Regina Ullman: The Country Road

But as I’ve said, it’s already quite a feat when the tongue is no longer simply the tongue, or the understanding, when instead it transforms itself again into heart and hand. And so the girl had cause to rejoice when the farmer woman came by with three little smocks and two shirts. For there was poverty on both sides, if not the same poverty. And the farmer woman felt secure by comparison to her sister in suffering. But the latter, as she slowly began to feel the terrifying travails of childbirth, felt a sort of horror at this mother of ten children. Nature tore this creature into four parts, if only in her pained imagination. Julia, I must resolve to call her by name again, gripped the edges of the straw bed with her hands, her outermost ends. Her feet were stretched out like a dead woman’s. Her head was turned back, as if it were no longer a part of her body. But now and then she went limp again and lay there like a weary animal dropping off to sleep. And in this, nature does not distinguish between a princess and a beggar woman. And if the princess demands a narcotic, it seems to me that this makes her more perishable than a plant, which, in its metamorphosis, breaks the capsule of its bud with its own strength, its final burst of living and dying. It is no coincidence that the landscape of the earth is identical to that of the heart. Outside, as the first snow fell, coming late this year, it quickly melted again and ran in many rivulets down the street. It was night, but like that summer night, the day of a night. But somewhat bleaker, befitting the season. You could forget to look up at the stars, because they appeared not only far away, but also very small. Inside the room everything seemed paralyzed, for as soon as other people make use of our belongings before our eyes (and all the more so when they wish to help us), those objects fall dead, and against our will we think of how it shall be here when we ourselves have died.

The door of the cottage opened. The midwife was there, and she set down her things. And the old messenger, who was satisfied now and had intended to go to his bedroom, remained standing, as if rooted in the open doorway. It was as if he needed to go out to the road again, to stay outside, to wander outside forever. And it was already night, with the stars in their dazzling splendor, detached from the world down below. Oh, how alone we can be. There was a cry. But not a cry of pain, rather, it was the sound of something splitting apart, and a child’s cry entered the world. It ruled over this world for a moment like a flash of lightning. Thinking and feeling are no longer just thinking and feeling. And even if there was only a single small lamp burning there, now the black of the darkness itself — as peculiar as it may sound — boldly came to light. It was not clear if this was death or life. The old man sat broken on the edge of his bed, while in the living room someone spoke and someone answered. It must have been the midwife and the farmer’s wife. But after a while there were four and then five voices, the mother and the child had joined the conversation. As if they had both been born.

With that, old Joe found his feet again. He stood again. And finally the midwife called to him from the next room, teasing: “Joey, you’ve got a granddaughter.” And the meaning of these words seemed to make this life a place to live again. The table in the middle of the room held the light, the tiny lamp, bearing it up in a touching gesture, offering it to all the objects in the room. The small beam that fell on the bench lit its clean cloth cover. Two pictures could be distinguished on the wall, illustrations from books. And a Jesus on the wall, only silver now, spread through the room like a holy spider web. You could have sunk to your knees. There are moments when we need not be ashamed of anyone, when it is Christmas in the soul. But with birth we have the crucifixion and the resurrection, and we can only be thankful; we can no longer say if it was someone else’s anguish or our own that we have suffered. Old Joe didn’t trust himself to look over to his maid’s bed right away. Although of course he knew: she was lying there with her child.

Oh, what a redemption that was. After all of that distress and fear, there was no choice but to love this child. It would cry for you, and by comforting it, you comforted yourself. Only slowly did he follow her voice, and he gently stroked her while still standing, as if from afar. He lifted the head of the fiery red little creature and dangled some of his own white hair in front of her. That was meant as a joke, or a sort of greeting. He marveled at the powerful little hand that blindly held fast to whatever it was given to grab, and he felt that he could hardly free himself again. And soon a new bond was formed, between an ancient man and a newborn child. And finally the midwife and the farmer’s wife could go in peace, because the old man was joyfully prepared to perform all the necessary tasks. He kept vigil at night, you could say. As he sat there on his careful watch, he almost resembled one of the three kings. For certainly he knew, too, that this child brought his household into being. Earlier he had wondered at times how long his young housekeeper would last. But now he knew that she would work for the child’s sake. And this was a different sort of work. And only this work could become what work should be: the two chain links of life. So he listened to be sure that both were breathing, mother and child. And if a stranger had reproached him, claiming that this was a calculating, loveless love, that would only have proven that the stranger understood nothing of life, for life consists of nothing but these relationships. They are its nature, its own life. The more noble a man is, the more strongly they are usually expressed in him. And it was like being woken from the dead when these relationships, which had died, were renewed. And life pulled the old man along in his new role. And the work that he had done by himself all those years, that he had half neglected, came to the fore again, and he worked for hours, hardly taking time to catch his breath. Even the spoons made his acquaintance again, and so, clumsily, did the bowls and plates. Guided by Julia’s weak voice, he pulled out things that had long since dropped from his sight. What he had first undertaken as an act of charity, life now compelled him to continue. Indeed, he took a small child in his arms for the first time in his life, this small child. And that amazed him above all. This creature slept and slept. She slept from the exhaustion of being born, or perhaps because there, in the blanketing warmth of the farmer’s house, she felt as if she were in her mother’s womb again, she slept almost without interruption, day and night. And because she didn’t eat for thirty-six hours, she remained pure, almost a symbol of holy poverty. The little white handkerchiefs that passed for her clothes hung over the stove: drops of sweat beaded on the little windowpanes and ran down one after another. The clock struck. A hen, unaccustomed to silence, flew in through one of the adjacent rooms. Fourteen days passed in this way.

A real love unfolded between mother and child. The child’s love for the mother was still invisible, as if blind. But the mother’s love for the child was so much like love itself that it appeared to embody it. But this, too, was a mistake. And therein lay the seed of her insubstantial being; that may be what sealed her fate. Nevertheless, she had made a covenant with a person for life, and that is the essential thing about the relationship between a mother and child. They both know, each time they see each other again: what we say and do to each other, it is forever. It will never fade. This is true even for parents and children who are strangers to each other due to certain turns of fate. This covenant simply cannot be destroyed, under any circumstances.