How to Keep a Letter Warm · Nazar Kalugin
Day 38: What Hanne Said
Tyutchev wrote that it is not given to us to know how our words will echo, and that kindness comes to us the way grace does.
I did not know, when I heard Hanne talk this week, how long her words would go on sounding.
Dear Grandmother,
You are home again, in Room Twelve, with your own blanket on the bed, the yellow one with the fringe, and the photograph of Grandfather on the shelf by the window. The hospital let you go on Thursday. The ambulance men carried you in very gently and said goodbye to you by name. You looked at the room for a long time and then you said, "There it is." I do not know what you meant. It sounded like someone finding a spoon in the right drawer.
Hanne was on duty. When you were settled and asleep, she took my mother and me into the little kitchen at the end of the hall, where the staff make their tea, and shut the door. She put three cups out, real ones, and filled the pot, and only then did she start to talk. I am going to write down what she said as well as I can, because I want to keep it.
She said that after an illness like this one, you would be more tired than before, and might stay more tired. She said you would probably sleep a great deal, eat a little less, and talk a little less. Some days might be better than others, and nobody could say which ones. She said this plainly, looking at us, not at the table. She said it was not anyone's fault, and that the team would keep a close eye on you, and that we could ask her or the doctor anything at all, at any hour, and someone would sit down and answer us.
Then she told us how to be with you, and this is the part I want to keep most. Sit where you can see us, she said, low down, not standing over the bed. Say who we are as we come in, every time, before you have to wonder. Speak slowly, one thing at a time. Hold your hand if you seem to want it. And if you think it is a different year, go there with you, gently, instead of pulling you back to this one. "She is not lost," Hanne said. "She is somewhere else for a while. You can visit."
So the next morning I tried the last part of it. You woke while I was sitting by the bed, and you asked me, quite anxious, whether the ice was safe yet, because the children wanted to go out on it. Before, I would have told you gently that this was not your year, and that the children were mine now. This time I went to your year with you. I said, "Not yet. I have told them to wait until the ferryman says so." Your hands went still on the blanket. You said, "Good girl," and slept again. Anyone could try it with someone who forgets. Answer the worry, not the date. Find what they are afraid of and set it down first, gently, the way you set down a hot pan before you speak.
An aside, because Hanne sang while she straightened your pillow, under her breath, a slow song with no words. I asked her what it was and she said it was only a lullaby. I looked it up later. People who study songs have found that lullabies from all over the world are alike in some ways. They are slow, they are simple, they repeat, and they go up and down gently like a rocking chair. Listeners can often tell that a song is a lullaby even in a language they have never heard. It seems we all learned to quiet a child in nearly the same way.
My mother cried a little in the staff kitchen, very quietly, and Hanne simply moved the biscuits closer to her and waited. Afterwards my mother said it was the first time anyone had told her what was happening without making it sound either better or worse. I think that is a skill, like knowing how much salt a soup can take.
Tyutchev said we cannot know how our words will echo. Hanne talked to us for twenty minutes over a teapot in a small kitchen. I do not think she knows how far her words have gone already. They have gone into the way I sit, the way I say my own name, the way my mother holds your hand. Kindness came to us the way grace does, in an ordinary room, on an ordinary afternoon, with three cups.
Your Vera
Day 39: Drawings in an Envelope
In one of Dostoevsky's novels a young man is asked whether it is true that he once said beauty will save the world.
I used to think that was a very large thing to ask of beauty. This week it arrived in a brown envelope.
Dear Grandmother,
I have been in the city for eight days now, sleeping at my mother's flat and coming to Room Twelve every morning. Mr Okafor rang on the first day and told me not to think about the school. He had found a substitute, Mr Albers. "Forty years in the district schools, and three summers of retirement," Mr Okafor said. "He has been bored. You are doing him a kindness." I am not sure that is true, but it was kind of him to say it.
On Tuesday a large brown envelope came to my mother's flat. The address was in Greta's handwriting, round and careful, and on the back she had written, "Kept flat all the way. G." Inside were eleven drawings, one from each child, and a short note from Mr Albers. The note said: "They have been mostly good. Pip has been less good. They wanted to send these to your grandmother. I did not help."
I spread them out on my mother's kitchen table, and we looked at them for a long time, the way you look at a tray of biscuits fresh from the oven before anyone is allowed to touch one. Bea had drawn the lake, very blue, with a tiny woman in a long skirt walking across it. Yuri had drawn the ferry bell, enormous, with lines coming out of it for the sound. Kostya had drawn his grandmother with a pot of soup, steam going up in curls. Pip had drawn his rabbit sitting on a hospital bed. Sofia had drawn the school, with smoke coming out of every chimney, including two that it does not have. Mila had drawn three people holding hands: me, you, and a very small Mila in the middle.
I took them to Room Twelve the next morning, and here is what I tried. I did not hand them to you, because you cannot hold paper still for long now, and I did not just pin them up and leave them. I pinned them on the wall opposite your bed, low, at the height of your eyes when you lie on the pillow. Then I sat beside you and told you about each one, slowly, one at a time. "This is from Bea. It is the lake, with a teacher crossing the ice." "This is from Yuri. It is Emil's bell." I said the child's name each time, and what they had drawn, and one small thing about the child. Anyone could do this with pictures for someone who can no longer read. Put them where the eyes fall, and give each one a voice.
You listened. I think you listened. When I came to Bea's lake, you lifted your hand off the blanket and pointed at the little woman on the ice, and you said, quite clearly, "That one is cold." Then, after a while, "She should wear the green scarf." I do not know whose green scarf. Perhaps it was yours, fifty-eight years ago, on the ice.
An aside, because my mother asked why Pip's rabbit had arms coming out of its head. Very young children all over the world draw people the same way at first: a big round head with arms and legs growing straight out of it, and no body at all. People who study children's drawings call them tadpole figures. A child does not leave the body out by mistake. The head is simply the part that matters most, the part with the face, and everything else hangs from it. Pip is old enough to know better, but he says his rabbit likes to be drawn that way.
Hanne came in at lunch and stood in front of the wall with her hands in her apron pockets. She said Room Twelve had never looked so busy. Then a man from the room next door came and stood in the doorway in his dressing gown, pointed at the lake and said, "I had a teacher like that." We did not ask which one he meant.
Dostoevsky's young man was asked if beauty would save the world. I cannot answer for the world. But I know what eleven drawings did to one small room. They made a nurse stop, a stranger smile, and an old teacher point at a woman on the ice and worry about her scarf. That is not saving the world. It may be how saving begins.
Your Vera