HOME | DD

Description
Our son and his wife sleep in separate rooms. They are painted the same colour and bear identical scars but are separated by a hall so long that by the time I walk from one end to the other, I am too tired to compare and know what is different.

That is the convenience of an oversized house, I think, that we did not have in our small one-room apartment—they never have to see each other’s faces. You remember the nights when we were given no choice but to lie next to each other, against the hard corner, when we were seething in each other’s anger. How wonderful it might have been to stare at a blank wall, letting the heat of our hands seep into the plaster until we forgot each other, and how to be angry.

I never told you the fear I had inside my heart every time we tore apart and came back together again, that we would forget how closely we fit, or that in the short intervals when we were apart, a piece of the puzzle would come loose against us like a grain of sand, until we could not stand each other.

I sometimes watch the hallway from my post between their rooms to see if they will walk towards the stairs simultaneously, and crash, and rip apart, but they never do.

I want to know if they are like we were.

                                                              +

After you were gone from me, it was difficult to see the dawn day by day. My shoulder is empty without your head leaning against it, after forty-two years gone like forty-two seconds, forty-two thousand millennia. Our son has asked me to live in his house and tend his plants, and so I go.

Please forgive me for turning Felix into the street this morning. I know he will be all right because the neighbours say we have a bad rat problem and cannot afford an exterminator.

The day I left was a Saturday, my suitcases filled with your frames and the potted iris from the kitchen, whose seeds you carried from the Motherland as a child, three falling into the water when you showed me on the ferry, and I loved you even then.

                                                              +

He leaves at six a.m., our son, storming down the stairs like a thunderclap passing underfoot. It wakes me at the old wooden desk where I have fallen asleep, writing this last letter to you. I cannot hear him fumbling through the cabinets in the dark, but I can picture him flipping on the light switch, covering his eyes for a second, and pouring a bowl of the mineral-enriched wheat cereal he eats these days. Then the Porsche roars like a leviathan, and he is gone.

His wife, who is more a statue than a person, passes my room at nine-thirty every morning. She does not make the sounds of a living being, and I have never heard her wake. She stares at me only with glassy eyes, and her skin is always colder than my own.

But she is our daughter, and so I have tried to talk to her. I wait for her to call me “father,” but behind my back I am “that old man,” and sometimes my heart aches with the same loss I felt on the day I buried you with my hands, in the old way, because now I have lost a daughter too. I look into her eyes sometimes and see that I am just a stain on the wall, waiting to be rubbed out.

                                                              +

After four years, they had a daughter. I did not learn of this until they brought her home from the hospital like she was theirs. Our son did not say to me, “Father, I am having a child,” but I am not angry because when he has a son, he will be proud, and he will tell me, “Father, I am bringing you a grandson.”

I tell him that I am proud of our granddaughter, who has rosy cheeks and thick blond hair and the laugh of her grandmother. She is my Snegurochka, and in the winter I must grow a beard for her.

Description
Our son and his wife sleep in separate rooms. They are painted the same colour and bear identical scars but are separated by a hall so long that by the time I walk from one end to the other, I am too tired to compare and know what is different.

That is the convenience of an oversized house, I think, that we did not have in our small one-room apartment—they never have to see each other’s faces. You remember the nights when we were given no choice but to lie next to each other, against the hard corner, when we were seething in each other’s anger. How wonderful it might have been to stare at a blank wall, letting the heat of our hands seep into the plaster until we forgot each other, and how to be angry.

I never told you the fear I had inside my heart every time we tore apart and came back together again, that we would forget how closely we fit, or that in the short intervals when we were apart, a piece of the puzzle would come loose against us like a grain of sand, until we could not stand each other.

I sometimes watch the hallway from my post between their rooms to see if they will walk towards the stairs simultaneously, and crash, and rip apart, but they never do.

I want to know if they are like we were.

                                                              +

After you were gone from me, it was difficult to see the dawn day by day. My shoulder is empty without your head leaning against it, after forty-two years gone like forty-two seconds, forty-two thousand millennia. Our son has asked me to live in his house and tend his plants, and so I go.

Please forgive me for turning Felix into the street this morning. I know he will be all right because the neighbours say we have a bad rat problem and cannot afford an exterminator.

The day I left was a Saturday, my suitcases filled with your frames and the potted iris from the kitchen, whose seeds you carried from the Motherland as a child, three falling into the water when you showed me on the ferry, and I loved you even then.

                                                              +

He leaves at six a.m., our son, storming down the stairs like a thunderclap passing underfoot. It wakes me at the old wooden desk where I have fallen asleep, writing this last letter to you. I cannot hear him fumbling through the cabinets in the dark, but I can picture him flipping on the light switch, covering his eyes for a second, and pouring a bowl of the mineral-enriched wheat cereal he eats these days. Then the Porsche roars like a leviathan, and he is gone.

His wife, who is more a statue than a person, passes my room at nine-thirty every morning. She does not make the sounds of a living being, and I have never heard her wake. She stares at me only with glassy eyes, and her skin is always colder than my own.

But she is our daughter, and so I have tried to talk to her. I wait for her to call me “father,” but behind my back I am “that old man,” and sometimes my heart aches with the same loss I felt on the day I buried you with my hands, in the old way, because now I have lost a daughter too. I look into her eyes sometimes and see that I am just a stain on the wall, waiting to be rubbed out.

                                                              +

After four years, they had a daughter. I did not learn of this until they brought her home from the hospital like she was theirs. Our son did not say to me, “Father, I am having a child,” but I am not angry because when he has a son, he will be proud, and he will tell me, “Father, I am bringing you a grandson.”

I tell him that I am proud of our granddaughter, who has rosy cheeks and thick blond hair and the laugh of her grandmother. She is my Snegurochka, and in the winter I must grow a beard for her.