An Exclusive Love

Author: Johanna Adorjan
Publisher: Text Publishing
Price: $27.95 (paperback)

A suicide pact can either seem desperately romantic or desperately tragic; it’s the sort of dramatic final act that understandably provokes extreme reactions. But for German-based editor Johanna Adorjan, the joint suicide of her grandparents led her to explore their relationship and its place in her family story, and to know and understand the couple better after their death. The result is An Exclusive Love, a tender but unsentimental memoir that recreates imagined scenes from Vera and Istvan’s final day against a backdrop of personal recollections and twentieth-century European history.

Vera and Istvan were Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust and eventually fled Hungary for Denmark following the 1956 Communist uprising. They lived in Copenhagen for the next three decades; in 1991, when they were both in their seventies, Istvan had become terminally ill and Vera was adamant that she could not live without him. In October of that year, they died together, hand in hand in their bed.

Perhaps the sixteen-year gap between her grandparents’ suicide and the publication of An Exclusive Love gave Adorjan sufficient distance to approach this intensely personal and contentious part of her family’s history with such pathos and lack of sentiment. Vera and Istvan killed themselves on a Sunday, which Adorjan dryly observes is ‘not really the ideal day of the week for suicide’; this begs the question of whether there really is an ideal day for suicide (perhaps Monday is the more obvious choice), but it’s clear from her portrayal of them that Adorjan feels no resentment towards her grandparents for their actions. When she learns from a family friend that she shared a peculiar insecurity with her grandmother—a sense that ‘nobody liked her’—she rejoices in their similarity: ‘suddenly I also understood my grandmother’s love, which was so exclusive, so needy, so great, and ultimately conditional. Suddenly I can also imagine why she didn’t want to live without [Istvan], why she died with him.’

Adorjan’s spare and fluid prose (elegantly translated by Anthea Bell) and non-linear structure make this a more compelling read than I initially expected—I read it in one sitting. Pieces of family history and conversations with her grandparents’ friends are interspersed with a fond re-imagining of Vera and Istvan’s last day. The fictional quality of this extended scene, with its intimate details of emotion and dialogue, builds an absorbing and naturalistic narrative framework. Over the breakfast table, Istvan asks Vera if she slept well; in response, ‘my grandmother’s face wears a dismissive expression’, and she has to remind Istvan what day of the week it is. Later, Vera bakes beigli while Istvan loudly plays piano in the next room, ‘hitting a few wrong notes but sticking to the tune.’ Entering the kitchen, he asks for a taste of the raw dough: ‘“paws off!’’, Vera admonishes, ‘but she waits until my grandfather has dipped his forefinger in the mixture and tasted it.’ It’s a comfortingly familiar domestic exchange.

Alongside this imagined tableaux, Adorjan’s stories about her grandparents—her own recollections, and those of their family and friends—build a rounded portrait of them as individuals and as a couple. Vera, in particular, is a complex character whose forceful personality seems paradoxically at odds with her self-proclaimed inability to live without the love of her life, and her belief that he was the only person who really liked her. Adorjan remembers her as ‘feared and admired’, a woman who ‘made her way along pavements as if walking over a red carpet.’

Adorjan’s memories also highlight the peculiar nature of family lore, which sometimes seems to exist without origin. Istvan never spoke of his time in Mauthausen concentration camp during the war, but Adorjan has always known that he learned to sleep on his feet there to avoid falling over and being shot. ‘Whatever knowing means,’ she adds, wondering, ‘who told it to whom? When?’ The answer is unknown, and unimportant.

Adorjan doesn’t bring much of herself into this book—she is present mostly as an observer, a documenter—but she hints at how her family’s history has subtly shaped her identity. She feels ‘curiously at ease’ on a visit to Israel, despite being ‘in a country with a climate that does not suit me, whose language I do not speak, and whose script I do not read’. When a Jewish friend finds it amusing that Adorjan has never had a Jewish boyfriend, it prompts her to wonder if ‘there was a tacit understanding that it couldn’t work with a non-Jew’, and she signs up to an online Jewish dating site. It’s a failed experiment: she learns that ‘if someone tells you in his profile that he is thirty-six years old (...) it can mean that one or two decades ago he was thirty-six, and still has a living memory of what it felt like.’

The denouement of An Exclusive Love may be obvious before the book’s spine is cracked, but that doesn’t lessen its impact. It both is and isn’t tragic; Vera and Istvan chose to leave together, and, as Adorjan points out, no one could dissuade Vera from anything once she had made up her mind. This is an elegy for the grandparents that Adorjan remembers as ‘an elegant looking couple looking as if they had just parked their vintage car around the corner’, and a paean to an uncompromising and enduring love.