The Woman Behind The Waterfall

by Meriel,Leonora

  T

  From the bottom of the river, Mother watches everything. She sees the birds overhead, swallows darting across the sky to their nests and back, insects touching the surface of the water, the shadow of flowers floating above.

  She sees me, lying with my head on Grandmother’s green lap. Long willow branches are hanging around us and Grandmother’s gnarled hands are laid on my forehead. She sees a rope of black thread, like a thin snake, winding itself around her mother and her daughter, weaving and winding, and she reaches out a hand to grasp it, to pull it away from us; but as her hand stretches out, she sees that the black threads are coming from her own outstretched fingers. Tiny black threads of silk.

  A scarlet flower drifts onto the surface of the water, and floats away.

  T

  Mother stands in the kitchen, holding the wooden spoon. The kasha has started to burn and she shakes her head to bring her back to the present, and stirs the thick mixture round in the pan. She wipes her hands on her apron and reaches back to tuck her long hair into her dress, to keep it away from the stove.

  “Angela,” she calls out to me, and I come in from the garden, hoping, hoping to feel something different, to see Mother smiling, to see some light around her. I smell the burning kasha and I see the struggle in her eyes.

  “Angela,” she says to me. “Angela, run outside and pick some flowers. The breakfast is nearly ready. We’ll need to fetch more water as well. Will you help me?”

  “Yes, Mama. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!” I say, and I run outside on bare feet. I jump over the water pail on the step and run down into the garden, the black soil soft and dry, and the sound of a bird singing.

  Mother watches me from the window. I turn round and catch sight of her face, and I pick the nearest flower, a red tulip, and I run up to the window, and I hold it out to her.

  33

  In the wind, Mother and I are carried far and high, a silver rope binding us to each other in the rushing ether.

  “A silver rope,” cries Mother. “And what is that?”

  “A rope of memories and dreams,” I say.

  She catches my words, one by one, out of the air. I am in front of her, creating sky all around us through which to fly.

  “Bring them all!” I call to her, over the wind. “Your hopes and regrets, your memories and dreams. Leave nothing behind.”

  The skies Mother is creating are filled with stormy, angry, dark clouds.

  “Mother,” I shout. “The darkness. Let it go, let all of it go!”

  Mother releases the strands of the silver rope and they tumble from her into the sky. The memories, the dreams, the wishes, the regrets, the desires and hopes; all of them are released and they fall, with the silver rope, out into the dark clouds.

  I look for the air to clear, for the storm to fade, but Mother is panicking.

  “What am I, then?” she cries out. “What am I without them? I am going to disappear!”

  She lets out a terrible, wolf-like howl and dives down out of the path of the wind which is carrying me, grasping in the air to the left and right, grasping for all the things she has let go; here a wish, here a regret, here a memory of me, dancing in a sunlit garden.

  “You are air!” I call to her. “You are the wind itself. Look, Mother! Look at me!” And I dissolve into the ether and fly fast and free and madly and I split into a million bright blue pieces and surround her with myself.

  “Look, Mother, look!”

  And she looks and she sees and she reaches out and touches the blue around her, but she feels me separate from what she has known. She feels me around her, but she cannot feel the girl, her daughter, dancing in that garden, and without this, she cannot accept that any of it is real.

  “It is all real!” I say, still moving around her, still rushing madly through the skies that I am creating before us. “It is all real, the memory is real, the regrets are real, I am real, the dancing girl is real! Mother, it is all real! But it is not all you!”

  She fades, with both hands clasping this one single memory; this one solitary prism through which, right now, she can understand anything at all. Her hands close around it, crushing it into nothing.

  I, sunlit in a summer garden, bend; crushed beneath her great hands.

  “It is not even you!” I try to say. But she misunderstands me, the memory. I try to say to her, “The memory, it is not you. It is me, dancing in the garden. It is me you are crushing.”

  “But it was my eyes that saw it,” she says. “And nobody else’s eyes. And if I hadn’t seen it, then there would be no memory. And if I don’t hold on to it, then what will happen to it? What will happen to me, seeing it? What will happen to any of it? To the garden, to the sunlight, to the place where you were dancing?”

  “Mother...” I try to say.

  T

  The skies are calm.

  In a sunlit garden, a memory has been crushed.

  I can breathe deeply, in and out, in and out. But it has changed. I am no longer the dancing girl in the springtime sunlight.

  I am a shadow of fear. A brief dark streak of reality twisted into something that never was.

  Mother watches from the window, and sees that it has gone. That no girl is dancing in the garden under a rain of lilac blossoms.

  She breathes in and out. In and out.

  “And now what?” she says.

  T

  Grandmother, from the willowbank, sees that her daughter is breaking into pieces. She can see the long, deep cracks appearing across her fragile reality; she can see her reaching out for shadows, which disappear as soon as she focuses on them. She sees her lifting the bottle of clear liquid, which is her last defence against what she can only understand to be a hell closing in on her, and on everything she knows.

  “Lyuda!” she cries. “It is not too late.”

  T

  While I am sleeping, Mother is pouring samohon into her mouth like cool, fresh well water. In my sleep, I hold the pillow against my damp cheek and I dream of Mother, a nest, a flock of flying white birds.

  A strong breeze springs up and I suddenly cannot control the beating of my wings. I have lost sight of Mother in the flock; the air is circling us and I cannot see properly. The breeze turns to wind and the wind turns to hail and from hail into a thick, driving snow. The snow beats and blinds me, and I rip open the pillow against my cheek and release a flood of tiny white feathers. They swirl madly around me until I cannot see; the snow and the feathers are pounding into my flying body. I try in vain to beat my wings through this white blindness, to escape it. But I am choking on the feathers, and gradually I begin to fade out of the dream and I realise that I am asleep and that I am a girl, in her bed, with wings fading to arms and hope fading into whiteness and a mother, blinded by her own suffocating dream, unable to hold onto a single last shred of reality.

  A white stork flies over the roof of the house, beating its serene wings. It flies towards its nest, moving the dark air with every downward beat. As it passes into a beam of clear moonlight, Grandmother looks up into the pale sky, and she shudders.

  Mother takes another sip of vodka and she breathes out a long, slow darkness, which winds its way through the rooms of the house, gathering strength. It rises, approaching me. I struggle to breathe through the white feathers and I fight with my hands against them and, choking, I try to find a single point of light that could guide me out of this awful dream, which could guide me home.

  “Grandmother!” I call out. “I need your help. I cannot find my way through.”

  “I cannot leave the willowbank,” cries Grandmother, trying not to add her own panic to mine. “Your Nightspirit will come. She will guide you.”

  “I cannot bear it,” I say. “I cannot see Mother like this.”

  I fade into my dream, knowing that my Nightspirit will come, and Grandmother turns her face to the river, and to the stars.

  “Show me what I can do,” she asks them. “Everything else has failed.”

&n
bsp; T

  My Nightspirit guides me to the willowbank, filling me again with her clear, healing light. She passes me to Grandmother, who takes my hands in hers, and she does not touch my forehead but she looks into my eyes and I look back into her ancient blue eyes and find myself in a kind of tunnel that we are creating with our gaze, and a wave of calm washes over me as I enter.

  I have a tingling feeling, as if this tunnel has always been here, an invisible strand of silver between Grandmother and me; and at the same time, it seems to be appearing anew beneath every step I take.

  As I move, I hear a faint tinkling at my feet. I look down and see that tiny pieces of glass – like clear, hardened tears – are falling off my body and onto the floor of the tunnel. As they fall, the pain I have been feeling is lifting away, shadow by shadow, and the most delicious relief comes to me as I step out of this darkness and into the simplest happiness, and it is at once overwhelming, uplifting!

  I brush my skirt, my legs, my arms, and the remainder of the tears drop in jagged shards to the ground. I move forward – so light! – and I look ahead through the grey tunnel, and to one side I see some sort of an opening; a moving green colour, which is drawing me towards it, a shimmering of gold and green. And I step into this opening and see that I am in a garden.

  Immediately, I think this is the same garden as the one in the first memory – the long grass and those sensual smells and the sound of the birdsong – and I gaze around me and see the arms of a woman and I see a child lying, and I smell those warm, comforting scents of skin and hair and river. I am full of anticipation to experience again this sensuous memory, and I shift to see if I can move in these arms where she will show me the wonders around us, and I take a step forward, and I cannot understand – how could I take a step? – and then I feel that there is a great warmth close to me and I suddenly see that it is not I who am lying in these arms; it is my arms holding this warmth!

  I am holding a child and I am moving around the garden, and I take a step forwards and I remember what I must say, and I say, “Look!”

  And I point to a sunshine-dusted butterfly, which is settling onto a wild daisy, and then I say, “Look!”

  And I point to a bird above us, which is rising from its nest in the lilac tree, and then I say, “Look!”

  And I turn my body around so that all of the garden becomes a blur of summer gold, and I hear a trill of laughter like a morning swallow and I turn faster and faster and I feel the love of the child in my arms flowing through me and creating a wind around me and I turn and turn and turn until the wind has taken on a momentum of its own, and then the child and I gradually slow until we are standing still and the golden garden has become nothing but a swirl of light all around us, and in the midst of this golden light, I bend my head down to brush the child’s face with my lips.

  The joy I am feeling with this warm spirit in my arms, and my lips touching her sun-brushed cheek, is something I have never experienced before. The overwhelming joy of knowing another person is in this world, and knowing that my love for them will fill every one of my waking moments while my heart continues to beat; the joy of knowing that from this time, there is a love that will lift me up, that will flow stronger than any other thing I have known.

  And in this moment, I understand the rope, and I understand why Grandmother has come back: to help her daughter. And I understand why Mother has tried so hard to stay, and tried to keep her sadness away from me. And I look down at this promise – this light in my arms, this love which is my future – and there is nothing, nothing I have ever wanted more than for this to be true. Not in all my times of transformation, in my freedom of flight, in my moments of the early morning. This is what I want. The river. The garden. This child in my arms. The light flowing through her, and through me. And my mother.

  As this understanding comes over me, the garden starts to fade, and I look for the opening of the tunnel, suddenly desperate to get back to Grandmother, and to Mother. I don’t know if there is still time. I don’t know if I can. Because something is changing.

  With this vision of myself and my child, with this new desire to be a part of the world that Mama lives in, I feel something is closing. I feel that my choice to step into this world means leaving behind the part of myself that is open to the flow of spirit around me; accepting a new dream, the singularity of my path. And to teach that dream, in time, to my own daughter.

  I feel this – the changes, the choice before me – but with all of my heart, this is what I choose. This is my last wish. Before my doors close, before I can no longer decide who and how to create myself in each of my waking moments. This is what I choose.

  I am back in the tunnel, and now I am running, and I can feel Grandmother at the end of the tunnel, and somehow I tumble out onto the riverbank, and Grandmother can see that something has changed, and her face lights up with a bright blue hope and she says, “Go, Angela! Go, as fast as you can!” And I am swimming across the river to find Mother, and Grandmother turns her face to the stars, and to the waters, and she says, “Thank you, thank you. My heart is yours, you have granted my request. I thank you.”

  34

  Lyuda washes herself under the shower head in the garden, her skin rising and falling against the flow of cool water. She reaches for a threadbare towel and slowly rubs each of her limbs dry. The garden is dawn-grey and Volodiya is asleep in their bed. The surface of her body feels alive against the air and the towel. It is like he is everywhere, she thinks. It is like Volodiya is touching me through each drop of water, through the air, through every stroke of cloth over my skin. She thinks of his arms around her and she shivers. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for his touch.

  She wraps the towel under her arms and walks back to the house through the dawn grass and a shadowy garden. The kitchen floor is cold under her feet and she passes quickly through to the bedroom and to Volodiya. Around his body she senses a warmth into which she can sink; a warm energy in which her own body can disappear, a space in which somehow, somehow, she no longer has to exist.

  She shivers. She unwraps the towel from around her chest and she moves herself into the bed. Volodiya shifts under the covers and encloses her in his arms; a woman, skin touched by water and hair touched by morning grey. He encloses the woman in his sleeping arms and she disappears into him, somehow, somehow. It is perfect, says Lyuda, from far away. At last, it is perfect.

  T

  Lyuda takes the spoon from the jar of sour cream. She pulls it out slowly, letting the white mass gather around the head as she lifts it and brings it to her mouth. She places the tip of the spoon between her lips and holds it there, her tongue licking off the cream, savouring the last moments. She closes her eyes, and she knows what is going to happen. She puts down the spoon and she twists the lid back on the jar and she goes into the bedroom. She takes the hairpins out of her hair so that it tumbles down her back; brown curls, golden curls. She breathes in and out and she lies down on her bed. She empties her mind and lets it drift her to the willowbank, a sunny afternoon, and a bottle of samohon.

  I run.

  T

  The samohon is weaving its way through her body like a slow river.

  On the willowbank, the afternoon sun speckles through the filter of dancing willow leaves, golden and warm on Lyuda’s long hair and over her quiet face.

  She squints through the sunshine to the other side of the river, to the line of willow trees standing wide and calm. Her eyes narrow them into a faint blur, so they are just a streak of green against the black fields beyond, like the single stroke of a paintbrush across a black canvas. She raises her hand in the air and starts to paint the landscape; a new yellow sun above the fields, flowers falling in the water, and –

  “A single red tulip,” she says out loud. “A red tulip and a dancing girl.”

  She paints them in. Falling flowers and a falling red tulip.

  She tips back the clear glass bottle and drinks. A long sip. Another long sip. She shivers
and savours the sweet, lingering seconds – one, two, three – as the samohon winds down into her body.

  I run.

  T

  She takes off her sandals, one by one, and throws them, one by one, into the river. They float away, dipping and rising on the surface of the water. She walks down the slope to the edge of the river. The grass beneath her feet is springy; the sunshine touches her hair. Her eyes are dry, drained of tears; tunnels of light focused only on a single, green death.

  With her paintbrush, she paints the river before her, fast and deep, an inexorable current; a powerful pull, strong enough to take her, hold her, embrace her, and release her into her deepest desire.

  It is flowing. She paints herself into it, stepping carefully. A leg into the deep water, another leg. It is higher than her waist and she has to use all of her resistance not to get swept away before she has reached the middle of the water. She paints a last single object – a red tulip – and pushes it behind her ear. She throws the brush far out into the water and it floats away. Imagination, memory, desire. Gone, and a rush of emptiness.

  I enter the house.

  T

  Mother stands in the river, the water curved around her body. She is ready. Her eyes follow the streak of red disappearing into the distance, and she remembers the words of the river.

  I will take you where you want to go.

  “Now it is time,” she says.

  T

  I do not kick off my shoes, and from the corner of my eye I see a jar of sour cream on the sideboard below the window and I see that the kitchen is neat and that Mother is not in it and I run straight through to the bedroom, calling, “Mama! Mama! Mama!”