by Alice Nelson
Working in the garden felt necessary and important, almost a kind of restitution. It made Marina think of her brother, the letters that Dov had written her from Poland during the summer he had spent there cleaning graves in the Jewish cemetery. What he was doing was avodat kodesh, Dov told her in his long, fervent letters. Holy work. He slept on a camp bed in the small house of the village priest and the life he described was spare and monastic. Early risings and long days of hard work in the cemetery, cutting back vines and cleaning the gravestones. The graves had been neglected for decades, some of them had been vandalised and covered with graffiti. Dov had abandoned his religious observance by then, but this felt to him like a truer form of faith. Small, unnoticed works of mercy were what interested him now, he wrote to Marina. No longer for him the fanfare and ceremony of organised religion – it had too much of the performance about it. He wanted nothing false. How Marina wished Dov could have been there with them, crouched in the soil among the plants.
In her telephone conversations with Jacob at night, Marina told him about the things they had planted that day. The flower seeds they scattered among the herbs, the little tents of muslin that Ben had constructed to protect the kale from bugs. She tried to imagine Jacob sitting in an armchair in the borrowed apartment in Cambridge, a glass of wine beside him, his feet resting on the coffee table. Ben’s footsteps sounded on the floorboards above her. A soft laugh, a door closing, then the house fell quiet.
When she woke from a dream hours later, the whole room was awash in a pale shaft of moonlight. She reached out for Jacob, forgetting for a moment that he was not beside her. Rose had once told her that for many months after Max died she surfaced from sleep believing he had been returned to her. Every morning there was the fresh grief of waking to find his side of the bed empty. She had worried that this was a sign that she was not steady in her mind. She felt his absence so piercingly, she told Marina, that she had truly feared she might go mad. That some essential part of herself would remain forever unhinged. She went walking a great deal in the weeks after Max died and she would look in at the lighted windows of the townhouses on the streets around her, thinking that she would always now feel cast out of her own life. She had entered into some other element and she was not sure how to inhabit the world anymore. This was what it would be like for her to lose Jacob, Marina thought now, staring across at the pile of books scattered on his side of the bed. It was a devastating thought. Rose was only a few years older than she was now when Max died. So much life still before her.
Marina had read a story once about the Aleut people that she had found strangely comforting. When an Aleut man’s wife died, the tribe would gather around him to brace his joints against grief. It was a literal swaddling – hide bindings wrapped firmly around the knees, the ankles, the elbows and shoulders. All the vulnerable points of bone. The Aleuts believed that if they did not take this precaution it would be possible, in your grief, to go to pieces; that the body could fall apart from sorrow. It seemed right that grief could take such a physical form. And a comfort to think it could be guarded against.
One afternoon when Constance arrived to collect Gabriel she came out to the garden. The girl stood there framed by the door, her canvas bag clutched in her arms, watching them all at work. Marina could not look into her face anymore without remembering all the terrible things she had read in the books about Rwanda. Of all the possible histories she imagined for Constance, the story of the marshes was the one that Marina most often inserted her into. She found herself searching Constance’s face sometimes for traces of the young girl who had hidden herself beneath the water. Waiting, watching in the cold mud, some desperate instinct for preservation conquering her terror. Marina agonised over the things she might have seen during those long weeks, the ways that she had been hurt.
Ben waved exuberantly to Constance. ‘Come and see our splendid kale,’ he called out to her. He simply filled in Constance’s silences, carrying on a conversation with her as if she had responded after all. To Marina’s surprise, Constance came over to the garden bed and crouched down in the dirt next to Ben. She reached out and touched one of the new kale plants, running her finger over its knobbly leaves. Ben passed Constance a tray of parsley seedlings they had bought at the nursery that morning. ‘Here. Help us get these planted,’ he said casually.
Constance looked down at the tray of small plants. A silence hovered over the garden; it was as if they were all holding their breath. Gabriel stood very still beside Alma, a small watering can in his hands. They were watching Constance, Marina realised, to see what she would do.
Constance placed the seedlings down gently and picked up a trowel that was lying in the garden bed beside her. She slipped off her shoes. Deftly, she dug out several small holes and pressed the plants expertly into the ground. When the parsley was planted, she set to work on a tray of silverbeet, bending silently over the plants, the soles of her feet pale in the sunlight. Something must still remain in her after all, thought Marina, from her life before this one. Someone had taught her about turning soil and tucking seedlings into the earth, about the space to leave around each plant. She contained such submerged histories. Not only the things that had happened to her during the genocide, but the life she had lived before that. Had she been married? She most likely would have been only seventeen when the genocide began, but perhaps that was old enough for marriage where she came from. Or had she lived with her parents? Were there brothers and sisters? But even if she asked her these questions, Marina knew, the girl would not answer her.
The next day Constance arrived just after midday. She must have come straight from her class in East Harlem. She went to the garden, where Alma and Ben were pulling up weeds from around the nuns’ old grotto. They wanted to plant bulbs there so that in the spring there would be tulips and daffodils. Constance joined them, hitching her wrap above her knees and taking a small hoe. She did not speak to them, but a different air came over her when she was working in the garden. There was something less formidable about her, something softer. She worked carefully, bent closely over the plants. Sometimes she stopped to examine her work, a faint glimmer of satisfaction on her face.
For Gabriel the garden was a place of fascination. He scratched away in the dirt with a stick, scavenging for hidden shells and dead beetles, his mouth pursed in fierce concentration. Marina plucked sprigs of rosemary and wild thyme, and crushed them for him to smell, found feathers and the skeletons of insects for him. One day she came towards him holding her hand out in front of her and let a ladybird circle from her wrist to his small cupped hand. He stared as the tiny speck made its way down his arm, brightly red against his skin. He leaned into her, taking her arm and placing it around his waist. Since the very beginning there had been this hunger in him for touch. This need was something she felt constantly and sharply, as if the only way he could truly know her love was when he was in her arms. Of course it made sense, Jacob said when she told him this. The mother’s body is our foundational experience, the relationship that tells us what a relationship is. The child was looking for something that would bear the trace of his mother’s body.
Marina thought of Gizela. If her history was remote to her children, then her body was just as unavailable. They had watched their mother with a stunned awe; even as children her beauty was evident to them. It seemed incomprehensible that they had come from her body. There were no photographs of Gizela when she was pregnant. If Marina and Dov had not looked so like her, they could have convinced themselves that they were not her children at all, that they had somehow been deposited into her reluctant care. Once, Gizela had caught a brooch in her long hair and asked Marina to untangle it. The sensation of having her hands in her mother’s hair felt like the most illicit of thrills, and Marina lingered over the task for as long as possible, until Gizela grew impatient and told her to hurry up. Marina and Dov were always dreaming up scenarios in which Gizela might need their help: illnesses that they would nurse her through, hospi
tal stays when they would keep vigil by her bedside. They would save her from terrible accidents and she would turn to them with love and gratitude.
Gizela did go to hospital one year. Marina was seven years old, Dov eleven. Their mother refused to tell them what was wrong, only that she needed to have something done and she would be gone for two days. They could not visit her, she said when Dov asked, because the hospital would not allow children. They watched her from the window, walking down the street with a small suitcase in her hand. At the corner she paused and looked back towards the house for a moment before setting off again. The apartment seemed darker than ever with Gizela gone. They missed the clatter of her typewriter from behind her bedroom door, the sounds of her feet on the floorboards as she walked around her room.
She was gone for twelve days. For all this time Marina and Dov continued to pack their lunches and go to school and do their homework at the kitchen table in the evenings. Dov bought loaves of sweet challah from the bakery around the corner and they ate bread and butter for dinner. They stayed up late reading, often falling asleep on the old velvet sofa, the reading lamps still burning when they woke in the cold winter mornings. Each day there was a growing, unspoken fretfulness. Some sense of dread stopped them from speaking to one another about their mother or where she might be. It was as if by naming possibilities they might conjure them into being.
But after a week passed they wrote down the names of all the hospitals they knew in Brooklyn. Gizela’s name was not listed at any of them. Marina watched Dov as he stood at the counter of one hospital, leaning in and carefully writing their mother’s last name on a piece of paper for the clerk. She and Dov had not once spoken about what they would do if they could not find Gizela, if she failed to return to them.
Several days later, the door opened and she walked into the apartment. She put her small suitcase on the floor and sat down at the kitchen table where Marina and Dov were playing cards. She looked pale and gaunt, her hair dull and unwashed. She said nothing to them about where she had been for so long, but she drank the cup of tea that Dov made for her, gazing at the two of them as if they were strangers. She sat there with them for a long time, still wearing her coat, her elbows resting on the table.
Those fall days in the garden of the brownstone were like brief, hopeful flares. They took on an enchanted cast. The liquid afternoon light, the modest flourishing of the vegetables, the shared effort. Constance joined them every day, coming to the house even when she did not have class. Ben would race home after his shifts at the supermarket, bursting through the back door into the garden. Sometimes they kept working until the sky darkened. How safe they all were there in the garden. As if the walls had been built to shelter such peace.
Late in the afternoons Marina made a pot of tea and they all sat together on the terrace, surveying the work they had done. The blue teacups lined up on a tray, slices of dark fruitcake that Rose had made – they were the strangest of tea parties. They talked then, too. Alma would describe the countryside of her childhood or the particular way her mother had cooked tamales. Ben once told a long story about an elusive Japanese mathematician and the particular beauty of the theorem he had discovered. Marina found herself speaking about Frieda, the young Satmarer woman who had left the community, and whom she found herself writing more and more about. ‘You should invite her for Shabbat sometime,’ Ben said. ‘She must be lonely.’
Constance remained silent, but sitting there beside her, Marina could sense an attentiveness that she had never seen in her before. Once, she caught her staring hard at Alma as she spoke about her younger sisters. Constance was trying, Marina thought, to be there with them in the best way that she could.
In November Jacob returned from Boston and soon afterwards the weather changed with an alarming swiftness. Within the space of a few days winter was everywhere. A frost spread over the garden and the lettuces and tomatoes succumbed. Their wilted remains felt irretrievably sad to Marina. It was too cold to be in the garden any longer. The nursery where they bought all the plants offered Ben a part-time job, and he and Alma spent long hours there learning how to propagate seedlings. Constance stopped coming. They returned to the old pattern. She brought Gabriel to the house before her class, sometimes walking away down the street as soon as she saw Marina open the front door, leaving the little boy standing bundled up in his red coat at the foot of the steps. She returned in the late afternoon, always refusing Marina’s invitation to come in for a cup of tea. It was as if those days in the garden had been dreamed, their strange companionship dissolving as quickly as it had formed. By the time the first snow came, the only thing that still survived out there was the rosemary.
Harlem
November, 1997
Marina walked west through the park to Columbia. The sun hung low in the sky, hidden by a gauze of clouds. She tucked the ends of her scarf closer around her neck. It was not yet December and already the city had succumbed to what felt like the bitter cold of midwinter. She had agreed to give a lecture in the School of Journalism about her research process for the Romani book. The students were learning about the art of the interview, her colleague told her; it would be interesting for them to hear about her experiences with the Romani community. When she was preparing for the lecture the day before she had taken her book from the shelf and turned it over. ‘An ambitious panorama of European Gypsydom’, the publisher had written. ‘A penetrating study of the world’s most elusive people’. She hated the word panorama. There was something false and smug in it, something against the whole spirit of the work. It was the same feeling she had about the idea of teaching students how to conduct an interview. What could she tell them? That very little of what they needed to know could be taught. That it took time and long silences and quiet, attuned listening. That they should throw their earnest lists of questions away. It was not what they would want to hear.
After the lecture, Marina walked to her office to collect her mail. She stopped to make herself a cup of tea in the staff kitchen. Strange to think that she would be back at work in a few weeks’ time, that her days would no longer be her own. The sky had turned dark and she saw the first few taps of rain as she sat down at her desk, the soft roll of it against the dusty window. There was a book that had finally come in on an inter-library loan, a pile of letters. One of the envelopes was handwritten; an unfamiliar scrawl. She sliced open the envelope carefully with the letter opener shaped like a feather that Ben had given her one birthday.
The letter was from a man called Patrick Stone. Marina’s mother had been his neighbour, he wrote. They had lived side by side for nearly twenty years in a small seaside town called Truro in Cape Cod. He was writing to tell her that Gizela had died. It was cancer, diagnosed at the beginning of the summer. Terrible but swift. By the time it was found there was nothing that could be done. In any case, Gizela had refused all medical intervention. She had died at home, in her house by the ocean. It had happened just after dawn, which, as Marina might know, was her mother’s favourite time of the day. Gizela had given firm instructions, the letter went on to say, that Marina was not to be told that she was sick. That she was not to be told of her death until afterwards. He had not felt able to defy her in this.
Gizela had been cremated, Patrick wrote, another thing that she had insisted upon. She had not wanted any ceremony, any gravestone or memorial, only for her ashes to be thrown into the Atlantic Ocean. The ashes had come back from the funeral parlour now and he wondered whether Marina might want to come to the Cape to be there to scatter them into the sea. She might also want to come to her mother’s house and see if there was anything of Gizela’s she wanted to keep. He understood if this was not possible for her, but had wanted to extend the offer. He would wait to hear from her. At the bottom of the letter he had written his address and telephone number.
Marina sat there with the letter in her hands. Everything seemed to close around her, as if the air had been sucked from the room. Here it was, all her old h
unger for her mother slipping into something so terrifying that it turned her stomach, made the edges of the room rise up, and recede. Her shaking hands, a lurching sea-sickness, tightness in her ribs. She looked at the date on the letter. It had been written nearly four weeks earlier. Marina struggled to line up the facts: Gizela’s death, this life by the ocean in Cape Cod. Impossible to fathom any of it. The distant sound of voices in the courtyard, the faraway hum of traffic, the catch and drip of the rain against the glass, the cooling cup of tea in front of her: the whole episode seemed suspended, out of time. She didn’t know how long she sat at her desk after she read the letter, her hands clasped around the mug on her desk to keep them from shaking, the tight twist of fear in her stomach. She laid her head down on the desk and closed her eyes.
Jacob came to bring her home from the university. He picked up the telephone when she called his office, and half an hour later he was there in the doorway, his coat slick with rain, a wrench of worry on his face as he crossed the room and put his arms around her. Suddenly she was weeping against him, his hand stroking her hair. Darling, darling. He murmured it to her like an incantation, a good spell to keep her from harm. She let him lead her home through the park, his arm looped through hers, the wide spread of his big umbrella encasing them so that she could barely see the world before them.