by Alice Nelson
It was almost the winter solstice. Truro seemed to Marina a place of perpetual winter – she could hardly imagine the days becoming longer again. She stood by the water, watching the ducks drifting in their safe clusters of sleep. The scalloped edge of the surf was almost at her feet; further out to sea there were curls of foam and sombre whitecaps.
Her days here in Truro seemed to be unmoored from the normal order of time. It was the lack of light, she thought, and the long nights. And the bewilderment of her grief. Often she would look up at the windows to find that the sun had shifted, that darkness was battening down. The days she had spent with Gabriel had the same timelessness. Whole mornings hurtling past, watching him playing in the leaves, lying on her bed with him, a book resting on her knees and those huge eyes fixed on her, his fingers in his mouth. A tilting joy would flood her in those moments. Such an ease to it, after all, this loving of a child.
Dov believed that it was the Children’s House which had made it impossible for Gizela to love them. That if she had cared for her own babies, had held them and fed them and rocked them to sleep, she would have loved them. Some door in her would have opened. Proximity, Dov believed, would have made things different. Once, Marina had spoken to a woman from their kibbutz who left with her children when they were toddlers. She realised, the woman told Marina, that she could not recognise her own child’s cry. She could not help feeling that this was a necessary knowledge, the woman said. The sound of her baby crying.
Marina thought of Constance. As far as she knew, Gabriel had been with her from the very beginning. She knew the sound of his cries, the weight of him against her back, the smell of his skin. And this had made no difference.
They were coming to Truro, Constance and Gabriel. It seemed impossible to believe, but in a few days they would be there. ‘We want to come to you for Christmas,’ Rose had written to her. ‘All of us. Please let us come.’ Marina’s eyes pricked with tears when she read Rose’s letter, slipped in with a package of chocolate, a box of tea, a thick pair of socks she had knitted. She, Ben and Jacob would have discussed this one Friday night, clustered around the table after dinner. Rose would have been elected as the emissary. It was a tradition to band together for the holiday: the lunch at Rose’s apartment, the walk through Central Park afterwards, the evening watching old films. She tried to imagine Gizela’s house full of the bustle of them. Leah making her famous cranberry sauce, Ben chopping firewood, Jacob reading the paper in Gizela’s armchair by the window.
The day after Marina received Rose’s letter she drove to Provincetown and called Ben from a telephone box. There was no telephone in Gizela’s house. Ben was full of news of his work at the nursery. People had been grafting plants for thousands of years, he told her. It was a form of alchemy. A hybrid rose grafted on to the root of a tougher variety. An apple tree that could produce two different varieties of fruit. Small botanical miracles. He and Alma were thinking of starting their own gardening business in the spring, he told her excitedly. It would be a kind of urban farming. They would teach people how to make gardens in their backyards or in pots on terraces.
At the end of their conversation Marina asked Ben if he would bring Constance and Gabriel to Truro for Christmas. ‘I don’t like to think of them being alone,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t know anyone else to go to.’
Yes, Ben said. He would walk to the projects and ask Constance that afternoon. If she agreed to come, he and Alma would catch the bus to the Cape with her and Gabriel.
Marina walked slowly to her car and drove the short distance back to Truro. Every radio station was full of Christmas carols; the soft hush of them filled the car as she drove along the shore in the dense, shadowless light.
She had asked Ben about Jacob, too. ‘He’s fine,’ Ben had said. ‘Busy. Missing you.’ There had been a faint twist of guilt when she and Ben were planning the Christmas visit. She knew that Jacob would not approve of Constance and Gabriel coming to the Cape. That at the very least she should discuss it with him before asking them. But it was not a conversation she wanted to have with him.
On the beach one afternoon a gale blew in across the dunes, the grasses lashed by wind. Marina held back the whipping strands of her hair with one hand, watching a single gull coasting above the waves. Further north, the emptiness of the shore was broken by the outline of a figure kneeling down on the sand. Patrick, Marina saw as she walked closer, digging for clams. His hands were bare and streaked with dark sand, his legs encased in rubber boots. He looked sturdy and competent, thrusting his spade into the wet sand, focused on his work. A green bucket stood beside him.
‘There’s something I want to show you,’ Patrick said as she approached. ‘Look out to sea.’ They stood together looking at the wild, rushing sheets of water, the wind meeting the breakers. White foam, made brilliant by the afternoon sun, streamed behind the waves.
‘There,’ said Patrick, touching her shoulder and pointing to a dark shape in front of them. ‘A seal.’ Marina saw the smooth black head breaking the surface. ‘You hardly ever see them here. He’s just a winter traveller, out foraging. Looking for a flock of ducks.’
For a long time they watched the great dark heft of the creature tumbling through the waves. Gusts of wind swept in from the ocean and Marina pulled the hood of her jacket over her head. It was the woollen coat she had found hanging in Gizela’s wardrobe. The first time Marina had worn the jacket she slipped her fingers into the pockets and found a dried stalk of lavender. Gizela must have plucked this. There were lavender bushes on the path leading into town. Marina pressed the flower between the pages of one of the books she had brought with her.
The seal disappeared beneath the waves and Patrick picked up his bucket. ‘I have cake if you’d like to stop by. From the Portuguese bakery.’
They stepped into friendship cautiously. During the days they kept between them a charming formality, but in the afternoons Marina would sometimes walk over to Patrick’s house and sit on the sofa by the window while he lit the fire and the kettle rattled on the stove. Their pots of tea by the window in the last hour of light acquired the seriousness of a ritual. Patrick was gentle and watchful, a touching shyness to him. Perhaps he was the kind of friend that Gizela had needed all along. One evening he left a box of dry kindling on Marina’s doorstep after a day of rain; another time she found a note pinned to the door warning her of a fierce gale that evening. Patrick’s light often burned late into the night, she noticed. Lying awake in Gizela’s bed she tried to imagine what he was doing. Reading in the pool of light from the cracked Bakelite lamp on his kitchen table. Standing staring at his wife’s painting of the fields of her childhood. Writing a poem. Had Gizela stared out at Patrick’s lighted windows against the vast night? Had it been a comfort to her?
They had not spoken yet about the scattering of Gizela’s ashes. Patrick must have the urn somewhere. He was the one who had made all of those arrangements after she had died. Patrick was waiting, Marina sensed, for her to raise it.
Later that afternoon snow began to fall slowly and soundlessly. Marina and Patrick were sitting together drinking tea, and they both turned to watch the drift of white at the window. What would the shore look like covered in snow, Marina wondered. She remembered Jacob telling her about Sibelius’s sixth symphony – how the composer had said that the music always reminded him of the scent of the first snow.
Patrick stood up and walked into his study and came out with a book in his hands. ‘I wasn’t sure when to give you this. I should have done so before.’
It was the first American edition of Marina’s book, a picture of a Romani girl in profile on the cover. She flicked through the pages; they were covered in careful pencil markings. Words and paragraphs had been underlined, pages turned down, asterisks marked by certain sections. Next to one paragraph describing the sorrowful face of a Romani musician, the word ‘beautiful’ had been written and underlined several times.
‘It was Gizela’s copy,’ said Patrick
. ‘She lent it to me because I was writing a poem about a Gypsy singer. That book was never far from her. I don’t know how many times she must have read it.’
Marina felt a sudden tightening in her chest. Her mother had found a copy of her book, had read her words over and over again. Gizela might have sat at the kitchen table in her cottage, the book open before her, a pencil in her hand. Marina’s eyes filled with tears.
There was a photograph of her on the jacket of the book, sitting in a grey armchair in front of the bookshelves in Jacob’s apartment on Park Avenue. Marina remembered the day so clearly: Ben’s excited direction of the publisher’s photographer, his earnest suggestions for props. A teacup, an open volume of poetry in her lap, the neighbour’s tortoiseshell cat in her arms –all of these things would make her look more serious and literary, Ben insisted. Jacob and Ben had sat side by side on the bed earlier that morning, advising her what to wear. The blue dress, Ben had declared. Marina was twenty-eight when the photograph was taken. Ten years after Gizela had last seen her face.
Had her mother scrutinised the photograph, tried to make out the titles of the books on the shelves? Had she imagined the apartment outside the edges of the frame, the unknown life surrounding the daughter she had abandoned? Could she have speculated about Marina’s life the way Marina and Dov had about hers? In all of these years shadowed by longing for her mother, Marina had never once considered the possibility that her mother had also longed for her. She leaned her face against the side of the old flowered armchair and wept.
That evening Patrick walked Marina to the door of Gizela’s house, carrying a slab of cake he had wrapped up. He waited while she opened the door. The snow was still light; it dissolved as soon as it touched the shoulders of Patrick’s coat.
‘Gizela almost never spoke to us about her other life. And we did not ask her. But there is one thing she told me many years ago,’ Patrick said. ‘When she left Israel after your father died, the kibbutz wanted her to leave you and your brother behind. They wanted you to remain Israelis, to be brought up in the Children’s House. You belonged to the kibbutz, they told her, not to her. It was your home. It was what her husband would have wanted, someone said. She could turn away from her country if that was what she chose, but why send her children into exile too? It was very hard for her, but she did not feel that it was the right thing to leave you behind.
‘After your brother died, she felt that she had made a terrible mistake. That something in her had tainted both of you. She was convinced that she was responsible for his death. That if she stayed with you she would only do more damage. She tried to explain to me once how, all her life, she felt some terrifying deficiency in herself, a lack of something profound at her very core. As if she were simply occupying the shape of herself.
‘When she told me this, I thought of Pablo Casals. Practising Bach’s neglected cello suites every day for more than a decade before performing them in public. And then his silence. First, his refusal to play in countries that mistreated their citizens; and then, after Franco came to power, his vow never to perform again. I don’t think it was a conscious choice for Gizela, but it was the same kind of withholding. The same removal from the world.’
They stood together in the snow for a long time, silence between them.
‘If I have learned anything,’ he said to her at last, ‘it is that sometimes all we can do for someone is to wait with them. And I know you might not feel this as a comfort – that it might not mean so much after everything that happened – but she loved you. I do believe that is true.’
There was no moon that evening, but the snow on the ground seemed to glow. The night was very still, not even the faintest rattle of wind. Marina sat at the kitchen table with a glass of wine in front of her. She wondered if Gizela had told Patrick about Dov’s art exhibition at Cooper Union. Remembering the look on her mother’s face when she had walked into the gallery that night, Marina could not imagine that she could ever have spoken about it to anyone. But to feel that she was responsible for Dov’s death. Yes, she could understand that.
It still seemed strange to Marina that Gizela had come to the opening of the exhibition. For all their lives she had absented herself from any event that involved her children. Marina could not remember Gizela ever setting foot in any of the schools she had attended. She never came to a school play, a parent evening, a graduation ceremony. Always Marina and Dov made excuses for their mother. She was unwell, they would say. She was working. She was in bed with a migraine. Once, one of Dov’s teachers came to their apartment. It was during Dov’s first year of high school, when he had become errant and stopped going to classes. Marina could still remember their panicked fear when the woman knocked on the door one summer evening. Gizela was not home. They did not know where she was or when she would return, but Dov told the teacher that she had gone to collect Chinese food for their dinner. It was something that a mother might do. The teacher said she would wait and sat down at the kitchen table, her legs crossed neatly at the ankles.
An hour passed, the teacher looking at her watch, fingering the handle of her handbag. This is very irregular, Marina remembered the woman saying. Dov looked stricken, walking to the window and peering out the curtains again and again. Gizela had never voiced it to them, but it was understood among them that no one must know how frequently she was absent, how often they were alone. Marina was not sure what had terrified them more: that Gizela would not appear, or that she would return to find the teacher sitting there at the table.
Eventually it grew dark. She could not in good conscience leave two children alone in an apartment at night, the teacher said at last, rising to her feet. She did not know where their mother was but it was well past dinnertime and something needed to be done. He had forgotten, Dov said suddenly, that Gizela had told him she was going to look in on a neighbour who was unwell. She must have needed to stay with the old woman. They would go downstairs and wait with the Zelman family, he said. They were good friends of Gizela; she could collect them from there when she returned. The teacher seemed content with this arrangement – the burden of responsibility for them had been shifted to another adult.
Mrs Zelman warmed up soup for them and sat with them while they ate. When she rose to clear their bowls, she placed her hands briefly on Marina’s shoulders. Even this most casual of gestures seemed enormous. Lying in bed that night, Marina could still feel the gentle pressure of those hands on her shoulders.
The exhibition was Dov’s final art project at Cooper Union. All through their childhood he had sketched and painted, but it became a serious passion for him during his last years of high school. There was a teacher who encouraged him to apply for entry to art school and he received a scholarship to Cooper Union. The scholarship included housing in the college dormitories, but Dov stayed on in the apartment with them, catching the train to Manhattan every day. He was intensely private about his work – it was the only thing that was not shared between him and Marina. She had not even known the subject of his final exhibition until she saw the title printed on the invitations.
An intensity of purpose emanated from him the whole year he was immersed in creating the works that would form the graduation show. It was something that transcended the zeal of his other passions; there were times when Marina was frightened by the depth of his obsession. There was something too desperate in it. Dov would stay at his studio until late every night, often sleeping there. Always thin, he grew almost skeletal that year. His face took on an alarming, starved expression. There were many days, Marina suspected, when he forgot to eat.
Sometimes Marina caught the train to Cooper Union after school and forced him to come to a café with her. She watched the tremble of his fingers as he held his cup of coffee. It seemed that the tremor moved through his entire body, something that he could barely contain. When he leaned close to her she could smell the stale reek of cigarettes. All the art students smoked, Dov told her. It was impossible to avoid it.
&n
bsp; Dov’s final exhibition was called ‘Children of the Gods’. It was a chronicle of his obsession. Every work in the exhibition was an echo of displacement and deprivation. A series of fourteen enormous canvases depicted each aspect of the Children’s House, rendered in the most meticulous detail. The rows of beds, the hand towels on pegs along the corridor, the dining hall, the shower room. When Marina saw the paintings she could hardly believe how detailed Dov’s memories of the place were. They had no photographs – everything had been reconstructed from his memory. The paintings themselves seemed ominous and foreboding, a terrible chill hanging over each one. In all the works, a tiny depiction of a pair of children could be seen. A boy and a girl, hand in hand. The figures of the children were dwarfed by the scale of the paintings; they appeared lost and adrift, their faces always in shadow.
Dov had found an old official black-and-white film extolling the virtues of communal child-rearing as it was practised on the kibbutz. Clips from the film were projected on to the walls of the gallery, sometimes over the paintings themselves. Children danced in circles, their hands held by women in nurses’ uniforms. The children beamed up at the camera as they clustered around sinks brushing their teeth. Rows of tiny boys and girls, no more than three or four years old, lined up outside a dining hall hand in hand, singing in Hebrew. One scene showed a dormitory full of sleeping children. Again and again a clip of a man speaking was played, cut in between every scene. ‘We will always be foreigners,’ he said. ‘But they are the children of the Gods.’