The Woman Behind The Waterfall

by Meriel,Leonora

  Through this window I watched him walk away from me.

  Through this window I looked for him to come back.

  I waited for something to happen. I waited for something that would explain what was happening in my life. I waited for something to take away everything that was crushing me.

  I waited for Mother. I waited for Volodiya. I waited for a lover. I waited for anything, anything, anything.

  And now I see. There was nothing to wait for.

  She thinks of Kolya. She thinks of the post office. She thinks of the vodka sitting outside on her step, in plastic bottles. A feeling slips through her that is almost unbearably sweet.

  Vova, she thinks. Vova, where are you now? I can’t believe that you are somewhere. How could it be possible that you are still alive and real and living somewhere now?

  And is it possible that you could come back?

  She pushes her forehead against the windowpane and breathes in the dust and stares out at the path and the gate.

  The garden looks beautiful in the falling light. It is the end of the lilac and the flowers have faded into long brown cones and the grasses and the wild daisies are high.

  And he could walk through the gate right now. He could just open it. He could just walk up this path and open the door and take me in his arms and then what would any of this mean? Anything at all?

  She feels the pressure pushing harder against her head and pushing against her chest. She is breathing heavily.

  What if I could make it happen? What if there was something I could do that would make him walk down that path, over the lilac flowers? And he would walk back into this room and put his arms around me. What would I do?

  She pictures him for a moment, his dark hair and his brown eyes and the love in them when he had looked at her. She pictures him walking towards the house, glancing up at the window, seeing her there.

  I would tell him to go to hell. I would spit in his face. I wouldn’t let him back into the house.

  She lets out a low, strangled moan.

  And yet.

  Lyuda looks up at the curtains again. She puts down the scissors. She climbs off the sideboard and in her bare feet she walks to the front door and she slides back the bolt and opens it. She picks up the three plastic containers of vodka from the step and puts two of them down on the table and she unscrews the lid of the third one and she takes a long swig straight from the bottle. The anger rises in her body and meets with an equal sadness, and together they flow through her. Grey, warm, safe. Lyuda pushes the breath slowly out from between her lips.

  Outside, the snow is falling steadily. Down, down, down.

  “At last,” she whispers. “It is over.”

  31

  Everything is moving very slowly. Mama is standing by the window, gazing out into the garden, but I think that she is not seeing anything at all. Her eyes are clear and full of light, as if they have been washed with bright tears, and now she is seeing everything dull and murky, through those tears.

  Now she is turning towards me. She comes over to me and kisses me on the forehead and her warm lips touch my skin for a long time. Like a goodbye. As if her touch is a goodbye; as if every movement of her arm, her head, her shoulder is a gradual movement away from me.

  She looks down at me and her gaze covers me with a waterfall of those bright, grey tears. I try to reach out through them, but she turns, and I see that they are falling everywhere, all over the kitchen and outside, over the entire garden, like a glistening rain with the sunshine behind it. Everywhere she turns these tears are falling.

  I dance through the garden in a white dress.

  Mother blinks. The waterfall shatters into sunlight.

  “I cannot do it,” she says.

  T

  I run to the willowbank.

  “Show me more,” I call to Grandmother. “Mother is going to leave. You must show me more. I can bring the memory back to her.”

  I climb up the riverbank. I am breathing heavily. Grandmother looks tired.

  “I want more,” I say. “I want to see other times, other memories. If Mama and I were like that once, then we can be like that again. I can bring her back. I can remind her of what we were. I can remind her of what she did.”

  I stand before Grandmother, impatient, breathless. She sighs. She looks very old here, alone on her riverbank.

  “It is not so simple,” she says. “I can take you back, but it might not be the same.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that if she changes, then the memory changes. It cannot be fixed. You can only go where she has left a path to follow back.”

  Grandmother sighs again. She does not know all the rules. She feels Lyuda’s darkness, close and heavy. It is difficult to see anything clearly.

  “Little one,” she says. “I do not know. I can try. Come and sit.”

  I sit on the grass and I lie back, resting my head in Grandmother’s lap. She strokes my hair, her dry hands scratching over my damp skin. I close my eyes.

  “I want to see Mother,” I say. “You have to show me. You have to take me back.”

  “Shhhhh,” she says. “Shhhhh. We will go there.”

  Grandmother pictures Lyuda, and I push my head deeper into the branches of her lap and her green fingers are touching my forehead and I am waiting for the sunshine to come; the garden and the golden light.

  Suddenly, I shiver. Snow is falling. I am cold. I open my eyes. There is a warmth around me but something in my centre is cold. Above me, white snowflakes are pouring from the sky; sparkling, soft shapes, which get bigger as they fall towards me. One lands on my cheek. It is cold. Its wetness spreads over my skin. Another lands and touches my hand. My body is shifted and the heat shifts. I look to the side, around me, and I see on one side Mother’s skin, covered in tiny bumps, a flap of her dress, a small blue button; and on the other side the white, white garden.

  I am in Mother’s arms. I am cold but I do not want to cry.

  Something is happening with Mother. She is whispering to herself, or to me. I sense she is scared. She wants to do something. I am also scared. And very cold. My blanket is open. I want to cry, but something inside me tells me not to cry, that if I do, then I will draw all the cold into my throat, take it into my body, and I may die. I shiver again. Mother pulls me closer to her. I try to hear what she is whispering.

  “Angela, Angela,” she is saying. She bends over me and I can see her face, drawn out and full of despair. There are silvery streaks on her skin, shining with ice. Her pale brown eyes are the saddest things I have ever seen.

  On the riverbank, tears run down my cheeks. I am shivering. Mother’s lips touch my forehead.

  “My god, you are so cold,” she says. She starts to cry again and the despair flows out of her and into my body. “My god, Angela. What am I going to do? My little one, what am I going to do?”

  She stands there in the snow, her baby open to the cold, with tears flowing down her cheeks, her arms and her hands trembling. She shakes her head from side to side. “It cannot be like this,” she says. “It is not possible to bear. This is not how it can be.”

  Something inside me is breaking. Something inside me that will never be able to heal is being torn from end to end. I know this feeling. I am remembering. Grandmother wipes away my tears with her fingertips. “You have to know,” she says. She feels the heaviness of my wound pushing down on her shoulders and her body sinks wearily beneath it.

  In Mother’s arms, the snow falls onto my face and onto the edges of my blanket and onto my body inside the blanket. I think I am going to die, here in her arms, here in the whiteness. I prepare myself to leave. I know the way. Mother will come with me. She is shaking her head and crying and I do not know how she is holding me when she is shivering so much, and her tears drop down onto my face and they are warm, and then she looks down and sees, as if for the first time, this child in her arms, this little face bathed in snow and tears, and she gasps. A jolt of panic goes
through her. I feel her shaking hands pulling the blanket around me and then she is pushing open the kitchen door and there is a great rush of warmth from the hot room and Mother slams the door and she carries me to the bed and gets into it and pulls the covers up over me, holding me against her body.

  “My darling,” she is saying. “My darling, my darling. What was I thinking, my little one, my love, I will live for you. Angela, darling, my little one, I will live for you. I will live for you, I will hold on for you. Angela, Angela, Angela.”

  The words cover me like warm water, like her warm tears. My body is still cold on the inside but Mother is pressing the blankets around me and she is kissing my face where the tears have fallen and where the snow has melted, and her mouth is warm and on the riverbank my body is shaking and I am moving my head from side to side and my tears are flowing like another grey river.

  “Angela,” Grandmother is calling to me. “Angela. The sun is shining. Come back.”

  Out of Mother’s despair I am drawn back to a spring afternoon. I open my eyes and sit up from Grandmother’s lap. I am dizzy from crying. I look at Grandmother through blurred eyes and she puts a finger to her lips. “Shhhhh,” she says. “Breathe, don’t talk, breathe.”

  I breathe, and I am calmer. The river flows past. Grey, slow, heavy.

  “This is what she did for you,” she says at last. “She lived for you. This is how she loved you.”

  “I wanted sunshine,” I whisper.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  “There is sunshine,” she says. “But you wanted to see her love. You have to understand. This was what she gave you.”

  “Tears?”

  “Life.”

  “Her life?”

  She does not answer. I leave her and I swim to the other side, the cold water calming my body and my face. I feel different now I have seen this. I feel changed. Older, lighter, heavier, sadder, deeper. I have a great urge to go home to Mother. I start to run. I am running between the willow trees and they are waving after me. Go, they say. They know the love that Mother has for me. They know the love I am longing for. They know what Grandmother carries in her old, tired bark.

  I run.

  T

  Something is changing. The crows are moving like a black shadow in the distance. There is a wind gathering and we are calling to one another in the flock to leave, to shelter, to hide. It is a wind that we do not know. I fly fast around the garden trying to see what is different. I will not leave. There are eggs in my nest. My partner. We will shelter. I hear a howling from far away, from the distant woods. A wolf. I cannot see anything different. The sky is blue. Sunshine. Only the crows in a slow movement. Caw, caw, caw. My wings are tingling. The flock is unsettled but we will stay. I fly up to my nest and feel calmer. There are white flowers around the nest, fading to brown. Our eggs are hatching soon. We will wait.

  T

  The sky calls to me. Daughter, come and fly!

  I turn my gaze upwards, and the clear blue expanse darkens. I see granite clouds drawing towards me from the distant horizon; I feel their looming shadow ready to cover me.

  I swing my legs. The air is growing colder. My skin rises in tiny peaks, answering the wind.

  I rub my arms with my hands, which are still warm.

  I swing my legs.

  Come, says the sky. Come and be what you will.

  I look up into the darkening clouds.

  I lift into the air and I dissolve myself into them.

  The sky darkens.

  I call out to everything around me.

  “Come!” I cry. “The whole world must be turned into tears and pass away.”

  I draw the clouds to me, seeking the water from the sky and keeping it close; gathering the thoughts into form, one after another, cloud upon cloud, closer and closer into the darkest place. And I call to the sky that there is no need here for light, and the sky closes as I cover it with my anger, and when at last everything is dark and everything is brought into a tight, furious centre, then I whisper to the clouds around me, “It is time,” and I release a scream into the universe and the clouds let out a deafening roll of thunder that goes on and on and on, and lightning flashes down repeatedly onto the garden and the village and the river and over everything that I know, and when the thunder and my scream are finished, then I pull my arms from around my chest and I hold them out and I let the rains pour down onto the earth.

  Down and down we pour, in a great rushing flow of our very selves, flooding the earth with that which is us; with the water, the rain, the sadness, the guilt, with everything that we hold and that holds us. We are a dark torrent, pouring into the river and over the garden and into the cups of the browning lilac and into the water bucket, and we fill the black earth with our black tears and I pour myself down onto the form of Grandmother, mixing my grief with her green leaves and her branches and she doesn’t move, but she lets it fall through her and she turns the colour of the rain, her hair transforms to ashen grey, and water flows through the crevices of her face and down into the roots of the willow trees and onto the silver birches, pushing the delicate leaves down, down, down so that they cannot spring up again, dancing, and I call again for the lightning and I hurl it across the sky with another howl, and when everything is black and everything is covered in my pain, then I feel a whisper of calm coming to me, amidst my storm; a voice which is so soft that I do not know if it is I speaking or another, and the voice says to me, It is all well, daughter. It is all right, Angela. Everything is light.

  And when I hear this voice, then my pain does not go away; but, as if from a far, far distance, I know that it will be well. I know that I will be all right; that I can rest.

  32

  I fall asleep in a state of deep peace, and while I sleep, my Nightspirit pours herself down into me in clear, healing waves of light, without memory, without knowledge, without pain. I dream that I am lying in a great, wide nest with Mother’s wings around me. It is the safest, warmest place in the world.

  I come out of my dream and I open my eyes to a dark room. I look over to Mother’s bed and I see that she isn’t in it. I get out of my bed and I go into the unlit kitchen in my bare feet and my white nightdress, which is torn above the knee. Mama is sitting at the table with her head buried in her arms. Beside her is an empty plastic bottle.

  My heart cracks. I remember everything. She is going to leave me. She will not choose to stay. I stand at the doorway and I start to cry. She will never choose me. I will never be enough. I stand, crying, my heart hurting so much I think it might shatter into a thousand pieces.

  Mother lies beneath the surface of the water and smiles at the flowers above her and the reflections of the green willows. The water flows. My tears fall.

  “I am coming,” says Mother.

  I inhale with a gasp and Mother’s head jerks up and she turns around. The smile on her face moves into eyes of panic and she stumbles up from the table.

  “Darling,” she half-chokes, and she runs across the nighttime room towards me and takes me in her arms. My heart is lying all over the kitchen floor. My neck is wet with tears. She opens her wings and spreads them wide and covers me with them. But it isn’t enough. It will never be enough. She cannot comfort me now because she has made her choice. I wasn’t enough. She cannot pick up my heart, because her desire not to break it wasn’t strong enough. There is nothing that can comfort me.

  I curl my body up into a ball and transform myself into nothing. I disappear. Where there were tears and wetness and pieces of my heart, now there is nothing. Not even air. Not even water. Not even a dream.

  T

  It is morning.

  After the storm, the village is resting; pausing before the day’s work begins, repairing tiled roofs, checking livestock and gathering broken branches.

  Mother brings me a glass of water mixed with honey and I sit in bed drinking it. She is trying to lift my spirits and stay here with me, but I know she wants to leave. I sip the pale
yellow water but it tastes empty. It does not taste of her love. I get up from the bed and I go over to the window and I pour the rest of the water out into the garden.

  I go into the kitchen holding the empty glass. Mother is standing over the stove, stirring a saucepan of kasha, grey porridge. There is a dish of strawberries on the table and a sunken brown cake. I cannot eat any food that she has cooked.

  “Mama. I want to go to the river. I want to see how high it is after the storm. Can I go?”

  She pauses, and seems to struggle, her face crumpling and then straightening.

  “Yes,” she says at last. “But not for long. Come back quickly.”

  T

  When I have gone, she stands in the kitchen. She doesn’t stir the kasha and it begins to burn on the bottom of the pan. She tries to focus, but her mind is drawn to the river.

  “Angela. Angela, I am staying,” she says.

  She imagines the river, and the water full of flowers. It would be so easy. One foot and then the other foot, and she would lie down. She can feel the current moving over her, pulling her gently where she wants to go.

  “I would not struggle,” she says to the empty room. She turns off the stove and goes out of the front door. She passes through the garden and up the slope to the village street. She walks along it, her unbrushed hair loose down her back, her housedress and apron streaked with dirt. She comes to the turning for the silver birch copse and goes down the path. Broken branches are hanging from the trees after the storm, but she doesn’t look up at them.

  Mother passes through the glade to the river. It is starting to get hot. I am sitting huddled beneath a willow tree, my long brown knees pulled up under my chin. Grandmother is sitting opposite, on the other side, watching me.

  Mother cannot see either of us. She pauses on the riverbank and then bends down and takes off her sandals. She reaches around behind her and fumbles with the strings of her stained apron, pulling the bow loose, and then she lifts the apron over her head and lets it drop onto the grass. She climbs down the bank and steps into the river. The water is up to her waist and her housedress floats out before her in the current. She smiles, and flowers drift into the water around her, white daisies and scarlet poppies. She stretches out her hand and touches them as they float by, drawing her fingers over the petals. A light rain of lilac blossoms falls into the river. A farewell. I close my eyes and I disappear into nothing.