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“Curio”
That year December announced its arrival to us with a heavy snowfall that silenced the city, adorning every building, streetlamp, and tree with a meringue grandeur that kept children home from school and sane drivers off the road. Ordinarily I loved the first snowfall’s peacefulness and suspension, as if for a little while time could actually be made to stand still.
But that December the air smelled of nothingness, and I felt less than real.
Still, when Matthew called from Budapest and I heard that worried catch in his voice across the crackle of distance, I told him winter’s return was exerting its rejuvenating effect. “I even went outside and built a snowman,” I lied. “To think I finally found a use for that pink angora beret I’m allergic to.”
“Well then,” he said, his voice so intimate I could almost smell his lemongrass scent through the receiver, “I hope it keeps snowing until I get home. I hope it snows so much that you build an entire family of snow people on the co-op lawn. Oh Alex,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Really. Just be safe, and come home soon…”
The next morning, I awoke before dawn to a streaky sky tinged the forgetful blue of sleep. Opening the windows, I breathed in the cold air, certain it was only a matter of minutes before the snow started falling again.
By nine a.m., there were six new inches on the ground. For the second day in a row, the university cancelled classes. The city came to a near standstill, and once again time unfurled its empty hand.
I wandered through the apartment clutching a mug of tepid tea, my tabby cat Beatrice trailing behind me. Back in the kitchen, Beatrice sat beside me as I tried to come up with an assignment for my first year art history class; but my eyes just wouldn’t focus on the text before me. I felt restless and on edge, and in the air I caught the drift of ammonia.
Although I had begun practicing yoga to tone my body, of late I’d turned to the practice to calm my mind. As snowflakes whitened the sky, I spread my mat on the living room floor, then lit a candle and assumed a cross-legged position, cupping my hands between my hips.
Initially I focused on the sky beyond the lead-glass windows, each cross-hatched pane reminiscent of a painting by Mark Rothko; but after awhile my eyes closed and I just watched my breath, as if from the inside, as if my breath had a shape and a physical presence. I was attentive to the inhalation that began in my chest (a sure sign of shallow breathing), but eventually I felt the breath move down to my belly. And as my breath moved there, I allowed white thoughts-feelings to rise before me, piercingly uncertain as the snow-filled sky beyond.
Three weeks earlier, the cramping started again, the accompanying blood a deceptively thin stream. My obstetrician was out of town so it was a very young resident who performed the battery of tests, “to check for abnormalities,” he said, “just in case.”
Two days later, the young resident told me there were pre-cancerous cells on my cervix that would have to be monitored carefully. “Your file says there is a history of reproductive cancer in your family,” he said, his eyes trained on some invisible point just above the crown of my head.
“My mother,” I said.
“How old?” The doctor began scribbling onto his pad.
“Nine,” I heard myself say. “I was nine.”
The tips of the doctor’s ears flushed scarlet. “No,” he said, momentarily meeting my gaze. “How old was your mother?”
“Thirty-four.”
Matthew had not yet left for the film shoot in Budapest, so it was not just me but my husband who watched the young doctor close the file containing my case history, press his cold fingertips to my shoulder, and step out of the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him.
Afterwards Matthew knelt beside me, his long-lashed brown eyes creased with tears. “Would it be better if I didn’t go to Budapest?”
“Absolutely not.” I knew how much this job meant to him, for after the commercials and the silly comedies, this was good documentary work at last. But opportunity wasn’t the only reason. Truth is, I couldn’t bear to meet my husband’s stunned gaze until I got my own thoughts together. “I need some time, Matt,” I said, holding tightly to his hand.
Twenty-eight years had passed since I felt the scratchiness of the wool jumper I wore to my mother’s funeral; twenty-eight years since I sat in an incense-filled church and listened to the young priest say that in death my mother had left her body and was now being lovingly embraced by God.
Although I occasionally dreamt about her, I had never really given myself permission to think about her death. But that morning, with the fragrance of vanilla rising from the candle’s flame and my own upturned hands resting near my pelvic bones, not only did I remember burying my face in my father’s coat sleeve during the funeral service and the envy I felt for my younger sister who, my father said, was too young to attend the service; I also remembered standing in the cemetery in the rain, counting all of the dark umbrellas, and wondering why my aunt Julia alone stood beneath an umbrella the color of the sun.
I even remembered climbing into the limousine still clutching a handful of the lacy white flowers from the altar just like the ones I had gathered for my own mother in an open meadow the previous July. How strange it seemed to me then to realize that the flowers would return the following summer, but my own mother would not.
Moments later, curled beside my grandmother on the damp leather seat, I surrendered to the feel of her fingertips in my hair, and heard her say, “You, Alexandra, knew your mother in a way that Nicole never will. That makes you the keeper of her history—and her memory.”
Beyond the windows, the snow continued to fall. I walked over to the glass and lay my palms along the panes, then looked out at a neighborhood I had loved as a college student, a neighborhood I believed would be the landscape of my own child’s growing up.
The chance this might not come to be sent a needlelike pain down into my belly. The difference this time was that instead of panicking I stayed there, believing I could learn to accept the possibility I might never bear a child. As for losing Matthew, who was a decade older than me and had begun talking about a baby a month into our relationship, this possibility flashed across the sky space of my mind; but like the snow when the sun burns away the clouds, it did not linger.
Early afternoon found me napping on the living room sofa, Beatrice curled in the crook of my shoulder. Somewhere in the distance I heard children laughing, and I opened my eyes. Although I did not go to the window and look out, I imagined their brightly-colored snowsuits, hats and mittens illuminated against the drifts of new snow. Immune to the cold in the way only children can be, I felt sure they were building snowmen or a fort or making snow angels, and would be at their play for hours, giddily tumbling into the magical whiteness until their mothers called them inside for hot cocoa and a warm bath.
I was still attuned to their voices when someone knocked several times at my front door. I was not in the mood for conversation. Yet my hundred-year-old building is a co-operative. At 5708 Dorchester, everyone knows everyone else, and courtesy is required. When the knocking persisted, I rose from the couch and stepped into the hall.
Old Nadia Prisekin’s caretaker, Millicent, stood on the threshold dressed in her usual matching turtleneck and skirt. That day, her color of choice was deep violet all the way down to her ballerina-style shoes and girlish anklets.
“Sorry to bother you,” Millicent said, taking in the book lying open on the couch. “It’s my daughter, Pauline. With all of this bad weather, she’s stuck in Detroit. I need to fetch my grandson and bring him over here for the night.”
“How can I help?” I heard myself ask after she told me that she planned to take the train into the city within the hour.
“Could you stay with Nadia? I’m sure to be back by suppertime.”
Elderly people had always made me nervous, and Nadia wasn’t just elderly, she was almost ninety-five and had been bedridden since her stroke. Still, the earnestness in Millicent’s face and the sweetness of her voice compelled me to say ‘yes.’
In a sunflower-filled room just beyond her apartment’s amber hallway, I found Nadia sitting up in bed; her fragile body propped against several floral pillows, her pale face brightened by a sweep of rose lipstick and two circles of rouge. Though she could not have weighed more than ninety pounds, she did not look shriveled like so many old, old people. Instead the skin on her face and body, though wrinkled, had simultaneously retained its elasticity; her gold-flecked green eyes were alert; and her silky white hair had been neatly combed into a sort of pageboy. There were even tiny coral studs in her ears.
“How are you, Alexandra?” she asked, motioning for me to come closer.
“It’s Alex,” I said. “Besides, shouldn’t I be the one asking you that question?”
“Why? We both know I’ve reached the end of a very long journey.” Nadia’s Russian accent infused her words with an ornate and unexpected beauty.
I wasn’t sure what to say after that and just stood there feeling awkward; but then Nadia’s gold-flecked eyes softened, and her alert little figure became more approachable. When she motioned to the yellow wingchair beside the bed, I sat down, then listened to her tell me about the book she was reading. It was a biography of Greta Garbo, whose “Ninotchka” Nadia said she’d first seen in Paris after the Second World War. “The only comedy Garbo ever made,” Nadia told me, her tone implying that the actress’s true talent had been wasted by the absence of humor in her films.
We talked about Garbo and the movies, until Nadia sent me into the kitchen to make tea and find something sweet. Once I returned bearing a box of shortbread and two cups of strong Darjeeling tea, I realized the lonely day I had been dreading was actually becoming a pleasure. I was about to tell her as much when she closed her eyes and began to snore, very softly, the rich rise and fall of her breath recollecting my own earlier practice.
After coaxing the tea cup out of the hand adorned by a rose gold ring with an exquisite ruby, I watched her, aware that I was in the presence of someone who had witnessed almost all of the twentieth century. It was common knowledge around the co-op that Nadia had survived the First World War, escaping her native Russia with her mother during the Revolution, only to endure yet another war in Nazi-occupied France. Sometime during the 1950s, Nadia found her way to the United States. In Chicago, she had directed a prestigious dance school not far from the Art Institute.
While Nadia slept, I wandered through the dollhouse rooms, rejuvenated by the sight of the many pots of blooming violets clustered on the dining room table, as well as by the precise bouquets tucked into corners or beneath lace-curtained windows. Had Millicent arranged the red anemones and white dahlias in a brass vase, I wondered, or had Nadia?
The apartment itself was a feast of color and imagination with its rich violet and forest green walls; and then there were countless beautiful or simply striking objects including an elaborately patterned sterling silver samovar, a jade sculpture of a laughing elephant, an intricate statue of Mary inlaid with blue and gold stones, even a porcelain ballerina whose face reminded me of a Modigliani.
These rare objects—‘curios,’ my mother would have called them—both compelled and saddened me, and for just a moment I remembered the morning a few months after her death when I awoke to discover that the curios were gone. Even my mother’s beloved glass animal collection had vanished from the china cupboard. Had I known that my father intended to box up her treasures and donate them to the thrift store at the hospital where she had died, I could at least have salvaged the glass unicorn.
Here in Nadia’s apartment, the black and white photographs along the walls seemed to watch over the elephant and the samovar and the swan-throated ballerina. There was a loving-ness among these inanimate things. Had I been much younger, I could easily have imagined them moving about the apartment while Nadia slept. Many, I felt sure, could tell stories.
As for the photographs, nearly all showed a much younger and more glamorous Nadia dressed for the role in one of the many ballets she had danced. In one, she wore a gossamer gown and tiptoed through a mist, her arms a floating sinuous line. In my favorite, which had begun to crack at the edges, Nadia screened her face behind the fan of her hands and stood en pointe, the long line of her body a testament to the strength and the beauty that had once been her own.
I was gazing at this last photograph so intently as to almost hear Nadia’s toe shoe brush the floor when she called out to me.
“I was just admiring the photographs of your dance career,” I said, stepping into the room.
“Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that the woman in those photographs is me,” Nadia said, smoothing out her silky white hair. “Had I been like Pavlova, I would have died while still able to dance. You do know that she died on the eve of yet another world tour?”
Was it perversity that made me ask: “Do you wish it had worked out that way?”
Nadia’s rosebud mouth curved into a smile that revealed a few missing teeth. “I may miss dancing every day of my life, but I do not wish for what I cannot change. Besides, had I died while still able to dance, I would never have held my position at the Institute.” She paused, as if remembering or reliving something in her mind’s eye. “I would have missed working with all those exquisite young dancers.”
“I wish I could be as content with my history as you are,” I heard myself say.
This time Nadia did not smile. Instead she beckoned to me with a long-fingered hand, so I scooted the yellow wingchair up to the very edge of the bed where I breathed in her scent of talcum and the sourness of the warm bedding, and some more exotic scent; the spicy fragrance of some costly French perfume, I felt sure.
“What is it about your history that troubles you?” Nadia asked, taking gentle but firm hold of my hand. Again I noticed the rose gold ring with the beautiful ruby at its center.
Although I had never spoken more than a dozen sentences to Nadia until that day, I found myself telling her about the second miscarriage and the diagnosis delivered by the awkward young resident. “I may never be able to carry a child to term.”
“I’m sorry,” Nadia said.
I stared at my hands, unable to explain why I felt comforted by Nadia who said nothing to change the situation, just placed a cool hand on my shoulder. When Nadia leaned closer, the spicy warmth of her perfume encircled me, and soon I was tunneling further back to tell her about the ride in the limousine where I held the lacy white flowers that reminded me of the meadow and of the mother I had lost; where I listened to my grandmother say that I must be the keeper of my mother’s history. It was a charge I had not undertaken successfully.
“Until I moved back to Chicago three years ago,” I explained, “I lived on the East Coast. I never tried to keep my mother’s memory alive for Nicole. I found it hard enough to keep her memory for myself.”
“All of us must make difficult choices,” Nadia said, as if the decision to escape my gloomy home for a private college in Baltimore had been a difficult choice. “More to the point, I find your grandmother’s request, though well-intentioned, far too great a burden to place on a child.”
“That was my grandmother,” I said.
“Where is your sister now?” Nadia asked.
“Nicole lives in Winnetka, about thirty miles north of here.”
“Is she happy?”
I thought about the last time she’d seen my sister. It was at her oldest daughter’s birthday party. While a dozen seven-year-old girls clamored for a slice of the custard-y pumpkin cake Nicole had baked herself, she convinced everyone to sing a second round of ‘Happy Birthday to you’ so that her husband could videotape what he’d missed the first time (having forgotten to turn on the video recorder).
“Yes,” I said, recalling the way her niece had fallen asleep in Nicole’s arms when the last parent came to pick up her child. “I would say so.”
“Well then, perhaps it’s time for those purple shadows to let go of your eyes. As for your father,” she folded her hands in her lap. “I would let your anger towards him go as well.”
I stared back at her. “Anger?”
“I heard it in your voice when you spoke his name.”
“That’s not so easy,” I said, looking away from Nadia to focus on the wan sunlight that now illuminated the mahogany patina on the wardrobe.
“Why not?”
Once more I recalled the morning I awoke to realize, little by little, each and every one of my mother’s precious curios—from the silk harlequin to the blown glass porcupine to the cherished unicorn—was gone. “I’m not sure I will ever be able to forgive my father,” was all I said.
“What you must realize is that forgiveness is not about what’s easy or hard,” Nadia said.
“It’s about releasing what’s destroying you inside.”
“How do you know?”
I think I expected Nadia to tell me that she had had to learn to forgive history for exiling her from the country where she was born, for everyone in the building knew that she had been one of the most promising new pupils at the Imperial Ballet School when she and her mother had fled St. Petersburg after her father’s arrest.
But when Nadia spoke, she said nothing about the vanished country where she’d been born. Instead, she told me that she’d had to learn to forgive herself. “As you will have to learn.”
“How?”
Nadia’s hands seemed to flutter with irritation. “You Americans always want an instant answer. Portée de fusil. This I cannot give you. All I have is my story.”
I apologized.
Like a prima ballerina bowing to her audience, she inclined her head in my direction and said, “It’s a story that requires a bit of sustenance.”
“Another cup of tea?” Already, I was rising from the chair.
Her gold-flecked eyes glinted in the light. “Please. And this time, use the Limoges cups.”
Once I returned with the tea, which I presented in a pair of delicate china cups adorned with violets, Nadia smiled and resumed her story. “There was a time when I practiced for hours every day, despite the minimal benefit of such rigor. In the evenings when I unlaced my toe shoes, my feet would bleed. And in a terrible way I relished my pain, for I believed it was the just punishment for what I had done.”
“When did you let it go?” I asked, hungry to learn what she had done that required such forgiveness, yet aware that such a question I could not possibly ask.
“After the war. It was springtime, and I was living in Paris with my mother. As I walked home, conscious of the blood seeping through my only pair of good stockings, I came upon an old man sitting on the steps of one of the churches. I’ll never forget him or his clear, gentle voice. A l’esprit pur, the French would say. He was Asian though he spoke the French language perfectly.”
“You spoke to him then?” I asked, imagining myself in that northern city where the light glowed on the stone buildings; where booksellers sold thousands of curious volumes from their dark green stalls along the Seine.
“Yes. He called me over and commented on the funny way I was walking. Cuirrasé, he called it. Almost defiantly, for I was very proud then, I told him I was a dancer and had just come from a rigorous practice.”
“What did he tell you?” I asked, almost able to picture her as she was some fifty years ago now, and equally capable of seeing him—his clean-shaven face, his sharp, black eyes.
“He said, ‘Your dancing is suffering because of your feeling of being un-forgiven and unforgivable.’”
A shiver moved through me, and for a moment I felt as if I were back in the obstetrician’s office. “What did you do?”
She frowned, and her face dissolved into a hundred tiny lines. “Do? I stood on that street and stared at him as the people hurried home around me, and he stared back, though ‘stared’ is not the right word; for there was a softness, a gentleness to his face. Later I tried to dismiss what he’d said. I tried to convince myself that he was another one of those people who was no longer right in the head after the war.”
“And did you?”
She smiled. “As I lay in bed that night listening to my own breathing, I realized I felt lighter, less burdened. And then the next day at practice I caught myself moving just as he’d described—cuirrasé—as if my legs were made of steel instead of flesh. My reflection in the mirror—that of a dancer who assumed only the form and not the spirit of the pose—told me I had forgotten the essence of dancing.”
“Did you see him again?” I asked, recalling the fluid photographs of Nadia costumed for countless ballets.
“I did not, though I walked that route almost every day. In time, a part of me came to believe I had imagined him, for it was a strange time for me; for all of us. I tell you this,” she said, once more taking hold of my hands, her own touch warmer now, “because for everyone there is the equivalent of dance.”
I waited for Nadia to say more, but she only closed her eyes. I looked once more at the ruby ring which now shone like some secret chamber of the heart. Sure she had fallen asleep. I was just about to get up and leave the room when she opened her eyes. “You’ve been admiring my ring all afternoon, have you not?”
“Yes,” I said, self-conscious now. “It’s exquisite.”
“A gift from my mother.” With some difficulty, she worked the ring over her knobbed knuckles and placed it into my own hand. “Did you know some say that the ruby is the gemstone of wisdom?”
I was about to say no, but then from deep within myself a story surfaced, a story my mother had told me, and one I believed I had forgotten.
“Ah,” Nadia said, “you have found something—it is there in your eyes. Tell me.”
“A story in which a poor woman rescues an injured swan,” I said, and as I spoke, my ribcage seemed to open. “The woman has very little to eat. Still, she shares what she has with the swan who offers her the shelter of his wing in return. When the swan recovers and is ready to leave, the woman asks him to stay with her. ‘I must return to my kind,’ he tells her, ‘as you must.’ Then he blesses the woman, and both she and the swan begin to cry. From the mingling of their tears, the first rubies are born.”
“I like this story very much,” Nadia said, and her voice took on the quality of a cool breeze moving through the leaves of a very strong tree at midsummer. “I like it so much that it seems fair exchange for the ring.”
At first I didn’t realize that she was offering the ring as a gift. When I finally understood, I said, “I couldn’t possibly.”
Nadia just smiled. “Don’t be foolish. I have almost given up wearing it.” She held out the arthritic hands. “No,” she said, “you must wear the ring, and enjoy it, and remember all that we’ve spoken about today, though I hope you will continue to come and sit with me so that we can drink tea together and talk.”
Again I tried to return the ring, but Nadia said, “As I told you before, I am not long for this life. You, my dear,” the gold flecks in her eyes glittered like jewels, “have a long time yet.”
Curled up in my own bed that night, I watched the moonlight flicker over the ruby ring which I now wore beside my wedding band. I recalled what Nadia had said about her mother burying the ring in their garden in St. Petersburg when the first signs of revolution erupted, and I tried to picture her digging it up by the light of this same moon on the night she and her daughter fled the city. A silver-haired woman with the same gold-flecked green eyes as her daughter curved over a shovel, her silhouette visible by the light of the moon.
But it wasn’t just Nadia’s history I remembered.
I also remembered the way my own mother sang me to sleep when I was small. Long before we moved from the city to a house on the North Shore, my mother had encircled me in her arms and rocked me gently back and forth to the words, “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be…” It was a memory I did not know I still had, and yet like the story of the swan, it rose up to the surface as if it had been there all along, waiting patiently for me to find it again.