Detachment

by Maurice Mierau

  Peter had no conscious memories before the orphanage, but he’d told us about a dream that seemed to go further back.

  In Peter’s dream he was in a house with his mother on the second floor. He was not sure if Bohdan was there too. She approached him from behind as he sat.

  “She wants to hug me every time I try crawling toward her, but then she runs or jumps into the air and vanishes,” Peter said. “When I try to get a glimpse of her face it always disappears. When I’m in range to see her face it fades. I just see lots of colours and then she fades.”

  “It sounds like a digital eraser,” I said.

  “Yes, so I couldn’t see what her face was like.” Then, Peter said, she signalled with her hands no don’t come closer. She wagged her finger at him. When his mother spoke again she said she had to go but would be right back. She went down the stairs.

  “Where are you when she leaves?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere so I can’t move. But she’s a liar,” Peter said, stomping his foot for emphasis, his chin wobbling as if it had been rolled in gravel. “She doesn’t ever come back.”

  He sat on my lap and his shoulders heaved.

  My father’s first memory was the mass murder of people he later discovered were Jews. He told me he could remember only this one image of German soldiers shooting the people into a mass grave, but Lil told me that she remembered an officer running upstairs with his face contorted. He said that he’d had it with this work, diese Arbeit. But down below the willing executioners kept doing their duty. And after it was over people from the village picked up the coats the Jews had been forced to abandon.

  As a teenager, the first poem I memorized was a fragment from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

  I sometimes hold it half a sin

  To put in words the grief I feel;

  For words, like Nature, half reveal

  and half conceal the Soul within.

  But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

  A use in measured language lies;

  The sad mechanic exercise,

  Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

  My grade ten English teacher said the poem was about the death of Tennyson’s best friend, and ignored my question about whether Lord T had used drugs.

  I knew a deep well of pain lay in my father’s childhood, a grief that he could not speak. Fear and pain, also half concealed and largely beyond words, lingered in Peter’s unquiet brain. Jeremy felt the sting of my leaving his mother’s house when he was twelve, a more profound pain than those wasps. And Bohdan did not remember anything before he met us, but his occasional rages revealed his early, pre-linguistic acquaintance with the grief of abandonment as well.

  My own grief had shallower roots than my father’s or my sons’, yet I was the one exploring their earliest memories. Peter did not do so in his diary, nor had my father in his autobiography. I was the one stuck in the past, sifting through words, while Betsy moved forward with Peter and Bohdan. The only way to numb my pain was to keep writing this book, to try to catch up with my family by typing.

  IV

  Late in the summer of 2009, Betsy and I decided to tell the boys everything we knew about their family in Ukraine. The child psychologist had advised us to answer all their questions about their mother and family as soon as we thought feasible, but it was a hard decision to make.

  The first letter that Olga — the Ukrainian investigator we’d hired in 2007 — sent us began with this tactful introduction:

  I understand that it is better to read nice words but I think that you should know the truth…. You made a decision and I hope that you are ready and you would like to know everything…. I hope that it will help you to understand the situation better.

  Betsy and I had not been shocked by the information her letter revealed; some of it contradicted what Oleg told us, but we had always known that Oleg had a compromised relationship with the truth. The boys were seven and nine now, and we agreed that Betsy would tell them the story. I would have begun to weep and mix up the details. I trusted Betsy to tell it the right way, the way parents in religious households trust the Christmas story in Luke.

  The four of us sat on the front porch at our new picnic table. Betsy had cut her hair short, like her mother’s had been, with the same dark, fierce curls. She made eye contact with each of the boys and then told them. We wanted them to know more about their own history, their surviving relatives, their birth parents, and their medical history, and we’d hired someone to help us find out. Peter, who often preferred the beautiful lie to the difficult truth, started to squirm uncomfortably in his seat.

  “The woman we hired, her name was Olga,” said Betsy. “She took the train all the way from Kyiv to the west of the country, where your family lived.”

  “How long did it take her to ride the train?” asked Peter, eager to distract us into details.

  “About eight hours. We took that same train when we first met you and Bohdan. Olga went to the province where you lived. In Ukraine the provinces are called oblasts.”

  “I like that name,” said Peter.

  “It’s a nice name,” Betsy responded. “So Olga went to the village where we knew your brother Viktor lived. She asked people where he was and they referred her to one house in the village. There Olga found a woman chopping firewood. She was short and her clothes were dirty and shabby. Olga asked her about your brother Viktor. She answered that he wasn’t home.

  “That woman is your aunt Inna, and Viktor’s too. She is the sister of your birth mother. Aunt Inna’s house was where your family lived. Your grandparents lived there too.”

  “And did she find my mother?” asked Peter. Bohdan was fidgeting with his legs under the table as if he’d rather be someplace else.

  “Just wait for Mom to finish, Peter,” I said.

  “This is what Olga found out about your birth mother, whose name was Nadja. She finished her education at the village school and left home. She didn’t want to get a job or continue with more education. She met a man named Roman and they had three children: Viktor, who was born in 1984, a sister Jane in 1985, and another brother Dima in 1986. 1986 is the same year Jeremy was born.”

  “Our brothers are just as big as Jeremy?” said Bohdan, looking up from his legs.

  “Yes, Olga said they’re the same size,” I said. “Just as tall, so you guys will probably be tall too.” Height mattered to me.

  “Then your mother left on her own, without her children. Your grandparents raised the kids. Your aunt Inna has not seen her sister, your birth mother, for at least ten years. Aunt Inna is not very sure of dates because she does not read or write much.”

  “That’s sad!” said Bohdan.

  “She knows your birth mother did not come to her parents’ funerals. Some people in the village have seen her in the city of Ternopil. They say she lives on the street.”

  “I can’t believe that’s true,” said Peter, argumentatively.

  “I know this is really hard for you, Peter.” Betsy stroked his shoulder. “But there’s more to tell.” Peter nodded.

  “After your mother had her first three children, she met another man and had two more babies: Petro and Bogdan, you and your brother. She couldn’t take care of children so she left you with her first husband Nikolai. Then later you lived with Aunt Inna in the village. Aunt Inna is poor. She works on a farm as a milkmaid but she doesn’t get paid.”

  “Why don’t they pay her?” said Peter.

  “Sometime Dad can tell you more about the history of Ukraine. They are a poor country, especially the farmers. Anyway, Aunt Inna doesn’t get much help from her husband, because he is an alcoholic and lets her do all the work. They have five children.”

  “But where is our mom?”

  “Peter, no one knows. People from her village have seen her, but not for a few years.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “She might be. We just don’t know.”

  “Why can’t we write h
er a letter?”

  “She doesn’t have an address or a telephone number. She might be homeless.”

  Peter buried his face in his hands and collapsed on the table. Bohdan continued to fidget. I put my arm on Peter’s shoulder.

  “Your brother Viktor was in the hospital when Olga was there,” Betsy continued. “His leg was cut off and he needed to get an artificial one.” Now Bohdan looked up, legs still. He was always interested in gory accidents.

  “Who cut off his leg?” said Bohdan.

  “He got hurt in an accident on the farm. He was probably caught between the tractor and some other equipment,” I said.

  “We don’t even know that much,” said Betsy, never willing to speculate. “It was a farm accident where he drove a tractor and the wound was infected. He got gangrene and they cut off the leg.”

  “Was he on crutches?” Bohdan asked.

  “Yes, he was. We’ll show you a picture.”

  “Can we see it now?” asked Bohdan eagerly.

  “No. We’ll show you in a minute.” Betsy said. We had decided to tell them the story before they saw the pictures Olga had emailed us. “Your brother Viktor works hard. He fixes appliances, TV sets, tape recorders, whatever people have in the village.”

  “Are there pictures of my mother?” Bohdan wanted to know.

  “Olga asked your brother if he had pictures of the family but he doesn’t. He did have pictures of your mom, but he burnt them all up.”

  “Why did he do that?” said Bohdan. Peter still had his head down.

  “He was angry at his mother because she left him. In the letter Olga writes that he said, ‘If she doesn’t need me I don’t need her.’ “ Bohdan nodded. He understood anger. “Your aunt Inna doesn’t have any pictures either. Her life is hard. She does not even know the birthdates of her children.”

  “Why? Doesn’t she have a calendar?” asked Peter, taking his head off the table.

  “She probably did not get much education,” I said. “She maybe can’t read a calendar, even if she had the money to buy one.” Olga had told us that ‘Inna is a very rural person,’ a euphemism I guessed for all kinds of misery.

  “Your aunt says that her daughter has the same fingernail and toenail shapes as you guys do,” said Betsy. “They are just like your mother’s, and your aunt thought it was funny that you all have the same shape too.”

  “Why didn’t she keep us?” asked Peter, his face rigid and serious.

  “She had to let you and Bohdan go to the orphanage because there wasn’t enough food for all the kids.”

  Peter’s head was back on the table, and Betsy stroked it as he said, “I can’t believe she’s homeless. I try to imagine her out there, sometimes I dream of her, and …” His shoulders shook with an indelible, unshakeable pain. My eyes blurred and refracted the scene through a kind of prism: Peter collapsing under the weight of what Betsy and I thought he needed to know; Jeremy fleeing the room when his mother and I announced our divorce, another death; my dad struggling to keep his grief at his mother’s fate closed off even from himself.

  In August I began playing some opera for the boys on my turntable on the weekends and at dinner. We got Carmen on DVD from the library and the boys loved watching it. Neither of them questioned the idea that people might sing instead of talk, often about their deepest feelings and, especially while dying, at great length. Then one Saturday Peter and I went to a movie theatre to see the Metropolitan Opera broadcast. I’d decided Bohdan was too young for the three hours of Il Trovatore.

  Peter was enthusiastic. I warned him about how long it would be, and how you had to stay quiet in your seat. I read him the plot description for Act I and he said it’s too much, he’d figure it out while he watched. It was the same problem I’d always had with Il Trovatore myself. It was too much. And even once you kept the plot straight there was the challenge of keeping a straight face. A bitter gypsy woman so bent on avenging her mother that she mistakenly throws her own baby boy into the fire instead of the evil count’s son, and then raises the accidentally spared scion of the dark count lovingly, as her own? But the music transcends the mounting implausibilities.

  The broadcast began with a shot of the Met’s interior: glittering balconies full of shiny people, then the main level even more iridescent, all the women blonde, all the men in black tie.

  “Why are the lights on?” said Peter.

  “Because we’re watching a live broadcast of an opera from New York, and they’ll turn the lights off here at the same time they do over there. You know when Grandpa was a boy he watched the Metropolitan Opera when they came on tour here to Winnipeg.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if they still came here?” Peter asked.

  “Yes, it would.”

  Then we were launched into Act I. During the duel Peter gripped the side of his chair. Count di Luna stalked around singing that he was full of fury, very angry. The singer had shock-white hair and snarled sideways, his mouth almost foaming with rage.

  At the intermission we waited for the on-screen clock to tell us how much time we had, and then headed to the lobby, where I gave Peter the granola bar and apple we’d brought from home, hidden under our jackets.

  “Wouldn’t it be great to just sing when you got really mad?” I asked Peter.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Are you enjoying the opera?”

  “Yes.” He wanted to try one of the video games in the movie theatre’s gigantic lobby. He had no spending money but managed to scavenge a single token left in a machine, not enough to actually play. I ate my granola bar, and watched him pretend to play a Star Wars shoot-’em-up until the call to return to the theatre.

  We took our seats for the third act, Peter again gripping his seat when Manrico sang his vow to rescue his mother, the revenge-obsessed gypsy. I suddenly thought of my dad, and wondered if he’d wanted to rescue his mother on that beautiful spring day in 1945 that he barely remembers. And what about Peter? Wouldn’t he love to rescue his mother? Manrico sprinted up the massive stairs of the turntable set, and I was in tears.

  Every aria, every musical gesture at all over the next half hour made me dribble more tears. I found a tissue in my leather jacket and dabbed at my cheeks and glasses. I wanted revenge for my grandmother, for Peter’s mother, vengeance on the forces of poverty and ignorance. I wanted revenge for those women crying in Syria, in Sudan, in Rwanda, in the Balkans, for every mother in the world. I glanced, embarrassed, at Peter in the half-lit theatre. He was too immersed in the opera to notice my tears, and by the time the lights went up I was once again in control of myself.

  “What was your favourite part?” I asked as we walked to the car. He thought for a minute.

  “When Leonora came to the prison and sang for a long time about how she loves him.” And he tucked his hand into mine.

  A week later he told me his favourite part was the execution and the gypsy’s revenge, when she told the count he’d killed his brother. I was struck by Peter’s ability to hold all these impulses at once: his admiration for Leonora, his desire for revenge, and his angry longing for justice in a world where people die every day just like Manrico did. As for the music, he said, “I loved all the music. It blurs together in my mind. It’s like eating too much. You’re happy and you’re sad.” I loved Peter then, more fiercely than I ever had before.

  The wind rushed through the elm trees and the cottonwoods as Peter and I walked down our block to the corner grocery, smelling the last dry heat of summer that promises to never leave.

  “That TV show last night,” he said, “is that true?” The show had been about hypnosis.

  “Yes, it was true, it was a documentary. Do you know the word mesmerize?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “It comes from a Dr. Mesmer who invented hypnosis. And Sigmund Freud, who invented modern psychology, he used hypnosis for a while too. People are still hypnotized now so they can stop smoking.” Peter took this in.

  “Could there be
a speaker under your bed at night, and it tells you and Mom give Peter his DS back over and over while you sleep, so you do it?” Recently we’d confiscated Peter’s Nintendo DS because he played with it in his bedroom after lights out.

  “That won’t work, Peter.”

  “Why not?” He giggled, then held my hand, suddenly serious. “Since hypnosis can help people to stop smoking, could it help me not think about stealing?”

  “I didn’t know you thought about stealing anymore.” To my knowledge Peter had not stolen since the previous year, when he was eight.

  “Sometimes I do think about it.”

  “Well, with smoking the patient has to be willing to stop for the hypnotic suggestions to work. I’m not willing to give you your Nintendo back right now, and your thoughts about stealing are probably too complicated for hypnosis.”

  I sketched Freud’s idea of the unconscious for him while he looked at passing traffic, squirrels, kids rolling on the grass in front of their houses. But I knew he was listening.

  “Freud gave up on hypnosis,” I said, “because he worried about patients having relapses. A relapse is when you fall back into something. Is that what you’re worried about with stealing?”

  “Yes, I guess so. I think about my birth mom and get upset. The pain is so strong I can’t stand it, like staring at the sun.”

  “Do you think maybe you feel sad because you can’t protect your birth mom, or rescue her like Manrico in the opera?”

  “How about if a psychologist hypnotized me,” said Peter, not answering directly, “and then while I was mesmerized, they got me to say: everything will be fine. Your mother did not abandon you because she hated you. She really loved you.”

  “I wish it was that easy, Peter.” And I really did. We walked the rest of the way in silence. The morning glories were in full bloom on Westminster and the sun pulsed beautiful and frightening.