Shadow

Somnambulant espionage, the everyday kind that goes on in houses; it went on. A shadow. They saw a shadow, the doctors did, and they took her away into the pines.

The Lung Unit in the pines outside the city proper, in the pines because they have a good reputation as respiratory helpers and these historical pulmonary blooms may go, they just may go away. Look, there is mother now, on the balcony, can you see her, she is there, on the balcony! Wave, wave to mother!

Every Sunday.

The child then getting her own heavy machinery X-Ray, hoisted up on a bench because she is so little still, and no one spoke at all it was serious, because they had seen a shadow inside mother. A shadow was like a ghost, or when behind the Christmas tree there was a dark spot without decorations.

See, little one, there she is, on the balcony, waving! Let’s wave back to mother!

A Shadow.

With the shadow gone, she later worked at Helios and when things were slow she would bring the little one to have her picture taken, or sometimes pose for pictures herself, such gorgeousness, such radiance, radiance, radiance in radiology where I also went to hear the news once and I was waiting for an eternity in the waiting room because it took a long time, a long time, in case the blooms might diminish with radio.

Grandfather’s evil mother spitting fire, but she got hers when they finally moved into a bigger apartment while she remained in the old one and he bought new cots so she can just go ahead and keep her own damn cots with the loose springs, thank you very much, just leave my wife alone, will you!

Look, little one, there she is now, it's Mama, she is waving, on the balcony! There, there!

The drainpipe gushes water, it has been hours; it is raining.

I eat a pear that is so ripe it almost liquifies in my mouth into Calvados. I think of how much I love and how useless that love is. All I do is hurt people. Maybe I don’t know what love is, like someone I loved very much told me once. They also said no one will ever love me because I am unlovable, a shadow.  I think of Grandmother in the death grip of her mother-in-law, years in that tight grip, of Grandfather trying to do the right thing by everyone but growing weary at his mother’s endless venom, even though she birthed him without a father in a time when it was the deepest shame imaginable for a woman, even though his sister had been murdered in her crib as an infant with a Molotov cocktail hurled through the window at night, in that house where they had been working as servants, and the bottle with its fiery gift hit the bull’s eye coming in – or had it been aimed at the mother, who, until that very night, had been sleeping under the window but had changed the places of the beds so the baby could get some air? Both children just sprung upon the maid, both fatherless, both fatherless.

How many times did he take the bus and walk the rest of the pine-rimmed walk to see his wife on the balcony, because of the shadow? Did his mother accompany him there, even once, at The Lung Unit? The waves, on the balcony, see, she is there, waving, amid the pines, like the other patients, secluded and wrapped in shawls like newborns.

But the shadow turned out not to be TB, after all, it was a precaution though, for it was a deadly disease, and the girl of three remembers waving at her mother from outside the large building the rest of her life, there is a recollection of the moment as one very frightening and very important, even though she is three.

Every Sunday. Of course, the child would not go along every time. But the husband went, every Sunday.

Years later, when the family was living in the housing project for Tako employees on Kuninkaankatu, one bedroom, a living room with a stove and a small kitchenette, the police came looking for him, and the child, now fifteen, was home alone, with mother visiting relatives with the little sister. Another husband from the neighborhood was missing, and the wife had started to panic since he had not returned home in a timely manner.

“No, sir, I do not know where he is.”

No one had their own telephone, so she had to walk down to the docks to make calls.

“No, sir, they did not know, either.”

Midnight, both men returned home, soaking wet but otherwise unharmed, hammered to the bone. They had taken the dinghy out from the docks to do some evening fishing by the lake, and because they were men amongst men and war vets and it was a beautiful summer night and warm fellowship was in the air, of course there was a bottle of a little something onboard. In a string of events neither man could account for from their hysterical laughter, the dinghy had suddenly capsized, leaving both men bobbing in the lake like a couple of fishing corks, in the darkness of the great Lake Pyhä. So, they had simply decided to swim ashore. Fully clothed and recovering from panic, they had managed to find dry land, but far from the city. Not to worry, though, the flask had been rescued in the breast pocket, so they walked the long walk home, reliving their fishing trip and getting toasted on their merry way.

I don’t know why this story makes me so happy. I realize it would have been horrible to be the one to sit at home and wait for word, and I can imagine the scolding both men got upon returning.

But it is the only story I have heard about Grandfather being silly and a bit raucous and a bit careless, and since it has a happy ending, I cannot help finding it lovely that he, too, was, if only for a second, just a man.

My mother always tells it in a way that makes Grandfather sound both carefree and happy while I know he was not a carefree man and the anxiety medication he sometimes took for decades after the war was extremely potent; she tells me he was still drunk when he came home, in shambles and smelled like hell, but that he was giddy and good-humoured. And why not? He had managed to rescue himself out of the depths of the large lake, he had been a soldier at seventeen and out there with the rest of them, he had seen what death looked like, what the hell did he have to be scared of? The shadow, but that was in the past then.

A good man, he took care of his family and his cruel and bitter mother, and yes, mother, you can keep your precious cots, I will buy new ones with a more thickly woven spring bottom, yes, mother, go ahead and keep your cots.

Where good-naturedness and even-temperedness are the maximum of grace, perhaps shame, not pride, in how the granddaughter lives her life. 

But I see you, I think I can see you. I see your shadow, too.

The building is like other abandoned buildings, and the balcony is no more, I wonder why, and why my love is so terrible. I wish I had known you better and not as a child myself, what must it have been like to stay there with a child, your first child, so very small not at your bosom, and the mother-in-law running the house, for months for months, and I wish for a lot of things. I wish I was not a shadow but someone who knows how to love and to care for others.

I wish I will not need to move into an assisted living unit because I can’t stop crying like your sister, another young collateral victim of wartime, bullied and verbally abused by an elderly aunt who would tear up her letters describing how the fanatically religious spinster would work her on the farm until her fingers bled, never allowed any young girl fun, excercised militant control over the kid so hard that her mind started to shield itself. Later, she became the night nurse at the insane ward and was attacked on duty one night, traumatizing her already troubled mind so she was never again able to work. 

I wish I knew how to love my own family better and be a better and more respectful daughter. 

Some of the pines remain, and the steps that lead to the entrance are surrounded by verdant, lush woods. Timelessness, and the decidedly happy waves to family members and loved ones who have come for their weekly visit, and the form of the round balcony that goes over the corner built in the fashion of functionalism is detectable still outside while it has been sealed shut, an awful image of hospital torture.

did the shadows befall me? were they made so that I would carry them? I can do it, I am stronger than anybody, I am stronger than Hercules and I can carry the shadows, but is it necessary to do it alone? Will I alienate the people I love because my love is the love of cruelty, like the woman’s I never met, the much-storied unmarried woman who escaped the burning room in the nick of time with the other child in arms, but the infant, the infant died in its crib? The woman who took out her bitterness on the closest people around her? The demonized forebear because she was mean to Grandmother, and yet what resilience it must have taken to survive at all. will I be like she was, or can such fate be escaped? Is there a limit to goodness, was I standing in the wrong line then? was I swallowed by the shadows, or did I swallow them, willingly, as part of my apprenticeship? Am I the devil? To aspire towards kindness, away from madness, but how many of those times have I failed and will do so in the future? Is it madness to remember it all and so well? To observe and see so painfully clearly and put it in writing? did I say yes to the shadow? what is the blood in me? is it the blood of the innocent, of that of a vampire?

will I ever know which of these women I was, or can one see it at all in her lifetime? I try to be honest and speak my mind, I care for nature and for my home, I try to leave air for others, only perhaps I do not. I try to remember and not forget, but I am fire and cannot escape it, and it is the fire that burns me into confession when silence would be better.

Leafing through black pages with pictures of what a woman's life was and how very little there is to deduce or backtrack, and the simultaneous, embedded, ancient doctrine seeping through like the blood from underneath George's photo in Wallace's It as to how life is to be lived to be referred to as good and how one is supposed to handle herself so that she will be thought of as a good woman. 

Who is that girlwoman? Who is that girl, who is that woman? Did she never lose her cool? The obvious pleasure in posing for pictures, a lovely, very feminine side of you existing only in a handful of pictures with ornamental cutting typical of its time. How frightening the shadow must have been, how humiliating needing to amene to a strange woman's iron fist since there was no one else.

But Grandmother, I see you, I think I can see you.

The last coherent words to me from Grandmother were an exclamation. Sitting on the edge of her bed in the tiny generic room that made me sad in the nursing home, before her mind got forever lost in the cruel and inescapable mists of dementia, her exclamation were the last words she would say to me.

“You are so beautiful!” she said, and although I was not sure, I was pretty sure she did not recognize who I was, I was just some young lady with her daughter there, but I was not sure. Life had not yet altered me into an unlovable woman, nor had it yet given its all in robbing me of my timidness, so I think I only smiled, stupidly. I still think of that final kindness, how lovely a thing to say to a stranger, and how imbecilically I responded nothing.

I was twenty-eight, so I guess it is true I was pretty, then. But I was nothing, nothing, compared to you.

 

 

 

 

I dedicate this story to my grandmother, a beautiful stranger.