The Rhythm of Memory

by Alyson Richman

  As time passed, Octavio grew to have enormous respect for Allende, not only as his candidate of choice, but also as a man, a husband, and a father. To each of his responsibilities, he seemed deeply devoted. Octavio was touched by the way Allende consulted with both Tencha and their daughter, Tati, about his campaign. He was mesmerized by the doctor as Allende recounted his meetings with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

  When Allende offered to pay him for his services, Octavio refused. “When I do things, I do them for the passion or the purpose,” he told the doctor. “I don’t need the money.”

  “I want to compensate you somehow,” Allende said firmly. “You deserve something for your efforts. What can I give you?”

  “If you are elected, and only if my instruction has paid off, you can send my wife and me on an exotic trip for a few months.”

  “Very well,” he replied, content with Octavio’s reply. “Tell your wife in a few weeks’ time she’ll be off on an adventure.”

  By the time Allende’s camera debut approached, he had benefited from nearly four months of intensive training.

  “You will make sure the camera takes me from the appropriate angles.”

  “Yes, of course, Doctor, I will make sure. I will take care of it.”

  The two men had grown close to each other over the past few months. So much so that Allende embraced him before he went on air. “No matter the outcome of this election, I will always be grateful to you, Octavio. I will always be indebted.”

  Octavio laughed. “Go out there in the name of Chile and make me proud.”

  Allende sat down at the desk that had been prepared for him by the television studio. The television camera loomed in the foreground, and as he stared into the large black lens, he remembered what Octavio had told him.

  “Keep your chin up high and your eyes focused on the center of the lens. Pretend it is the eyes of your wife on your wedding day.” Allende remembered how he and Tencha had gone to the court-house that afternoon so many years before. It had been a private day between them. No pomp or circumstance. No flowers in her hair. But he had looked into her dark eyes and promised himself to her. He had sworn his undying devotion to her, just as he was willing now to do to the people of Chile.

  Allende folded his hands and cocked his chin, steadied his gaze, and began his speech in perfect, polished prose.

  From behind the camera, Octavio stood beaming. His pupil was doing well. “Yes, yes,” he whispered to himself. “Keep that chin up. Yes, now take off the glasses, stare directly into the camera.” He pushed the cameraman, instructing him to zoom in on Allende’s eyes.

  Allende was doing everything perfectly. He paused at the right moments and looked squarely into the center of the lens when he made his promises. He came across as sincere and honorable, the two traits that were indeed truly his.

  From behind the camera, Octavio was smiling with pride.

  “You don’t need me anymore,” Octavio told him that night as he bade Allende farewell. “You were flawless.”

  Allende beamed.

  “The rest is up to you and your campaign managers. You’ve been a wonderful student. You have both my vote and my best wishes for good luck.”

  “Thank you, my friend,” Allende said as he embraced Octavio. “I will always be grateful.”

  Octavio nodded and smiled. “You know how to reach me if you need me. I will look forward with great anticipation to having the privilege of listening to your inaugural speech come September.”

  “Thank you again, comrade. I take it this year you will vote?”

  “Indeed, I will! Viva Allende!” Octavio said with a wink as he packed up his satchel and waved toward the man he now considered his friend. That evening he went home smiling, eager to get back to his wife and children, who were waiting patiently for his return.

  Twenty-two

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  AUGUST 1970

  When Kaija announced that she was with child, Samuel held her so tightly that she had to scold him, for fear he was crushing the unborn baby. She knew she was acting a bit ridiculously, but she was fearful. She just didn’t want anything to go wrong.

  Since discovering she was pregnant, Kaija couldn’t believe how protective she felt toward this little thing growing inside her. It was as if, instantly, from the moment of conception, her maternal instincts had been awakened. It all happened like an explosion: a wondrous and miraculous thing. For the first time in her life, she felt magical.

  Samuel noticed the change in his wife almost immediately. Her radiance intensified, her pale white skin ripened to a warm, golden hue. He always believed she could never have been more beautiful than the day he first laid eyes on her. Yet, now, he saw her as a woman transformed. Her delicate, birdlike features were replaced by a soft, gentle roundness. Her cheeks were constantly rosy, like the pale petals of a peony. Every night as they lay down in their bed, the crisp cotton swaddled over their naked limbs, Samuel would place his palm on Kaija’s stomach and imagine the day he could feel the child’s first movements. He would count down the months to the child’s birth on his fingertips and tell Kaija how he longed for the day that he could place his ear to her navel and marvel at the sound of their child’s precious heartbeat.

  Only a few months before, they had moved from their small apartment in Göteborg to a large, four-bedroom house in Vesterås. They had come upon the house almost by accident, having taken the car down a road they had mistaken for another. Yet there, amid a canopy of apple trees and blue hydrangea, they found a house that seemed to claim them. The house could have been taken right out of one of Kaija’s dreams.

  “There is a For Sale sign!” Kaija said with great excitement. “Samuel, doesn’t it look absolutely perfect!”

  He had smiled over at her, pushing his hand past the car’s stick shift and folding his fingers into hers. “Yes, Kaija, it does. There is a phone number on the sign. Why don’t we drive to the center of town and ask if they might show us the house this afternoon?”

  “Can’t we just ring the bell, Samuel? I’m sure they would be excited at the prospect of a potential buyer arriving at their door.”

  “I’m not so sure, Kaija…”

  “Please, Samuel,” she pleaded. “I’ll make the necessary apologies. You don’t have to say a word!”

  Against his better judgment, he had pulled into the small gravel driveway. People had never arrived unannounced at his parents’ home back in Peru. It would have been considered rude and improper. But even after they were married, Kaija had maintained her childlike innocence, and he thought it sweet how excited she was. “We will offer to come back if it is a bad time, Kaija. Promise me that.”

  “Of course, Samuel. Of course.” She jumped out of the car and smoothed back her blond ponytail. From behind, she looked no more than fifteen years of age.

  In the end, everything could not have worked out better. The older couple who lived in the flower-filled home were overjoyed to have a young couple ring their bell. They welcomed Samuel and Kaija in and offered them tea and warm biscuits. Afterward, they spent nearly two hours showing them the house and reminiscing on how they had raised four children within its walls.

  “We’re getting too old to care for a house with so many rooms,” the wife had lamented to Kaija, “but a lovely girl like you with a doctor for a husband, well…it would be just perfect for the two of you.”

  Kaija smiled and pressed her cheek into Samuel’s shoulder. The tweed of his blazer scratched her delicate skin, but she was so happy at this moment she barely noticed.

  “Do you have any children yet?” the elderly husband asked. “There are four bedrooms. You saw the big backyard, and the town has two school systems. So many children in this area.

  “I can’t believe how Vesterås is growing. So many artists and writers. Many immigrants relocated by the government. Still, I believe it will be good for the area. Some new blood in these parts.”

  Samuel smiled, nodding his head i
n agreement. “Yes, I know about the government’s plans. That is exactly why Kaija and I are looking for a home around here. I have been thinking of setting up an office in the center of town, as my practice is dependent on the immigrant community.”

  “Well then,” the older woman said, smiling, “this house will be perfect for you.”

  They bought the house within a matter of weeks and began to make preparations for the move a month later. Kaija packed all of their things in brown cardboard cartons and wrapped everything in generous clouds of crumpled, white tissue paper. They made love on the floor of their empty apartment with great fervor, each of them hungry for the other, each of them anxious to create a child that was symbolic of their love. They knocked down a tower of sealed boxes as they rolled in their passionate embrace, and afterward, as they held each other tightly to their chests, they giggled with nervous anticipation of the new life they were hoping to create.

  Both of them knew that the new home would afford them ample room for their burgeoning family. So that evening, after they had been in the house barely two weeks and Kaija announced that she was pregnant, Samuel lifted her into the air and carried her upstairs, spinning her around each room, chiding, “Take your pick! Take your pick! What other woman has the choice of so many rooms for a future nursery!” He kissed her. “Finally, my love, you’ll have everything you ever wanted!”

  As Kaija’s belly grew, so did Samuel’s practice. Nearly seventy-five political refugees moved into Vesterås that year, and nearly twenty-five somehow got word of Samuel Rudin’s success with his patients.

  He took a small office on Skolgatan Street and bought a new desk, some wooden bookshelves, and a leather chesterfield couch for his patients to recline on. He walked home every evening, through the village square and to the grassy street where his pregnant wife waited for him. Even after a difficult day of work and seeing several new clients, he was always smiling. After all, things were beginning to fall into place. He was helping people who desperately needed his guidance. He had a loving, devoted wife, and even Sweden itself had warmed to him. Life, for Samuel Rudin, finally was good.

  Twenty-three

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  APRIL 1971

  When Kaija held her newborn daughter in her arms, she was overcome with emotion. Here, sleeping sweetly at her breast, was this tiny child that she and Samuel had created together. She was theirs completely. She looked at the infant’s tiny head, which was covered in light blond fuzz, marveled at the delicate eyelids, which shielded two blue-green irises, and sighed with satisfaction. In all her life, she could not recall a child more beautiful than hers, nor could she believe that she, Kaija Sorenson-Rudin, could have the capacity to love anyone as deeply as she did the child that now lay sleeping in her arms. And it was these new and intense feelings that awakened her unanswered questions of her past. For as Kaija looked at her daughter with the blond hair and thimble-size nose, she could not help but see herself as that newborn infant. In her heart, she knew that she had once resembled her, sweet, pink, and round. That she too must have had the rosy skin, the thin, delicate eyelids, the hazy hue of newborn eyes.

  She wanted nothing more than to love this child and to protect her. Even when Kaija slept, she wanted to watch over her, wishing that she could keep one eye open, just to ensure the child was safely beside her. She could not imagine a day without her.

  And Kaija wondered whether this was how all mothers felt after they’d given birth. As though their child were born from the muscle in their heart and the cells of their body. That they were connected even after the umbilical cord was cut and the milk no longer flowed from their breasts. And if so, what had she done wrong so many years earlier? What could she have possibly done by the age of two that her mother could have had the heart to give her away?

  There are so many things a simple wooden crucifix and prayer book cannot fulfill or replace. The objects cannot speak, and thus they lack the power to appease the ache of unanswered questions. And Kaija was still filled with that ache. Like a partially healed wound that is still sensitive to the sting of salt, she remained vulnerable to her past. Her childhood continued to be a taboo subject that Kaija preferred to relegate to the far corners of her mind, rather than release it to the present. Consequently, she spoke of it rarely. Keeping it buried inside, tightly tied and laced down in the depths of her memory. Only recalling it when it crept up on her uninvited. Like an unwanted web of ivy, chasing her every time she thought she had cut it down.

  It was one of the two great misfortunes of her life that Kaija had absolutely no memory of her mother. She could not recall the sound of her mother’s voice or the sensation of her touch. She had no idea if her love for drawing was inherited from either of her parents, or if her fear of abandonment was related to her adoption. What she did know was that every time she gazed at the faded wedding portrait of her parents, she felt cheated. She wished those old sepia-toned images could speak to her. She wished, as she was now a mother herself, that she could ask her own mother, “Why?” She wished she could hear from her mother that it had caused her terrible pain to give her up. She thought that might bring her some sense of comfort.

  After Sabine’s birth, Kaija began framing pictures of Samuel and their daughter and scattering them around the house. “Finally,” she said to herself, “I have a family of my own.”

  She tried to think of her mother less, although it was nearly impossible for her to do. Seeing her own daughter growing before her, the privilege of seeing her discover the world around her, brought such joy to her that she wanted to pity her mother for not being able to see that in her. Yet, other days, it was enough to infuriate her and make her blood-boiling mad. So the woman in the photograph vacillated between saint and sinner, with increasing frequency, depending on Kaija’s mood.

  Her feelings for her father were far more distant and abstract to her. She had nothing of his, nothing that he had ever touched, nothing that she could now say had been his own. In the photograph, he didn’t look a day older than nineteen. His face full and his eyes sparkling with both pride and promise. His body tall and strong.

  She rarely let herself think of the man she’d met briefly after the war. Those three months in Finland were all but erased in her mind. She had become an expert in blocking those memories that were filled with anguish and despair.

  But her memories of her first arrival in Sweden were still vivid to her.

  Her first memory of the house she was brought to was the smell of bread baking. That wonderful, intoxicating perfume of rising yeast, butter, and flour was completely foreign to her. She remembered how the gentle man with the soft, sweet voice had told her to call him Papa, and how he had handed her a large slice of warm bread with honey spread over the top.

  It was he, not his wife, who helped Kaija unpack her tiny, red suitcase. He folded her dress and spare pair of socks in the drawer. He withdrew the crucifix and placed it on a nail beside her bed.

  What she had not seen, however, was the sight of her adopted father as he opened the prayer book and discovered the letter inside. As it was written in Finnish, he could not read the letter at all.

  However, he knew by the careful penmanship, the deliberate and precise folding of the paper, that it was important and should be taken care of. He feared that it might get soiled by the small child if she came across it while she played, so he put it away in his desk drawer, promising himself that he would give it to her when she was old enough to understand.

  Every evening after he returned from the office, Hugo Sorenson opened his top drawer, withdrew his fountain pen, and attended to his correspondence; and each time he saw the folded letter that had arrived tucked in the prayer book of his adopted daughter. But one evening, he was shocked to discover that the letter was no longer there.

  At first, he thought it was only buried under a spare folder or a strip of stamps. But, upon closer inspection, he discovered that it could not be found. Panic struck him. Guilt that he
had lost something so precious, that which could never be replaced.

  He asked his wife, “Have you seen a folded letter written in Finnish, Astrid?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? I’ve misplaced something important.”

  He thought she was acting strange, secretive. She avoided his gaze, her eyes firmly focused on the kettle of boiling water.

  “Are you sure, Astrid?” he asked her one more time, hoping that she would confess that she had found it and inadvertently left it in another part of the house.

  “No. I haven’t any idea what you are talking about.”

  He went back to his office and scoured through all his files and drawers. Kaija had already gone to sleep. Perhaps she had discovered it. The next morning, he asked her if she had been rummaging in his desk.

  “No, Papa,” she said sweetly. “I would never do that.”

  He believed her. He didn’t want to let her know what he had lost. She would never forgive him. So, for many weeks, he searched for the lost letter, never giving up hope that it might one day magically reappear. But it never did.

  He thought about it constantly, wondering if he should tell Kaija as she grew older about what he had lost. But he hesitated. He didn’t want to do anything that might cause the precious little girl any pain.