“Why don’t you see her now, Mama?” I ask, and immediately I feel the change, her body closing to me, and I think that she won’t answer the question, but she starts to say something, and I take her hand to help her.
“We were so young,” she is saying. “We didn’t really know anything. We had these dreams, Angela. We had these plans. And then Sveta met Vasya. And...”
“And you met Father. You met Tato.”
She is closed. She tried, but I feel that she cannot say any more. We are at the top of the slope leading to the gate and to our house. Mother stops to take a stone from her shoe.
“Go on ahead,” she says, but she doesn’t look up, so I slide down the slope with my bags of fruit and I don’t glance back. I know that the tears are coming up into her eyes. I know that she will fight them with that expression on her face, which looks like anger, but I don’t know why she is angry, or at whom. I know that I am a part of those tears, I know that something is connected to me, and I want more than anything for Mother to be happy.
I leave the bags of fruit on the kitchen step and I run down into the garden. A bird is diving into the lilac blossom and I follow its path through the flower beds, looking for the nest.
T
When I come back up to the kitchen, I can see that Mama is crying. She is standing at the window and looking at a bird in the lilac tree, a sparrow, or one of the swallows. She wipes her hand across her eyes and her face is shining with tears. She doesn’t know I can see her, coming up the garden path holding a stem of wild grass, and before, after I had eaten my dinner one night when she was washing the plates, and before, after she kissed me goodnight and I heard her in the kitchen, sitting on the wicker chair making little sounds. She doesn’t know I can see her but I can, and it’s always in the moments between, not when we are sitting at the table and eating soup, or playing in the garden, or reading together on the bench, but in the moments between them, when she slips away from me, not looking at me, forgetting that I am here, that I am in front of her.
I run my fingers up and down the stem of grass, plucking off the smooth, oval seeds, and now I have that feeling in my stomach again, as if I have done something wrong, and I feel scared that I have made all those tears, that I have made Mama cry, that it is all my fault.
I go back to the garden gate and open it and close it noisily, pulling the broken metal latch up and down so she will hear it. I drop the grass and scattered seeds. I call out “Mama, Mama, where are you?” and then I come towards the house, and she has gone from the window and comes round to the door to me, and she has the look that she has in the moments after she has been crying, the tight look, when she is breathing too hard and smiling without her eyes, and it looks to me as if her mind is going quickly from one to the other, from the tears to now and from now to the tears.
“Mama?” I say, and she breathes in and looks at me, and then at last she smiles with her eyes.
“Dorohenka, darling,” she says.
“Come into the garden. I think I can see the nest where the little bird lives.”
“Now?”
“Of course, now!”
I pull her hand and we go together down the path, through the long grasses and the scarlet tulips and poppies. I lead her to the bottom of the garden, where the raspberry bushes and the potato plants are, and then I say, “Pick me up so I can see, take me in rooki, in your arms,” and she laughs when I say this because she knows how I love to be held in rooki, and she bends down and I take a jump like a little bird lifting up from a branch in a tree, and I am in her arms and she is holding me to her and I reach out my hand and point and say, “Look, Mamochka! Look through the branches over there. Can you see the nest? Just in the elbow, where the branches go away from each other?”
She looks and spots the nest and puts her face against my neck and against my hair, breathing onto me. “I see it,” she says. “What a clever girl to have found it.”
“Do you know how I did it?”
“Tell me,” she says, and I say, “I followed the bird. I sat under the tree and watched it. It took the crumbs from the window and then flew over the garden and down to here and I couldn’t see anything because the bird had disappeared and then it came out of somewhere and I looked closer and I saw it was a nest. Wasn’t that clever?”
“That was very clever.” She lowers me gently to the ground and she turns and starts to walk back to the house. “I have to get lunch ready.”
“Mama?” I run up beside her.
“Dorohenka?”
“Are you sad?”
She stops and looks down at me and something passes over her face.
“What do you mean?”
We are at the kitchen door. Her foot is on the stone step.
“I thought you were crying.”
Mother pauses for a moment and then goes up into the kitchen. She slips off her sandals and pushes her feet into her house shoes and sits down at the table. I come and stand in front of her. She holds out her arms to me and I feel that she has somehow become very serious.
“Sometimes I cry,” she says at last. I move into her arms and she pulls me up onto her knee. “But people can cry when they are happy or sad.”
“Why do you cry?” I ask. She puts her arms around me and holds me against her. She whispers into my hair.
“I don’t know.”
And I feel that she wants to start again, but is pushing it back, and her arms wrap tighter against me, and she whispers again. “It is like I see you laughing when you are doing something in the garden.” She pauses. “Or when you are in the sunlight...”
She has stopped talking, and I know that she is crying now. I try to turn around in her lap but she holds me where I am and the kitchen has become very quiet and I hear her breathing long, shaky breaths, but that is the only sound, and I think that if a drop of water fell now, that I would hear it.
And then I think that I might hear one of her tears falling onto the floor, or onto her dress, and I picture a single droplet falling slowly, slowly, and then she says, “That is how it is,” and I have forgotten what she means. “Like when you are in sunlight and you laugh,” she says, and then, “This is how it is. Sometimes I am not in the sunlight, and...”
I push myself off her lap. She lets me go and I turn to her, standing, and see her face turned down, eyes closed and cheeks covered in tears. They are not falling, they are gathering on her face, making it wetter and wetter. I suddenly feel that I shouldn’t have asked. She didn’t want me to see. I have made it worse. She reaches out her hand and opens her eyes and squeezes my hand. Then she shakes her head and smiles at me with a strange, crooked, downturned mouth through her wet face.
“Go and play, darling,” she says. “I’ll be fine in a minute.” And she lets my hand go with a little push towards the door.
When I step outside, I look up to the nests under the eaves of the house and I see the red throat and pale breast of a swallow emerging from one of them. It flies over to a high branch of the lilac tree and starts to chirp and trill, and without thinking I laugh and blow a kiss to it, and I think that its dark blue feathers must be so lovely and warm in this springtime with the sunshine on them, and I stretch out my arms on each side, like wings, so that my arms are held in the sunshine, and I wave them up and down while Mother is crying. And she doesn’t see me lifting into the air. She doesn’t see me rising, rising and flying. She doesn’t see me caught across the surface of the sun and the surface of the land, my warm blue feathers stirring the heavy spring air into a rising laughter.
T
In my sleep, the tendrils of a willow tree wind their way around my dreams. Through the serpentine motion of the strands, I see a river moving slowly, and a figure appearing on the distant bank, a face of wrinkled bark, a flash of blue.
My Nightspirit watches me, weaving the images into my sleeping thoughts.
I will protect you from the tears, she says. You are too open, too full of light. The tears will go deep an
d you will not be able to return. You are too young.
She watches me as I dream, creating a barrier of light around me so that Mother’s sleeping darkness does not come too close.
Your grandmother will help you, she tells me. She is waiting.
5
It is morning.
While I lie star-shaped under an infinity of tiny flowers, Mama is far away in her thoughts. She watches me through the kitchen window; its cracked, wooden frame thrown open to the scent of lilac and the vision of me, white and sun-brushed, on the garden floor.
Her own face is framed by the flaking paint. Her cracked face gazing into the garden with tired eyes. Her long hair is pinned clumsily over her head; it half tumbles, half holds, light brown and when caught by the sun it turns golden. Her face is wide and flat, her eyes are brown and full of a thousand flecks of constant sadness. She looks out at me lying beneath the lilac, open and dreaming.
“Everything I have done is wrong,” she murmurs.
“You have created me,” I say. “You have created a white star.”
Her body is soft, wrapped in a stained blue housedress with red flowers. Tumbled brown hair. The layers of flesh and fat rest on her body below the dress like a burden of unused dreams. She carries them heavily, always with her, always close. She reaches out for a dab of sour cream from the open jar next to the window. She puts her finger into the jar and brings the cream to her mouth. She sucks her finger. The dreams come closer. Her body softens.
“I regret everything,” she says quietly.
The sunshine draws a long, golden brushstroke over my cheek, and then shimmers into a thousand separate dreams. Each dream is a drop of sunlight, droplets of gold suspended around me in the heavy air. Each dream a perfect expression of a perfect life, held here by the beams of my heart, by my desire. The belief of a white star. The knowledge of the impossible. The droplets of light tremble, breathing in and out, waiting to be chosen. My heart pours out to them. I open my eyes a little and I exhale lightly, as if blowing away the seeds of a dandelion clock. The dreams disappear.
In the kitchen, images are appearing one after the other in Mama’s head. Sunshine on a grassy hill. A hand moving up a smooth leg. A house overlooking endless woods. She wants to reach for the samohon, to stop them, but now the anger is rising through her body, blocking out everything but the remembrance of his hands on her, the shadow of the house that was promised, the ring on her finger. Her failure. Her mistakes. The pain that only she created. She wants to howl.
She looks around and sees the jar of sour cream on the window. Her head is alive with pain. She picks it up and lifts her arm, the images gathering into a swirl of blame within her vision. Her mistakes. Her mistakes. Her mistakes. She hurls the jar to the ground. It smashes over the paving stones, spewing white liquid. She steps back, panting. Broken glass is everywhere. Her heart is beating violently.
“I have ruined everything,” she says, breathing, crying.
T
I hear a crash of glass breaking on stone and sit up, dizzy for a moment from the bright sunlight on my face. I put my hand up to shade my eyes and squint towards the kitchen window.
“Mama!”
I can see her head through the window frame, turned away from me, and I see her hair has come loose from its pins and hangs down her back. From her eyes, droplets of salt and water are falling. Each tear is a dream; a perfect spent droplet falling from the belief of nothing. Held by nothing. They fall onto the stone, onto the glass, into the cream. Onto her slippered feet.
“Mama!”
I stand up. The back of my white dress and the warm skin of my shoulders are covered with black soil. I run to the kitchen door and tiptoe over the broken glass to my mother. My feet are bare but she does not see.
She looks up at me and tries to compose herself. Her head is bent and she is breathing heavily in and out and the tears are covering her cheeks. She shuffles through the broken cream to the kitchen table and reaches for a tea towel and holds it up to her face. She pulls out one of the chairs and sits down on it. She opens her eyes and closes them.
“My darling,” she says, struggling. “My little one.”
Her eyes closed, she is seeing her own childhood, in this house, in this garden, in this kitchen.
Her mother, Zoryana, is standing at the kitchen window and Lyuda can see her from the flowerbeds, where she is playing.
She can see that something is wrong.
T
Zoryana is watching her daughter, Lyuda, playing in the tulips and her husband, Grisha, hammering nails into a new wooden bench. The kitchen window is painted fresh with whitewash and the smell of the paint and the sting in her eyes makes her think how little there is in her life that a new coat of paint can make this day stand out from all the others.
She watches Grisha finishing the bench, getting ready to paint it the same whitewash as the window frames. She doesn’t think he has made the bench wide enough. Her body is starting to spread with age and she doesn’t want her flesh to hang over the edges of the planks.
Lyuda is dancing among the high grasses and summer tulips and watching her father hammering in steady blows. Her bare feet are dirty from the black soil. She picks a red tulip and runs up to the kitchen window where her mother is standing, her eyes full of tears.
“Mama!”
She hands her the flower.
“For you Mamochka!” she says, holding it up. Zoryana reaches down to her daughter and takes the flower.
“Thank you little swallow, little lastivka.”
And then Zoryana is crying. Where have her dreams gone? How is it that the excitement of her life has become a coat of paint on a kitchen window and a new bench? Where has her passion for Grisha gone?
It is the tang of the paint. The fresh, acrid smell, which is so different from her daily scents of cooking beetroot, and potatoes frying in sunflower oil, and meat, and overgrown grass, and lilac. It is this new scent that suddenly makes her aware that all those other smells – the soup, the oil, the garden – are her life, and nothing more. That the moment for dreams has passed; the moment for choices, the moment for romances, the moment for leaving, the moment for a wild spirit exploding against the background of a miraculous universe.
That is gone, and what is left is a path so ordinary that it seems almost pointless to tread it. The same path as her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother. The feeding, the cleaning, the working, the ageing, the birthing, the pains and then the passing. And right now, this smell of whitewash and a dancing daughter and her hand holding a red tulip and her husband hammering nails into a narrow bench.
Her tears fall onto the floor and onto the cloth of her apron. She pushes them down into the stone with her slippered feet.
Outside, a bird is singing. Lastivka.
T
In the evening, while Angela is sleeping, Lyuda steps outside the house holding a bottle, a glass and a chipped plate of food. She sits on the bench and sets down the plate next to her. The planks are too narrow for her body and she rests her feet heavily on the ground to balance herself. She takes a piece of dark rye bread from the plate and holds it up to her nose, breathing in deeply to take away the harsh smell of the vodka. She lifts the glass of samohon to her lips and knocks it back, feeling the fire in her throat and stomach, and then she takes a slice of the salo, the raw pig fat, and chews it slowly with a clove of garlic. When she has finished the fat, she reaches down and pours another glass of vodka. She takes a sip and shivers.
Why now? she thinks, looking around the garden at the overgrown grasses and the rotting wood of the fence. Why am I falling apart now? It has been so long, and nothing has changed.
Her mind drifts back over the past seven years, the years of Angela’s life since Volodiya left, and she touches her finger where the ring was, rubbing it softly. She almost wants to go and look again in the garden, between the plants, on the soil, as she has so many times before, as if finding the ring might bring him
back. She shakes her head. Stupid. Of course it won’t.
And why now? An image appears in her head of a little girl and a red flower, and she wonders if it is Angela. She tries to picture the hair, to see if it is dark like her daughter’s, like Volodiya’s, or fair like her own, but she can’t see. The image fades. I have held on, she thinks. All this time I have held on. I haven’t asked for help. I haven’t let Angela see. And all this time the weight has never left me, pulling constantly down on my head, on my heart, on my stomach, day after day. As if my entire existence is a journey through a tunnel that I never chose to enter and which has only one possible way out. And the way out is calling me, every second of every day. It knows how much I desire to go there. To step out of the darkness. To end it so quickly. But I will not choose that. I will not leave Angela. Not like that.
Lyuda picks up another piece of dark bread and holds it to her nose, breathes in the rye, and then knocks back the glass of samohon. She chokes from the force of it and waits impatiently for it to reach her thoughts. She tries to focus on one solitary image. Angela. Thin brown arms filled with flowers and a rope of plaited hair. She holds this image in her mind while the vodka closes down the colours and the memories around it.
It is done. She nods, unsmiling, her eyes are quieter, and she picks up a slice of salo and a small clove of garlic, and puts them into her mouth.
T
As Lyuda sleeps, the Nightspirit comes to her, a faint shadow of moving grey, and she calls up into her memory the eyes of her mother and the movement of a willow branch blowing across the water of a flowing river. Spoken words and memories and a blue dress swirling around a dancing woman. The blue of her mother’s eyes and a scream of laughter diving into cold water. In her sleep, Lyuda reaches out her hand to her mother, and in her sleep her mother takes her hand and pushes something into it – a flash of red – and then disappears into the laughing current.
Lyuda smiles, pulling her dream up over her like a cool sheet, and the Nightspirit drifts quietly away into the waiting moonlight.
The Woman Behind The Waterfall Page 3