“But don’t you ever wonder,” I asked, “what it’s like there? Don’t you dream of going back to see where they came from?”
His habitual good will lighted up his clear, gray, sun-wrinkled eyes. “To a land from which they barely escaped with their lives? You’re crazy, woman. I’m glad they got out.”
2 “I wasn’t always your mother,” my mother told me in the kitchen, when I was eight, and could not grasp that she had ever been my size. “I was a little girl once, and later a young woman.”
“Were you beautiful?” I asked, because that mattered to me. As did blondness, which no member of our clan had ever achieved.
“Beautiful enough. And very free. The summer that I graduated from college, I traveled all over Europe by myself, slept under trees, drank wine at the feet of fountains, you name it. I dreamed of becoming an anthropologist. I was going to spend my whole life sleeping in huts in small villages.” She went on with what she was doing to the vegetables.
“Why didn’t you?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I married your father, and then I had Nurit and you and the baby.”
I was glad she hadn’t become an anthropologist, but the word began to hold its sway over my imagination. “What was your favorite place?”
She sighed as she thought about it—Esther Blum’s singular sigh, which never conveyed disappointment or disapprobation, a sweet sigh. “When I went to the Scottish countryside, I never wanted to come home. The hills rolled like the sea, and there were beautiful old forests, huge billowy clouds in the sky, old stone fences around the farms. I never was happier anywhere in my life.”
“Why?”
She put her work down and came to sit with me at the table. “Something about the landscape, how somber it was in its beauty. I felt at home.” Even in the glare of the overhead lamp she looked rosy. “You’ll understand someday.”
“1 feel at home here.”
“Then you’re lucky.” She gathered both my hands into hers. “There were tales, Ruthelah, of people on one of the islands off the coast living a very simple life—people without electricity, without anything modern, simply working the land, as people always have. I chartered a boat for a day—all I could afford back then—and I went looking for the mythical village of Mandragora, tucked like an egg into the middle of a nest of mountains, but perhaps it’s no surprise I didn’t find it. I’ve never heard anything else about it, so I guess it was a fairy tale.”
“It’s too bad,” I said.
“Yes, it is.”
“I’ll find it for you,” I told her.
She raised her dark eyebrows at me. I could not wait to be older, and to be taken seriously. “You do that, Ruthelah. You’ll make me so happy.”
She went back to making dinner, but as you can see, I filed it, more or less, verbatim.
3 The father of the current Archduke, Urbis of Nnms; an amateur cartographer and legendary rake.
4 I can only conclude that Yves was too modest to see that his congress with his dead siblings was every bit as unique as his brother’s more general traffic with the Beyond, and that his clearsightedness, though of a different nature, was of the same magnitude as Mandrik’s own.
5 My house did change after my mother died. I don’t mean the old, faded sheets over the mirrors, the wooden boxes for sitting, strange-smelling foods from other people’s kitchens in their unfamiliar Pyrex and pans. I mean the house itself. Word of her death trickled down the house like rain, from my sister, Nurit, who had the misfortune to answer the phone on her way out of the shower, to me and my father, preparing what would have been a nice breakfast downstairs, to my younger brother, Eli, still asleep in his twin bed in his basement lair. Nurit’s scream, a piercing “No,” shook the house to its nails, and while all the rest of our stomachs drew in in terror, the neighbors called the police. My father took off his glasses, which left bean-shaped red spots on the sides of his nose, and held his arms out in front of him. The blank look on his face terrified me. “Ruth?” he whispered, not approaching me, standing with his arms out, waiting for me to fill them. “Ruthie, come here. Mommy’s gone.” I cried into his chest as I had a thousand times in my life, but that time I was certain of what my arms held—muscle and bone, a layer of fat to soften and protect, a carefully calibrated system of impulses in nerves. I breathed deeply to smell his scent, and realized that though some of it was our family soap, some his shaving cream, there was something in it I would never be able to quantify or keep, something precious: his absolute essence. He was, as we all were, I realized, exactly one breath away from dying, a divide across which my mother, eaten away by cancer and pain and the concomitant fear of death, had so easily slipped.
She had died an hour after dawn, when it must be easiest to leave—in a chill, bright stillness, untroubled by sirens and televisions and daughters hanging on your elbows, begging you not to go. It had also, a few hours earlier according to the weather report, begun to snow; so that when she left, the world behind her was soft and pale. The four of us drove to the hospital in her ratty burgundy station wagon, and it would not hold the road. It used the excuse of the thin coat of snow to wobble and sail, to turn sideways each time Nurit braked. “Easy, easy,” our father whispered, but he was looking out the window, and did not respond to Nurit’s expressions of panic and vituperation, or to her wheezing cough, which worsened each time he chastised her.
The day before, our mother had retained the wispy shreds of her sense of humor, her personality. That morning, she had become wholly body. Her sparse lashes remained, the arch of her black brows, the firm lines of her elegant, bony nose. She had asked me for a manicure earlier in the week, and the nails on the curling hands were still pearly and pink. Her eyes were closed, but all three of us had inherited them, so I could watch her expression of confusion and unrest as I looked to my brother and sister for guidance. Eli, at twenty, was too young for this, and he slouched and brooded, seemingly on the verge of hysterics. Nurit clearly wanted to take charge of something, but in a room with a peaceful corpse, there is nothing to take charge of. Our slightly plump, blue-eyed father, who had always brought levity into our anxious, serious home, perched on the edge of a chair with his eyebrows raised, his eyes dimmed as if with cataract. We said our goodbyes, but mine, at least, were not those I wanted to say—they seemed forced and trivial, more for the living than the dead, as light as air.
Nurit, as always, took care of everything. As Eli and I sat on the living-room floor fingering the contents of our mother’s purse—a few half-shredded Kleenex, a plastic hairbrush, lip balm, baby pictures, fortune-cookie fortunes—Nurit cleaned and made lists. By mid-afternoon the house was spotless for guests, all our piles of papers had been stashed in closets and drawers, food had been ordered, and everyone had been notified. She kept pushing at her hair, although it was pulled back tightly and elongated her narrow face. Her black wire-rimmed glasses made her eyes look bigger, but there was still no sign of tears.
“She’s mourning in her own way,” my father said, but I didn’t understand how.
Eli sat at our mother’s vanity table half the afternoon, methodically looking into her many small boxes of hairpins and beads. No one wanted to disturb him there, though I was jealous that he could probably catch the scent of her on the faded needlepoint bench. When he emerged, near dusk, he had replaced the steel studs with which he’d had his ears pierced with a tiny pair of our mother’s gold hoops. It warmed my heart to think how she would have pursed her lips in disapproval, but instead of telling him, I buried my face against his itchy black sweater and held him.