accompanied her. When Grandpa’s corpse was shown to them, Grandma turned to her daughter and said, “Doesn’t he look awful?”

The first time I went to church with my family—for a cousin’s wedding—I watched in amazement as my father dropped to his knees in the pew, then covered his forehead and eyes with one hand. Where did that come from, I asked myself, before—as far as I remember—making some halfheartedly imitative gesture of piety, which probably involved a certain amount of squinting around or through my fingers. It was one of those moments when your parents surprise you—not because you have learned something new about them but because you have discovered a further area in which you are ignorant. Was my father merely being polite? Did he worry that if he simply plonked himself down he would be taken for a Shelleyan atheist? I have no idea.

When my mother died, the undertaker, from a nearby village, asked if the family wanted to see the body. I said yes; my brother no. Actually, he said (to me, when I passed on the question), “Good God, no. I agree with Plato on that one.” I didn’t have the text he was referring to immediately in mind. “What did Plato say?” I asked. “That he didn’t believe in seeing dead bodies.” When I turned up at the undertaker’s—which was more like the rear extension to a haulage business—the funeral director said apologetically, “I’m afraid she’s only in the back room at the moment.” I looked at him questioningly, and he expanded: “She’s on a trolley.” I found myself replying, “Oh, she didn’t stand on ceremony,” though I couldn’t claim to know whether she would, or wouldn’t, have wanted to do so in the present circumstances.

She lay in a small, clean room with a cross on the wall; she was indeed on a trolley, with the back of her head toward me as I went in, thus avoiding an instant face-to-face. She seemed, well, very dead: eyes closed, mouth slightly open, and more so on the left side than on the right, which was just like her—she used to hang a cigarette in the right corner of her mouth and talk out of the other side. I tried to imagine her awareness, such as it might have been, at the moment of extinction. This had occurred a couple of weeks after she was moved from hospital to a residential home (a term that used to make me wonder what an “unresidential home” might be). She was quite demented by then, a dementia of alternating kinds: one in which she believed herself still in control of things, and constantly ticked off the nurses for imaginary mistakes; the other, acknowledging that she had lost control, in which she became a child again, with all her dead relatives still alive, and what her mother or grandmother had just said of pressing importance. Before her dementia, I had frequently found myself switching off during her solipsistic monologues; suddenly, she had become painfully interesting. I kept wondering where all this stuff was coming from, how her brain was producing this counterfeit reality. Nor could I feel any resentment now that she wanted to talk only about herself.

I was told that two nurses had been with her at the moment of death, and were engaged in turning her over when she had just “slipped away.” I like to imagine—because it would have been characteristic, and people should die as they have lived—that her last thought was addressed to herself, and was something like Oh, get on with it, then. But this is sentimentalism—what she would have wanted (or, rather, what I would have wanted for her)—and perhaps, if she was thinking anything, she was imagining herself as a child again, being turned in some fretful fever by her long-dead mother.

At the undertaker’s, I touched her cheek several times, then kissed her at the hairline. No, she didn’t look awful: there was nothing overpainted about her, and her hair, she would have been pleased to know, was looking good. (“Of course, I never dye it—it’s all natural,” she once boasted to my brother’s wife.) Was she so cold because she’d been in the freezer, or because the dead are naturally cold? Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly curiosity than from filial feeling, but there was a bidding farewell to be done, for all my long exasperation with her. “Well done, Ma,” I murmured. She had, indeed, done the dying “better” than my father. He had endured a series of small, then larger, strokes, his decline stretching over years; she had gone from first attack to death altogether more efficiently and speedily. When I picked up her bag of clothes from the residential home, it felt heavier than I thought it should. First I discovered a full bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream, and then, in a square cardboard box, an untouched birthday cake, shop-bought by village friends who had visited her on her final, eighty-second birthday.

My father had died at the same age. I had always imagined that his would be the harder death for me, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the other way round: what I had expected to be the lesser death proved more complicated, more hazardous. His death was just his death; her death was their death. And the subsequent house-clearing turned into an exhumation of what we had been as a family—though we were really one only for about the first thirteen or fourteen years of my life. Now, for the first time, I went through my mother’s handbag. Apart from the usual stuff, it contained a cutting from the Guardian listing the twenty-five greatest postwar English batsmen (though she never read the Guardian) and a photograph of our childhood dog, Max, a golden retriever. It was inscribed on the back in an unfamiliar hand, “Maxim, le chien,” and presumably taken by one of my father’s French assistants back in the early nineteen-fifties. Max had either run away or, more probably, been stolen, shortly after the picture was taken, and, wherever he had gone, he must have been dead himself for fifty-odd years. Though my father would have liked it, my mother would never have another dog after that.



Given this family background of fading religious belief, I might, as part of adolescent rebelliousness, have become devout. But my father’s agnosticism and my mother’s atheism were never fully expressed, let alone presented as exemplary attitudes, so perhaps their discreet non-beliefs didn’t seem to justify revolt. I might, I suppose, if it had been possible to choose, have become Jewish. I went to a school where, out of about nine hundred boys, a hundred and fifty or so were Jewish. On the whole, they seemed cleverer, and both socially and sartorially more advanced; they had better shoes (one contemporary even had a pair of elastic-sided Chelsea boots) and they knew about girls. They also got extra holidays, which seemed an advantage. And it would have usefully shocked my parents, who had the low-level anti-Semitism of their time and class. (As the credits rolled at the end of a TV play and a name like Aaronson occurred, one or the other of my parents might comment wryly, “Another Welshman.”) Not that they behaved any differently to my Jewish friends, one of whom was named, rightly, it seemed to me, Alex Brilliant. He was reading Wittgenstein at sixteen, and writing poetry that rippled with ambiguities—double, triple, quadruple, like heart bypasses. He took a scholarship to Cambridge, after which I lost sight of him; but I would occasionally think of him down the years, assuming that he had forged ahead in one of the liberal professions. I was over fifty when I learned that for more than half my life I had been thinking of someone as alive who was in fact dead. Brilliant had killed himself in his twenties, for no reason my informant could determine.

So I had no faith to lose, only a resistance (which felt more heroic than it was) to the mild regimen of God-referring that an English education entailed: Scripture lessons, morning prayers and hymns, and an annual Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Giving thanks for what? Life, another year, exam results, the founding of the school?) And that was it, apart from the role of second shepherd in a nativity play at my primary school. I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, marriages, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons, and—more widely—to get a sense of what Englishness once was.

My brother had slightly more liturgical experience than I did. As a Wolf Cub, he went to a couple of regular church services. “I seem to recall being mystified, an infantile anthropologist among the anthropophagi,” he writes. When I ask about his own de-Christianization, he replies, “Loss of faith? I never lost it, since I never had it to lose. But I realized it was all a load of balls on 7 Feb 1952, at 9.00. Mr. Ebbets, headmaster of Derwentwater Primary School, announced that the King had died, that he had gone to eternal glory and happiness in Heaven with God, and that in consequence we were all going to wear black armbands for a month. I thought that there was something fishy there, and How Right I Was. No scales fell from my eyes, there was no sense of loss, of a gap in my life, etc. etc. Nor have I ever had any religious inklings. I hope,” he adds, “that this story is true. It is certainly a very clear and lasting memory; but you know what memory is.”

My brother would have been just nine at the time of George VI’s death. My own final letting go of the remnant, or possibility, of religion happened at a more advanced age. As an adolescent, hunched over some book or magazine in the family bathroom, I used to tell myself that God couldn’t possibly exist, because the notion that he might be watching me with disapproval while I masturbated was absurd; even more absurd was the notion that all my dead ancestors might be lined up and watching, too. This wasn’t exactly a strong argument, more a mild yet convincing feeling. And it was, of course, self-interested: the thought of Grandma and Grandpa observing what I was up to would have seriously put me off my stroke.

As I record this now, however, I wonder why I didn’t think through more of the possibilities. Why did I assume that God, if He was watching, necessarily disapproved of how I was spilling my seed? Why did it not occur to me that, if the sky did not fall in as it witnessed my zealous and unflagging self-abuse, it was perhaps because the sky did not think it a sin? Nor did I have the imagination to conceive of my dead ancestors equally smiling on my actions: Go on, my son, enjoy it while you’ve got it; there won’t be anything like that when you’re a disembodied spirit; we wish we’d done more of it in our time, so have another one for us. Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth, given me an uncharacteristic wink, and murmured complicitly, “I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel.”

Orphan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture

MY FATHER’S SUITCASE

ORHAN PAMUK

The Nobel Lecture, 2006

New Yorker 25 December 2006

Two years before my father died, he gave me a small suitcase filled with his manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual jocular, mocking air, he told me that he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after his death.

“Just take a look,” he said, slightly embarrassed. “See if there’s anything in there that you can use. Maybe after I’m gone you can make a selection and publish it.”

We were in my study, surrounded by books. My father was searching for a place to set down the suitcase, wandering around like a man who wished to rid himself of a painful burden. In the end, he deposited it quietly, unobtrusively, in a corner. It was a shaming moment that neither of us ever quite forgot, but once it had passed and we had gone back to our usual roles, taking life lightly, we relaxed. We talked as we always did—about trivial, everyday things, and Turkey’s never-ending political troubles, and my father’s mostly failed business ventures—without feeling too much sorrow.

For several days after that, I walked back and forth past the suitcase without ever actually touching it. I was already familiar with this small black leather case, with a lock and rounded corners. When I was a child, my father had taken it with him on short trips and had sometimes used it to carry documents to work. Whenever he came home from a trip, I’d rush to open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savoring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. The suitcase was a friend, a powerful reminder of my past, but now I couldn’t even touch it. Why? No doubt because of the mysterious weight of its contents.

I am now going to speak of the meaning of that weight: that weight is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room and sits down at a table or retires to a corner to express his thoughts—that is, the weight of literature.

When I did finally touch my father’s suitcase, I still could not bring myself to open it. But I knew what was inside some of the notebooks it held. I had seen my father writing in them. My father had a large library. In his youth, in the late nineteen-forties, he had wanted to be an Istanbul poet, and had translated Valéry into Turkish, but he had not wanted to live the sort of life that came with writing poetry in a poor country where there were few readers. My father’s father—my grandfather—was a wealthy businessman, and my father had led a comfortable life as a child and a young man; he had no wish to endure hardship for the sake of literature, for writing. He loved life with all its beauties: this I understood.

The first thing that kept me away from my father’s suitcase was, of course, a fear that I might not like what I read. Because my father understood this, too, he had taken the precaution of acting as if he did not take the contents of the case seriously. By this time, I had been working as a writer for twenty-five years, and his failure to take literature seriously pained me. But that was not what worried me most: my real fear—the crucial thing that I did not wish to discover—was that my father might be a good writer. If true and great literature emerged from my father’s suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed a man who was entirely different from the one I knew. This was a frightening possibility. Even at my advanced age, I wanted my father to be my father and my father only—not a writer.



A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding words to empty pages, I feel as if I were bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way that one might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. As we hold words in our hands, like stones, sensing the ways in which each is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes from very close, caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The lovely Turkish expression “to dig a well with a needle” seems to me to have been invented with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love—and I understand it, too. When I wrote, in my novel “My Name Is Red,” about the old Persian miniaturists who drew the same horse with the same passion for years and years, memorizing each stroke, until they could re-create that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew that I was talking about the writing profession, and about my own life. If a writer is to tell his own story—to tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people—if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and give himself over to this art, this craft, he must first be given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination but from another power, which had found them and generously presented them to me.



I was afraid of opening my father’s suitcase and reading his notebooks because I knew that he would never have tolerated the difficulties that I had tolerated, that it was not solitude he loved but mixing with friends, crowds, company. Still, later my thoughts took a different turn. These dreams of renunciation and patience, it occurred to me, were prejudices that I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote amid crowds and family, in the glow of company and happy chatter. In addition, even my father had, at some point, tired of the monotony of family life and left for Paris, where—like so many writers—he had sat in a hotel room filling notebooks. I knew that some of those very notebooks were in the suitcase, because, during the years before he brought me the case, he had finally begun to talk about that period in his life. He had spoken about those years when I was a child, but he had never discussed his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his Paris hotel room. He’d spoken instead of the times he’d seen Sartre on the sidewalks of Paris, of the books he’d read and the films he’d gone to, all with the elated sincerity of someone imparting important news.

When I became a writer, I knew that it was partly thanks to the fact that I had a father who spoke of world writers much more than he ever spoke of pashas or great religious leaders. So perhaps, I told myself, I would have to read my father’s notebooks with my gratitude in mind, remembering, too, how indebted I was to his large library. I would have to remember that, when he was living with us, my father, like me, enjoyed being alone with his books and his thoughts—and not pay too much attention to the literary quality of his writing. But as I gazed so anxiously at the suitcase he had bequeathed to me I also felt that this was the very thing I would not be able to do.

Sometimes my father would stretch out on a divan, abandon the book or the magazine in his hand, and drift off into a dream, losing himself for the longest time. When I saw this expression on his face, which was so different from the one he wore for the joking, teasing, and bickering of family life, when I saw the first signs of an inward gaze, I would understand, with trepidation, that he was discontented. Now, many years later, I understand that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. Patience and toil are not enough: first, we must feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary life, and shut ourselves up in a room. The precursor of this sort of independent writer—one who reads to his heart’s content, who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes others’ words, and who, by entering into conversation with his books, develops his own thoughts and his own world—was surely Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature. Montaigne was a writer to whom my father returned often, a writer he recommended to me. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who—wherever they are in the world, East or West—cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature.

But once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books—the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors—and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.



My father had a good library, fifteen hundred volumes in all—more than enough for a writer. By the age of twenty-two, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book. I knew which were important, which were light and easy reading, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated highly. Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library—build myself a world. When I looked at my father’s library from afar, it seemed to me to be a small picture of the real world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul. My father had built his library mostly on his trips abroad, with books from Paris and America, but he had also stocked it with books bought at Istanbul’s foreign-language bookshops in the forties and fifties.

In the seventies, I did begin, somewhat ambitiously, to build my own library. I had not quite decided to become a writer; as I related in my book “Istanbul,” I had come to suspect that I would not be a painter, as I had hoped, but I was not yet sure what path my life would take. There was inside me a relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to read and learn, but at the same time I felt that my life was in some way lacking, that I would not be able to live like others. Part of this feeling was connected to what I felt when I gazed at my father’s library: that I was living in the provinces, far from the center of things. This was a feeling I shared with everyone in Istanbul in those days. There was another reason for my anxiety: I knew only too well that I lived in a country that showed little interest in its artists—whether painters or writers—and offered them no hope. In the seventies, when I took the money my father gave me and greedily bought faded, dusty, dog-eared books from Istanbul’s old booksellers, I was as affected by the pitiable state of these secondhand bookstores—and by the despairing dishevelment of the poor, bedraggled booksellers, who laid out their wares at roadsides, in mosque courtyards, and in the niches of crumbling walls—as I was by their books.

As for my place in the world: in life, as in literature, I felt, fundamentally, that I was not “at the center.” At the center of the world, there was a life that was richer and more exciting than our own, and, like all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. In the same way, there was world literature, and its center was far away from me. Actually, what I had in mind then was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were certainly outside it. My father’s library was evidence of this. At one end of the room, there were Istanbul’s books—our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail—and at the other end were the books from this other, Western world, which bore no resemblance to ours, a lack of resemblance that caused us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the otherness of another, in the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels in order to escape his life and flee to the West—just as I did later.

Books in general, it seemed to me in those days, were what we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found wanting. And it wasn’t only by reading that we could leave our Istanbul lives and travel West; it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris and shut himself up in a room, and then he had carried the notebooks back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it seemed to me that this was part of what was causing me disquiet: after working in a room, trying to survive as a writer in Turkey for twenty-five years, I was galled to see my father hide his deep thoughts in this suitcase, to see him act as if writing were work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason that I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.

In fact, I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine—because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent it happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. But part of me also knew that I was not so much “angry” as “jealous,” that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy. I’d ask myself in a scornful, angry voice: What is happiness? Is happiness believing that you live a deep life in your lonely room? Or is happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or, at least, acting as if you did? Is it happiness or unhappiness to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all that surrounds you?

But these were ill-tempered questions. Wherever had I got the idea that the most important measure of a good life was happiness? People, papers—everyone acted as if it were. Did this alone not suggest that it might be worth trying to find out if the opposite was true? After all, my father had run away from his family many times—how well did I know him, and how well could I say that I understood his disquiet?

So this was what was driving me when I first opened my father’s suitcase: Did my father have a secret, an unhappiness in his life that I knew nothing about, something that he could endure only by pouring it into his writing? As soon as I opened the suitcase, I recalled its scent of travel and recognized several notebooks that my father had shown me years earlier, though without dwelling on them for long. Most of the notebooks I now took in my hands he had filled when he was in Paris as a young man. Although, like so many writers I admired—writers whose biographies I had read—I wished to know what my father had written, and what he had thought, when he was the age I was now, it did not take me long to realize that I would find nothing like that here. What disturbed me most was when, now and again, in my father’s notebooks, I came upon a writerly voice. This was not my father’s voice, I told myself; it wasn’t authentic, or, at least, it didn’t belong to the man I’d known as my father. Beneath my fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote was a more profound fear: the fear that, deep inside, I was not authentic. If I found nothing good in my father’s writing, if I found him to have been overly influenced by other writers, I would be plunged into the despair that had afflicted me so strongly when I was young, casting my life, my very being, my desire to write, and my work into question. During my first ten years as a writer, I had felt these anxieties keenly, and, even as I battled them, I had feared that one day I would have to admit defeat—just as I had done with painting—and give up writing as well.



So these were the two things I felt as I closed my father’s suitcase and put it away: a sense of being marooned in the provinces, and a fear that I lacked authenticity. For years, I had, in my reading and my writing, been discovering, studying, and deepening these emotions, in all their variety and their unintended consequences, their nerve endings, their triggers, and their many colors. Certainly my spirits had been jarred by the confusions, the sensitivities, and the fleeting pains that life and books had sprung on me, especially as a young man. But it was only by writing books that I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity (in “My Name Is Red” and “The Black Book”) and the problems of life on the periphery (in “Snow” and “Istanbul”). For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.

A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—and that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center.

But, as can be seen from my father’s suitcase and the pale colors of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a center, and it was far away from us. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with the same feeling of inauthenticity and Chekhovian provinciality, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, insecurity, and degradation than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger . . . but today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature ever could. What literature most needs to tell and to investigate now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears—the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin. . . . Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know that they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies, and nations outside the Western world—and I can identify with them easily—succumbing to fears that lead them to commit stupid acts. I also know that in the West—a world with which I can identify just as easily—nations and peoples that take an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their glory at having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.

So my father was not the only one: we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a center. Whereas the impulse that compels us to shut ourselves up in our rooms to write for years on end is a faith in the opposite, the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people the world over resemble one another. This, as I know from my own and my father’s writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt toward the West all his life—I have felt this, too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West and I have beheld the world that he built on the other side.

All writers who have devoted their lives to their work know this reality: whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing will, in the end, take us to other, very different places. It will take us far from the table at which we have worked in sadness or in anger; it will take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world. Could my father not have reached such a world himself? Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, rising from the mist in its many colors like an island spied after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us. We are as beguiled as the Western travellers who voyaged from the south to behold Istanbul rising from the mist. At the end of a journey begun in hope and curiosity, there lies before us a city of mosques and minarets, a medley of houses, streets, hills, bridges, and slopes—an entire world. Seeing this world, we wish to enter it and lose ourselves in it, just as we might in a book. After sitting down to write because we felt provincial, excluded, marginalized, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.



What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me, the center of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life but because, for the past thirty-three years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days, and its nights, making them a part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world that I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings seemed to begin to talk among themselves, interacting in ways that I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books but for themselves. This world that I had created, like a man digging a well with a needle, then seemed truer than anything else.

As I gazed at my father’s suitcase, it occurred to me that he might also have discovered this kind of happiness in the years he spent writing. I should not prejudge him. I was so grateful to him, after all. He had never been a commanding, forbidding, overpowering, punishing, ordinary father. He had always left me free, always showed me the utmost respect. I had often thought that if I had, from time to time, been able to draw on my imagination, whether in freedom or in childishness, it was because, unlike so many of my friends from childhood and youth, I had no fear of my father. On some deeper level, I was able to become a writer because my father, in his youth, had also wished to be one. I would have to read him with tolerance—to seek to understand what he had written in those hotel rooms.

It was with these hopeful thoughts that I walked over to the suitcase, which was still sitting where my father had left it. Using all my will power, I read through a few manuscripts and notebooks. What had my father written about? I recall a few views from the windows of Paris hotels, a few poems, paradoxes, analyses. . . . As I write, I feel like someone who has just been in a traffic accident and is struggling to remember how it happened, while at the same time dreading the prospect of remembering too much. When I was a child, and my father and mother were on the brink of a quarrel—when they fell into one of their deadly silences—my father would turn on the radio, to change the mood, and the music would help us forget it all faster.

So let me change the mood with a few sweet words that will, I hope, serve as well as that music. The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.



A week after he came to my office and left me his suitcase, my father paid me another visit; as always, he brought me a bar of chocolate (he had forgotten that I was forty-eight years old). As always, we chatted and laughed about life, politics, and family gossip. A moment arrived when my father’s gaze drifted to the corner where he had left his suitcase, and he saw that I had moved it. We looked each other in the eye. There followed a pressing silence. I did not tell him that I had opened the suitcase and tried to read its contents; instead, I looked away. But he understood. Just as I understood that he had understood. Just as he understood that I had understood that he had understood. But all this understanding went only as far as it could go in a few seconds. Because my father was a happy, easygoing man who had faith in himself, he smiled at me the way he always did. And, as he left the house, he repeated all the lovely and encouraging things he always said to me, like a father.

As always, I watched him leave, envying his happiness, his carefree and unflappable temperament. But I remember that on that day there was also a flash of joy inside me that made me ashamed. It was prompted by the thought that maybe I wasn’t as comfortable in life as he was, maybe I had not led as happy or footloose a life as he had, but at least I had devoted mine to writing. You understand . . . I was ashamed to be thinking such things at my father’s expense—of all people, my father, who had never been a source of pain to me, who had left me free. All this should remind us that writing and literature are intimately linked to a void at the center of our lives, to our feelings of happiness and guilt.

But my story has a symmetry that immediately reminded me of something else that day, bringing with it an even deeper sense of guilt. Twenty-three years before my father left me his suitcase, and four years after I had decided, at the age of twenty-two, to become a novelist, and, abandoning all else, shut myself up in a room, I finished my first novel, “Cevdet Bey and His Sons.” With trembling hands, I gave my father a typescript of the still unpublished novel, so that he could read it and tell me what he thought. I did this not only because I had confidence in his taste and his intellect; his opinion was very important to me because, unlike my mother, he had not opposed my wish to become a writer. At that point, my father was not with us, but far away. I waited impatiently for his return. When he arrived, two weeks later, I ran to open the door. My father said nothing, but he immediately threw his arms around me in a way that told me he had liked the book very much. For a while, we were plunged into the sort of awkward silence that often accompanies moments of great emotion. Then, when we had calmed down and begun to talk, my father resorted to highly charged and exaggerated language to express his confidence in me and in my first novel: he told me that one day I would win the prize that I have now received with such great happiness. He said this not because he was trying to convince me of his good opinion or to set the prize as a goal; he said it like a Turkish father, supporting his son, encouraging him by saying, “One day you’ll be a pasha!” For years, whenever he saw me, he would encourage me with the same words.

My father died in December, 2002.