Day 46: Anna's Clear Afternoon

In Goethe's Faust, a restless man wagers that no moment will ever be so good that he wants to say to it: "Stay a while, you are so beautiful."

On Sunday I wanted to say it to a whole afternoon.

Dear Grandmother,

My mother met me off the noon bus, and we went in together. Hanne met us in the corridor and said, carefully, "She is very bright today. Go in. Do not waste it on me."

You were sitting up, dressed, with your hair pinned back the old way. When I came in, you said, "Vera. You have cut your fringe." I have not cut my fringe since I was fifteen. But you said my name, and you said it as if you had been waiting for me, and my mother had to sit down on the edge of the bed.

It lasted the whole afternoon. I have no explanation, and Hanne says there often is none. Sometimes a clear day comes, she said, like a window that opens by itself, and the best thing is to step up to it and look out, and not to ask how long it will stay open.

So we looked out. You asked about the school. Not as if it were fifty-eight years ago; as if it were now, and mine. You asked whether the stove still smoked when the wind was from the east. It does. You asked whether the bread oven in the yard still had the crack on the left side. It does; Dora fills it with clay every autumn. You asked about my pupils, and I told you about Mila's spelling and Sami's drawings, and you laughed in the right places.

Then you talked about yours. A little girl who coughed through a whole week of November; when I told you she is Kostya's grandmother now, you said, "Of course she is." A boy who brought you a frog in a jar every Monday until you made him take it back. The winter you walked across the ice. The play, and the lamp in the window. You did not say Emil's name. But when my mother asked what you liked best about the lake town, you looked out of the window for a long time and said, "The ferry. Standing at the front, in the wind."

Near four o'clock I tried something. I had brought your recipe tin, the cards only, not the letters. I took out the card for the plum cake and began to read it aloud, slowly, and I left out the steps to see if you would fill them in. You did, every one. "Not that heat, lower," you said. "And the plums cut side up, or they weep." We baked a whole cake in the air between us, with nothing in our hands. Anyone could try this with someone who still knows their kitchen better than their calendar. Read the recipe aloud and leave a gap. Let them finish it.

My mother did not say much all afternoon. She held your other hand and listened, and once she laughed so suddenly at the frog that she had to wipe her eyes. When you asked her whether she still burned the toast, she said yes, every morning, and you said, "Good. Some things should not change." Later you asked for your brown shoes from the cupboard, because you wanted to stand at the window on your own feet. Hanne took one arm and my mother took the other, and you walked three steps and stood there, looking at the birch trees in the yard, as pleased as if you had crossed a lake.

The afternoons are longer now, and that helped. I looked it up on the bus home: around the end of March the days grow longer faster than at any other time of the year, by a few minutes every single day. It is as if the year is in a hurry to give back what the winter borrowed. At five there was still sun on your windowsill. At six there was still light in the sky.

When the supper trolley came, you looked at me, and the window began to close. I saw it go, gently, like a curtain moving in a draught. You asked me if I was the new teacher. I said yes. You said, "Be kind to them," and I promised.

My mother held my hand all the way to the bus stop, which she has not done since I was small.

In Goethe's story, the moment cannot be made to stay. I said the words anyway, in my head, on Sunday. Stay a while, I told that afternoon. It did not stay. But it came, and it was beautiful, and my mother and I were both there to see it.

Your Vera

Day 47: The Last Telephone Call

Walt Whitman wrote that all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and that to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

I am holding on to that line tonight like a warm cup.

Dear Grandmother,

The telephone rang at ten past two. I did not hurry to it. I think some part of me had been waiting for it since the clear afternoon.

It was Hanne. She said your name, and then mine, and then she told me plainly, the way she tells everything. You died a little before two, in your sleep, in Room Twelve. She had looked in at one and you were sleeping with your hand under your cheek, the way you always slept. When she came back, you had gone. She said there was no struggle and no fear. She said the window was open a crack, because you liked the air, and that she had sat with you for a while before she rang.

I thanked her. I do not know what else I said. She said, "Your mother is on her way to us. Take the morning bus, not the night road." Then she said, "She was a lovely lady, Vera," and I had to put the telephone down on the table for a moment before I could say goodbye.

I rang my mother. She was already in her coat. We did not say much. She said, "Oh, love," and I said, "I know," and we stayed on the line for a long time just breathing, two people in two kitchens, with the whole dark road between us.

Then I did the only thing I know how to do at a kitchen table at three in the morning. I lit the stove, though the house was not cold, because it gave my hands something to do. I made tea and did not drink it. And I took out paper, and I am writing to you, because you are still the person I write to. That has not changed in the last hour. I do not think it will. The blue tin is on the table beside me. I opened it before I began, only to look at your handwriting on the cards, the round letters, the little line you always put through your sevens.

Here is a small thing I tried tonight, and that anyone could try on a first night like this. Before the sun comes up and the day fills with calls and plans, write down the first memory you have of the person. Not the best one. The first. Mine is your kitchen in the city, and me on a stool, and you letting me crack an egg into a bowl, and the shell going in too, and you fishing it out with a spoon and saying it was good luck. I had forgotten that. It came back tonight as clearly as if the bowl were on the table in front of me.

Old families in the lake town have a custom for a night like this. Mrs Varga told me about it once, in the autumn, when I could not imagine needing it. When someone in a house dies, you open a window a little, so the air can move, and you stop the kitchen clock for a while, so the house can rest before the days start again. People did it here long before anyone wrote it down. Hanne did not know that, but she had opened your window anyway.

I have opened my window too, and stopped the clock above the stove at ten past two. The lake is black and quiet. There is no ice on it now, only water moving against the stones by the ferry house. There is a light on down there. I do not know whether Emil is awake, or whether he always leaves a lamp lit. I will walk down to him in the morning, before the bus, and tell him myself, so that he does not hear it from the road.

I sent one line to Tomas. He answered within a minute: "I am awake. I will drive you to the bus at six, and I will keep the stove." That was all he wrote, and it was enough.

Whitman said that to die is different from what anyone supposed. I do not know if it is luckier. I know that you went in your sleep, with the window open and your hand under your cheek, after a long life and one clear afternoon. I know that all of it goes onward: the cards in your tin, the plum cake, the waltz, the pupils who are grandparents now. Nothing has collapsed. It has only gone quiet, and I am still writing.

Your Vera