The afternoon was so hot that the sun itself was on the verge of fainting; it was rolling down, straight into the Grandma’s open grave. A strangely animated rabbi, who also served as a funeral director, read quickly today’s Torah portion and left, vigorously jumping over reddish chunks of dried-up dirt that looked more like horse manure than the respectable cemetery soil, which covers the dead and thus closes their earthly chapter.
This brand new section of the Jewish cemetery was merrily pushing its way through patches of the transparent forest. Sashka glanced over the gravestones closest to him. All names were Russian sounding. New immigrants had brought their elderly to die here, in the land of opportunity, and took advantage of the added benefit of being buried properly and cheaply in the Jewish tradition. However, the Christian customs that they’d brought with them from their abandoned yet internalized forever Russian homes were deeply embedded in their Jewish minds. Each Monday, flowers were thrown out by the cleaning crew, and each Sunday morning they stubbornly reappeared on those graves that hadn’t been abandoned yet. First-generation immigrants, who’d settled for discounted rates of the Orthodox burial ground, couldn’t insult their dead who’d been ignorant about the rules of Judaism during their entire life by denying them a bouquet of flowers after death.
Sashka knew better not to bring flowers or a wreath to Grandma’s Jewish funeral, but Mother got so agitated when he told her that flowers were “discouraged” (he didn’t dare say, “forbidden”), that he decided to save himself this trouble and let her do whatever felt right to her. After all, this was her day, the first day in her life when she could make her own decisions or follow impulses, without constant fear of reprimands from Grandma. Somehow, the first day of her adulthood- wasn’t it ironic that she had to wait that long, until her fifties, to become an adult?- and Flora was clutching a few stems of roses with petals already blackened by today’s heat.
Sashka’s job gave him two personal days per year when he could supposedly take care of family related matters. This was his second year on the job, and the first time when he could not avoid taking a day. Even though no one asked him questions or doubted his need to take a day, he felt guilty for having to do so. It was such a miracle for him to get work in America that he never felt fully entitled to anything beyond his modest paycheck. In reality, Sashka was well liked by his coworkers, as well as bosses, who felt sorry for his crippled arm and thick Russian accent. He managed his responsibilities well, but never struck a conversation outside of his job duties. Isolating from others was his life-long routine.
Beginning with his kindergarten class, and moving on to coworkers and occasional comrades at the local bar, Sashka’d been managing to remain almost invisible. By all means, he could be rated the quietest kid in his school and in his street. He never was a problem child, nor was he a wunderkind that his school could ever be proud of. Having his parents called to come to school for whatever reason was his biggest fear during his school years, and the best way to avoid it was to become a mediocrity. He didn’t have close friends, out of fear that eventually he would have to invite them over, and they would hear Mother speak in riddles, smell the stench of his place, or see Grandma’s ritual dance of psychosis on the rise during the days preceding her seasonal trips to a psychiatric hospital. This part of his existence had to remain hidden from everyone else’s eyes if he was to amount to anything in life. Even as a kid, Sashka intuitively knew it, and was cautious enough not to attract attention to his persona.
Life in warm climate rarely stays concealed indoors. By the night time, except for the coldest days of a short Tashkent winter, women and men (actually, mostly women, as men were flocked in the tea house after work- and, yeah, tea was served there, too..), dwellers of a three-winged building and four one-story houses that had formed a square, were done with their chores, and all moved into the inner courtyard: Russians with their massive glasses of tea in metal glass holders and Uzbeks with their china teapots and small teacups, elderly matrons armed with knitting needles and new mothers with colicky infants, and, of course, men of all ages, looking forward to their nightly game of nardy (mah-jong) were all taking their regular seats on two benches attached to the wooden table in the middle. Those who didn’t manage to squeeze onto the bench brought chairs from home. Later on, certain chairs would get assigned to the courtyard forever, and would become a part of the scenery. This was the apotheosis of the international friendship that had been so widely advertised by Soviet propaganda. Russians and Uzbeks, Bukharian and Ashkenazi Jews, and one Armenian granny were passionately discussing unfaithful wives, drunken husbands, and naughty kids who lived within the radius of three blocks. The courtyard was a news center, a court room, a social club, a judgment day. Nothing escaped neighborhood gossipers’ attention. No one could avoid their adjudication.
However, discussing that family was an ill-mannered thing, like picking your nose in the street. Flora with her string of suitors, Anna with her quarrelsome insanity, and Sashka, with his bad arm and scared gaze, had to remain a shameful collective secret of the neighbors. Otherwise, someone could reproach the courtyard’s unspoken decision not to intervene, no matter what had been happening behind the door of Sashka’s tiny house with a crack running across the front wall, a house that consisted of two rooms, a kitchen the size of a linen closet, and a toilet that was separated from the kitchen by the cotton curtain. Who knows how it withstood the famous earthquake when bigger and stronger buildings got leveled?
If only anyone, a neighbor, a teacher, or a school nurse, ever spoke up, Mother wouldn’t have to grow up on a mental ward. She would have never been tortured by her mother. Maybe, Sashka’s father would choose to stay with them. Maybe, Sashka wouldn’t be picked on at school. What else would be different? Oh, Sashka composed quite a list in his head, but what was the use of it if Grandma was getting older and required more care than ever, Mother had her seasonal episodes requiring hospitalizations, and he had turned into a family face saver and a perpetual caretaker for both women since he learned how to walk?
***
If Sashka’s memories were accurate, he saw his father twice. His first memory of the father was blurred and distant. Sashka vaguely remembered an awkward and tense hour with the tongue-tied man who brought him a yellow-skinned, elongated melon that started melting and turning into a sticky juice in Sashka’s mouth once he delved into a boat-like slice. Sashka was busy licking off the juice that was pouring out of the corners of his mouth, and didn’t even notice when the man left. Second, and last, time, Sashka saw him years later, when he was already a student at the local vocational school. Sashka’s father came to have Mother sign the papers which would free him from his paternity rights, as if he’d ever exercised them. Her signature would allow him to permanently immigrate abroad without his son. Flora signed at once (which provoked a huge fight, as Grandma justly believed that Mother just lost an opportunity to easily squeeze some money out of the prick), but his father lingered at the door. He asked Sashka to walk him out, and, once outside, started telling him a long, confusing story about his family’s evacuation to Tashkent when the war began in 1941; his parents’ subsequent slow death of starvation when they both bloated and grew stomachs the size of watermelons; years in the orphanage; and becoming a metal worker once he turned thirteen.
It sounded like Iosef, Sashka’s father, arrived to the outskirts of Tashkent from Moldova during the first weeks of the war. Uzbeks hated new evacuees immediately. They, “Russian” invaders who had come to take away locals’ food and shelter, were to introduce even more uncertainty and chaos into already shattered lives of locals.
This particular batch came from the border of Moldova and Romania, from a town which had become a part of the Soviet territory just one summer ago. Russian language had been pronounced an official language of the place and included in the school curriculum just months before the war broke out; no local people spoke it yet. In retrospect, it was hard to determine whether Yiddish speaking evacuees, brand new Soviet citizens, fully understood why they had to leave their homes in such a hurry, and then travel for days in cattle cars. Everything had happened so quickly. They left because their neighbors were leaving. They left because someone had heard about recent Jewish executions in Poland. They never learned if they made the right choice by evacuating with Soviets, and whether they’d do better with Germans. They never got a chance to learn what happened to those who chose to stay.
These people weren’t good at surviving. Almost all of them, including Iosef’s parents, spoke only Yiddish, while most locals spoke only Uzbek. They didn’t know how to beg for food, or look for a job, or secure a place to stay in. Most importantly, in the course of their travel, they lost a sense of community that kept them alive in the past turmoil. Former members of a close-knit community got off that train as a herd of scared little people who were busy with their own, individual survival. This ultimately contributed to their quick demise. Iosef’s parents died within a few weeks of each other, a couple of months after their arrival to Tashkent, that legendary Asian city where winters were mild, and food was abundant comparing to the rest of the warring country.
During this monologue, Sashka silently wondered whether his dead-beat father tried to relieve guilt by telling him all these things, thus asking for the blanket absolution of his later life choices. Was the man even capable of such complex plot, or just responded to the sudden urge to make connection to this strange, sulky teenager who carried his genes? Sashka was half-listening, trying not to look up. It felt terribly important not to look at the father’s long and pale face and not to notice its familiarity. Looking like him would be equal to betraying Mother. He couldn’t help noticing, however, that one couldn’t tell that his father was from the Eastern European part of the country. He looked and sounded like a local, while Sashka, his mother, and, especially, Grandma looked like they just moved here, distinctly non-Asian. They never allowed this city to penetrate them; in their turn, they remained strangers, not running a chance of getting assimilated. Even Sashka, who’d been born in Tashkent, felt pangs of nostalgia whnever these places and people he never saw were mentioned.
Sashka’s father didn’t talk at all about his past connection to Mother, or whether he ever started another family. He only mentioned that he would try to go to New York now, when all the papers were collected. Ten years later, Sashka looked him up through a friend’s brother who lived in New York. Sashka asked his father to fill out an application for him so that he could immigrate to the United States as a son of the American citizen. Sashka also asked to assure his father that, if they were admitted to the United States, he was never to contact him or ask for help. That’s how Sashka, Flora and Anna got their chance to immigrate.
Preparing his women for immigration was surprisingly easy. For the first time in their lives, they heard Sashka speak up. He told them that they could choose whether to stay home on their own or to go with him, but he was going regardless. As expected, Grandma threw a temper tantrum, and then merrily went rowing down the stream with paramedics to the mental hospital, and stayed there, though not by choice, until it was time to go to Moscow for their interview at the American embassy. It felt like cooperation that she took mercy on him and eliminated herself from the picture so that he could concentrate on preparations.
Mother was listlessly obedient, not seeming to understand that her life was about to change. To be fair to her, there wasn’t such a great deal of change, because she was never involved in anything outside of her family life and its daily pain. She got used to being in pain, like an aging woman gets used to her loveless marriage. Anguish was her true motherland. In turn, Sashka discovered that his motherland was contained within the enclosed space of the courtyard, which he’d used to fear and despise so much while growing up. Trees, houses, street dogs with signs of recent shingles on their sides freely walking in and out through the dark and cool passageway connecting the courtyard to the street, broken chairs that, after years of use, took on an appearance of their respective owners, an old water fountain in the middle of the yard, the barn behind his house- each bore significance, and, taken together, meant home. Away, away from it all!
All papers were ready in two months. It took Sashka almost all his savings to bribe the doctor at the local prophylactics center for the mentally ill, but the doctor didn’t let him down in the end, and made Sashka’s money worth it. On the center’s letterhead, with the rectangular stamp on the bottom, he officially testified that no one in the family was ever diagnosed with mental illness, and this was enough to open the doors of the American embassy for them. During the interview, Sashka told whatever he knew about Grandma’s tragic past and his own unfortunate birth, and it defined the outcome. They were admitted to the United States as refugees.
Transporting Anna and Flora was an ordeal that he had to go through on his own, as usual. One by one, he had to resolve problems with the house that could be sold but was eventually returned to the City of Tashkent for free, and to work on obtaining foreign passports. Sashka was amazed by his newly emerging ability to make decisions and to follow through, to insist, to cheat, to bribe, to get his point across. The new Sashka was developing like a letter written with the invisible ink, having to sell and buy, decide what they would have to take with them into the new life, and pack it all up. However, they all made it to New York, and, later, to New Jersey. They had no guarantor, and there was no way to stay in New York without securing one. Sashka was fully aware that New York was a better place for new immigrants like themselves but he kept his word, and didn’t ask his father for yet another favor. Besides, he couldn’t see himself joining his compatriots who settled at 108th Street in Queens, while the whole Republic of Uzbekistan knew the expression “along 108th”, which meant to “become homeless.” That’s how they ended up in Teaneck, New Jersey where Russian speaking immigrants were an exotic item.
Atypically, Grandma was behaving better than Mother, not causing scenes and forgetting to decompensate. It was partly due to the fact that, more and more frequently, she was losing it, and didn’t know if she was still in Tashkent or already in Teaneck. Best of all, sometimes she imagined that she was in Leningrad before the war, and in the course of these particular episodes of confusion Sashka could hear an unfamiliar untamed, flirtatious laugh, as if there was a different woman in the room, as if the future held nothing bad for her, as if she had nothing to lose, as if death and pain never targeted her. Gradually, her brain was getting blissfully purged of later memories, and she ended up in the earlier times, in a happier world, that of her childhood. She died an unexpectedly serene, idyllic death which was totally antithetical to her feisty earthly presentation.
***
As long as Sashka remembered himself, family life revolved around Grandma’s hospitalizations. Mother was getting hospitalized, too, but her comings and goings were somewhat peripheral. She was almost apologetic about having to go to the hospital, as if she was faking symptoms that had brought her there, from episodes of paranoia when she was hiding in a closet or running away, to surgeries of all sorts. On the contrary, Grandma’s theatrical descent into insanity was always grandiose and frightening, of the apocalyptic nature. She was wailing, drooling, spinning, falling to the ground, and fighting paramedics. Mother seemed to disappear during these days. However, she was actually there, protecting Sashka from dramatic scenes and accidental injury from thrown plates and cutlery, hiding things that could be broken during a big fit, and running to use the neighbors’ home phone when it was finally time to call the ambulance.
Grandma was petite and thin, but her physical strength during the episodes of paranoia was quite formidable. She could successfully fight the biggest guy on a team of paramedics, let alone Mother. Mother, even though she’d gained weight rapidly once diabetes took over, had short stature and weak arms, and knew all too well that she, a pale sourdough ball, wasn’t a match for Grandma. Yet, when Grandma was telling her to approach in a sinister, hissing voice, Mother would not dare to disobey her, and would get closer, even though she potentially subjected herself to blows at that moment.
Sashka couldn’t helped noticing and, later on, becoming mesmerized by the sight of two sets of dark eyes that were looking intensely at each other: Mother’s narrow angled eyes, with constant fear in them, and huge, slightly bulging eyes of Grandma, gleaming with feverish excitement- or hatred? It was strange, though, that Grandma’s sly, distant eyes seemed to look through Mother, as if it didn’t matter who Grandma’s enemy was. Grandma’s hatred was calculated and cold; her blows were pointed and merciless. It seemed that she had knowledge base a dutiful anatomy student would envy: she always aimed at vital organs when hitting. He, Sashka, was never hit, though, no matter how full of rage Grandma could become in her worst days. Following the “03” call to the psychiatric emergency, Mother and he usually went through a month of peace and quiet which was interrupted only by their daily visits of Grandma at the mental hospital.
When he was very little, he was scared of other patients, but in later years he got used to their unpredictability, and then started to like ward visitations. Ward nurses knew him very well, almost as well as they knew Mother and Grandma, and often had hard candy or a small toy car which had been saved for his visits in the roomy pockets of their white coats. Better yet, Grandma was sedated and quiet, more often than not put in a straightjacket, and not scary any more. When he got older, he could appreciate that she, probably, could be called beautiful if not the wild gleam in her eyes and a constant mask of rage and anguish on her face. These were his good days with Mother when she could better take care of him, to wash and iron his clothes, and to buy milk and bread without reminders.
They never went to the hospital empty-handed. Sashka liked the ritual of wrapping apples into yesterday’s newspaper, pouring the chicken broth in a small glass mayonnaise jar, and then putting all these presents into a handmade netted bag of undetermined color that was normally used for trips to a market. He learned that apples were a hospital food, while hard boiled eggs and fried chicken were a train food, and a slice of bread with the sliver of butter was a courtyard food that he would take with him on long summer days when he wasn’t planning to come back home for lunch. Every food had its place. Every gesture had the same meaning across situations. Every sound signified a specific time of the day: sounds of the national anthem of the USSR on the ever blasting radio meant that it was six in the morning, and that Grandma would start screaming at Mother to get up, and that the milk women would soon start ringing their bells in the street, as they walked from home to home with their huge metal jars and metal mugs attached to their belts; a falsely cheerful voice of the kid coming from the radio meant that it was Sashka’s turn to get up and get ready for school; muffled singing behind the bedroom wall meant that it was Friday afternoon and neighbors were drinking to the end of the work week; screams coming from the same direction meant that their party was coming to an end, they were already fist fighting, and it was past midnight. Sensations were predictable, and it felt good. Looking back, Sashka was reflecting on his own childhood resilience and at his psyche’s unconscious attempts to turn depravity into a sentiment.
Sashka was so fortunate as to be born, since, according to Grandma, he wasn’t meant to happen. She thought that Mother was too crazy to give birth to babies and to take care of them. When Grandma found out that Mother was pregnant with him, she beat her up. She screamed and yelled at Mother for not taking good care of herself, and even cut out a strand of hair in the front, as a punishment. Grandma the accompanied her to the polyclinic to demand that Mother had an abortion done, but when the doctor looked at the crying Mother who was holding on to the bald spot above her forehead, he refused to discuss anything with Grandma, and told her that Mother was an adult and could decide for herself.
Did Grandma corner Iosef into a marriage at this juncture?- another mystery, never to be solved. Anyway, Sashka had a legitimate patronymic, and a last name different from his mother’s. He was lucky in that respect, too, because no one could call him a bastard. Lucky, lucky!- not to come out retarded, or crazy, or in several pieces. When Mother was in labor, they discovered, somewhat late in the process, that his was a breech delivery. He was coming out with his arm in front of the head, and a midwife just pulled him out by the arm as he was struggling through the birth canal. She probably never thought that a son of the loony Flora would ever have any use for an arm. Sashka couldn’t feel anger, just sadness, when he thought of this woman who probably never remembered that delivery, despite of being reprimanded by a doctor for a job poorly done. Once again, he was lucky, as it was just his left arm that got injured during delivery, and, therefore, he was capable of writing and doing physical work. Mother often told him how scared she was to see the midwife pull him. In her constricted, consequential world, it was only logical to punish her for doing things her way, the wrong way, but why did Sashka get punished?- she couldn’t grasp it. The meaning of his birth trauma kept slipping away from her. “The arm was just hanging down,” she kept repeating in childish awe and surprise.
Flora was getting tired of standing under the hitting, falling sun and thinking about the flowers. Why no flowers? Mommy likes flowers. That’s why she calls her Flora. Mommy says that it’s a flowery name. Oh right, Mommy’s dead now. She’s in a box. Flora saw the wooden box in front of her. Mommy kept Flora in a wooden box, too. Flora suddenly saw herself within the wooden walls of a barn where she kept getting scared until she realized that it was much scarier to be outside of the barn, with Mommy. Mommy shouldn’t be scared in her box now. She used to scare Flora on days when she had wolf eyes. No one knew yet, but Flora saw the eyes and knew that in a few days she’d be seeing Mommy in a hospital. When wolf eyes told her to get close, she had to be a good girl and to come near. Mommy Mommy stop hitting I’ll be good.
Sashka watched Mother shrink and pull away from the grave. He immediately knew that it was a signal that she was going through something, and that it was time to get her out of there. He hastily paid the workers, took Mother by the hand, like a little girl, and led her toward the exit. He stopped by the funeral director’s office and was about to write him a check, but Mother was pulling on his sleeve, and Sashka asked the rabbi to invoice him instead.
He knew that Mother was reaching her limit. He remembered a game that he invented as a kid: freeing worms from apples. If he spotted a tiny hole on the surface of an apple, he worked his way around it, biting the pieces off so that the whole apple was gone, save the area encapsulating the worm. Then, he carefully bit through the wall of the tunnel and, if his estimate was right, a white, fat, naïve body of a disoriented worm would suddenly show in the opening cavity. Freed from his apple prison, which also used to be his nourishment, a worm didn’t know where to go, and eventually rolled off the apple core. Mother seemed to respond to the events of the last days in the same way he loved to observe in worms- quietly panicking once the encapsulating, hateful yet protecting,walls were gone.
Sashka called a cab to take them home. He couldn’t afford to have his own car, nor could he drive, with his bad arm. They got out of the car one block away from home and walked to a vegetable stand. Some time ago, Sashka implemented a new ritual for Mother when they would go to a store where she could choose just one vegetable or a fruit. She never ate them but rather kept them as pets. She liked them. They seemed to help her calm down. Today, Flora chose one orange to take home with them.
Once home, she wrapped her fingers around the orange and lay down on a couch, her cheek on the pillow, feet on the floor, rocking the orange like a baby. Her face was covered in beads of sweat from the combination of a hot day and hot flush, but she objected to him turning the A/C on. She was always shivering, always cold, looking for a jacket in the middle of the most merciless summer.
You funny sweet orange, don’t be scared. I won’t eat you. No more sweets for me. My doc said so. No more sweets, Flora, not even apiece of fruit. I don’t want fruits. Candy’s better than fruits. Flora loved candy but Sashka knew better, and Sashka said “no.” Sashka’s kind. Mommy also said “no” a lot, but she wasn’t kind so Flora wouldn’t listen. Flora’s a bad girl. She never listens. Mommy said that the bad girls belong in a barn. Girls like Flora shouldn’t walk around. She tied Flora’s legs together and had her kneel in the corner. Hands already had been tied behind Flora’s back, but Flora knew a trick. With her hands tied up, she could fall on the ground, and then roll around or just rest. She could roll far, far… Once, she reached the communal storage shelves in the opposite corner of the barn. A previous visitor of the barn, an energetic mouse, had started working on a hole in the 36-pound bag of sugar that belonged to a neighbor, and Flora just made the hole a bit bigger with her teeth. Mommy and Flora ate sugar only in the beginning of the month, before mom’s pension ran out. A stream of sugar started pouring into her mouth. Flora was drinking and drinking and drinking from a sugary well until she either passed out or fell asleep. When Mommy came back to get her, she was still holding on to the wet cloth of the bag with her sweet, stiff, swollen lips. Mommy always told Flora that her diabetes had been torturing her because of her bad, bad behavior on that day.
Sashka decided not to waste the rest of the day and to pack up Grandma’s stuff so that Mother could move into a bedroom that used to be occupied exclusively by Grandma, and wouldn’t have to share a living room space with him. It wasn’t hard to put it all away, since majority of Grandma’s things had remained unpacked since they arrived from Tashkent. She brought with her a lot of things that had been absolutely useless even before immigration. Sashka folded her dresses that had lost their original shape and color from multiple washings, and packed them in oversized canvas duffel bags, together with a faux beaver coat, winter shoes and a tweed jacket. Without looking and holding his breath, he emptied her underwear drawer into a black garbage bag. Then, he threw away china tsatskes: a ballerina, a rooster with the head that could open up, a hollow tree trunk that held grandma’s hair pins, and other figurines that he used to admire as a kid. These were unnecessary reminders of the past that could send Mother into an attack of fear and panic.
A couple of pictures were stored under folded lace curtains that grandma never had a chance to hang in the new place. One was a half of the studio photo, with the studio logo and numbers “1946”, possibly a year when it was taken. On the part that Sashka was holding now, he saw a much younger Grandma who was sitting next to an emaciated round eyed schoolgirl. Second half was cut off and nowhere to be found. Also, there was a picture of a young woman in a tiny hat who was sitting between two toddlers with shaven heads. A man in a military uniform was standing behind her, his stiff, awkward hands touching heads of the toddlers. There was no use to ask Mother about old photos so Sashka just put them into his pocket. He felt a sudden urge to check on Mother, and went to the living room. From just looking at her, he knew that she’d already plunged inward, beyond reach, gone back inside to be among those noisy, angry, unforgiving voices which never left her alone completely.
During their first month in Teaneck where they had settled upon arrival to America, Sashka saw, for the first time in his life, jigsaw puzzles in the store window. He imagined his family history to look just like that, a big box full of tiny, irregular pieces that made no sense but definitely belonged somewhere in a larger picture. He wasn’t even sure if he’d had all the pieces collected over the years, as if someone dropped a box like the one in the window on the floor. He had to reach into the darkest corners of mother’s and grandmother’s memories to look for the missing pieces, and didn’t know if he could ever locate them all. His mother was like a shop, with the “Inquire Within” sign on its door. However, the doors were locked permanently. There was no way to get in and to “inquire within”- only to observe and infer.
Information that he could extract, piece by piece, from Mother’s word salad, was sketchy and contradictory. For example, no one ever knew for sure whether Flora was a real, blood related daughter of Grandma. There were times when Grandma was saying to Mother that she’d been adopted after the war, and was avoiding the topic at other times. Grandma had a slight limp. Once, during a particularly cold winter, when she started limping visibly, she murmured something to Sashka about the bones that never grew back together right, after her jump in a ditch when she was pregnant with Flora. When asked why she had to jump, she answered in the annoyed tone of voice, as if he had questioned her common sense, “To get rid of the baby, of course.”
Some elements of her story seemed to always stay the same. In 1941, she lived in Leningrad, and stayed there during 900 days and nights of the famous siege when most of the city dwellers died of famine and cold; she had been always as strong and lean as she was in her later years, and did better than many other people who were dying during the siege like flies. She almost got eaten once; not her boy who wasn’t as thin as she was, but her. Some woman, under a pretense that she wanted to exchange a slice of bread for the grandmother’s red shawl, tricked Grandma into walking up to her apartment where other members of the infamous cannibal gang were waiting for the new prey. They knocked her down, but were too weak to fight or chase her. She could free herself and run away. That’s how strong and healthy she was, even in these days.
Oftentimes, Sashka was going over Grandma’s story, and in his mind, even created a ritual which was replayed every night while he was waiting for the sleep to come. He would built a fallout shelter out of his worn out, thin wool blanket, and would start breathing out hot air until he’d gotten dizzy. Then, he clearly saw faces of cannibals who were sitting around the table with no food on it. He saw that the table was covered with white tablecloth and had silverware on it. The plates were empty. He then saw a still shot of the temptress who’d promised Grandma a world for going upstairs with her. Many times, he wanted to ask Grandma how cannibals were planning to eat her, cooked or raw, and what were the signs to watch for if he ever ran into a cannibal woman in the street. He knew, however, that she wouldn’t provide him with the level of detail he craved, but would get angry instead, so his “movie” was ending with the long shots of shining of the silverware, which made him so drowsy that he finally could fall asleep.
Sashka learned some more details when he started to prepare everybody’s paperwork for immigration. Both women had to provide information about their marital status, and to show a proof of divorce or widowhood in order to immigrate without their respective husbands. It was clear cut with Mother. Upon Sashka’s pleadings to give him some pointers about Grandma’s marital status, she produced a “Missing in Action” letter that was dated 1944. Based on the letter and more bribe from Sashka, a local department of vital records agreed to consider Captain Perelman dead and holding no claims against Anna Perelman.
Grandma’s life before the war was never mentioned neither to Sashka nor to anyone else, as if it didn’t exist, even though she must have been in her mid-twenties when the war began. Sashka didn’t know who her parents were, where she came from, and whether she ever held a job. No one ever heard details of her evacuation to Tashkent and coming into a possession of their house, an improbable fortune after the war, and even less probable after the earthquake that had brought about severe housing crisis. There was no mention of the boy in any other context, and there was no way to find out whether the boy who used to be “not as thin as Grandma” was still alive at the time of the evacuation. Sashka knew for sure that he didn’t have any living relatives. Sashka wondered whether Grandma was always sick, or she had a nervous breakdown after her siege experiences. Whatever was the case; she was getting hospitalized several times a year, and usually spent on a ward a month or two at a time. When Mother was little, she used to go to the psychiatric hospital with Grandma, as there was no one to take care of her during the time that Grandma would be gone. She slept on a cot in a hospital corridor, next to a nursing station, and nice ladies in the dining hall used to give her second helpings.
***
Mother’s own first psychiatric hospitalization occurred when she was a teen. She started hearing angry voices which cursed her out day and night. She was taken to a hospital after trying to get rid of them by submersing her head under the water. She walked over to an oversized barrel full of rain water that was standing in the courtyard, and dived in, head first. When Grandma saw her at the hospital, she called her a stupid cow, but brought her four apples, a small glass jar of apple juice with a picture of a plump kid on the label, and tea biscuits. When recalling the episode, Mother kept repeating, “Wasn’t it stupid of me?!” and, “She brought me biscuits.” Mother always covered for Grandma, acquiescing to her insensitivity and coldness, making excuses for her.
Amazingly enough, her old acquaintances, ward nurses, were rude and rough with Flora during her own hospital stay, as if they couldn’t forgive her for turning out just like her mother, a nut, that is. When she returned from the hospital, she was pregnant. She didn’t know that she was pregnant until her body started to act up. Something strange was going on inside of her, making her stomach move on its own, making her feel swollen and clumsy, frightening her. Finally, Anna noticed, too. Flora honestly didn’t know how she became pregnant, and it enraged and scared Anna. She kicked and punched Flora’s stomach, made her sit in scalding water, then paid some lady for giving Flora hot shots in her veins, but Flora did not miscarry. There was no time left for a legal abortion, so she had to take Flora to an underground abortion place. There, Flora was freed from her burden with the help of a spoon with the long handle. All she remembered from that one was a quacking sound that her blood-filled boots made when she was walking home some forty minutes later.
Before getting sick with diabetes, Flora worked at the cardboard factory. This was a perfect place for her, as she was responsible for assembly of cardboard blocks. Lovely friendly blocks. She loved her work and her blocks. It was nice in there. No one yelled at her there. She worked and played at the same time. Folding folding folding sides. Flora was the happiest gal when she could work. Folding sides stopped havoc. Mommy never approved of her job, though. She wanted Flora at home, with her.
She felt hunger and went to the kitchen to get food. She opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a pot of soup that Sashka’d cooked just before Mommy died. Fish soup. Soup is still good but Mommy’s dead. Fish soup is best when made with fish’s head. Empty white eyes looked at Flora when she opened the lid. It’s just a fish Flora. You scary… stop staring at me. Flora tried to treat it as just another soup, but a dead fish with white plastic-like eyes followed her every move, pretty much like Mommy’s wolf’s eyes. She emptied the pot in the toilet and flushed. Wolf’s eyes kept staring. She flushed again and again. Then, she ran out, slamming the bathroom door behind her so that the eyes don’t chase her.
Sashka heard from the other room that Mother jumped up and ran out of the room. When she came back, he heard her pacing. Oh no. Not another anxiety attack. Mother suddenly appeared at the door and declared, “We did good. We put her inside. Not outside. She is okay now.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying that Grandma is okay?”
“She’s okay. Not like the girl. There was no box for the girl.”
“What girl? Mom, what are you saying?”
“The dead girl. The dead girl had no box. She had to go get the box. I stayed with the girl.”
“Mom…mom.”
What was it? What was she saying?
“Mom, I need you to calm down and tell me clearly about the girl.”
But Mother withdrew again and went back to the couch to rock her orange. The dead girl was right there, on a bed where both of them used to sleep. She was cold and stiff when Flora touched her. “Nothing to be afraid of. This is our Lisa. Remember playing with Lisa? Your big sister. How come it’s her who’s dead and not you?” She used to be warmer than Flora, and Flora would press hard against her during the cold nights. Lately, she felt almost like a gas heater in their kitchen. She was good to Flora and let her play with her box of buttons and laces. Flora loved buttons. Would the button box become hers now, when the girl turned so cold and Mommy went looking for a big box to put the girl in? So cold so cold. I want to hide inside orange peel.
Flora shook the dead girl’s hand off her shoulder and looked at Sashka. He remembered at that moment that he was in such a hurry in the morning that he trusted her to take medications independently. Moreover, her afternoon pills still haven’t been dispensed to her. It was getting dark, close to dinner time. Did she eat today? Where was his head? The complexity of the day was taking its toll. He pricked her finger with the pen and checked the sugar level. Surprisingly, it was close to normal. Upon his command, she obediently opened all the pill bottles and started to assembly a rainbow of antipsychotics, antidepressants, insulin, blood pressure pills… God bless America for the multitude of medical specialties and an assortment of pills they prescribe! “My merry pills,” she called them. Wait… wait. Let her finish what she’s doing.
“Mom, do you have any family pictures left?” Sashka asked, in the most diplomatic tone of voice.
“Yes. Pictures. Have to cut them up.”
“Why would you cut them up? You better give them to me. They’ll be safe with me, promise.”
Mother could be very stubborn when she wanted to, but he was as stubborn, and finally convinced her to at least show him what she’s got. Mother finally produced a crumpled picture of a young girl with an unusual triangular face and slanting eyes that were coquettishly peering through the strands of long dark hair. Her charm was tentative, flowing. She looked like she was ready to run off the paper or dissolve in the direct light. She resembled a famous movie star of the fifties, but lacked the star’s confidence in her beauty.
“Mom, is this your picture?”
She ignored his question, but he already knew the answer. She was hiding something else in her fist. It was an old, yellowish cutout of a little girl who was holding another child’s hand. Toddlers are cute even in famished times but this one, with almond shaped eyes, was extraordinary cute and extraordinary hungry.
“Whose hand were you holding in this picture, mom?”
No answer. There was no need to ask, though- rusty yellow color of the photo paper and the shape of the cutout matched the picture that Sashka was touching in his pocket from time to time.
His mother was cut off, symbolically and literally, and it was too late to try to understand why and who initiated this alienation. Why did Grandma hate her so much?
“I had bad eyes… ugly eyes,” Flora suddenly uttered. She was back on the couch, rocking her orange to sleep. “Mommy tried to make them better, but they would turn ugly by the morning. Mommy cried. Cried looking at me.”
“How did she try to make them better?” It suddenly occurred to Sashka that the extent of torture that Flora had to go through was bigger than he ever knew or imagined. He felt sorry that he made her elaborate on the memory. She’d be better off just forgetting this all.
Sashka’s voice was muffled, as if there were oversized earplugs in her ears. Earplugs splitting her head, making it too big to carry around. Drummers were playing; other voices were pushing Sashka’s faltering voice into background.. One voice was parroting whatever Sashka was saying, playing concerned. “You took care of me when I was little; now, it’s my turn to take care of you.” Such a liar’s lie. I’m ignoring you ignoring you.
The other voice was so much like mommy’s, scolding her. “No good. Never good. Scared little shit.” Scared little voices urged Flora to run away and hide. Little fingers were clawing her shoulder, and she kept trying to unclench them. Splitting head with the ache in it.
“Tape.”
Flora spoke out of nowhere.
“Tape? What are you talking about?”
“Mommy put tape around my eyes for the night so they get rounder by the morning.”
All of a sudden, Sashka felt a splash of nausea against the rib cage, its waves reaching up to his trachea. He was scared to listen to her, to prompt her to plunge back into her memories any further, to find out more about her past. He was scared to put her through it again. This intense questioning could be disastrous for Mother’s condition. He didn’t know what to do with what she was saying, other than repeat, “It wasn’t fair. Mom, it wasn’t fair. You were good. She was sick.”
Flora knew from experience that in the mayhem like this one it was important to find one spot of stillness inside of her, and to concentrate on being there. Maintaining the equilibrium. The weight of this quiet spot kept her centered, solidly on the ground. She was searching and searching for it in her abdomen, in a place where Sashka first pushed when she was pregnant with him, when he wasn’t her Sashka yet but an unfamiliar moth flying inside her body. The quiet spot was nowhere to be found. Gone… lost. Disarray was quickly taking over her. Her disorder was, indeed, a dis-order. There was no order or system in her pain. Her eyes stung from Mommy’s touches. No glue. Please no glue. Glue stings. Sting sting sting peel my face. Peel my face off me I’ll be like an orange in a pool of orange blood.
Flora was pacing and getting agitated, rubbing her face with both hands, trying to cover her whole body with two small, swollen palms, with her knotted, flat, printless fingers twisted by arthritis, left without papillary lines after twenty years of folding cardboard and seven years of needle pricks. Pieces were falling out of the Mother Puzzle. Her whole being was a fracture that never healed. It was important to get her into bed. To get her into tomorrow, and then we will see how to live after all that.
***
One flashback later, long after Flora went to bed, Sashka was sitting in the kitchen, smoking and mechanically moving around medication bottles, boxes of buttons that Flora was so fond or, and various other stuff covering the kitchen table. What a mess. What a day. Everything’s wrong, her medications and all. A drink or two would definitely help now.
In no way was Sashka addicted to drink, but drinking was the only way he knew for opening up and talking to other males without fear of being ridiculed. In these rare moments, he felt that he was a part of that mysterious brotherhood of adult men that he observed, from afar, in Tashkent tea houses, and secretly craved to belong to. Being one of those drinking men made him feel regular. A regular guy with a drink in front of him. Taking on this role felt like an instant injection of a sense of purpose that was usually so hard for him to achieve in other places, in different circumstances. But even during these escapades into the outside life, he continued to be anonymous, in accordance with his own rules of conduct. He never remembered faces of those he talked to, no matter how hard he concentrated. It took guts to let their features be seen clearly, to register them as real people, to interact eye to eye. If he saw them, they could see him, too, in all his weakness and constant turmoil. He couldn’t afford such exposure. Hence, all his occasional acquaintances had to remain blurred and faceless. Worse yet, getting to know the other felt like emotional overload, and could take too much out of his supply of sanity that has been wearing thin in recent years. What if he became just like Mother, or Grandma, or even crazier than them?
After fifteen minutes of walking along the familiar highway which fell dark and silent at this hour, his body leaning forward, much like a knife cutting through the melting butter of the swaying air rising from the still hot asphalt, Sashka was sitting in a bar and telling his family story to a total stranger. It felt weird to relate his life- its essence- in English, like reading one of those bland texts from his fifth grade English textbook. Short sentences, flat words, bare facts. Yet, there was something calming about this feeling of detachment that such narration provided. Strangely enough, the man seemed to follow his accented, sweaty confessions. He replied suddenly, “Your grandmother’s nothing special. Had kids, lost kids, got mad angry… what’s new? Your mom is an exception, though. I don’t know how intact she is up there but if she is, she is amazing. If she was a Christian, she could qualify as a martyr, and do you know why? She’s a perfect sufferer.”
“What’s a perfect sufferer?”
“Well, let me see…Do you know who Job was?”
Sashka nodded, pretending to understand.
“He, of all Old Testament characters, almost made it. He was closer to perfection of suffering than anyone else. All those ailing, and dying, and depraved- they questioned the fairness of their misery. Job didn’t- up to a point when he demanded to be judged fairly, and thus contaminated his martyrdom case. But then, he took his unreasonable inquiry back, and consequently was rewarded for it. Your mother, like Job, accepted her misery as a part of a bigger plan that was not for her to comprehend or question. She treated her crazy parent like a weather condition, almost.”
“Is that why every minimally normal experience is accepted by her as a gift? A reward, you say?”
“How do I know? Maybe your grandmother hit her on the head hard enough to make her retarded, and then her perception is skewed, and then it doesn’t count, and the whole martyrdom idea pops.”
Sashka already started to regret talking to him in the first place. What could this American drunk understand about suffering? How could he say that it was right not to ask for some minimal fairness in life? He annoyed Sashka, but, surprisingly, his gibberish, along with several gulps of beer, provided some relief, and he could now head back home.
Instead, Sashka fell asleep right there, his forehead on the bar table. In his dream, he saw a big tree without leaves, black against the colorless sky, with many birds sitting on its branches. These were small birds which looked like sparrows but they had human faces. Some faces were familiar: Grandma’s, Captain Perelman’s, Mother’s. Some were totally new to him: a young Uzbek’s bird who was sitting on the branch next to Grandma’s bird, whether a one-night stand or a drunken rapist; several birds with children’s faces that were crowded around his father’s bird; and many others who Sashka couldn’t place in his memory right away. Birds sat quietly for a while, looking straight at him, as if posing for a camera. Then, they started to fly up. One by one, they all flew away, and the tree was left bare.
Once Sashka got home, he peered into Mother’s room, a former Grandma’s bedroom. Flora was lying on the bed; face up, extremely pale and not moving, drops of perspiration on her upper lip. Her skin was cold and slippery to touch. She, probably, had a hypoglycemic coma in her sleep, and couldn’t even call him for help. Her face was remote and peaceful, as if she was playing with that other girl in the field of poppies, or being hugged by her mother who no longer was raging and cold, or had her Mongol eyes un-taped and allowed to be who she had been born to be. A stupid thought was replaying in Sashka’s head over and over: tomorrow morning, he’ll have to call his job and take another personal day, and then there will be no personal days left until the end of the year. Then he thought, I won’t need personal days anymore. Mother and Grandma are gone, and there’s no other personal matter in sight to attend to. There is no recourse anymore, and now I’m next on line.
Suddenly, Mother snored loudly and turned on the bed.
“Where’s my funny orange?” she asked.
“I’ll keep it for you until tomorrow,” Sashka answered.
“Tomorrow… let’s go to a big office and ask the lady to get me another name. Not Flora. Let Flora go.”
“Sure. You definitely should get a new name. What would you like to be called?” he asked but she was already fast asleep.
Summer-Fall 2005