Even though she’d sworn never to grow up.
I was an old woman before I was a young one, she tells her granddaughter, and asks her not to put it in writing. When an old woman stabs at the child within her, she wastes whatever resources she has left.
Non-memory – that’s what she ought to have talked about.
Even in earlier times she’d been unable to put a face to the young man climbing down the steps. Couldn’t give him eyes or hair. All that stuck out in the shadows was his name. Stephan. Only with great difficulty did the hazy silhouette of the farmer and his wife appear. She found excuses to avoid the hard labor of remembering, as if the time she’d spent in that hiding place had been excised. Excised? Who was the surgeon who had done such a good job? The storyteller knows the answer; and the listener can only guess.
***
How long did it last? How much time?
The word time had not been part of her vocabulary, and even if it had been, the little-girl-who-once-was would not have known how to cut it down to size. Without understanding what she was doing, she calculated how many “whens” had gone by since her birthday. The one when they’d given her the skates. A doll with braids on the birthday before that one. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t help thinking that if there had really been any skates, or a doll, or a birthday – they must all have been before she was even born.
How long did it go on?
The silence goes on for so long that her granddaughter figures the old woman hasn’t heard the question.
She hadn’t counted. They told her about it later, after the fact. Her guess was a winter, a spring and a summer, based on the calendar of the earth. New grass had grown over the crack that the rat used to slip away.
If time is calculated on the basis of a person’s expectations of change, her own watch had stopped. Anything beyond the darkness, anything that had come before and anything that might come after, became an illusion.
A big city. Her room. The frozen lake. A blue cape. The hand that had kept her from falling. All those things had disintegrated, to the point where one could hardly believe they had ever played a part in someone’s life. All that remained of her mother was her mother’s back. A locked body-door. All her attempts to conjure up even the slightest bit of her face were in vain.
Her parents’ promise was all that remained. Clear and precise. When she asked the farmer’s wife for the Latin again so that she could pray properly, the woman just laughed.
Dead people can’t keep promises.
Now the granddaughter is concealing from the old woman her own joy over memory loss. Her notebook is empty. What a clever girl. It’s the blank spaces that kept the old woman from hemorrhaging to death. Luckily, we don’t really remember.
Perhaps this crossroad in the story could be titled “Thank the Blank”.
***
An eternal outcast from the world. A walled-off existence. When asked, she’d say simply, “I was a child during the War,” to account for the fact that she had nothing to recall. The world keeps insisting on memories, whereas she has a miraculous power of forgetfulness. Even now, there’s a cesspool inside her, and into it she tosses the spikes of evil and ugliness. Meanwhile, far removed from those close to her, the story keeps unfolding secretly, of its own accord.
You could say it’s been wrought inside her.
To think of all the complaints heaped on her by her own child, the one whom she bore and who had given her her share of complaints. The old woman had to be on guard, as if her daughter was the enemy.
The daughter, the granddaughter’s mother, always suspected that her mother was obsessively repeating the story to herself. She claimed that whenever a person becomes immersed in a story, he doesn’t bother to listen to anything around him. Perhaps she was trying to cry that she had a story too, one that was no less important than her mother’s. No one had explained to her that her mother was immersed not in the story, but in the question of how to tell it or to refrain from telling it. If only the old woman really had allowed herself to indulge in self-pity, the story might have come to the fore much earlier. And