Julia and Slava walked, slowly, Emilian trailing respectfully beside them, behind the heavy coffin as it was brought into the church and laid at the front, white flowers trailing on the corners of the altar and down the sides. Before the service, the casket was opened, and lines of people solemnly walked up to it, pressing their palms on the shining mahogany and saying silent prayers. Julia was last, and she watched slowly as his face appeared to her as she walked up. He was as she remembered him in the hospital yet took comfort that there were no machines chained to his body. He was peaceful, there was no pain of the flesh, no presence in him now. He was gone. She turned where she stood, and saw a sea of people sat behind her, as far back as the door to the church, and even lining the back walls. Young and old, people that had traveled distances to be here, people that lived around the corner and had never said but a few words.
The two priests began, one holding an overly ornate icon of a gold Jesus lamenting his fate on the cross, quietly reciting the hymns of St Henry Damascene, both chanting in monotone Gregorian voices. The beatitudes followed, all the while the three metal chains of the kadylo, the incense burner held by the priests, clanged and shook, releasing frankincense in heavy clouds, incensing the body. It was intensely cathartic and heart-rending, the repetition and the smells creating a frenzy of melancholy worship. Then, the beginning of Vichnaya Pamyat, the hypnotic and dark funeral song, blessing the dead.
‘In the name of the father and son and holy ghost, with God’s almighty blessing…’ one of the priests began, in a deep booming voice cutting through the silence, ‘…shall this soul see his eternal reward.’ He held the notes, the walls reverberating with a sound that was almost inhuman. ‘Peace will now be granted unto your soul, with Christ and the Holy Mother of God residing on their thrones beside you as you enter the gates of heaven.’ His voice rose within the minor notes of the song, the force almost withdrawing the blackness of the day and releasing a ghost. The congregation began their response, the various harmonies filling the space:
‘In the name of the father, son and holy ghost, may your memory live on, live on in our hearts, through our lives, may your memory be an eternal reminder to the souls you have left behind on this earth, a reminder that God will be waiting for us… may your memory live eternally, may you find the peace that your soul has longed for. And now, Slava would like to sing Zhuravli, will everyone please rise.’ And then Slava stood up and walked to the front of the church, her hand resting on her belly, her heels echoing in the space, and she saw her mother nodding at her to go on. She reached the front and turned around in her somber black dress that she had bought just for this occasion and would never wear again. She whispered Papa, I miss you to herself, and through her tears she began to sing the opening notes of her father’s favorite song:
Do you hear, my brother, my friend?
The cranes departing, with silvery wings aloft
Their voices calling out, as they cross the sea...
Her voice lifted and echoed amongst the silent, cold walls of the room, and then a few voices joined her, slowly, and then more still-- baritones and tenors and altos, men and women’s voices joining together-- as it was a song that they had all heard as children and felt deeply. The far corners of Julia’s life finally connected in their collective mourning and their memories of Henry collided with their own realization: that death was the final freedom that he had spent his entire life searching for. It seemed a sea of faces, not a single one dry, sang for the loss of a man that had lived a long life in too short a time.
At the end of the service, as people streamed back out and black umbrellas unfurled against the sky and moved towards the cars, Julia sat on her own, a lonely figure in the front pew, thinking about what was left of her life. She looked around at the saints preserved in stained glass, and at the gold pots of incense in the corner, their chains hanging loosely on the floor. The only sound in the room was of her breath, long and steady, and the settling of the walls. Julia placed her jacket on her shoulders and took the small bag next to her as she stood up and walked to the casket, and then kneeled in front of it and looked in at Henry’s face, and then down to his hands that were placed one on top of the other. She saw that the mortician had left his wedding ring on. ‘I will come back to you one day,’ she whispered, and quickly stood up, clasping her hands in prayer. The ring was his promise to her. And she would never take it off. When she stood up, she reached for a large bag that she had placed by her feet, and from it she withdrew a fedora, the one he had always worn, and placed it delicately by his side.
The coming days blended into one another like watercolors, the plates had been scraped and the glasses washed, once everyone had gone and the last bit of food had been covered and put away, once the bedrooms had been emptied of guests and the last light in the house had been turned off, Julia sat down in a house that was extraordinarily quiet. She was alone, and felt it like a sodden dress, or the pull of gravity.
She was still wearing her dress: thin black silk that had long sleeves, a high neck and a hem that delicately hugged her knees as she walked. She had barely slept: the phone had been ringing relentlessly, the well-wishers had been at her doorstep offering food and sentiment. For the first time in days, she’d finally captured a quiet minute. She was sitting on the old worn couch in the living area, arms at her sides, her bare feet sinking into the dark brown pile carpet. The wood-framed pictures above the stone fireplace smiled placidly at no one in particular. There was no dominant voice in the house. The moon-faced grandfather clock clicked its arm past midnight. Julia observed that, part from the few extra plates and glasses from well-wishers, the house was exactly as she had left it when it happened; the day that Henry died. His flannel shirts still hung in the bedroom closet; his favorite slippers were by the door. It was better that way, or at least, for the time being. Tonight, Julia sat and closed her eyes, attempting to sleep somewhere that wasn’t in a room where she still felt him. As she drifted off, she felt the hairs on her arms raise and the temperature drop, imperceptibly. She opened her eyes.
I probably left the door open, or a window, she thought, wondering where the draft was coming from. She looked towards the door to the front room. It was closed. To the right, the windows were shut. To her left, at the door to the basement. It was closed. I’m just tired, she resolved, leaning her head back and shutting her eyes.
Shhh
One of the things that she’d learned to live with, when they moved to Cooper Street, was that the door to the basement was slightly too tall for the height of the carpet pile beneath it, so as it closed, it always made a recognizable sound, like someone raising their finger to their lips and saying
Shhh
She opened her eyes and stayed very still, as if in a dream not of her own making. As she slowly turned her head left, the door moved, ever so gently open, as if a child was entering, or a breeze finding its way through. She blinked hard, but it was still apparent that she wasn’t dreaming. And then a ribbon of cold air traveled from her left shoulder, across her chest, then to her right shoulder, down her arm, and was gone. And then the warmth of the room embraced her, and she knew that he’d finally left.
A month after the funeral, Slava moved back to the city for an indefinite period of time, waiting for their new arrival. She and Emilian’s jobs had no leniency for time away, and they had both used all of their compassionate leave, so she and Emilian said their goodbyes to Julia and promised to come up on Saturdays to see her, and maybe occasionally during the week as well.
After their daughter was born, they helped Julia sell her share in the apartment building on President Street as well as the building in Glen Cove, the money from it a healthy sum that would sustain Julia comfortably for a little while at least, before her social security afforded that little bit extra in the remaining years of her life.
It could be said that loss lives within us and around us, comfortably. Like a scar, or a separation from a loved one, we don’t survive it
, or erase it, but rather, place it permanently in a part of our daily lives that learns to accept and be grateful for what it teaches us; it enriches us with a sense of identity to the past; an attachment to a memory of someone, or something, affecting us profoundly. Julia had lost her siblings, her parents, she had given up two children and gave two more to God, and she had now buried her husband. But loss cannot exist without love, and so with time, Julia discovered the beauty in the melancholy again.
The contentedness in the solitary walks she took to see Henry was rivalled only by the joy spent in her garden: Julia would spend most of her days wrist-deep in the dark earth of the tidy garden, wedding band winking, her now longer, whiter hair tied loosely by her neck and covered with a cotton scarf to shield her eyes from the sun, her knees resting by explosions of hydrangeas and marigolds. She didn’t look over her shoulder anymore to see Henry to walk through the wooden gate, though she had for the first few years after he’d gone. His presence diminished gradually, and now, twenty years later, Julia only spoke of him occasionally with Slava, or in her nightly prayers, sometimes leafing through several pictures of him that she kept on her nightstand.
This particular evening, after she’d had dinner at the long table that now only had one place setting, she ran a bath and indulged in it-- her body so still and her thoughts so deep, that the water looked as if made of glass. As the water cooled, she realized why her thoughts consumed her: it was Henry’s birthday. She removed the plug and watched as the water cycloned towards the drain, and once the bath was empty, she stood up and retrieved a towel from the back of the door. She wrapped herself in a thin blue robe and looked in the mirror to survey her age: the heavy blue in her eyes, that had once been described by Henry as ‘like the sea before a storm’, had lightened, and there were dark spots on her forehead and cheeks, marking all the years the sun had chased her. Her nose, once sharp and Roman, had softened slightly, and the lines of Venus on her neck were deeply etched into her thin skin.
She walked out of the bathroom and towards the closet and stood on the very tips of her toes to retrieve a large, rectangular wooden box crudely engraved with sunflowers, which she brought back to the bed with her skin still slightly damp. It was light in weight, but the contents had sat heavy in it for years. She sat down on the bed, cross-legged, as she used to when she was younger, and opened it to reveal two folded pieces of paper, permanently creased into quarters, hidden memories from so long ago. Beside them was a stack of unopened letters that had been returned to her, each with a stamp bearing the words RETURN TO SENDER-INCORRECT ADDRESS.
She took both pieces of paper out and opened them, scanning the information. They would be fifty years old. She had missed an entire lifetime. She glanced over at the letters and realized it was pointless to search for answers now. She would stop wondering how their arms felt around her. She would stop wondering if they’d ever asked for her, longed for her, if they’d longed for her to sing to them. For so long, her heart had filled with the unrelenting hope of seeing their faces again, and so she held onto withering evidence as proof: proof that they did, in fact, happen, and that they loved her once, and she them. But fifty years can pass by in oppressively long minutes, or vast floods of seconds vanishing in a single drop. Time doesn’t deliberate, doesn’t debate age or circumstance. It spins the world on its axel, and the world has no choice but to turn, and as a result, the desire for one single thing disappears, due to lack of time, lack of energy,
or even lack of hope. And the acceptance of this can mean the beginning of a different story.
Julia took each sealed envelope, without ceremony or emotion, slowly tore them in half, and then into quarters, one by one, until there was a pile of paper at her feet that resembled nothing but ink and empty words. She placed them all on the floor by her bed, and then she took the two remaining memories and placed them on the nightstand, no longer hidden from view, and withdrew the pale blue rosary that her mother had given her, placing it in the pocket of her robe, and walked out of the bedroom. She proceeded down the narrow hallway, stopping in the kitchen briefly to shut off the small lamp by the window, and then past the grandfather clock, towards the door to the porch. She walked outside and down the ten wooden steps towards the garden, the bright moonlight stretched its silvery light across the perimeter of the garden and out into the fields where it faded. She stood, alone, her eyes reflecting what little light there was left, looking out across the dark fields, as she had done so many times in countries that she would no longer see again.
When she closed her eyes and felt her feet sink into the soft grass, she remembered again that it was Henry’s birthday, and what that meant.
Therefore, I say to you, her sins, which are many,
are forgiven, for she loved much.
Luke 7:47-48
Part IV
2011-2015
35
Glen Cove
‘Why do you still wear it,’ the cashier asked as she placed a handful of marigolds in the shallow box that Julia held. ‘I mean, after so long, you know?’
Julia smiled. She had seen Alice every week for as long as she and Henry had lived there, which wasn’t that long, now that he had gone. Alice was young and pale, with wide green eyes and a halo of red curls that were always gathered into a ponytail. She had always been kind, always interested. She had always said Hello Julia and waved, whenever she saw her walk down the path past the shop, towards the beach, heading home. She always asked questions. It made Julia smile, and reminded her of when she was that age.
Julia looked down at the worn gold of her wedding band. ‘Love persists, I think,’ she moved the flowers aside to make room for a few packets of seeds. ‘within the things that force you to remember.’ She looked up. ‘Photographs, letters, jewelry. Little things can mean everything.’
Alice pressed the keys of the cash register and took the money from Julia. ‘I think I’d be super messed up if my Mom died. It’s just her and me, you know. After my Dad left.’ She rolled a piece of gum in her cheek and sighed. ‘Can’t even think about it.’
Julia retrieved her change and lifted the small box to leave. ‘You would be very surprised at what the heart can endure if it has to.’ And she walked home.
In the twenty years after Henry’s death, and after nearly an entire life of constant upheaval, Julia’s life began to settle, like the earth after a seismic shift. She knew her life would eventually end here, in the spot where Henry left her, and the only journey she was interested in was a small one: the daily visits to see the place where he was laid to rest. And today, on the day after his birthday, she needed it more than ever, to lift the burden of a heavy heart.
This morning was similar to all the others before it: she dressed in trousers and a sweater for the invigorating weather, for it was bright sun but also brisk enough to redden her cheeks with an intense scarlet. She parted the thin curtains to reveal the view of the horizon beyond the garden, she smoothed the bedsheets, stacked the pillows, and smoothed the sheets. She arranged her perfumes in a line of various shaped atomizers on her dressing table and hung her robe in the closet and closed the door. She made her favorite tea, black with raw honey, and stood looking through the window above the sink that looked out onto the front of the house, and as it steeped, she found the thick gloves and the small, rusted trowel that she’d always kept in the drawer by the door-- the one that kept all the remnants and tools and odd bits of a house that had had a story once-- and placed them in the oversized pocket of her thick parka that she’d left hanging on a chair by the hallway. What’s the use in keeping broken things, Henry had often remarked to her as she would unearth strange metal clasps and knobs and old keys, and she would reply that nothing was ever fully broken; everything had a purpose.
She slipped on the pair of boots that she always wore, even in summer, and locked the front door, leaving instead through her bedroom and the sliding door that led to the porch and down the stairs. She stayed for a few minutes to in
dulge in the view in front of her: the pines and oak trees standing in a line across the distance, with the small humps of mountains farther still behind them, their tops hidden by the feet of the hovering clouds.
Down the stairs then, and left onto the gravel mile from the house, straight past the small craggy trails that lead to the woods, and then right, down the street where the dogwoods bloomed and carpeted the path with white. Past the pines that hovered at the stone gates of the church, past the small hotel with a new name that they used to own, and then down the road towards the cemetery walled in by a plain iron fence and mounds of over-fertilized grass.
Before she would walk in, she would look for the pale pink wildflowers that she she’d seen once before and never again, though she vaguely remembered something called a waxflower. And anyway, there were usually many others hiding in the abandoned lot across the road, in the bramble overgrowth: bluebells, dog violets, ground ivy, and foxglove. She would pick them, and then, clutching the offerings in her hand, follow a wide footpath that curled around the perimeter and then towards the middle, leading her to a four-foot tall rectangle of dark granite, engraved with a byzantine cross hovering over black letters:
Hironimus (Henry) Rudnick
Beloved father and husband
1919-1978
She knelt down and placed the flowers in front, noticing that a few weeds had grown at the base of the stone.
‘Henry, today has been a good day.’ She took her wool hat off and brushed aside strands of tangled white hair hanging in front of her face. She spoke softly, as if to a friend. ‘Slava was here the other day, helping me organize some of your things. She had a daughter. Lyuba. You would love her little face, dark like yours, with a birthmark on her cheek like a star. When she comes back to work, they said they would promote her to senior technician in the neonatal department, which has something to do with taking care of babies, she had to explain to me. She is taking care of babies.’ Julia’s eyes creased; her smile flooded her face. ‘I wonder sometimes, about my babies. I pray for them. I know you did to, when you were still here.’ She sifted some dead leaves from the side of the headstone and traced the letters of his name with an arthritic finger. ‘Slava is also helping me sort out your will. Or lack of one.’ She sighed. ‘I wonder if this was a way for you to keep me busy?’ Her lips rose at the corners. ‘I wonder if, had you stayed, you would have started doing things differently? Smoking less? Working less? Would you have been happy?’
Motherland Page 29