Mom is on duty, assisting someone who saves lives. It’s not that it matters that she isn’t here, it doesn’t even matter. She is now taking someone’s blood pressure, sticking in a cannula, changing a diaper, then praying by the bed for health or for the soul. She thinks that all patients believe in God. She used to think that all people believe in God, because God arranged it so. I said: Dad didn’t believe in God.
Dad was a communist, she said as if she were talking about Romans or cavemen or dinosaurs. Then we talked about the church, we didn’t talk about Dad anymore. I never saw her sleep on Dad’s side of the bed, maybe there are some communist mites that bite only believers. She said I have to finish university, that thirty is around the corner, that those are serious years and that, on top of everything, I must go to church in order to save my soul. I said that I am twenty-five, that this is far from thirty. She got angry and said that I must finish university and go to church and she also added that people in church ask her why her daughter isn’t there, they see me on the street but not in church. I said I don’t give a damn about church, and even less about the people in church, I didn’t mention university. Her eyes turned into despair. She sat down at the kitchen table under the bare lightbulb, let her hand fall against the surface of the table, sighed and said that God is testing her.
I felt the juices of anger bubbling up against the laws of physics (from below to above, from the heels into the head) and I said that it is logical that people in Somalia are hungry if the Lord God is only busy with his Savka. I saw my mother Savka’s jaw twitch as if it would fall out, gape, and from the depths of my mother Savka’s throat a righteous angel would gush out, spread its wings of light across the kitchen of the two-room socialist apartment and cut me down with a flaming sword.
She screamed that I am under her roof, and under her roof God’s name is respected. I screamed then that Dad got this apartment thanks to the gods of the Central Committee and that I don’t give a damn about God’s name and that in any case I can’t wait to move out. She stopped screaming and started crying. She cried for a while, I was silent. I thought how a human being is a tree that bears tears, a useless fruit, salty water.
You are my trial, said Mom. Tears and snot were streaming down her face, she looked like a huge dirty child.
She told me how I almost died during childbirth, how the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, how my face was dark as an overripe plum, how she begged God to save me, how she told her God, her dear little God to take her and not me, how she then got scared of death when she felt her pulse rising and felt herself losing consciousness. And that is all she remembers. When she woke up, I was screaming in her arms, alive and loud. The doctor said that he had barely saved us and that it was a miracle. Since then, she says, she knows that I am her trial, because at the last moment she got scared of the dark, betrayed her faith, and took back her prayer.
I was silent and scratched the burnt part of the tablecloth, long ago I had set down a hot pot there and forgotten the trivet. A black, coal crescent. A full moon from hell.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she looked at me as if she really meant it. Her eyes were ugly and watery. “This is too heavy,” she said. “I wish you had died in that hospital.”
I scratched the negative of the pot on the tablecloth, finishing with my finger the curve of the black crescent into a precise circle — like history returning on itself, like a snake eating its own tail. I didn’t say anything to her. I haven’t said anything since. The bare lightbulb left an imprint on my retina, I blinked furiously to chase it away.
Then I called Jakov, I cried with him, I wanted to kiss him, to take his body, to put it inside mine, his eyes to replace my eyes, to grow together like two knotty oaks, to swallow him, to put my hands on his cheeks, touch his forehead with my forehead, to be a two-headed goddess, to create the world anew, for time to flow from below upwards, and not from left to right.
Now he is leaving.
And that is all.
