Mother Winter

by Sophia Shalmiyev

  The Russian L is an empty American A. Without containment. No mother. No home. The Daughter can’t utter her name without swallowing the letter like tepid pureed soup. The speech therapist asking, “Please touch your teeth. Do you hear yourself? You make it sound like a V.”

  But the phantom mother and the tongue-tied daughter share a mute V. An upside-down Russian L. The shape of their sex. The American cunt of her future. Victory. Freedom without freedom.

  × × × ×

  It was too risky to ask for her and be denied so I didn’t say her name much. Mother, loosen my tongue.

  I was scared of us being seen together, scared to sit next to her and be aligned with an outcast. Most of all, I didn’t want to betray my father’s girlfriend, who judged Elena without pity. A generous scarcity of mercy. My mother must have felt humiliated. She must have given up on herself completely. She must have retreated and relapsed even harder. How small she looked sitting on that couch, reaching out for my hand.

  When my mother was allowed a visit, I swatted her away as she shrank into her seat. I stared toward the door, tortured her with prolonged silence. I worried that if I sat on her lap, if I hugged her, if I sided with her in front of my dad and future stepmom, I would fall through a dank well in her chest and she would leave again. I would be banished to live in her chest like a traitor, an outsider, nomadic roadkill.

  A returned check. Null and void. A zero would be my number. I would be vanished.

  V

  Girl is a four-letter word.

  Four is the only number in the English language that is self-contained and holds the clue to its function, being made up of four letters. No other number does this.

  Russians are scrupulous followers of numerology, tea-leaf readings, evil-eye spells. We believe that good luck can be lost if you’re not paying attention to a coded system, one passed down to you generationally.

  You can also fail to collect on your good fortune if you do not remain vigilant and know what to look for. Most of the superstitions are about launching your journey.

  Before you set off for the airport you must sit on your suitcases. This way you are able to think and leave your troubles behind.

  If you forget something inside when you’re already out the door you must go look at yourself in the mirror upon reentry. This way you make it back home in one piece.

  It is best to have a family member, or a friend, splash a jug of water on the back of your car as you drive off. This purifies your voyage, providing you with a clean slate.

  × × × ×

  We once left Russia; I once came back. When I returned to Russia in 2004, determined to find you and bring you back home with me like a lost puppy stuffed in a sack, everyone in my family refused to sit on suitcases for good luck. There was unanimous disappointment at my decision to waste time and money on a lost cause. There were murmurs of ethnic cleansing, hate crimes, and kidnappings.

  Russian Orthodoxy Believers call death a homecoming.

  My father’s friends took turns telling their own stories of rough muggings, assaults that ran the gamut from being choked in an alley for a gold watch to pistol whipped in a stairwell for an engagement ring in a corrupt and unruly country. The wild wild Eastern Bloc would have me raped and killed and called out as a dirty Jew, like they used to, all for a woman who is nearly a stranger, an egg donor, pickled in the brain to be sure.

  × × × ×

  Ian Svenonius was the lead singer of the 1990s radical punk band Nation of Ulysses. He wrote the books The Psychic Soviet and Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ’n’ Roll Group. He proclaimed that four is a magic number, a potent ingredient in the formation of a rock group. Svenonius is a Marxist from Washington, D.C., who views a four-person band as one of the few means of subversion available to oppressed peoples.

  The Gang of Four were Chinese Communist Party officials who formed a treasonous group spearheading the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong’s last wife. She killed herself in 1991, while living out a life sentence in prison.

  The year I was born, 1978, the band Gang of Four released their stark finger-pointer of a song called “Damaged Goods.”

  Four years later, four people sat together in a Leningrad apartment. They were comprised of four generations of firstborn girls, a nesting Matryoshka doll of a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a mother, and her daughter—tiny, last, solid wood inside.

  The four-year-old girl watched from the bed she shared with the eldest one as the three women drank homemade vodka around a little square table covered with a waxed canvas cloth. Her folks were about to get a divorce and the mother would lose her parental rights shortly thereafter.

  In a town of three women there was a fourth. No one ever remembered to feed her, no one laid out clothes for her, no one bought new shoes for her, no one set aside a comb for her, no one looked for the lice in her hair, no one checked the scabs on her legs, and yet in spite of all this she continued to live in the town without resenting what it did to her. She considered herself a formidable candidate for their clique.

  There are four forgotten saints in the Russian Orthodox Church—Faith, Hope, Charity, and their mother, Sophia-the-Martyr. The feast of these saints is in September, the month I was born.

  In Russian, the names of these saints are Vera, Nadezhda, and Lyubov.

  My great-grandmother’s name is Nadezhda—it means “Hope.” She prayed to an old copper-cornered icon of the four saints in a hidden makeshift altar while religion was still forbidden. She often told me the story of Faith, Hope, and Charity when she got loose by lunchtime as we buttered black bread by the bay window in her flat.

  Russian Believers keep a “red corner” in their home devoted to worship. When a loved one dies they are to be bathed, dressed in white, belt cinched at the waist, a paper, flower, or cloth crown placed on their head, feet facing the Krásnyj úgol. The mourners then keep a wet rag by the window for forty days so that the spirit can come back to the holy corner to bathe and visit with the family.

  Sophia was a widow who raised her three daughters as Christians during the Roman Empire. The four of them were ordered to make a sacrifice to the goddess Artemis. Sophia’s daughters were tortured then executed before her eyes upon their refusal. She was allowed to bury them and mourned on their graves until her own death. For her solidarity with their suffering she was blessed as the fourth martyr along with Vera, Nadezhda, and Lyubov.

  Shortly after we buried my great-granny Hope and her coffin was moved from the red corner, I developed rheumatic fever and my mother temporarily quit vodka to nurse my inflamed valves back to health. I recovered, and she stayed sick. It didn’t stick for her.

  Holy is the crown of hope that perches in clipped wings.

  Within the chambers of the heart are four main valves that help the organ we believe to be responsible for feeling our loss and our joy relax and contract during each beat.

  If one of these valves malfunctioned, the backflow of blood would drown us. They will open and close at the right time and press on in their journey no matter the pace until one gets blocked as a result of heart disease.

  Christianity has several examples of four signifying Death, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Four Last Things.

  The Chinese believe the number four to be the unluckiest number known to man, since it sounds like the Chinese word meaning “death.” They avoid it at all costs and structure their families, their homes, and their businesses around the erasure of this number. Most buildings in China are designed without a marked fourth floor. There is still an actual fourth floor if you count the windows, but if no button was allowed for it on the elevator because the structure was renumbered, we can skip it, if only in our imagination.

  Christians bring flowers to graves to let people know the dead are cared for and their resting place is tended to in their memory. Jews put rocks and pebbles on graves to reflect a similar sentiment.

  VI

  I absentmindedly picked
at my petticoat netting under the blue velvet dress that I wore to ballet performances at the legendary Kirov Theatre. My dad would gently slap my hand when I lifted up the hem too high while fidgeting around next to him in our subway seats. He would give me a quick wink to say, Sorry, kid, rules are rules. The dress was made for me from scraps gleaned by my mother’s friend who shared her namesake and was the costume designer for the Mariinsky Ballet Company. It had an adjustable waist sash and was to be worn as a floor-length gown in the beginning and eventually transition to a flouncy miniskirt number in the years to come.

  Dad taught me how to open fancy chocolate wrappers without making a sound once we were in the red velvet chairs looking up at the gold-leaf ceiling and the botanical motifs carved into the balconies, like an inverted cake for a queen. The hunger kept me full. Artfully unveiling the candy was more delicious than letting it melt between the tongue and parched roof of my mouth.

  At intermission we queued up for the little black caviar canapés, but only one each. I took mine away into the heat of the crowd in the lobby. I was there alone, in my version of a night at the theater. I walked around touching the protruding plaster angels in the hallway mirrors. My father misplaces and then finds me, not lost, but consumed by playing a woman on her own, proud, primping, wrist held high, nodding to passersby, needing no escort or assistance. No canned orchestra mothers to accompany me.

  Back in our seats I imagined this was my living room and I had generously welcomed these strangers sitting behind me into my palace. Their faces looked so pleased in anticipation of the second act, so cozy, familiar, and warm—precisely planted together like a Christmas tree farm. I pined for her, a ground of brown needles, drippy with sap.

  × × × ×

  On top of his full-time college course load, Dad had a job fixing busted sinks and toilets at his school. He hid away his plumbing tools and wore a crisp white shirt to blend in with the other students who didn’t perform menial labor to support a child, or in case he ran into cute girls. Gabriel also hustled up some seasonal work selling watermelons out of the back of a truck in the summer, and in winter, he was on to slinging pine trees sourced through clandestine methods. The man who hired him took a bunch of guys into the woods after dark to chop and load up whatever they could harvest in a hurry for as far as the reach of the headlights permitted. They would then park by the busiest train stations where ladies in woolen boots and fur hats paid a little extra to get the young men to haul their trees home for them.

  There was no Christmas in the Soviet Union, officially. But we did get a holiday tree, religiously. We opened our presents on New Year’s Day. Like most Russians, we had a plastic figurine of Ded Moroz, Old Man Frost, and his granddaughter, Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, under our tree. A whole nation never wondering why this cold man was alone with this young girl whose job was to assist him in delivering the gift of winter. We all displayed a frozen child whose mother was all but out of the picture as our holiday centerpiece, conspiring in the myth that she is magically capable, diligent, selfless, and not lonely or creeped out by the old man.

  That she is unmarred by seasons of obedience. That she likes to work for the man.

  I do not recall a single New Year’s Day when I woke up and you were there to open presents with me. I would go to bed staring up at the red star on the tree illuminating the yellow duck curtains in my dad’s study, which doubled as my room in the beginning years, and think about the jolly old man’s wife, whose figurine didn’t exist, but her face floated around the room like I had been inhaling anesthetic gas, nevertheless. Swedish doctors have come up with a proper name for this withdrawn state—uppgivenhetssyndrom—resignation syndrome.

  Refugee children with recent temporary asylum in Sweden, when told that they would not receive permanent residence, became catatonic and limply accepted feeding tubes from doctors who deemed them de apatiska, the apathetic. It was recorded that a typical refugee child in their care “lies completely still on the examination table and shows no reaction to caregiving. The doctor lifted Georgi’s wrists a few inches above his forehead and then dropped them. ‘They fall down on his face,’ she wrote.”

  The observation notes on resignation syndrome in 2017, sound like hallucinations of motherlessness in 1987:

  The patients have no underlying physical or neurological disease, but they seem to have lost the will to live.

  I think it is a form of protection, this coma they are in.

  They are like Snow White. They just fall away from the world.

  Mothering is dictated by proximity, followed by a psychic absorption of the love object, so the closeness can be carried on anywhere regardless of distance. The inversion of this can never hold. Mothers who come back after loving from afar for any serious length of time will be gravely punished as they troll after their grown children with a warm scarf during winter, or a bowl of porridge in the haste of the morning. I still would like to try having her beg me to wipe my nose.

  I want those first rights of refusal.

  Refrigerator mothers were once held responsible for causing mental illness in their offspring. Their inadequate displays of affection disturbed the child into a disorganized and frenzied state. The fathers probably read this hypothesis in the newspaper they never looked up from long enough to notice their wives were legally drugged and stripped of purpose beyond enthusiastically cooing, “Open wide, darling, thaaaaaaaatah girl.”

  × × × ×

  In the five years I came home from boarding school with a series of ailments, your ex-husband tried to be my sick nurse, to wean his inconsolable girl from needing a mother whose stilts he could no longer hack at to bring her back down to our level. After the mobile clinic doctor would leave shaking his head because I was too thin and my fever too high, Dad taught me to put a towel over my head and breathe in the steam from boiled potatoes to clear the sinuses, to grind up mustard seeds and tape the paste to the back of my neck when swollen lymph nodes wouldn’t drain, to sip hot milk with a dollop of butter and a spoonful of honey, to rub vodka on a wheezing chest, to stuff garlic into wool socks to draw out impurities, to tightly wrap up in a camel hair blanket to shiver and sweat through the night.

  He swabbed little glass jars with alcohol and lit them on fire, blowing them out and sticking the rims onto my back to make rows that left brown marks in a turtle-shell pattern.

  I must have had delirium tremens by proxy, the way a partner might feel sympathy pains during labor. Somatization implies that our cells, our antigens and pathogens, are ruled and activated by the anxieties of the mind. But I had no body without you. The things that touched, the cups creating suction, the shots in my flat behind blooming with indigo rosebuds of scar tissue, all passed through me like in a lost-and-found bin at a bus depot. Nothing was mine to be absorbed because I wasn’t absorbed by you, or you by me. I could buy the ticket, take the ride, but never arrive at my body, clean and fed. Not until I cleaned and fed children of my own.

  VII

  I gave birth to my daughter on 12/12/12, which equals 36, the age of my mother when she came over to my uncle’s place and demanded to be given my address in America. Skeptical, he phoned his brother, who requested she continue to be kept in the dark as to our exact whereabouts. She was drunk, smelled bad, and needed a place to crash and sober up, so he gave her the four corners of his bed instead of a place to mail a letter, feeling guilty and saddened by her misfortunes.

  I have asked my uncle Chanukah many times to tell me the story of my mother reaching out and being shunned without my permission. The part I can’t seem to store away in my memory’s lockbox is of him changing the bed after she is gone. He strips the dirty sheets like an orderly would at any hospital with patients checking in and checking out, dead or alive.

  I would like to wear an equivalent of a medical alert bracelet: I lost my mother and I cannot find her—née Danilova.

  My uncle is the oldest of four kids and is still a virgin. There is confusion over how he was
given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but one theory is that he suffered a head injury when his mother got hit by a car while carrying him. Chanukah managed to become an engineer and curate a floor-to-ceiling library ranging from The Master and Margarita to The Count of Monte Cristo—my main source of summer entertainment as a child.

  He believes his mother, Chaya, was a saint even though she would not let him marry the only woman he deemed important enough to meet the family. I saw them parting outside a bookstore where she worked, and where he browsed almost every day instead of eating lunch, letting me tag along. He rested his forehead on her chest for a brief moment, trying to inhale her as they said goodbye. I never saw her again.

  Breasts are four circles. The holes in those circles are countless.

  Chanukah explained that when my mother couldn’t care for me and stopped nursing me I was sent over to my granny’s in Azerbaijan, where they took turns feeding and bathing me until my father had a better plan and brought me back home.

  I was given mare’s milk as a substitute. I was later assured that it contained more nourishment than my mother’s ever could.

  A weanling is a foal no longer feeding off the dam.

  When mother winter arrived to collect her daughter after months of absence, so did the fevers that almost swallowed the baby. Did her presence cause the fevers or had mother winter come to cool her down? Chanukah says that an ambulance was called because they feared that my brain would be cooked. I had already begun walking and wouldn’t come to my parents for comfort when they called me over with their wiggling fingers. At our reunion, my father commented that her child was now feral.

  Horse mothers have sex with every stallion in the herd after they already know themselves to be pregnant. Since male horses have a territorial viciousness, this is the only way to confuse them into thinking that the foal may be theirs. The mare knows that if she fails to bed them all, one of the stallions will kick her foal around to death. Female horses have the ability to give themselves spontaneous abortions when this fate seems imminent for the gestating fetus.