Imaginary Conversations

For years I told the story about a conversation between my parents. We – the three of us children – were patients of a certain dentist, Dr. X, while my father was a patient of another one, Dr. Y. When my father suggested to my mother that he see Dr. X too, my mother told him, “for your teeth, Dr. Y is good enough.”

The anecdote came to life a few years ago, when were preparing to pack up our Jerusalem lives and I was going through letters from my father. In one of them, written to us in Addis Ababa, he said he was amused that I had told this story – apparently I had written to him that I had done so - “but for the record,” he wrote, “it was my eyes, not my teeth.” This gave me quite a jolt. “But no” I argued, “it was your teeth!” For a split second he was in the room with me. I wasn’t talking to a ghost but to him, fully alive, and it was a conversation, one person responding to the other, not the monologue I’d been addressing to him for more than 30 years.

It was then that I realized that I’d been talking to my father ever since he died. I still do. No, I’m not delusional. I know I’m imagining the whole thing; I know I’m speaking to him in a kind of daydream. In these waking dreams my father never responds, just listens. And the dreams are very short – just long enough for a sentence or two. Strange, isn’t it, our communing with the dead? Our parents are never really dead as long as we are alive.

The other strange thing about my father’s letter is the lapse in memory it represents. My mother died in 1951 so the conversation between my parents must have occurred by then. Although my father was writing to me in 1969, I don't doubt that he was right. But I’d been telling my version of the story for so long that his correcting me took me by as much surprise as if he had told me that I was born in Cairo. In The Madwomen of Chaillot, a character says that if you wear false pearls long enough they become real. That’s what happened to me, I guess. Memory is treacherous, which is why some historians rely solely on the written record – letters, minutes of meetings, treaties, etc. - rather than on memoirs or interviews with witnesses. To “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” we may add memory.

My children will probably converse with me in one-sided imaginary conversations after I’m dead in the same way that I talk to my father. And they’ll also probably mix up some of the stories about me and their mother, just as I misremembered that story about my father's eye doctor. I wish I had asked my father if he had talked to his father in imaginary conversations, after his father died, but the question never occurred to me. I’d like to think that he did, however, and that he also told family stories that he had misconstrued. While being dragged unwillingly towards that cliff, the notion of continuity is a comfort.