The Berlin Wall was still eleven years away from falling. Jimmy Carter was president. There was no Gorbachev yet, no perestroika, no porous borders, no Skype, no frequent-flyer miles. To leave was to leave. To go was to stay gone.
But from Mama I got the silent maneuver again.
Fury was not the feeling it provoked in me. Not rage, either. Something deeper than rage. Something unleashing itself from under all the civilizing restraints of upbringing. I tried to cover it up with empathetic listening. “What am I asking you to do that is so horrible?” I asked her.
“What—tell me—will I do there?”
“You’ll have a pension, just as here.”
“Sit on the dole, twiddling my thumbs. Here I have my work, my students.”
“You’re sixty-seven! How many more years of work do you have left? There’s more to life than work, Mama. I’ll take care of all of us.”
“It was never my intention for you to take care of me!”
“But I want to!”
“Why are you persecuting me like this?”
“What am I doing?”
“You want to turn me into an invalid!”
“I don’t want to turn you into anything.”
“You want to make me useless. So that no one will need me.”
“That’s not true—I need you, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Trying to take away my independence. Do I not deserve at least this, after everything? Have I not earned the right to a little freedom in this world?”
“You call this being free? Living in this country, with its lies and hypocrisy, these execrable quotas…”
She knew, of course, of my being denied my doctorate, and her eyes were powerless not to show it even as her lips could not help uttering their beloved phrase: “I’ve lived through worse.”
I could hear the kids in the living room, where my wife was keeping them away, my daughter asking why Papa was yelling at Grandma. Panicked, Lucya came in and tried to make a hasty peace between us, but we were careening blindly now, not to be stopped. “—This garbage,” I continued shouting, “that we are told to eat from morning to night…eat with a big grin on our faces…I am throwing away my life here!” I screamed. “My life!”
“It was never my plan to prevent you from leaving….”
“You’re afraid to go back, is that it?”
“Stop it!”
I could see I’d hit an artery.
“You threw away your life, and you can’t bear it….”
“I will not listen to this….”
You can’t bear going back a failure! I wanted to shout at her. You can’t bear admitting that all your exalted ideals, your so-called principles, all your struggles, everything you gave up—that it was all for nothing!
This was not, however, what I said as I stared into my mother’s frightened blue eyes—those bottomless eyes that in spite of having lost some of their vividness with age remained the focal point of her face. To say all this would have required a callousness and cruelty of which even I was not capable.
What I did in fact say was less courageous, though possibly no less hurtful to a woman in an already fragile state of mind.
“Do you want to die alone, Mama? Because this is what is going to happen. You will die alone in that miserable little room you love so much, a stone’s throw from your ‘theaters’ and your ‘culture’—die just the same, and no one will notice, or knock on the door, until someone’s cat begins scratching on your door because of the smell. Do you hear me?”
“I will not let you!” Her voice was trembling now, as her eyes began to brim with angry tears. “I will not let you force me to give up everything I…I…” But she couldn’t go on. She fled from the room, from me, out the front door, before I could think to run after her.
She didn’t wait for the elevator. How fast was she bounding down those stairs to get away from me?
When I heard the hubbub a few landings below, I did not at first understand what had happened. From the echo of voices in the stairwell, I did not immediately make out the stifled moans of my mother.
By the time I reached the landing on the seventh floor, there were two people trying to help her up—a couple about to enter their apartment. The bearded husband was lifting her by the underarms, while the wife held Mama’s right foot in her hands as though she were picking up a cracked egg.
It had been a bad tumble, though Mama herself did not seem to realize this. “I’m perfectly all right,” she was insisting between growls of pain. Maybe she thought her fall, frightening and painful as it was, was only an embarrassing slip. She would not meet my eyes. I came in on the other side of her and draped her arm around me. It was as weightless as a child’s. “It doesn’t look right at all,” the woman said, releasing her ankle. Inside the torn nylon casing, Mama’s foot was swelling like a frankfurter on a skillet. When I touched her heel, she let out a loose howl of pain.
The ancient Greeks believed it was the effort to escape one’s fate that led one directly to it. And so it was with Mama. Her worst nightmare had arrived at last: she’d become an invalid.
In the first weeks of Florence’s recovery, the act of hoisting herself up onto crutches parked by the foot of the sofabed was an ordeal of such backbreaking labor that there was no chance of her returning to her old room on Chekhovskaya. They couldn’t risk it. In his living room, already in the midst of being dismantled and packed, Julian had made a semi-permanent bed for her on the foldout couch. Here she would remain encamped like a refugee while the family prepared for their own wandering journey without her.
In spite of this inconvenience, everybody in the apartment was solicitous and accommodating. In the mornings, her nine-year-old granddaughter brought her breakfast on a tray—buckwheat grains, black tea, pain pills. Julian, defeated, no longer hassled her about coming with them. His eyes still flickered with frustration and guilt whenever he asked her how her foot was healing. The same went for Lucya. All that awkward doting attention made Florence feel like a patient in a mental ward. Only little Lenny, diving into her lap on the armchair, gleefully making noise while his mother tried to hush him “so Grandma could sleep,” was immune to all that enfeebling politeness. And so she loved him the most.