Shut out of one’s own house.
A room within the family, a room within its narrative, a former colony now suddenly standing alone, and yet still reverberating with narrative.
She cannot understand how I can do it; but then she doesn’t really know what it is I’m doing.
She leans forward over the sofa, places a hand on my knee, retracting it almost at once, as though it were unexpectedly wet, as though it were on fire. Winter, phosphorescent and unreal, a whimper of wind. Dressed landscapes. The snow remembers every wandering, traces left that cannot be wiped away; the snow remembers; the body does. But this winter perhaps is different. This winter, the snow perpetually blown into drifts; it snowed again, and again it snowed. It’s impossible to remember anything, and yet one cannot doubt that something was left behind beneath the snow, something that would be found again in the spring. Beneath the layers of remembered footprints, traces forgotten, yet as recollections to remain, a latent illness that may return at any time. Awkwardly in spring, awkwardly in a broken face.
I look up at my mother.
Yes, I think, this face is broken. Like if you dig with too much abandon, if you dig like a person possessed or don’t know when to stop. My mother’s face, my grandmother’s, and now this third, strange and yet familiar, which is what else but my own. A feeling of having returned too late, of rattling a locked door and knowing your things are inside. So we share this too, this puzzle of arrival, eternally postponed arrival at something that is—well, what, exactly; still, perhaps.
WHEN I THINK back on the days in the summer house they seem oddly architectural. As though in recollection they share something in common with structures and exact drawings. They are not allowed to be simply days. Remembered, they become the days when.
The days surrounding.
These are the days before, these are the days after; they fall like thick hair on each side of a broken face: how long have you known, I ask. My mother phones; I am still in bed, only then I sit up.
I’m not breathing.
How long have I known, she repeats, buying time.
There’s a feeling of sitting in the back seat and being in my parents’ hands. Planetary coercion. The grubby sky that hangs above the fields. The trees stand clustered like animals in the pasture.
I’ve known for almost a week, she says.
I nod.
I’m sorry. She apologizes. She didn’t want to get in the way of my work. She thought it best to wait. I think about what she imagines I’m working on. Do the others know, I whisper.
Are you there, she asks. I clear my throat. Do the others know, I ask. Again. I think about my sisters.
Yes, she says.
So I’m the last, I think: So they all know, I say.
I sense that she nods. I picture her biting her lip so as not to cry. I bite my own lip so as not to cry—and I cry. Aren’t you upset, aren’t you afraid, I whimper.
Yes, she whimpers back, yes, but I’ve cried and cried, I’ve no tears left, she lies. Maybe she thinks the distance makes me blind, makes us blind.
We’ve wasted so much time, I think. And the two of us, I say. We’ve spent so much time on . . . I come to a halt.
On what, exactly. Don’t you think this puts everything into perspective, I ask her.
I’m not breathing.
Again there’s no answer; there is noise and light.
Yes, she says at last, I suppose so, but I’m still just as . . . disappointed.
I wipe my nose on the duvet cover. Okay, I say.
Are you coming home soon, she asks. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, looking at the birds that keep the air moving so nature won’t freeze up.
Of course I’m coming home, I answer. I’m not breathing.
The question is if the mother who is telling you she is ill in actual fact is the disease itself. If a person can survive that sort of thing: death entering the stage, a burglary in the home that is life, theft of everything you knew. When you lose your mother, not because she dies, but because she becomes death, the disease that is death.
The conversation does not end with our saying goodbye and hanging up; it’s as though we simply become quieter, as though we’re standing in an open field, walking backward, away from each other, speaking with increasingly greater physical distance between us, and eventually we can’t hear each other anymore, we put down our phones, each on its own surface. The sound of my mother’s phone on the sideboard and the sound of my own phone on the dining table.
She goes out to feed the birds. I look out across the sea. I’m not breathing. Everything is still, or there is some other music, detached from the image. It’s not music, it’s a sound of something unfamiliar, something you don’t really know anymore.
WHEN I LIE down in my bed at night I look like a woman lying down in the grass and becoming a heap, a dead calf. I lie down and think: have I risen; I’m in doubt. All that went before. The days. The ones to come. I sleep and do not dream; I am awake in sleep and tell myself a different story just to find peace. I tell myself about the vegetable garden at home, my mother presenting it with a pride more usually characteristic of mountains; she tells me about the various varieties. There are four rows of potatoes: Secura, Sava, Folva, fingerlings. Half a row of them. She points them out, one by one. I remember the plan of the vegetable garden, the sheet of paper with four lines, one row of this, another of that:
The rows of potatoes run parallel with the hawthorn hedge. On the other side runs the willow from which she was going to make baskets, only she never found the time. It became a kind of willow hedge instead. Not inferior, just something else. Another dream that never was. The fruit bushes, black currant, red currant, hanging over the path like those standing passengers on trains. Calves and trees. Disappointment. She digs up a potato plant with the spade, squats down and inserts a broad silver spoon between the small shiny tubers. The spoon is inherited and is black, its entire surface oxidized apart from the worn area on the underside of the bowl. The spoon makes the same sound as the spade—when it cuts through stony soil, washed in spirits.
YOU’RE CRYING, SAYS my dead man, concerned and reassuring all at once, sounding like someone coming home to an unexpected table, lit candles and food full of promise. I try to smile.
Am I, I say in a voice that seems cleansed of all humanity. Or the opposite, a voice that is all too human, as though too much person has been pressed into the sounds.
My attempt at a smile makes my face look atrocious.
It’s evening. I haven’t talked to anyone since I talked to my mother; I don’t know what to say to my sisters. I’m not sure we have the same mother; I’m not sure we’re a family anymore. When did it get to this, I think to myself, but maybe it was like this always. That we are neither one body, nor one family, or else: maybe a family is not the same as a family. It’s a construct; it’s like that because we can’t endure anything else. We excuse ourselves, saying some plants resemble others, that some animals do; we’re a bunch