F R E E L A N C E

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020 TLS 15

cards of encouragement in black ink. More oftenthan not, my submissions went unanswered. Therewere other cards from him, which had to do withmore mundane matters: birthdays, graduations,invitations to attend a play.

They were all kept somewhere safe. At least Ithought they were. Because one day, I cannot saywhen, I lost them all. For years I searched, but invain. And now I began to wonder whether theycould had been stashed away with those otherfamily documents and left in some forgotten con-tainer in the house I used to share with my ex-hus-band. More than once I asked him about it, but hesaid he hadn’t come across anything. By then, hetoo had moved flats and the matter was dropped– until the day last spring when he told me aboutthe cardboard box.

As soon as I returned to the Bayswater flat withmy daughter, I tore it open. There were a few sheetsof newspaper at the top which I disposed of quickly,before I was greeted by my son’s Star Wars memora-bilia. Below this there was a stack of letters andpictures. It didn’t take long to realize that the timecapsule I was staring at was, in fact, my long-lostbox: here were my parents in Jerusalem in the1970s, sitting in a garden wearing sunglasses. Herewas the photograph of my paternal grandmother,holding my sister and me as we leaned against thebalcony of her nursing home in Haifa. There wassome correspondence with the French historianMarc Fumaroli, who died recently. Drawings by mythen small daughter. A tender portrait my fatherhad done of my husband and me, shortly after wegot married. A picture of my mother looking youngand glamorous, my four-year-old self at her side.Around her neck is hanging an African stone neck-lace which I had just recently worn to a party.

Today my mother’s memory is deteriorating rap-idly, and she has entered her own penumbra. Gaz-ing at the picture, I can remember her as she wasthen. The stones of the necklace against her skinmust have felt as they had against mine.

There were more photographs, from the late1990s. And, tucked beneath a New York Hospitalfolder containing a series of ultrasound scans of myunborn son, a stamped envelope bearing my name.I recognized Beckett’s handwriting instantly. Theenvelope contained pictures of us together, as wellas three notes from him to me – one of them aboutmy literary efforts. All the cards were written in the1980s. Two are in English, one in French (he andI spoke both languages together). As I recall, therewere a few more, which I hope might one day reap-pear, just as these have done. Seeing them imbuedme with the feeling that something precious hadhappened. I held them delicately and read themseveral times. There were his congratulations on mytwenty-first birthday. A note about my graduationfrom college – “Dear Bachelor Alba”, he writes – andabout beginning a new job in New York: “yourengagement with Marlborough (Gallery)”. The thirdone, in French, was about a play I had sent himwhen I was twenty. It is dated August 15, 1986.“Chère Alba, Lu ta pièce avec plaisir. Brava! Lovet’embrasse.”

Did Samuel Beckett really read my play with pleas-ure? To say it has left me dumbfounded is an under-statement. As far as I can recall, the plot was abouta modern-day Oedipus, set in a Left Bank café. I findmyself wondering whether he actually meant it.Then again, given all the times he remained silent,I’m justified in thinking he might have. What mat-ters most is that I was reunited with those cards, andin the strangest of times. I can see Sam sitting in thearmchair (which, family legend had it, might haveonce belonged to Ingres) of our Parisian living roomsipping his Irish whiskey, an enigmatic smile on hisface. My father and he are listening to a Beethovensonata. Sam lights a cigarillo. There is a diminuendoin the strings section. He closes his eyes.

My lost and found box is part of my past, cer-tainly. And I’m glad to have recovered it for thatreason alone. But what it also contained was mycontinuity. n

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Alba Arikha’s books include Major/Minor, a memoir. Her most recent novel, Where to Find me, was published in 2018

O NE AFTERNOON IN THE SPRING, I went topick up my daughter from her father’s flat.It was an unseasonably warm day. I parked

the car outside my ex-husband’s building, just as heand my daughter appeared. They were luggingheavy bags, a guitar and various other things,including a bulky cardboard box, which my ex-hus-band explained was in fact mine. He had found itby chance, as he was packing up in anticipation ofhis return to Italy. It seemed that I had left it behind(or perhaps the movers had) when we separated,fourteen years earlier. Now, unexpectedly, it hadreappeared. “There are a few things in there you’llfind interesting”, he said.

When I moved out of the house we had sharedfor fourteen years, I took everything that belongedto me apart from a few household objects which wedivided between us. An invisible demarcation linewas quickly drawn between my life then and my lifeas it was about to become. I can still remember theday I entered my new flat, keys in hand, with mytwo children in tow. It overlooked the rooftops ofthe Greek Orthodox church on Moscow Road inBayswater, and was flooded with sunlight. I felt animmense wave of happiness, which I was aware wasnot shared by my children. They had not wantedtheir parents to separate. They had not wanted tobe closing or opening any cardboard boxes.

But I did. I wanted my new place to feel likehome, both for them and for me. And as I beganthe process and unpacked one object after theother, I was overcome by the strange feeling thatalthough I had only parted with my belongings a fewdays before, they felt different in this flat, this light.As if they, just like me, had been given a fresh leaseof life. Their new setting had somewhat altered whatthey represented to me. Everything seemed clearernow and soon the novelty of my surroundings

melded into a routine my reluctant children event-ually adapted to, then came to view as normality.

In that same flat, I began taking notes for the bookI had been struggling to write for some time. It wasmainly about my adolescence in Paris, growing upwith artistic parents: the painter Avigdor Arikha andthe poet Anne Atik, who had both emigrated toParis in the 1950s – my mother from the US, myfather from Israel via Bukovina, a German speakingpart of Romania. I described their high-mindedfriends, my father’s low tolerance of pop culture,my mother who strove to make herself heard – notalways successfully.

But it was also about the war, my father’s youthspent in a concentration camp, and about how ourrealities clashed with each other, like jarring noteson a piano, as those of many parents and childrendo. The principal setting for the memoir was Paris,where my sister and I went to school, but the storywould straddle other countries – the town of Czer-nowitz, in Bukovina, Eastern Europe, the US, andIsrael, where we spent our summers.

As part of the research for the book, I sought outfamily documents in order to gain further under-standing of those years. Although I did find most ofwhat I was looking for, some valuable things weremissing: certain letters, some folders of my ownwriting, photographs of my parents when young,and of my paternal grandmother.

A section of this memoir, called Major/Minor, waspublished in 2011. It delves into my father’s relation-ship with Samuel Beckett, who was his close friendover many years. My father drew Beckett and illus-trated some of his writings: for example, Nouvelleset textes pour rien, published in 1958. (Avigdor Ari-kha died in 2010; Beckett in 1989.) When I was born,Beckett became my godfather, and in the book Irelated the (cringeworthy) fact that as a buddingwriter, still in my teens, I used to send him poemsand stories which I bashed out on an old typewriter.Occasionally he wrote back to me, handwritten

Lost and foundPostcard from Samuel Beckett to Alba Arikha

ALBA ARIKHA