Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  “There, there,” said her mother’s voice. She lifted her eyes to see her mother bending over the pots at the far edge of the deck, hazily outlined by the setting sun.

  She stopped crying, squinted against the light.

  “Mama?” Oddly, she wasn’t surprised. “Is that really you?”

  Her mother was wearing her bright green gardening gloves. She did not look up, busy poking the crumbling plants with a rubber finger.

  “Forty days,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “What?”

  “Have you forgotten all of your people’s traditions? Spirits loiter in places of their past for forty days, to say good-bye to all the things they loved before finally moving on. Or at least that’s the idea. I suppose if one’s spirit has nowhere better to go, it may hover about forever, or at least until it figures things out. But not me. I’ve always hated good-byes. Forty days—and I’m off.”

  Dimly she remembered the subdued gathering held on the fortieth day after her grandmother’s passing; she had been ten at the time. “Yes, I knew that,” she muttered, shielding her eyes; the brightness was spreading across the sky. Her mother was wielding a large pair of shears now, snipping in silence; it was difficult to see her expression clearly in the sunset’s shimmering glow, but she seemed peaceful, smiling a little to herself, perhaps even happy—happier than she had looked in years.

  Mama has come to say good-bye to her plants but not to me, she thought; after all, it’s merely by accident that I happen to be here. But then, it shouldn’t seem so very out of character—hadn’t she spent more time with her pots than with her own daughter while she was alive? Or—was it perhaps my own failure to pay more attention to her, to let her reminisce about the past as she tried to once or twice, when I had no time to sit and listen—when I had a roast burning in the oven or Paul’s shirts to iron or Maggie’s homework to check? Oh God, she talked to the flowers, she must have been lonely . . . And because her eyes were beginning to brim over again and she was suddenly afraid that she might fall apart, or worse, speak harshly, she asked the first irrelevant thing that came into her mind: “So . . . why forty? Why forty days?”

  “It’s always forty,” her mother replied, snipping, smiling. “Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Oh, you know what I mean—Noah’s forty days and nights of rain, Moses’ forty years in the desert, Jesus’ forty days of fasting and temptation. Forty of anything is long enough to be a trial, but it’s man-size, too. In the Bible, forty years make a span of one generation. Forty weeks make a baby.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

  They were silent for a minute. Her mother would not stop her puttering, her back bent, her hands always moving, strands of white hair falling over her face, so she could never see her clearly, could never meet her eyes directly. In the evening stillness, the gardening shears went on making sharp little sounds, unpleasant like the clicking of teeth, the scraping of claws. Bits of greenery rained onto the floorboards.

  “You’ve made a terrible mess of my little garden,” her mother said at last, not altogether kindly, as she stepped back to survey the plants. “You are at an age where it would do you good to learn some particulars about the world. Making things grow is a kind of immortality too. But that’s the trouble with people who prize words above all else—you don’t know anything practical, anything useful. Your father is just like that too. Philosophy this and truth that, but I don’t believe he could ever tell a cactus from a begonia. The world becomes obscure and remote when you look at it through a mesh of words, you know. Like those semi-transparent sheets of paper they used to put over illustrations in old books, to protect them—it just ended up turning the picture all hazy so you could barely make out what it was supposed to be in the first place.”

  And this was just like her mother too—she had never seemed to comprehend the urge to create things that had no tangibility to them, things that were not flowers or feasts or offspring.

  “Words don’t make things hazy,” she said, feeling defensive. “They clarify.”

  “Well,” her mother said tranquilly, “I suppose that depends on the words. The words that clarify don’t seem to be your kinds of words. Too small for you, aren’t they? What is this plant called, for instance?”

  She looked at the spiky monstrosity in the pot, almost hoping that its name might pop into her head of its own accord, as if the name was its perfect essence, the summation of its nature, to be revealed to those who studied it closely. Hadn’t Adam and Eve guessed at the right, God-given names of all the creatures and plants in the Garden through mere contemplation?

  “I don’t know,” she admitted at last.

  “You see my point,” said her mother triumphantly. “Not everything is soul and love and art and happiness. In fact, very often, the bigger the word, the smaller the kernel of substance within it—it’s been rubbed flat, worn-out by all the use. Maybe that’s why it’s harder to be a great poet than a great novelist. A novel can be full of little words, as fresh and particular and unlike one another as a meadow of forget-me-nots.”

  “I bet Olga would agree with you there,” she mumbled, all at once disconsolate.

  “Who?”

  “Olga. You know. My best friend in Russia.”

  “Every other girl in Russia is named Olga,” her mother remarked with a shrug, and turned her attention back to the plants.

  She sighed, recalling how distressed she had been a year before by the very same conversation, the first sign of her mother’s rapidly nearing senility: the first sign of many to come. She had mentioned Olga in passing over dinner, and her mother claimed not to have known her. “But you must remember!” she had cried in exasperation. “She came over scores of times. The two of us even spent three or four days at the dacha right after high school graduation, you and Papa drove us there, remember?” Her mother had given her a withering look. “Aren’t you a bit old for imaginary friends?” she had said. “I remember perfectly well. After graduation, you went to the dacha alone. We dropped you off. That was your present—you told us you wanted a taste of adult life. I was against it, but your father said fine, it would be good for you. There was some boy you liked across the street, so naturally I worried, but nothing came of it. I remember. I’m not yet senile.” Her mother’s insistence had made her very upset; she had even gone up to Eugene’s room to retrieve a couple of Olga’s novels she had seen on his shelf, but the novels had gotten somewhere, and her mother had acted so stubborn and tight-lipped about the whole thing that she had quickly dropped the matter, just as she hastened to drop it now.

  The shears continued to click, click-click, click-click, beginning to sound like the ticking of some rusty old clock. She wanted to ask her mother so many questions—about God, and death, and life, and whether she had ever been truly happy with Papa—but the sun sank lower and lower until it was gone from the sky, and as the halo around the borders of things dulled into shadows, her mother seemed to fade ever so slightly, and then a bit more. She was still there, fussing and clucking, humming under her breath, but now it was possible to see her only out of the corner of one’s eye, moving on the very edge of one’s vision, for when one turned to face her directly, she quietly passed out of sight, like the flame of a candle at the moment of flickering out, only to appear again, a vague afterimage of a frail old woman in green gardening gloves, when one looked away.

  She kept very still, her face averted, to prolong her mother’s faint presence.

  “Do you mind if I snip off a bit of parsley?” her mother asked.

  Her voice too was growing more distant, coming in and going out.

  “What?”

  “Parsley. I thought I’d make your father some roasted chicken when I see him in a couple of weeks—you remember, don’t you, it’s his favorite dish. I’m af
raid the parsley’s wilted, but it will have to do. Do you mind?”

  Surprised, she turned, and her mother was gone. She rose, walked over to the row of plants. There were no snippets of leaves on the deck, and the darkened water was still standing in the pots, already beginning to look stagnant, to smell of decay—and yet she felt comforted, almost joyful, as if the world made better sense, after all, than she had any right to expect. For maybe, just maybe, the world is really like that, she thought, the way we imagine it as children, before we stop seeing: now it may seem only a mundane, finite place, but there are things moving just out of sight, at the very limits of our adult vision, and these things are every bit as real. And maybe big words do obscure ordinary things, but for these other things—the hints of things, the elusive presences of things, the great things we can’t easily define—for these kinds of things, only big words will do. Maybe that is precisely the magic of true poetry: it looks at these retreating things directly and pins them down with big words before they can dart out of sight, making them visible, if only for the duration of a few verses. And maybe, after all my decades of blindness, I too will be able to see them at last—to see them again: maybe I just need to complete my own trial, my own forty—oh, not forty years, I’ll be fifty-five next month, it’s too late for that, and in any case, my trial would not be carried out on such an epic scale, it would be small, like my small life, a life within four walls . . . So perhaps—yes, wasn’t there something about the average person inhabiting forty rooms in his lifetime? And didn’t someone close to God, some saint or prophet, say that the soul has many rooms? So perhaps that is the desert through which I am destined to wander—forty rooms, each a test for my soul, a pocket-size passion play, a small yet vital choice, a minute step toward becoming fully awake, fully human; and by the time I have crossed my own wilderness of forty rooms, I too will be able to see the world as it really is—

  With a start, she woke up from an unpremeditated nap on the deck of a large house, or else a small mansion. Her back was sore, and she was groggy from her dreamless sleep. She rose from the chair, walked over to the table with the herbs. The water, she saw, was still standing in the pots. Obeying some vague impulse, she took the plastic container with parsley in her bejeweled hands, rubbed the dying herb, smelled her fingers—and, amidst the chill of desolation, felt an inexplicable bloom of comfort.

  Setting the parsley down, she wiped her eyes, and went inside to finish packing her mother’s cheap, synthetic dresses, to be picked up by a local charity in the morning. When she was done, the clothes had not filled even half a suitcase. Prompted by another dim impulse, she flew to her own closet, scooped up, without looking, as many hangers as she could carry, and stuffed her own glittering garments, all the silk, all the velvet, into the suitcase as well, until it was crammed full. The zipper caught on something—a dress, or was it a skirt, of peacock-blue taffeta—but she jerked once or twice and freed it.

  The suitcase zipped, she stood still for a moment, thinking, then ran to get another, bigger suitcase and returned to her closet.

  38. Library

  Lies and Idle Chatter

  She was dozing in her favorite armchair, a volume of Pushkin and a half-knitted scarf in her lap, when he strolled into the room. She had heard no approaching footsteps: one moment she was alone, the next he was there. She had forgotten him decades before, and, in the years since, had forgotten that she had ever forgotten anything at all; it took her a long, squinting moment to place him. He was still the same age as when she had seen him last, around forty, give or take a millennium; from the vantage point of her fifty-seven years, he appeared surprisingly young. He was dressed in nondescript clothes—gray jeans, a grayish shirt, graying sneakers; he was also rather less good-looking, less dangerous-looking, than she remembered, his features bland and smooth. He moved uncurious eyes over the imposing bookcases that lined the walls, nodded at her in a casual manner, as though they had parted only yesterday, and sat down in the armchair across from hers, throwing one leg over the other, crossing his arms behind his head.

  “So,” he said, “have you figured it all out yet?”

  “I suppose I’ve figured out some things,” she said mildly.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “the last time we saw each other, you chose not to go back home, so you could be free. You were oh-so-eager to escape a conventional life. How did that work out for you?”

  She smiled, secure in her elderly wisdom, happy with knowing her limitations at last. “Well, it didn’t work out as I expected, but it worked out fine all the same. I believe I would have had this kind of life—an indoors kind, you know, marriage, children, home—no matter where I ended up. And yes, there were times, in my twenties, in my thirties, when it felt claustrophobic. The endless encroachment of stuff, it felt like, at times—things to take care of, people to take care of, the relentless thickening of matter . . . I used to wonder: Does it happen to others as well—do their lives change bit by bit, a new table here, a new baby there, until one day they wake up and look around and recognize nothing of their past in their present? But I grew into it. Learned to count my blessings. Learned to appreciate the small things. In fact, the older I get, the more I suspect that what we mistake for small things are really the things that matter. A child’s happy smile on Christmas morning, that sort of thing. And it’s not ‘settling’ if you are truly at peace.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “Do remind me, though—unless I’m getting you confused with someone else—didn’t you want immortality or something?”

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but those talks we used to have—oh, it was heady stuff for a girl of thirteen, but at my age I find that kind of fortune-cookie philosophy rather . . . hackneyed. Someone once wrote that the memory of man was the most likely location of heaven. If so, a mother of six is ensured her place among the angels, at least for a generation or two. And beyond that—well, no one who isn’t Homer or Shakespeare has a right to hope for more anyway.”

  “All possibly true. Still, I thought you aimed a little higher than half a page in a grandchild’s photo album.”

  She wondered whether she would tell him; she felt reluctant to revisit the follies of her youth. “Do you remember that time when I burned all my poems?” she asked at last, sighing. “Almost forty years ago?”

  He nodded noncommittally, sprawled in the chair, his eyes half closed.

  “It was only a dramatic gesture, you know, because I remembered them word for word. But I never wrote them down again. I believed them engraved upon my soul and I thought I would never forget them. But memory is such a funny thing. I did, of course—I forgot them with time, forgot them entirely, give or take a few lines. And as gradually as I forgot the words, I began to believe that they had been something special.” She glanced at him for a reaction, but he appeared to have fallen asleep. “All the poems I wrote later, after my little bonfire, never felt quite . . . quite in earnest. When I looked at them with their ink still fresh, I always made excuses for myself: they were drafts to be reworked later, or mindless doodles, or prefabricated magnetic jingles, or rough translations from the original Russian. Oh, I knew myself capable of absolute brilliance, of course—the poems I had burned, now, those—those had been amazing . . .”

  She was silent for so long that he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Well?”

  She studied her hands in her lap. “Well, after my mother’s death, I finally got around to sorting through her things in the garage. I found two bundles of poems in a shoebox. Turns out my parents had saved the poems I had sent them while I was in college—”

  “Ah, yes. On the Other Side.”

  She cringed. “Yes. So I sat on the floor of the garage and read through them right there and then. And see, I had remembered them as something luminous, something rare, something so much more than the sum of mere words on a page.
But they were just stringent, hysterical, derivative little verses about nuns and angels and devils. And here is the truth: I was never very good, was I? I was nothing special.” Again she looked over at him for a sign—a confirmation, or maybe, just maybe, an objection—but he only watched her politely, one eyebrow cocked, expecting her to go on; so, ignoring the slightest ache that had started somewhere deep in the hollow of her chest, she went on. “Which seemed a painful discovery when I first made it, but in the end, it’s a relief, of course—I would hate to have wasted something real. As it is, my life has turned out to be just the right size for me—it simply took me a while to recognize it. Now that I’m too old to believe myself the center of the world, I’d much rather be a happy woman than a mediocre poet, and it’s enough to know that the world is full of beauty made by others.”

  She nodded at the volume of Pushkin in her lap.

  “Didn’t you say there were two bundles of poems in the shoebox?”

  “Yes. The poems in the second bundle weren’t mine, but those—those were beautiful. Quiet, and wise, and—heartbreaking, really. They were about ordinary things: falling in love, falling out of love, children, death . . . They were in my mother’s handwriting.” She paused. She wanted to tell him how certain she felt that they had been written by the mermaid she had once met in her mother’s bedroom, but his exaggerated nonchalance stopped her. He was inspecting his fingernails, seemingly indifferent to what she was saying. Something caught in her throat.

  “Wait,” she said. “Did you—you didn’t by any chance know her?”

  “Not closely. I can’t quite recall. One meets so many people—”

  There was something in his careless tone, in the glib readiness of his reply, in his refusal to meet her eyes, that made her heart throb. Since his eyes were cast down, she felt at liberty to inspect his face closely for the first time, to wonder, wildly, what it would look like if it ever had a mustache—but already, not wanting to see, she averted her gaze.