Regina Ullman: The Country Road

Two older women came. They both received a stipend from the church, and they wanted to rent the room that now stood empty. They were not good souls. They had none of the old man’s caring qualities. But Julia took them in. She had her own plan for them. She took them on as tenants, putting the house at their disposal, and keeping only a small profit in return. Then she tailored little skirts for the child — far from being too small, these skirts seemed meant to fit for several years to come — and she cleaned some things for herself.

How quickly poverty can be prepared to travel. Two little bundles, and the few Sunday clothes that are worn for the trip, and there’s nothing left to be forgotten. It only takes a single glance to survey everything in the house, to see where it stands and how it stands. The flowers with their colorful eyes in their pitiful little beds in the garden are the only things that might try to hold one back. For who knows, when harshness and denial hold sway, if the flowers will not be the first target for hatred.

But there are some farewells that brook no opposition. After discussing a few details, and pointing out this and that, they left the house. Little Maria moved through the unfamiliar world as if she were made of glass, and her mother seemed to have nearly forgotten the little market town that she had walked through years before, and the bench where she had rested. It was spring again, the air seemed to race through the world with a joyful breath, like a frisky horse. It did not hurt the tall fir trees, it caused no pain to the little flowers or the poor people. On the contrary, everything was waking up. It was the right day for a resolution, it was the newly opened page of a book of legends that had yet to be written. Little Maria could easily walk in and disappear among the letters and their meanings. First they went into the church, where the silver bell that rang for mass could take its measure against the silver voice of this child. For she didn’t know yet that the church is a quiet place. For Julia, this church was like an antechamber to the cloister where she planned to house her child for several years. She went out to a little door and rang for the prefect. Simple words are quickly understood. They were brief, just as their farewell had to be, a bit poorer now, for she had left behind what little money she still had. Everything happened so quickly, it was as if the little one had only looked around. And her mother was gone. And everything looked as if it were carved on an old wooden panel. There was the dormitory, and there was a school. And somewhere else there was a garden, and at another end was the refectory. And the church was everywhere, even in the dormitory. But no matter where she waited, her mother was nowhere to be found. But Maria was a child accustomed to her fate. She felt that her mother had done this herself, and so she didn’t cry. Indeed, after a time she would not even have thought about her mother, she would have become a tiny nun. But the sisters consoled her, and in their minds they cried her unwept tears. She soon learned to read and write, learned the words of conversation and the words of prayer. And she learned to sing and to do needlework in linen, and to keep a room or a house in order and well fed. She would surely have become a lay sister, if the nuns had not made a special place for her mother in her thoughts. And since they taught her not to forget her mother, she did not forget. That was her nature. She had become a pillar of obedience and proper upbringing. She was a small miracle. Like a saint in a coffin. But despite this lifelessness, which she had also inherited, there was a power within her: she embodied the spirit of her golden background, the church. And she had to sense this in spite of her great innocence, otherwise she wouldn’t have been the way she was. The prefect smiled each time she saw her, though she was otherwise a serious woman. And outside, her mother might not have been living as she should, she might have forgotten the little holy cross that God had bestowed upon her. Or she might not have known God, might never have given thanks to him, until the end of her life. But the nuns never spoke of that. Least of all to the child. And that was good. For what can we know. A soul’s desperation is often a struggle with death. While we are far off, lost in speculation, the trunk tears itself out of the earth by its own roots. Ah God, such a poor person! For he doesn’t die as soon as he is uprooted. He goes through the world bearing this mark, and he knows that he is not at home anywhere. Though he has committed no murder, still he is Cain.

Only one thing is certain: Julia went to one of the larger cities and visited old friends. But they were not the same. Her own lack of interest, and of love, had failed to sustain these ties in the face of distance and change. They talked past her, and she past them. And besides, Julia needed an income. And so she had to move on, to a place where there was one to be had. So she came to another small city. It was a time when everyone was seeking a new life, like a migration. But Julia was not so enterprising, she didn’t go to America or to Jerusalem. A weaving mill was hiring untrained laborers. She took her place among them. And she stayed in this job for nearly ten years. She was so quiet and undemanding that they began to see her as one of their own. And it was precisely what she lacked that made her so well suited to a factory, for those places are practically made for such soulless or bodiless people — which is what she was, once and for all. And the fact that this woman never stole anything, or kept flawed wares for herself, which was halfway permitted, seemed like a miracle as well. And it was also a sort of relief that she never asked to be moved to the looms where patterns were woven with flowers and vines. She worked at the gray loom, once and for all. And she never took sides in a quarrel, or made any friends. But it wasn’t as if she were sad, no, it would be more accurate to say that she was satisfied, in a primitive way. She had understood that she was not self-reliant, not independent in a certain sense. And if death had chosen to take her away from her little house and garden, then she just had to seek other accommodations. And since she couldn’t hope to find such a good old friend just anywhere she looked — someone who would take not only her, but also her child, into his care and protection — she had to find her own place for the little one, too. This is how things were for her. And it was a miracle that she understood, and an even greater miracle that she acted accordingly. Of course no one disturbed her in this one harmony that she still had. But in her childhood and her early youth, even before she was born, in the restless existence of her forebears, she must have already been broken and brought low and crippled to the point of exhaustion. Wasn’t it an angel that simply folded her hands in this way? And that called her at just the right time, like the fragrance of flowers, called her to follow blindly, with the simple experience of her failings?

Indeed, that urged her to provide for her future? For on her own she never would have managed — on her own she lacked all the energy that another person or an institution might have had for her. On her own she never would have succeeded in raising her child in that little farmhouse, without a master. She hardly would have understood the point of this upbringing; for in her eyes, for her, life was basically empty and hollow. Indeed, it still seemed this way to her when she was with others, but then she bore it patiently, with friendly gratitude, like a precious gift that she really hadn’t needed.

Of course this insight was not the insight of a single day, or of a single disappointed night of love, though even the most trivial incident from her childhood ought to have been enough to tell her who and what she was. But she had not learned this all at once. All the hours of her life, added together, had made it clear as day to her: You are clumsy to the point of foolishness, you are asleep in the deepest sense. You are without love, though you are patient and almost good. For I killed your love in the frost of spring. And a person cannot truly live without love. And yet I, nature, will not let you perish. You shall experience unto the end who you are and what you are, and who others are and what they are. And I will even grant and teach a few things to you. But even that will not enrich you in any true sense. All that will belong to you is poverty: all that you are denied, those intangible things that you never receive. This is my intention, to which you must be faithful. And this faith, if you will, shall be your only victory.