Authors: Melanie Rae Thon
You were sorry: for the ducks and the elk and the bear and the children, for the sheep on the hill and a black man in Florida, electrocuted twice because the first time the chair sparked and fizzled and he didn’t die: only his hair and slippers caught fire. His picture in the paper last week looked so familiar, so much like you, you taped it on your mirror, beneath the bright angel family.
The men wanted you to pray, and you wanted this too, wanted to believe in a god that hears, and comes, and loves in mercy. Your pants were torn, your knees scraped, your palms full of grit and bloody. You felt the first kick and the second, and the blow to the back of your head, and you closed your eyes, and the god who answers in mysterious ways spared you all joy and pain, all desire, all language.
You woke in the moonlight, facedown on the rocks by the Bitterroot River. They must have dumped you here, and you thought,
This is fine
, and you saw ponies swimming and a dog with a halo. When you woke again, Magdalena Avalos and her one-armed friend Gideon Daro were rolling you up in a tarp and carrying you to her Chevy. They were strong, these two, despite age and afflictions. Gideon had a story like yours, an arm of his own left back in the jungle.
In her trailer, in her bed, Magdalena splinted your broken fingers with sticks and bandaged your slashed belly with rags torn from a child’s Superman pajamas.
Try not to move
, she said.
You’re leaking.
Twenty-two years you’d waited for this. You loved your own precious life. You couldn’t help it. You wanted to stay alive—one more hour, one more day—to lie here like this while a woman who wasn’t afraid touched you.
When you were strong enough to kiss, you kissed. When you could dance, you danced Magdalena Avalos out under the stars. She wore a heavy shawl, sewn with acorns and shells and juniper berries. It opened and closed, violet and green, one great wing whirling around you. It sang with its thousand bells, this shawl with a voice like no other. You fell in the tall grass. You thought you had fallen forever.
But Magdalena wouldn’t let you stay. She said,
If you have a home, go home. If anybody wants to love you, let them.
Twenty-two years, and then you were home, holding baby Jeanne in your sister’s kitchen. Blesséd was the God who hears, who had kept you alive and sustained you and delivered you whole to this moment. Blesséd was Roshelle’s kiss full and wet on your sweet mouth in the soft light of morning. Blesséd was the child you held, the child reborn, the one come to save you.
Your people thought you’d stay for days and years to come.
The living, the left behind, the bereft think of all the days unlived—tomorrow and tomorrow. But you thought only of today, each holy moment. Blesséd was this God who belonged to no one, who was the spark in all things, in everyone, everywhere. Blesséd was this life, not held, not in you alone, not contained in one body:
this
life,
this
God, moving here as breath, as light, as love between you.
The wounded Vietnamese mother took you in her arms at last, Raymond Good Bird, her own, her most belovéd child. Blesséd was the mother of God. You and she knew only comfort.
for the drowned and the saved
THE GIRL WAS RADIANT
. I saw her in the shower naked. Glistening with water, she seemed lit from inside, a woman illuminated. I tried not to stare, then simply surrendered.
Alone, I tried not to look in the mirror, tried not to hear my mother:
The old are more naked than the young.
Before the camp, she had never seen an old woman naked.
One day last week the slender girl flickered beneath me. Three lengths she swam, seventy-five yards underwater. She had strength and desire, the discipline to stay down even if her lungs were bursting.
There are others like me at the pool, not that old, but already too fat or too thin, trying to stay fit, but already withered. There are others with scars: the woman with one breast, the man who leaves his left leg, his prosthesis, at the edge of the water.
The long, green-eyed girl gave us hope, a vision of a human being perfected.
My mother weighed seventy-two pounds the last time I dared to weigh her. I fed her puréed peas, strained carrots, tiny spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. I was always afraid. I thought her thin bones might snap as I bathed her.
She no longer spoke out loud, but the voice inside us said:
Love is stronger than death. Trust me.
Yesterday, Mother and I bought figs and apples. She was strong, yes, five months dead and still walking. She squeezed a plum.
These aren’t ripe
, she said. And,
Who will have pomegranates?
She wanted carob, coconut, grapes, olives—chestnuts, cherries, pears, almonds—all the fruits of Tu B’Shvat, the new year of the trees, God’s Rosh Hashanah. My father said,
God seeks us, this day above all others.
In Israel, cold winter rains turned to drizzle; sap flowed through myrtle and cedar. Here in Salt Lake City, I woke to see new snow on white aspen, the whole world in pink morning light fractured. I envied my mother, the ease with which she moved, free of her body. She waited for me. She said,
This is something.
By noon, sun shattered off snow, the day suddenly fierce, the blue sky unbearable. Mother opened her eyes wide, loving the light, able at last to take everything inside her. Only thirty-five degrees, but I was hot in my down coat, sweltering. I believed, yes: in this rage of light, the Tree of Life,
all
life, might be reawakening.
I told myself:
Rejoice.
I whispered:
For your mother’s sake, be thankful.
And so I was—but more grateful to come home and close the blinds and close my eyes and let my mother go and lie perfectly still in perfect silence until Davia and Seth returned from school, until I heard Davia in the living room, lightly playing one phrase at a time on piano, then turning to the chair to invent an answer with her cello. She plays as she moves, graceful as water flowing, a girl who sees a mirage of herself shimmering across the desert: as soon as she reaches the place she appeared, she is already changing. My Davia learned piano sitting on my lap, hands resting on my hands, five years old, her whole body trembling. When I put her to bed that night, she lay quivering, near tears, unable to tell me why, unwilling to take comfort. Too much, too soon, a mistake, I was sorry. But the next morning, the trill of the piano woke me, Davia running her fingers up the keys—a ripple of light, the body becoming light, blood clear as rain—then down to the lowest notes, the mind a waterfall plunging. She had moved the bench to walk the full range, to touch every key, to feel the hammers strike wires inside her—Davia finding her first song, Davia in rapture.
Now she plays piano, zither, cello—Gipsy love songs, Bob Dylan, Arvo Pärt, Ludwig van Beethoven. Now she serenades a doll; now the snow is dancing. She conjures the carnival of Saint-Saëns: kangaroos and tortoise, wild asses, people with long ears—pianists, fossils. She plays the songs Dvořák’s mother taught him, the cello strand of “Transfigured Night,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
She loves the cello because it vibrates through her bones, and its voice is almost human. She loves piano because it came first, that night, that morning. She loves the zither because even the wind knows how to play it—as if her gift is not her gift, only the breath passing through her. She lies on her bed in the dark, headphones on, sound searing straight into her skull—she’s safe for all time, sheltered by
The Protecting Veil
, the voice of the Mother of God in a cello, Yo-Yo Ma playing Tavener. She turns the volume down lower and lower, until sound stops, until she becomes its lingering vibration. Davia, seventeen, and good enough for Juilliard, but she wants to live in the wild, meet the snow leopard face-to-face, hear its still, small voice high in the Himalayas—she wants to follow caribou across mountains and tundra, record the sounds they hear on their way to the edge of the world—Davia wants to sing as elephants sing when they visit the bones of their ancestors.
Seth already knows he’ll be a fireman and a cantor. I see him now, my thin boy with narrow shoulders, small for his age, climbing the ropes at school, proving himself, faster than the other boys and able to squeeze his skinny hips through tight spaces, Seth Betos, unafraid of smoke-filled tunnels—our beautiful savior, bright hazel eyes ablaze with desire, eleven years old, my boy, singing the Kaddish, walking into the flames, healing the wailing mothers with a song as he lifts their babies from the embers.
My children! Let the night begin; let your father come home; let the dead stop speaking.
My mother died with a crumbling spine, bones too brittle to hold her.
Starvation
, Doctor Lavater said,
all those years ago.
isaac Lavater, a smart and serious man with blue eyes and soft white hair—my husband’s friend—he didn’t mean to be cruel. When I bathed my mother, I imagined her as she was, Éva Spier, sixteen years old, thirty-one kilos, my mother in another life, already an orphan though she didn’t believe it, an emaciated child stiff and bald as an old woman—Éva, a girl, younger than my daughter—Éva Spier standing thigh deep in the vistula River with seventy other women just like her,
to even the banks, January 1945, the war lost, our final task, sublime madness.
The camp sat wedged between the vistula and the Soła, a swamp, a land of floods, soil impervious to rain and melting snow, marl two hundred feet thick, crumbling clay, impossible to drain and farm—but the Nazis still believed they could make everything in the world useful. Day by day for four years, they sent the women to the fields—hundreds, thousands—marched them five by five out the gate while the band played the rousing “March of Triumph” from
Aida
, marched them for hours, for miles, past deserted houses and evacuated villages, set them to work uprooting stumps or digging ditches, building roads, dredging fish ponds to spread the muck with their own muck as fertilizer. If a stone was too heavy to lift, a root too deep to dig, your shovel too dull, the clay too resistant—if you stopped, if you staggered, if you reeled, dizzy from hunger, the kapo beat you with a stick and you found the strength or died there.
In the end, my mother’s captors contented themselves with one simple project: to move the stones, to even the banks, to make the river straight, to force the vistula to flow more smoothly.
I see her bones, all their bones, glowing white through their skin, washing away in frigid water.
Soup was God
, Éva said.
Thin as He was, God sustained me.
My mother lived because she was strong for her size and not too pretty, because she stood straight, because she believed her sister or her father or one cousin lived as she lived, by faith and will, by chance, somewhere. She lived because life itself was proof of rebellion. One day she collapsed and lay in the cold unconscious. When the whistle blew, she did not rise, and two other women whose faces she did not recall, whose names she never knew, who whispered to her in Czech or Polish, used the last of their strength, their love, to drag her back to the camp between them. My mother lived because the river ran cold, because frostbite, because fever, because too weak to march as the Russians approached, because left to die and instead liberated.
Éva Spier became Éva Lok and bore one daughter: my mother lived fifty-eight years after the war, twenty-three without my father—tiny Éva, one more survivor who never recovered, whose bones carried an irrevocable message: she couldn’t walk and then she couldn’t sit; one stroke took her desire to eat; another stole her voice in every language.
Night after night, my mother lives and dies. I touch her bones. I smell her. I breathe when she breathes. I count. If I don’t stop, she won’t stop. Am I awake or dreaming? There are things I know that my mother did not tell me, words I hear in the voice of her violin, Bach’s “Chaconne” playing on barbed wire.
When you cried with hunger, I felt my own hunger. I praised God for your noise, your flesh, your fat—for fear I could soothe with a song, and hunger I could satisfy with my
body.
Night after night, my husband lies beside me in this unstable darkness. He sleeps as children sleep, in complete surrender. He sleeps blessed, because he deserves comfort. I wake and wake again, and though I know it is unjust, each time I wake, I blame him.
My brilliant husband is famous: famously kind, famously patient. Doctor Liam Betos knows how to slip titanium ribs into the bodies of children with scoliosis so that they can breathe and walk, free of oxygen tanks and wheelchairs. He is not vain.
A man had to build a titanium bike before anyone thought to put ribs in a human.
Liam’s children teach one another to do somersaults and cartwheels. They hang by their knees from the monkey bars at school, roll down grassy hills in the park, then charge to the top again, laughing.
If Doctor Betos sleeps in peace, he has earned it.
This morning I kissed them all good-bye, Seth and Davia and Liam, and I forgave him, my good husband, and I was unafraid, calm in the lavender light, no need to shield myself against it.
I walked to the pool alone, but not lonely. Mother comes when she comes. I cannot choose the day or the hour. Birds flew tree to tree, gathering twigs and hair, fur and feathers, hopeful and foolish they were, everywhere building. From a dense hedge, a hundred hidden sparrows sang, and I felt the sound, all their bodies in my body trembling. I smelled damp earth beneath melting snow and heard every seed, shells ready to split, green shoots quivering.
God, here, in all things: the birds, the song, the silence, the seeds—the snow, the coral clouds, the space between—the old terrier tugging at his chain, the hand with which I touch and soothe him. God immanent, God humble, God who offers Himself as olive, wine, wheat, carob—as the pomegranate we found at last—as sweet pears and nuts and apples. God who restores Himself through us each time we eat with holy intention. Tu B’Shvat, today, tonight, we celebrate this endless wonder.