The Reprieve

“I want to interview you,” my daughter Serena said. She didn’t ask, she stated, she laid her claim. It wasn’t me she really wanted to know about, it was my mother. After half a lifetime of trying and failing to write my mother’s story, suddenly Serena announced that she intended to write about her mysterious Transylvanian grandmother. I wanted to refuse. It was my story, my past, mine alone and mine to bury. But her entirely casual assumption that she too was the rightful heir to my mother’s story made me think I was wrong. So I agreed to the interview.

As soon as I arrived I saw the quote. The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. W. Faulkner. I used to calligraphy quotes on bits of paper and stick them in my desk drawer. She’d taken one of them, laminated it and hung it over her desk.

“Where did you get that?”

“I rescued it from the bin. That’s your handwriting isn’t it?”

Rescued from the bin or simply lifted from my desk drawer? I didn’t want the interview to begin badly, so I said nothing.

We sat in her tiny tiled kitchen in south London. She offered me tea.

“Would you like csipkebogyó or builders?” She said it flippantly, as if she’d been speaking Hungarian all her life.

“I didn’t know…”

“I’ve been taking classes from this antique dealer I met in Swiss Cottage. I found this old Transylvanian map in his shop and we got chatting… such a difficult language, I’ll never learn it now.”

I let the unspoken accusation hang there for a moment between us, before I refused the tea and decided to leave my mackintosh on. She was hurt. I could tell by the way she smiled at me, deferentially, but with a small shrug of her bony shoulders.

 “What’s this? You never mentioned anything about a tape recorder before.”

She’d tucked it under a sheaf of papers with neatly numbered questions on them. The little sneak. She looked at me with my mother’s sapphire eyes. I could see that same sadness, but there was none of the defeat.

“If you’d rather I didn’t…”

“Yes, that’s right.”

My voice on a tape, telling her story. I hated the idea. It made it seem so permanent, so definitive. So final.

“Oh let’s just get on with it!” I told her, tightening the belt of my coat.

Her questions were focused and systematic, but with a writer’s eye for detail. She started with my father’s death, when I was ten years old. She wanted to know what the weather was like the day they took him to hospital. Was there a siren on the ambulance? Were there men and women in the ward, or only men? What were the nurses’ uniforms like? Was there a picture of Stalin on the wall? When were visiting hours?

“I don’t know anything about the hospital because I never visited my father.”

“Why?”

“My mother said she didn’t want me to get upset, that little girls didn’t go to hospitals, that they were awful places. But it wasn’t that, her new boyfriend wouldn’t let her. He was the jealous type, I suppose. I was frightened of him. He shouted a lot and was always grabbing at my mother.”

“So, she had a boyfriend while he was in the hospital?”

“Oh yes, she wasted no time at all.”

“How long was your father in hospital?”

“A year. He died in there.”

She looked down and fussed with her papers. Her eyes filled with tears.

“Were they divorced at that point?”

“No, they never divorced. But as far as she was concerned he was a dead man already. She packed his clothes into boxes and hid them away under their bed. Maybe she knew he was never coming home.”

She blinked her eyes furiously, like windscreen wipers swiping away at dirt.

“And your mother’s boyfriend, what happened to him?”

“He left just after my father’s funeral.”

“What do you remember from that day, from his funeral?”

“I remember very clearly that I tried to throw myself in his grave.” Serena looked down at her notes and then up at me. She seemed torn between wanting to hear more and feeling as if she should be sympathetic.

“It’s okay,” I told her, “just keep asking your questions.”

“Did you find that photo of your mother?”

“No, but I can see it. It used to sit propped up on my father’s bedside table. She’s standing in a bikini by Medve Tó in Szóváta, hands on hips, torso tilted forward, head cocked to one side. On the back it just said, ‘Piros’. Her real name was Piroska, but she insisted on being called Piros. It means red in Hungarian. All the Piroskas were nicknamed Piri, but not my mother. And she had red hair to match. She wasn’t a real redhead. She used to dye it herself and get me to help her rinse it out. The whole bathroom would be sprayed with red dye afterwards. She thought that was funny, the mess, my fingers being stained red. And she taught me how to paint her nails. On Thursday nights I’d sit at the kitchen table with her and paint them so they’d be fresh for the weekends. Of course, widows didn’t dye their hair red in those days, or wear red dresses. Back then the women wore black forever and after once their husbands died.”

“What did the neighbors think?”

“They were mean. They hated us. The other children were forbidden to play with me. Even my father’s family didn’t want anything to do with us. They tried for a while though, after he died. His sister Marta wanted to adopt me. They were childless. They lived in a small village about 30 kilometers from Marosvásárhely. My mother got so mad when Márta asked her, she screamed and called her names and threw a glass of wine into my aunt’s face. I’d never seen her like that, it was terrible. And it wasn’t the smartest thing to do since they were supporting us. She tried making it up with them but it was too late.”

“So how did you survive?”

“Well my uncle, my mother’s brother Miklós, owned a sweet shop next to the main square. It was just a small narrow strip but he sold things nobody else did. Vanilla and chocolate caramels, small like stock cubes. They were always soft because he kept them by the heater in the winter and in the summer he put them in the shop window. And chocolate creams, they were his specialty, all different flavors. The customers loved the exotic ones best of all, the ones in the funny shapes, filled with the ‘southern’ creams, that’s what they called them. Kiwi, pineapple, banana, mango. Nobody had ever seen fruit like that in Romania in the 50s, let alone tasted it. He once told me that all the chocolate fillings were made from egg yolk and sugar just with different food coloring added. My mother loved sweets. She was always worried about getting fat and was constantly dieting. When mama was on a diet, so was I. No sweets, no cakes, no jam, no cream, no sauces. Anyway, she ran the store for him and he went into the chocolate manufacturing business. He was a good man, he tried to help us. I think he accepted my mother the way she was. He never criticized her, or told her how to run her life. It was Miklos who arranged for me to come to London. He used to say a pretty woman could sell more chocolates than any man. Maybe he was right. For the next few years there was money and my mother was optimistic about her prospects of finding a new husband. The shop was right in the city centre. A good neighborhood, she’d tell me, with well-mannered customers who didn’t haggle.”

“Did she find a new husband?”

“No, never. But there were always men hanging around her, just not for long. After a while she stopped introducing them to me. I don’t know if that’s because she wanted to protect me or herself. Anyway, the real problem was that she got a reputation. The kids at school used to whisper things behind my back…”

“Like what?”

“Oh Serena darling, please just use your imagination for this one.”

She scratched a few words onto her notes and searched for the next question, but there was no need, I would tell her everything she needed to know.

“I used to go to the shop after school. I’d do little odd jobs for her: sweeping the floor, washing the shop window, helping her count the change at closing, things like that. She taught me not to ever touch her or call her ‘mama’ when a man walked into the shop. When I was fifteen, just before Christmas, a man came in to speak to my mother. I was sorting the caramels. That year my uncle had introduced a new kind, strawberry caramel. Well, let’s just say it was strawberry scented caramel. It was wrapped in pink cellophane and the customers were crazy about it. The man had an expensive looking coat on, long and dark, with a fur hat and shiny leather boots. He seemed very friendly, I remember he smiled at me and made a joke, something about Christmas on a beach that made my mother laugh, and me too. She was sitting behind the counter and he leaned over and whispered something in her ear. I watched him put his hand up her skirt and slip some bills into her garter belt. Then she jumped up from her chair so fast she knocked it over. I knew something was wrong then. I went to my mother but she pushed me away. She picked up the money and threw it in the man’s face and swore at him. I thought he was going to hit her, it was terrible. Instead, he picked up his money and then he laughed, at her, at me, at our entire world it seemed.”

“Christmas was awful, awful that year. My mother closed the shop, then she argued with Miklós about it so he didn’t invite us for Christmas. We didn’t have a tree. There were no presents. No Christmas dinner. She stayed in every day in her dressing gown and slippers, drinking coffee, reading romance novels - the only kind she ever read – and weeping, literally weeping over them in the most maudlin, unashamed fashion. Even back then I was embarrassed by her carrying on, and I was angry at her for being so selfish.”

“Sometime in early January, I still remember seeing the Christmas trees, I walked home from school and went to the shop. It was bitterly cold and when I arrived the shop was closed. The lights were out, the shutter was down and there was no note for me. I practically ran home to stay warm. When I got there she was waiting for me. She’d been cooking, something she hardly ever did. The flat was filled with delicious, sweet, warm steamy smells. I knew what she’d made straight away. Stuffed peppers and plum dumplings. My favorites. And she was beautifully dressed in an outfit I’d never seen. A red and white polka dotted blouse with a red pleated georgette skirt. And she’d put makeup on and painted her nails again. She told me to wash my hands and change into something pretty, that was the word she used. Another visitor, I remember thinking, but at least I get a good dinner. But I was wrong about the visitor, it was all for me.”

“In the morning when I woke up it was so quiet. There was no coffee on the stove and my mother’s bed was already neatly made up. She was in the bathroom, I thought, she had to be. The entire flat was just one room plus the tiny bathroom next to the stove. The door was closed so I knocked but there was no answer. My mother had strictly forbidden me from ever opening the bathroom door if she was inside, so I waited. I waited a long time and I couldn’t hear anything. I called out to her but there was no answer. I turned the handle. It was locked. Then I started banging on the door and crying and shouting until our neighbor came to see what all the noise was about. She called Miklós. When he arrived he asked her to take me to her place. She didn’t want to but I saw him give her some money. Later I heard an ambulance siren and I saw some men in white go into the flat with a stretcher and take my mother away. Only later, much later on, I found out that she’d hung herself.”

Serena gasped, but I knew she’d felt this ending coming. She tried to take my hands in hers, but I don’t like pity. I pulled away.

She had one last question. She wanted to know if my mother had left a note. I never found one. But how desperately, how hysterically I looked for that note, even months after her death. Only Miklós selling the flat put an end to my pathological searches. Serena couldn’t have known, and yet with that final question she had uncovered the single greatest hurt in amongst the many hurts I have about my mother.

After the interview I avoided Serena. I was angry. I felt as if I’d been made to speak against my will. She’d taken away my secrets and I had no idea what she was doing with them. I was angry with her, but also at myself for having given up on writing Piros’ story. Something was lacking in me. A necessary steeliness, the ability to claim Piros’ past, to take it unapologetically, to manipulate it and ultimately to break it and re-cast it as my own. At the same time I admitted to myself that the real reason I could never speak, much less write about my mother was because I was ashamed of her. In spite of myself I hoped that Serena would succeed where I’d failed.

Several months after the interview Serena sent me a letter. She’d addressed it to Kovács Ibolya, as I was known when I was a girl. This is what it said.

It was early January in 1960. The streets of Marosvásárhely were silent, the people were hiding from the cold, recovering from the excesses of Christmas, steeling themselves for the long winter ahead. I waited until my daughter was asleep and the peppers and dumplings had cooled. I put them out on the balcony so they wouldn’t spoil and she could eat them for the next few days. Then I opened out the day’s newspaper and clipped my nails into the classified section. Afterwards I dipped them into a bowl of acetone and scrubbed them clean. I was worried that the smell would wake Violet but it didn’t. She was so full from her dinner she’d probably sleep till lunchtime. Then I ran the bath. I eased myself into the steaming water and closed my eyes.

Under my mattress was the package I’d been preparing since before Christmas. I unwrapped it now and spread the contents before me. New white bed sheets with a thin lace trim. A white nightgown embroidered round the neckline with tiny red tulips. And the envelope, pale grey, with a single sheet of pale grey paper inside. I made the bed up, careful to tuck all the sheets in smoothly and tightly, just the way I always liked them to be. Then I pulled the night gown over my head. I went to the mirror to look at myself, but thought the better of it. Instead I sat on the edge of the bed and breathed for a little while, until I’d emptied my head of everything but the sound of breath. Then I opened the grey envelope, took out the single sheet of grey paper and read it one last time, mouthing the words slowly, evenly, in a very faint whisper so that my little girl’s sleep would not be disturbed. After, I sealed the envelope and propped it up against the little brass reading lamp, where I was sure Ibolya would find it in the morning. Then I lay down, turned out the light and covered myself up.

I didn’t know if it was really possible to conjure death. I knew that death could be summoned by violence, but I didn’t know if peace was as strong. Staring up at the blackened ceiling I wondered which of the thousands of images to last recall. There was Ibolya before me, as a tiny pink wriggling baby, as she was tonight laughing with cinnamon sugar on her lips, and then she was gone, into a future that I would have no part of. And then I saw the pale ash that is most like dirty clouds, most like nothingness. I inhaled one last time and then I slept.

In the morning Ibolya found her mother’s body, cold and peaceful. On her bedside table was an envelope addressed to her.

She opened it and read:

When I die, bury me with my eyes open so that I may see dark eternity stretched out before me. Languorous, dark eternity. So that I may feel the humbling surrender of the infinite, eternal waters. So that I may sleep for centuries and wake to find the waters inside me again. The opaque jelly fish, the blue flowers, rusting treasures and rumbling waves. To see a millennium of sunrises, to see the shadows of the living moving silently through me. Memories of what I have been long faded to dust. To no longer mourn my child. To be an echo in a shell in the hand of my great-great-granddaughter, on a beach, on a continent, far far away from here. My slim legacy will live in the shape of her bones. I will be deaf to the wailing of the world, blind to its trembling, immune to its suffering. So I will tumble with the waves. My duty dispatched, my love bequeathed, my fate expiated. So I will whisper with the wind, hushed songs etched into the throats of the living. Universal matter. The bride of infinity. A suggestion in space. ◊