The Other Time

The Other Time

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here.

I wake up to silence and the bed I’m in has a dark wood headboard, dark wood slats, slightly dented. The ceiling has a single lamp, with a floral fabric lampshade. Odd, almost Victorian? Who chose this décor? I would have preferred a Tiffany shade with colors fanning across the room to this fading cloth. Am I correcting my own dream? Or maybe it isn’t a dream.

I hear a rustling sound a plump woman who looks like a 19^th century maid comes in.

“Coffee or tea will it be?” she asks cheerfully.

“Well coffee of course, as usual” I find myself replying. “Don’t you remember?”

“You do look familiar to me….but I cannot say when we met. There are so many visitors, you know my dear.”

“Is this a B and B?” I ask. She looks at me curiously. 

“What is a Bee and Bee? We don’t have hives on the property, but Farmer Williams tends hives down the lane. Heavenly honey they have.”

“Er….a B and B is a sort of inn” I’m too stunned to give any more detail to this retro shadow maid. Shadow. Maybe she’s a visitor herself and hasn’t a clue.

How did we coincide? She’s so different….from another era…

I’d sent in my sample of saliva, had my genealogy ‘done’. There are ancestral names in the chart the family was putting together. But this woman is clearly not from Russia, Poland or Ukraine, or even Germany.

“My name is Edith” she informs me, “Sarah  is not well. Poor thing, sweet but so thin and tired. This place is strange for her, so I’ve showed her how we do things. Anything you should require do I shall do my best to obtain. Simply ring the bell here” she says, pointing to an exquisitely wrought silver handbell with an ebony handle.

Sarah? Who is Sarah? I know there was once a Sarah somewhere on my mother’s side, and a female on my father’s side whose name began with S as well. Shoshana? From the Ukrainian branch generations back.

“You must send in Sarah” I say boldly, feeling empowered in my role as special guest with a personal servant. 

“Ah no, this will not be possible. She is in the Temporal Antechamber until she recovers her memory and returns to her proper self.”

“What are you talking about?” I’m irritated at the strange language emerging from her Victorian mouth. “Temporal what? Sorry if I’m rude but this is weird. You say you’ll help me and now you’re babbling as if you……as if you’re in another century!”

Strange feelings begin to envelope me, I feel like I’m on a long journey.

“Then I’ll simply go visit her myself. Show me to this temporal room or whatever it is now! You can leave me at the door.” 

I am feeling entitled and dominating and not too polite. This is not the typical me, but I don’t seem to mind this change in my personality. I feel I’m moving forward with a fast flow of narrative. As a special guest I know I’m entitled to access to the person for whom this….this Edith woman is filling in.

Edith looks distraught, and pulls at straggly bits of grey hair escaping from her bonnet, tries to tuck them back in.

“But Sarah isn’t ready yet! She's still a bit weak and perhaps hasn’t learned enough background information to meet with you in person.” 

“Mine or hers? She surely knows who she is……or does she also have this strange amnesia?”

And I feel I’m forgetting my own story, my own personality. I am so…..aggressive and desperate to uncover this scenario, this stage drama without a stage. I’m not at all my usual self. How am I here? I’m desperate to unveil the hidden stranger whom I seem to believe is my ancestor.

I begin to confuse my own history, which seems to be a whirl of geneaology charts in my head. What are my own motives in this strange scenario as I begin to lose my power of recall.

“Now!! We’re leaving this room now, and you will guide me to Sarah!!” I ordered.

Edith shuffles to the door of my room and opens it, allowing me to follow her through a narrow maze of corridors, unable to recall the shifting directions we’re taking. 

Finally we arrive in front of a door padded in pink satin. To stifle the noise? Old-fashioned décor? So odd yet not out of place.

"Sarah dear! It’s Edith – frightfully sorry -- our guest insists on meeting you. Are you well enough prepared? Are you ready for the encounter?”

A thin voice replies, though the words are indistinct.

My servant understands and turns to me:

“She says she’s ready, dear. Are you ready?”

“Well of course I’m ready, why else would I ask you to……”

The door opens slowly and a small woman with a blue and grey scarf over her head emerges. Her impossibly blue eyes glitter like little stars: she gazes at me intently. I’m breathless, intimidated but not scared.

“Miriam!!” she says, wrapping me in her thin arms. This feels reassuring, like a safe haven within intense knowingness.

Familiar? Somehow she is. She has the faint aura of lavender, a scent of reminiscence.

Sarah It’s you!” I hear myself saying. 

Sarah seems to emerge out of the genealogy chart of my memory, a live being who has been hemmed into a box in an online diagram. I am flooded with surprise, joy, perplexity, nut not fear. It’s all comes to me so naturally, and I begin to recall her history in stunning detail: her intense suffering as the Cossacks thunder through her village, slashing men, raping women, as the six year-old Sarah hides behind the chicken coop on the tiny farm. Who survives the slaughter of her father, who dares to hold his fist up defiantly as cruel men on horses fly by. Not a myth.

Fatal bravado, and a legend for generations to come. 

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