by Alice Nelson
Spliced into these scenes were clips from another film, a documentary Marina had seen before, made by a young man who had grown up on a kibbutz. The man had conducted a series of interviews with the children of the kibbutzim, now adults in their twenties and thirties. All these men and women had been terribly wounded; their quiet, serious voices spoke in Hebrew as the camera moved through the rooms of an abandoned Children’s House. The place had fallen into ruin: doors hung off hinges, broken furniture was piled in the corners of rooms. English translations of their words were projected over the images of empty rooms. One woman spoke of feeling as if she had no skin on her body, living in such close proximity to hundreds of other children. Another spoke of her terror of the communal showers, her shame at the daily revelations of her changing body to a room full of other girls. ‘I’m not sure who is more of a mother to me,’ one woman said, ‘my own mother or the space that was always around me.’ Even on the crackling audio of the film, the tremble in her voice could be heard. Several times she turned from the camera to wipe away her tears. Another man spoke about how his greatest pleasure was to say goodnight to his own children. ‘Sleep is when they leave the world for a little while,’ he said. ‘And even before they were born I knew that I would want to be there with them each night when they slip away.’ Another man spoke the same phrase repeatedly, his voice full of bitterness. ‘They called us children of the Gods, but really we were small offerings to the Gods of ideology.’
The scenes from the films and the voices, repeated over and over, formed a kind of echo chamber, a strange and disconcerting symphony. Down the centre of the gallery, hanging from the roof, were fourteen enormous silk screen images. Each one was the same image of Gizela. Her face, rendered in black and white, loomed. Dov had caught her expression with an excruciating exactitude: the huge eyes, the distant, abstracted gaze. Her hair was braided around her head like a crown, her arms folded across her chest. It was the most intimate of portraits. Across every image were emblazoned the Hebrew letters for mother.
Gizela arrived late to the opening of the exhibition, just before the speeches were about to begin. Sitting with a cluster of Dov’s friends on the other side of the room, Marina saw her walk through the door and stand there stunned for several minutes as she took in everything around her. For a moment Marina feared that her mother was going to cry. People always looked at Gizela: it was her beauty, and something fierce and singular about the way she held herself. But that night Marina watched as people in the audience began to notice that Gizela was the woman in the pictures. She was instantly recognisable – that crown of hair, that gaze. Perhaps it was only her flawed recollection of that night, but Marina remembered a hush over the room and whispers. And Gizela’s face. That terrible look on her mother’s face.
Gizela walked through the room, all the way to the front, where Dov was standing beside the art critic who was to give the opening speech. Standing in front of her son she raised her hand and slapped his face. The crack of it rang out across the room. Then she turned away and walked out of the gallery. Marina jumped up to follow her but when she stepped into the street it was empty, not even the sound of footsteps on the pavement. By the next day, Dov was dead and Gizela was gone forever.
When Constance stepped down from the bus in Hyannis, it struck Marina again how unprotected she was. Constance looked around her uncertainly, her eyes huge in her narrow face. She seemed thinner than ever. Ben and Alma emerged from the bus, Gabriel in Ben’s arms. As soon as he saw Marina waiting there, the little boy struggled free of Ben and came running to her, flinging himself against her legs and starting to cry as she picked him up. She had been away from him for nearly a month. He could only have felt her absence as a terrible betrayal. He sobbed against her shoulder, his tears running down her neck, his hands twisted in her hair. Marina was glad that Jacob was not there to witness this.
Constance hung back, a plastic shopping bag clutched in her hands. She permitted Marina’s embrace, leaning in against her briefly. Driving back to Truro from the bus station, she caught sight of Constance’s face in the mirror. The girl needed a mother, a wise uncle. Someone from her own country. The car wound around the road by the shore, the band of sea glimmering beyond the dunes.
After so many days of silence it felt strange to Marina to have the house full of people. Her only company for the last month had been Patrick; those hushed conversations in the last afternoon light, the pots of tea by the fire. They were all there now: Jacob had arrived with Rose and Leah late that afternoon. When he stepped out of the car, Marina fell into his arms in the same way that Gabriel had dissolved against her earlier that morning. She felt the sharpest tenderness for him when she rested her head against his chest, his arms around her as they stood together in the gathering dusk.
The hum of voices, the smell of coffee brewing, the clatter of dishes as Leah and Jacob cooked together; the cold silence of the house was suddenly gone. It was as if it were a different place altogether, barely one she recognised any more. Marina sat at the kitchen table with Gabriel on her lap, pointing out the gulls perched in the swaying fir trees beyond the window. The noise of the waves was all around them. Rose and Alma sat beside her, bent over a pile of wool. Rose was teaching her to crochet. Marina smiled to see them – Alma’s serious absorption, Rose’s quick fingers, her gentle instructions like an incantation. The girl had been befriended, just as she herself had been so many years before.
Through the window she spied Patrick walking up the path, rubbing his hands together in the cold. He had offered his spare bedroom for Rose and Leah to stay in and they had insisted that he come to the cottage to join them for dinner. The day before, he dragged two mattresses to the cottage for Alma and Ben to sleep on, and they made the beds together, fluffing up the pillows and piling on extra blankets. He was going to make a plum pudding for Christmas lunch – a very un-American tradition, he said.
‘We love him already,’ Leah whispered to Marina as they watched Rose and Patrick deep in conversation at the end of the table. He was telling her about frigate birds. Those great regal creatures with their sweeping feathers and sun-drenched lives in islands full of mild evenings and clear water. Sometimes, Patrick said, whole flocks were swept up in hurricanes and carried thousands of miles through the gale to other countries, not knowing where they had come to, or how far a distance they had travelled. The miracle of the birds, Patrick said, was that they could pick themselves up and intuit home. The birds found food and water, gathered their strength in hiding, and began the long flight back to their own lost lands, their sweet white beaches and shady palms. Home was a trace laid deeply in them, Patrick said, a kind of true north that they always knew to navigate towards. Where they belonged was never in question and return was always possible.
Marina wondered if he was thinking of his wife’s watercolours, those yellow fields of her childhood. Or perhaps of Gizela, who had never belonged anywhere. She noticed Alma listening very closely to Patrick’s story, her chin resting in her hands. What happens, Marina wanted to ask Patrick, when there is no possibility of return? No way for the wanderers to find a path home.
Constance had disappeared almost immediately into the small bedroom at the back of the house. She refused a cup of tea, an extra blanket, only emerging reluctantly when Rose went to fetch her for dinner. She sat silently at the table beside Ben, staring at her plate. Perhaps it was too much for her, Marina thought, to be here among all these people. The slow banter, the bursts of laughter, the crowded table. It was as if those days in the garden that fall had been dreamed. Constance seemed to have retreated even further into herself now; to be marooned entirely by her despair. Sometimes there is a kind of damage to people’s inner lives that can never be rectified, Jacob had once told her. He had been speaking about Gizela, but it was true for Constance too, Marina thought, watching the girl’s face.
That night the sound of thunder woke Marina, the rumble of it loud and close. It was raining, a sudden hard s
patter against the window. She heard the horn of a ship out at sea, a cold, disembodied sound; mournful and ominous. For a moment, she thought it was the cry of a child. Surfacing from sleep, she was confused briefly to see Jacob there beside her. She could see his face clearly in the shaft of moonlight that spilled into the room. Sleeping, he looked younger, his lips open slightly, his cheek resting on his hand. How deeply he cared for those he loved, for those who had been granted admission to the circle of his protection. Marina turned towards him and he moved to make a space for her against his warm body, his arms reaching around her, his lips pressed into her hair.
On Christmas morning they walked slowly in single file along the path through the dunes, a silent procession. The first breath of light was in the sky, the cold so sharp that Marina could feel it in her cheekbones. A whisper, the call of a bird, the crunch of their boots on the sand; the morning was still and hushed. They had left Constance and Gabriel asleep in the bedroom at the back of the house. Patrick put his hand on Rose’s arm to steady her as they walked over the top of the dunes down towards the water’s edge. In his other hand he held the small wooden box that contained Gizela’s ashes.
It had troubled Marina at first, this burning of her mother’s body. It was something forbidden by their faith. A desecration of the flesh that had housed the spirit and the breath of God, had housed her own holy soul. The dead must be buried in the earth. But Gizela had cast all that behind her long ago. She didn’t want a brass plaque under a salt-blighted rosebush, would not allow her name to be carved on a stone in the cemetery. It was how she had lived her life. Marina believed Patrick when he said that this was what Gizela had wanted.
They stood in a line along the edge of the water, watching the light creep slowly into the sky. The ocean stretched away beyond them, still and black. There were no speeches, no words about Gizela as they scattered the ashes into the waves, but as they stood there together Patrick began to sing. It was a high, strange tune, the words bending into cadences Marina could not identify. Later, he told her that it was a Gaelic love song, that as a small boy he had watched his father sing it above his mother’s grave, tears streaming down his face. One of them should have said Kaddish for Gizela there by the shore, Marina thought at first, but no, Patrick’s song was right. So often consolation was unexpected; so often it came in a language not one’s own.
An arc of grit, her mother’s body out there on the waves. The ocean that she had loved. These ceremonies of sustenance. Beside Marina, Jacob touched her cheek gently; she had barely realised she was weeping. Patrick swayed slowly as he sang, the notes rising up high and pure in the cold morning air. It seemed a hymn not just for Gizela, but for Dov too, and for Constance. For all the lost and the uncommemorated. Beyond them a drift of pale pink cloud trailed across the dawn sky. The black motes of distant birds circled and turned above the waves, taking up a cry among them with a single voice.
Gabriel
December, 2018
The Christmas Day my mother disappeared there was a particularly savage winter storm on the Cape. The winds were so fierce they peeled back the sand from the dunes, and the blackened skeleton of an ancient ship that had been buried for over a century lifted itself free. There’s a newspaper clipping about it – a photograph of the old ship perched on the dunes as if it were cresting a wave, its hull a giant ribcage. When I first saw the picture, it reminded me of the dinosaur skeletons at the Museum of Natural History – those ancient arcs of bone. After the weather had cleared, the townspeople of Truro made their way down to the beach to exclaim over the old ship, to climb through its hull and take photographs of each other standing by its prow.
At the same time, a small search party was combing the town for my mother. The Coast Guard, the Truro police; men who had left their Christmas lunches to look for a woman who would never be found. Later there were dogs. A pond was dredged. For some reason this collision of stories seems to be important, as if the resurrected ship is somehow connected to my mother, as if the two things are part of the same story.
There was no photograph in the newspaper of my mother, because no image of her existed. She wasn’t the sort of person you took photos of, Marina said. Seven months, she knew her: a summer, a fall and part of a winter before Constance disappeared. Barely any time at all.
I’ve divided the pictures of me as a small child into two piles: the ones I know were taken while Constance was there, when I still lived with her in the projects, and the ones taken in the years afterwards. I suppose I’m looking for a trace of her in me. Not in the sense of any physical resemblance, but a feeling I must have held for the life I had with her, the life I went back to at the end of each day. Marina took so many pictures – me playing in the leaves in Mount Morris Park, squatting over a bed of seedlings, sitting on Ben’s lap. She’s a relentless archivist, Marina; a chronicler and a recorder. My face gets older in the pictures, but there’s no shift that I can see. No before and after. Living in an apartment in the projects; living in a brownstone on the park. A ghost mother; a real one. Nothing in that little boy’s face to register those shifts.
‘Yes, yes,’ Marina says when I ask her, ‘of course she held you. She bathed you and fed you and brushed your hair and carried you on her back.’ But there’s a catch and a pause in the things she tells me; something that she can’t bring herself to say. She did all these things, but she did not love you.
When they were searching for Constance – along the water’s edge, by the Truro ponds and then later through advertisements in papers, traces on her bank account, notices in post offices all over the north-east – Marina was terrified that she wouldn’t be found. Then, as the years passed, I suspect, although she never said this to me, her terror was that Constance would return. That Marina would have to give me back. But no word came, no sighting was ever reported. There’s no pressing rewind, no miraculous reversal or return.
Last Christmas at the Cape, Patrick told me a story about the Nauset tribes who first inhabited the dunes there. Living on a sandy promontory, they had nothing with which to build monuments, so they marked the sites of important events by digging ceremonial holes in the sand. They kept these sand holes well dug out, year after year, returning to them through the seasons.
So life forms around an absence. We have almost nothing to remember Constance by. No photograph, no letter. There’s the blue exercise book from the literacy classes that she stopped attending after the first week, but only three pages are filled. The letters are firmly drawn – clear, squat forms, large and awkward like a child’s. They remind me of my own workbooks from my first days at Calhoun. I take the blue book with me when I travel, tucked into my suitcase. It seems the only tangible proof that my mother existed.
Marina took a few things from the apartment in the projects when she went to clear it out after Constance disappeared: old pots and pans, a grey blanket, three drinking glasses, a mismatched set of cutlery. She wrapped each item neatly in butcher’s paper and packed everything into two cardboard boxes. They’re still down in the basement of the brownstone. Everything in the boxes seems anonymous; nothing of Constance clings to them. She must have cooked with the pots, slept under the blanket, perhaps poured me a drink in the plastic glasses, but they all seem tired and anonymous. Hand-me-downs doled out to her, things that had passed through many other hands before hers.
Marina has told me that there was always a strange force-field around Constance, something about her that prevented anything from the world from penetrating. I know that she used all these things in the boxes, washed them, put them away, but none of them bear a trace of her.
I once read a book written by a man who was sent to England on a kindertransport during the war. Marina gave it to me when I was in high school – because of her own mother’s story, but I think also because she wanted me to know that she too had lost things, and that what we lose remains in us as a slow burn.
Then of course there was everything that might have happened to Consta
nce in Rwanda. ‘We could go there,’ Marina has said a few times over the years. Visit the region she came from, search for anyone who might have known her. See if there’s family. ‘One day,’ I say. One day, perhaps. But it’s not a gulf I think I can bridge. I’m not sure how useful these kinds of excavations are. Constance never let a word of her story spill out – what right do we have to go searching for what she didn’t want to be known?
The man in Marina’s book was four years old when he left his own country, a year older than I was when Constance disappeared. He described the faltering of his language, the way the sounds lingered in him for the first few months of exile and then slipped beneath the surface, with all that went with them. He wrote about the echoes of his childhood language coming back to him, scratching or knocking, then falling away into silence as soon as he strained to hear it. My feeling for my mother is something like that. I don’t have any memories of her, but she’s in me like a door banging a little in the wind. Or perhaps I just think she’s there because she should be there. A mother should be there.
Every year we return to Truro for Christmas, converging on the winter beach. Ben and Alma and the girls fly up from Arizona; Jacob and Marina and I pile into the car with Rose, all talking over each other as we drive up the expressway, Christmas carols playing on every radio station. Patrick and Leah are waiting for us when we arrive, the fire burning, the kettle on the stove. There’s spiced brandy with cloves in the evenings, morning walks along the shore, visits to the Portuguese bakery in town.
All through my childhood the year seemed to revolve around those two winter weeks by the sea. That house is where I spoke my first word. It’s become a story now: four years of silence and then my first word sung out across the dunes.