Mother of ...three

(Hi guys. This is my first time here so I could use some comments and critiques. Thanks!).

I woke up in a mood that immediately felt wrong for that day. The air smelled the same way I remembered it from all the mornings I was all packed up and ready to go to summer camp. I would always feel excited but terrified at the same time, ready to be away from home on my own but also apprehensive and sad. That day, thirty-some years later, I felt the same mixed excitement. It was bitter-sweet and made me feel like a child again. But all I am trying to remember now and describe in so many words, at the time just rushed through me in a fraction of a second like the fading remains of a dream you will not remember when the light of the day sears your brain awake. It could not have been a more misplaced feeling that morning when I had planned a drive to the city with my mother. We had to go to the hospital to arrange for my father’s palliative care services.

I prepared myself and dressed up quickly, with the precision that I perfected over the years, paying attention to every detail just for the sake of not thinking of anything else. Only in hindsight, I can try to find an explanation, or should I say an excuse, for what for a split second felt like excitement on a day like that. It was only the third time in my entire life that I would go somewhere outside our small town with my mom. Despite the grim task, somehow the prospect of that trip alone with my mom in the car, for the forgotten child in me, felt good.

I didn’t go to say bye to my dad. I just pulled the car out of the yard and went back inside to tell my mom we can go. We didn’t talk much and we seemed to share the same precision in our movements, both with our minds elsewhere.

The summer was still in full stride but the morning was cooler than it should have been.

In just a few minutes we were out of the main boulevard of the town, shaded by the ancient chestnut trees that I remembered, looking the same, for all my life.

As we left behind the dusty area of the town’s meagre industrial outskirts and the first villages started to string their small mostly white houses on the sides of the road, the sun rose and its warmth doubled through the car’s windows.

We haven’t had much of a conversation yet when my mother told me all of a sudden:

“I am glad we have this chance to be just the two of us… I want to tell you something that never told anyone. Not your sister … No one else. Except for your father.”

“Sure, mom”, I said, no idea what to expect.

“I was very young” she started.

“Seventeen, maybe eighteen …” “In ‘53 … I think. My first vacation in Pedagogical School.

After the year ended I didn’t go home right away. One of the teachers asked me to enroll in the camp the Union Of Communist Youth was organizing that summer. I had written a letter to my dad and he had agreed. At home they would be busy with the summer crops and my sister was already working as a nurse in the city. I got along well enough with my step-mother, but since my older brother passed away the year before, I was not pressed to go home.

So I stayed. We had preparatory political courses in the morning and activities in the afternoon. I had the chance to take some extra violin classes with my music teacher. His wife had died right after the war and his kids and grandkids lived in another town. He was probably lonely and happy to make some extra money: the Party paid for the teachers and supervisors staying for the summer.

For the courses, we didn’t have our regular teachers though. The summer ones came from Bucharest, the young political activists, fresh from Political School. With their slicked-back hair and their blue suits, each probably costing the entire music teacher’s salary for the summer. A few were older, they had wives, maybe kids … you could guess by the dark circles under their eyes, if not by the thin gold band rings, the proof of being the proud founders of their own family, the prized, fundamental cell of the proletarian society. 

It was one of the ones with golden bands who asked me to come to his make-shift office, a small room, near the mess hall. It was the last day, a Sunday. We would all gather in the mess hall for the last lecture and then help clear it up and decorate it for the camp closure festivities to be organized in the evening. 

He told me to come very early that day, before the lecture, to help him sort out and prepare the pamphlets we will be sent off with, to make sure we study the Party’s directives and become better young communists. 

He was there when entered the room. He looked sleepy but somehow in a good mood. He was standing by the window, smoking a cigarette. He greeted me and told me he was glad I could come and that he had noticed me because I was smart and always wanted to answer the “what-if” questions they would ask in the lectures ...and because I was tall. He had never seen a girl that tall ... almost as tall as him … and pretty too...he said something about my eyes… or my smile… I don’t remember anymore. He had already circled the table laden with propaganda material, and gotten closer, dropping the cigarette on to the green linoleum, his back to the closed door”

I did not look at my mother. I kept driving. I knew that she didn’t need to say more. I hoped that she didn’t need to say more. She didn’t. At least not right away. 

After a while, she spoke again. This time in her calm, comforting voice that I could recognize once more. 

“I didn’t know what to do. It happened very fast. He told me after that I can’t talk to anyone about it. That I would not want anyone to think that I am a lying “imperialist” slut. My father could lose the farm. Or even go to jail.

In those days, people would disappear in the middle of the night, never to be seen again for much less. Just the slightest rumour that they sympathized or kept ties with the old regime.

“I stayed with my sister for a while. But school was starting soon and by then my condition would not be possible to conceal. So I went home eventually. I talked to my father. I told him that he could kill me if he wanted, but I had nowhere else to go. He didn’t get mad at me as I thought he would. He sat down for a second then asked my step-mother to set the table for supper. 

He wrote to the school that I was sick and I would probably have to skip the year. When it was time, my sister arranged for me to be admitted to the hospital where she worked. A doctor she knew from a village next to ours wrote appendicitis on my chart. 

It was also my older sister who found the family. All I know it was a young lawyer and his wife. I never saw them. Nor have I ever saw my boy”.

I could see the outline of the city. The sun was high now. I was trying to focus on my driving but the more I looked the more everything outside my body, including the meandering road, the car and my mother’s fading voice seemed more and more unreal. 

The only thing I could think of was the day after my daughter was born. How I felt when they took her away to put her under the light for jaundice. For a few hours. Just for a few hours, the nurses said. “And we will come and take you to her when it’s time to nurse her”. I had felt a crippling sense of loss many times before, whenever after another series of treatments the life spark that the doctors were helping create was just not enough. Nothing even nearly remotely close to what I felt when they took my baby from me that morning. For just a few hours…

“I don’t know why I wanted to tell you about this.” my mother said. Her voice was different again. I always thought that my mother had a beautiful voice, calm, always soothing and young. But it sounded even younger, shaky and uncertain, like the voice of the girl she once was when she said: 

“But I hope you don’t think less of me now that you know my secret” 

“That you will not see me differently”

All the ways I was seeing her differently at that moment were colliding in my head: as the tall girl full of life, as the educator that he became and had been for all her life, as a woman, for the first time... 

Out of all this, out of fear that by trying to say too much I would get it wrong somehow and I would deny her the closure that she was looking for, the first thing I said was:

“Never. I will always see you as Mother” 

 That day we went about our tasks and with time, the mood lightened. We never talked again about this. Every now and then I think about it but the memory of the day I found out that I shared a mother with a brother that I’ll never know becomes more and more strange and faded ...Like the sepia picture from the 50’ of a tall girl in a white shirt and pleated skirt.