Surrender

 

I am being escorted outside, held upright by two women I hardly know. I can feel their strong hands, their fingers gripping my forearms, gently leading me with soft determination, step after step into the waiting car.  It is a cold December night.  Under my feet, the stone steps soak up the rainwater, their light shade of grey turning black.

The car in the courtyard is black like the stairs, and I can hear the water slap against it like a whip on bare skin.

The shadow in the driver’s seat is my husband. I am pregnant with our child and wonder why that doesn't make us kin enough for me to stay.  But I am not a blood relative. So I go.

Hard as I try, I slip and apologetically hit the ground to a chorus of sighs and exclamations in a language that I now call my own. I don’t understand why there is no light when there is a light switch on the left side of the wall, I know it’s there because I pass by it daily on my way to Piazza Garibaldi, adorned by trees and crowded benches made of the same grey stone as the stairs which tonight have eluded me.

It’s not a hard fall, creating a stir and a wet spot on the back of my pants.

The inside of the car smells of mold. My husband turns on the heat and starts pulling out of our driveway which on most nights is blocked by illegally parked cars of those passing the hours at the adjacent bar. But tonight, avoiding the rain is the only activity and the gate swings open freely to the outside world.                                                                                                  

“I’ll take you to Aunt Gina’s.  It’s just for one night. She’s waiting for you.” he says.  He has a questioning tone, as though the decision were up to me.

Aunt Gina is not my aunt. She is an elderly widow who comes to the house after mass on Sundays to see my mother-in-law.  At Christmas, she is the one who brings the carved, gilded image of the “Madonnina” from house to house for a holiday blessing.   By the time it reaches our house, countless lips have been pressed against its surface, and just as many prayers released into the heavens while imploring her image for a safe passage into the new year.

 

We are the only ones on the narrow road heading out of town. The rain hits the windshield in bursts, like water being pumped from a well.

My husband reaches for my hand to find it limp with disappointment.

“You know I have no choice. I can’t ask my relatives to go to a hotel.  How would that look? What would you have me do?  They are elderly people.”

He knows he’s wrong and is grasping at forgiveness. Appearances are at the forefront of his discomfort. He has the fear of invoking local gossip, were he not to welcome his out-of-town relatives and offer them refuge on such a gruesome night.  Through my water-streaked window, I see the coral-pink Hotel swim by and disappear, its walls looking animated.

Aunt Gina lives on a hill a few miles away, across the street from the cemetery. Her land had been deemed unfit for construction by the city, a plot that should have remained barren, but her husband didn't heed the warning and built a home across the street from fields of death. Now every Sunday she watches the procession of mourners making their way up the hill to keep their

dead company. She sees their familiar faces, their bodies, two by two, arms entwined so as to keep one another from falling, or from slipping into grief along the way.

Beyond the concrete barrier that divides the living from the dead, there are walls filled with bones, decorated with flowers, protected by religious symbols, and names inscribed on shiny metal plates. This must be how God keeps track, how he files away all of his disciples.

On Sundays, this cemetery is a winter garden, humid with the breath of the living, a greenhouse of memories in bloom. From Gina’s house you can walk a straight line into the mouth of the graveyard, without having to veer to the right or to the left. The front porch has stairs leading directly to its regal iron gates. Once this Auntie is on her death bed they will only have to carry her out of her front door feet first.

As we drive up to the curb, I see her small figure standing against the light in the doorway. She appears to be on the brink of leaping into the rain, and a feeling of tenderness overwhelms me.

I look at my husband’s face who is leaning over me in wanting. But I do not owe him the gesture of affection he is seeking. I climb out of the car and try to walk as fast as I can toward the light of the front porch. My hands are in my pockets, wrapped around my middle from the inside.   Bowing low under my hood, I watch my feet take brisk steps to avoid the puddles, the toes of my shoes already sopping wet.

 

The inside of Aunt Gina’s house is very bright. She smiles, exposing the two gold teeth on the right side of her mouth, one next to the other, and ushers me down a narrow hallway of closed doors. I watch the backs of her heels in their thick black stockings as she scurries in silence. She shows me to my bedroom which has walls the color of French vanilla and a single wooden cross hanging above the bed.

I am Jewish, but I do not mind.

I moved to a foreign country for love, an immigrant times two. Once out of necessity, then later by choice. My father tells me I have a restless nature. The experts call it something else.  They say longing to be “elsewhere” is a defect of all refugees. Whatever it is, I carry it with me day in and day out, referencing it as you would a history book or a favorite playlist.

The bedroom window looks onto a field littered with empty wine bottles. A discarded Heineken can stand out as a sign of the times in an otherwise anonymous pile of garbage as though it’s waiting for the owner of that good time to return and claim it. The rain falls, hitting the can, tap tap tapping out a morse code.

Further down, the land is disheveled, wild with rocks and boulders.

In the silence, I think of my mother. She would have raised a fuss. She would not be pushed out of her own bed. Her understanding of marriage does not allow for such surrender. Her life is guided by an invisible manual that only she can access. In this book, there are instructions for everything, from washing dishes to breastfeeding. At times I wish that I too had such large toms to consult for internal guidance.

“Let me check,” is my mother’s favorite expression. To her, everything is dictated.

The Soviet gospel has corroded her.  She holds on to the reigns of her memory with unharnessed strength, with fingers like roots curved inward, nails digging into the soft soil of her palms.  She can no longer “sleep it off” with a “deep Hypnotic sleep,” like the one they prescribed in the sanitariums in Tashkent during the war.  She lived in a hut made of clay back then, recoiling from the dank, hard floor into a stranger’s lap, like a household pet.

After forty years in the United States, she is still dreaming in the past tense, unable to conjure up a new identity, one free of supervision.

But I am “loose” with my thinking, my reasoning is too messy.

Lying in bed I am finally warm under the two matching down comforters. The freshly ironed sheets are hand embroidered, white on white.