Day 20: The Reason for Leaving

Marcus Aurelius wrote that the world is change, and our life is what our thoughts make it.

He wrote it to himself, late at night. My mother said nearly the same thing over the washing-up.

Dear Grandmother,

I stayed at my mother's flat last night, after the Sunday visit to you. We had not been alone together since the telephone call about the letters, and I think we were both careful, the way you are careful carrying a full pot across a kitchen. She made noodles with mushrooms. I washed and she dried, because she says I leave the glasses streaky.

She was the one who began it. She asked what the school was like, and I said it was small and cold and full of you, and that people kept stopping me in the lane to tell me something you had done fifty-eight years ago. She was quiet for a while. Then she said, "Do they ask why she left?"

I said nobody had asked me, but I had asked myself.

So she told me what you once told her, when she was about fifteen and cross with you, and wanted to know why you had given up teaching. Your parents had not wanted you to go to the lake town at all. They thought it was too far, too lonely and a waste of a good education. You went anyway, but only after promising them that it would be for one year, and that you would come home in June. And there was Paul. He was the son of your parents' friends, already an engineer, and he had asked you before you left. You had said yes, but not yet. He wrote to you every week that year, on a Thursday, so that his letter would arrive on Saturday. You told my mother you kept every one.

"She said she had made two promises," my mother said, drying the same plate for a long time, "and she kept both of them, and they were good promises. That is all she ever told me. She said it as if it were a recipe. That was how she said everything important."

I asked if you had ever said you were sorry to leave. My mother put the plate away and said, "Once. Your grandfather had just died, and we were clearing out the garage, and she found an old school map. She said, 'I was happy there.' Just that. Then she put the map back in the box and went inside."

I said nothing about Emil. It is not mine to tell, and I am not even sure what there is to tell: a green dress, a waltz, a cake. She said goodnight and kissed the top of my head, which she has not done since I was small.

I remember Grandfather only a little. I was thirteen when he died. He wore a grey cardigan with leather buttons, he mended my bicycle on newspaper on the kitchen floor, and every evening he dried the dishes while you washed, the same way my mother and I did last night. I never once thought of him as a young man who had waited a whole year for you, one Thursday at a time.

On the bus this morning I tried something, and I think it is worth doing for anyone who hears a family story. I wrote down everything my mother had said, at once, in the back of my lesson book, in her words and not mine, before I had time to improve it. Family stories change each time they are told, like a soup heated again and again until it is thicker and saltier than it was. The first telling, written down the same day, is the closest to the truth you will get.

Long engagements were common in your time and long before it. Couples who lived apart courted almost entirely by post, sometimes for years, and a letter on the same day every week was a kind of promise in itself, as dependable as bread on the table. People kept those letters in boxes and tins, tied with ribbon, in the order they came. Somewhere, I suppose, my mother has Grandfather's Thursdays.

Marcus Aurelius was right that our life is what our thoughts make it. I believe you thought of that year as a good year kept, not a life lost. You put the map back in the box and went inside. And then, I expect, you made Grandfather's supper from a card in your tin.

Your Vera

Day 21: Noor's Question

"The course of true love never did run smooth," Shakespeare wrote, in a play where four young lovers lose their way in a wood at night.

I used to hear that line as a complaint. Today it sounded more like a weather report.

Dear Grandmother,

It was the last lesson before lunch, and we were filling the question box. I made it last week from a shoebox, with a slot cut by Dora's bread knife, which she has not forgiven. The rule is simple. Anyone may post a question, signed or not, and on Friday I open the box and answer every one out loud. Most are about volcanoes, or why the lake freezes at the edges first, or whether Pip may bring his rabbit to school. This morning Noor did not post hers. She stood up and asked it.

"Miss Lind, do you have a sweetheart?"

The room went so quiet that I heard the stove tick. Sofia put both hands over her mouth. Kostya looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer might be written on the new boards.

I could have said it was not a school question. Teachers say that, and sometimes it is true. But Noor asks everything in the same serious voice, the one she uses for fractions, and I did not want to teach her that some questions get shut in a drawer. So I gave her the truth, which was smaller than the class hoped. I said I did not have a sweetheart. I said I was not sure about some things, and that not being sure is allowed.

"That is not an answer," Noor said.

"It is an honest one," I said. "Honest answers are sometimes unfinished, like dough that has not risen yet. You leave it under a cloth and you wait."

Then Mila said, very loudly, "My dad fixed your roof," and everyone laughed, and I said that a roof is not a sweetheart, and we went back to long division. My face stayed warm until the soup came. I noticed, too late, that when Noor asked her question I had looked at the window, the one that faces the road to the workshop.

Dora had heard everything through the kitchen hatch, of course. She said nothing at all. She only put a second slice of bread on my plate, the heel, which she knows I like, and patted my shoulder once on her way back to the pots, the way you pat a loaf to hear if it is done. Bea watched this and nodded, as though a grown-up matter had been settled. In a school of eleven, nothing stays in one room for long.

Later, when the others were outside, Noor came back to my desk. She said she had asked because her big cousin is getting married and everyone at home talks about it. "How do you know?" she asked me. I said I thought you know slowly, mostly, and then all at once. She wrote that down in her spelling book, which worried me a little.

Did a pupil ever ask you, Grandmother? I think someone must have. You were twenty-two, and the town was small, and a young man stood at the edge of your class photograph trying not to be in it. I wonder what you said. Perhaps you said what I said. Perhaps you knew already and kept it under a cloth.

The question box is something you could have used in your year, and anyone could use at home. A box with a slot, a rule that every question gets an answer, and one day a week to open it. Children ask braver things on paper. Grown people do too.

When I was walking home I thought about love tokens. In some places, long ago, a young man who wanted to court a girl would carve her a wooden spoon in the winter evenings, with a long handle and a pattern cut into it: a heart for love, a key for a house, links of a chain for staying together. If she kept the spoon, that was her answer. Nobody had to say a word. I like that the question and the answer were both something you could stir soup with.

Shakespeare was right that true love does not run smooth. But a river that is not smooth still runs. It goes round stones, it slows in the reeds, it freezes at the edges first, and in spring it is still going the same way. I told Noor I was not sure. That was true this morning. I am writing it down so that I can see whether it stays true.

Your Vera