How to Keep a Letter Warm · Nazar Kalugin
Day 56: The Last School Day
"The months and days are travellers of a hundred ages, and the years that come and go are travellers too." Matsuo Basho begins his most famous travel diary with these words.
Today my first year packed its bag and went out of the door. I waved.
Dear Grandmother,
The last day of the school year is not a school day at all. I had planned spelling. The children laughed at me, kindly, the way you laugh at someone who has brought a coat to the beach. Kostya explained. "On the last day," he said, "we clean, we eat, and we go home early." So we cleaned, and we ate, and we went home early, and it was the right plan after all.
The cleaning took all morning. Eleven children with eleven cloths and one bucket. We washed the desks and found things in them that had been lost since October. A blue mitten. Three pencils with Leon's teeth marks. A letter from Mila to her mother, never sent, folded very small, which Mila took from me with a red face and put in her pocket, and I said nothing, because who am I to say anything. We took down the drawings from the walls and gave each child their own pile to carry home. The walls looked very bare afterwards. Clean, and a little sad, like a kitchen when the guests have gone and only the table is left.
Before lunch I did something with them that I would like you to know about, because it could work in any house, at the end of any year. I gave each child a slip of paper and asked them to write one line to themselves, to be opened on the first day in September. Not a wish. Just a line, about who they are now. Then they folded the slips, and we put them all in a big glass jar that Dora gave me, and I sealed the lid with a strip of paper, and Bea wrote on it in her best letters: Do not open until autumn. The jar is on the shelf above my desk now.
Then came the gifts, which I had not expected. Sofia brought a jar of honey from her grandfather's bees. Ida had sewn me a needle case with my initials in uneven stitches, and I thought of your initials in pencil on the kitchen door frame, and could not speak for a moment. Noor and Ari had painted a stone from the lake with a face on it, which they said was mine, and the face is laughing. Kostya brought a bunch of lilac from your tree by the wall, so much of it that the classroom smelled of nothing else all afternoon. And Mila gave me a letter. It was folded small, like the one in her desk. She told me I could open it at home, and I did, and I will keep it in the tin with the others.
Mrs Varga came at noon with a pot of barley soup, the one she still makes the way she remembers it from your time, and Dora brought bread from the oven in the yard, and we ate outside on the steps with bowls on our knees.
I have been reading Basho's travel diary in the evenings, a little at a time, because the lines are short and the evenings are long now. It is a strange kind of book. He walks, and he writes plain, short pieces about where he stops, what he eats, who gives him a bed, and then, every few pages, he stops and writes a very short poem. The prose carries you along like a road. The poems are where he stands still. I like how it is made. Our school year was like that, I think. Most of it was the road. Here and there, a moment where everything stood still, and I wrote you a letter.
At three I rang the hand bell for the last time. The children ran out into the sun shouting, the little ones first. Pip turned at the gate and waved with both arms. Then the yard was empty, and the classroom was empty, and I sat at my desk with the lilac and the honey and the laughing stone.
Basho said that the years that come and go are travellers. I used to think that was a sad thing to say, as if time were always leaving. Today it did not feel sad. This year was a good traveller. It came in September with a leaking roof and a tin of recipe cards, and it leaves in June with eleven slips of paper in a jar and lilac on my desk. I hope it had a good stay with us.
Your Vera
Day 57: The Full Tin
"Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separations." These are the first words of the long poem Rumi wrote about love and longing.
The reed sings, Rumi says, because it was cut from the reed bed. I have been thinking about that all week.
Dear Grandmother,
The lid of your tin will not close. I noticed it on Sunday, putting in last week's letter. The lid sat on top of the paper like a pan lid on a pot that is too full, and when I pressed it, it sprang up again at one side. Fifty-six letters, the recipe cards, Emil's envelope, Mila's folded note from the last day of school. It is full. It is not only full. It is finished, I think, the way a loaf is finished when you tap the bottom and it sounds hollow.
I sat at the kitchen table with the tin open and did not know what to do. My mother came for lunch, and found me like that, and sat down across from me. She did not ask to read anything. In March she would have. Now she only looked at the pile and said, "You've written her a book." I said it was not a book. She said, "What is it, then?" and I did not know.
So I spent the week trying to answer her question. What are letters for, if nobody reads them? I asked Emil. He said, "They're for the one who writes them, mostly. The other one is a kind of window you look through." I asked Dora. She said letters are like starter for bread: you keep a little back, and feed it, and it keeps you. I asked Tomas, and he thought for a long time and said, "So you don't forget how you sounded." Mila said letters are for later, when you are old. I think they are all right. I think none of them is the whole of it.
Here is my own answer, as near as I can get. These letters were how I stayed beside you after I could no longer reach you. They were a place to put the day down, the way you put a hot pan on a board so it does not burn the table. I wrote things in them that I could not say aloud to anyone, and in writing them I found out that I could say them, after all. Some of them I said later, to my mother, to Tomas, to Emil. The letters went first, like a cook who goes into the cold kitchen early to light the stove for everyone else.
There was one small thing I did this week, and it helped, and you could do it with any pile of letters or papers that has grown too big to hold. I sorted them by season, not by date. Autumn letters, winter letters, spring letters, summer letters. Then I tied each bundle with plain kitchen string, a single bow, with a loop long enough to pull. It took one evening. When I had finished, the pile on the table was four small bundles. It looked like a year again, instead of a heap. Each bundle was a size you could hold in one hand.
Bea asked me last week how a reed becomes a flute, because I had read the class a few lines of Rumi. I looked it up for her. A reed flute is made from a stem of cane, cut from the water's edge and dried for a long time. Then the maker opens the inside of the stem, makes small holes along it, and shapes the end where the breath goes in. Nothing is added to make the sound. The sound is the empty space inside, where the reed used to be solid. Air moves through it, and the flute sings. Bea said that was sad. I said I was not sure it was.
Last night I walked down to the birches by the lake, where you lie now, and stood there for a while with the evening coming on. At six Emil rang the bell once, as he does every night, and the sound went out over the water and came back off the far shore, a little softer. I thought of all the letters, sitting tied in their four bundles on my kitchen table. I thought that they were a kind of bell too. Rung every evening, whether or not anyone was listening on the other side.
Rumi's reed tells the tale of separation because it was cut away from where it grew. I was cut away from you, slowly, all through this year, and then all at once in March. These letters are the sound that made. Not a complaint, I think. Something closer to a song. I am glad I let it sing.
Vera