Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

Being an introvert, she didn’t have that many friends either, almost nobody since Sergey and Vica and then Vadik left for the U.S. Her mother was the only person who kept Regina from feeling hopelessly lonely. She did enjoy their long walks together, drinking tea in their tiny kitchen, gossiping about long-dead writers as if they were acquaintances.

Regina and her mother had had only two disagreements in all of their life together. The first one was over Regina’s abortion. Regina had gotten pregnant on her last trip to Villa Mont-Noir. She had just turned thirty at the time. The father was a mediocre French writer who had a wife and three children at home. Regina’s mother was vehemently against the abortion. She developed this fantasy of them bringing up the baby together, being a tight little unit, no need for men. But it was precisely this idea of the baby tying her to her mother forever that scared Regina. If she had the baby she would never be able to get married or even to leave. Their life together was comfy, but Regina hoped that she could lead a different life someday, a freer, more independent one. Plus, she doubted she would make a good mother. “Are you even capable of truly loving another human being?” the Polish artist asked her once. She wasn’t sure she was. She had been deeply hurt when Sergey left her for Vica, but she wondered if it wasn’t her wounded pride that had caused most of the pain.

Regina went ahead and had the abortion. It didn’t go well. There were complications that rendered her unable to have children. The surgery following the procedure left her with lingering pain that grew so intense at times that she felt as if the baby was being yanked out of her again and again. As for the emotional side of it, Regina didn’t suffer that much. She had to admit to herself that she was a little relieved. Not everybody was meant to have a child. It was her mother who was devastated, not Regina.

The second disagreement happened when a university in Berlin offered Regina a two-year teaching appointment. She was beside herself with joy. She pictured her time in Germany in minute detail. She would improve her German, impress her students and colleagues, go to concerts and gallery openings, meet interesting people, eat warm apple strudel in a little café at the Tiergarten in the company of a European academic who would find what Russian men saw as homeliness mysterious and alluring. As for her mother, Regina didn’t really see a problem. They would visit each other often. With the salary that the university offered her, they would certainly be able to afford travel. But her mother didn’t share Regina’s enthusiasm. She said that if Regina wanted to teach, she should look for a position in Moscow. She would have a much better standing there. Regina was adamant. Her mother had cried for three days and then she started to get sick. She would complain of the lingering pain in her abdomen, digestive symptoms, fatigue, arthritis-like aches in her knees. She even lost some weight. She said that she had actually had those symptoms for a while, she just hadn’t wanted to worry Regina. Regina was sure that her mother was doing it on purpose. Well, not exactly faking the symptoms, but bringing them on herself, because she didn’t want to let Regina go. There were some ugly scenes between them. A lot of words were said that made Regina squirm for months afterward. Then there were doctors’ appointments. Tests. Waiting for the results. Regina was impatient for proof that her mother was healthy as a horse so she could go ahead and accept the Berlin offer. Then the results came back. Advanced and aggressive cancer. What really broke Regina’s heart was the expression on her mother’s face the morning they got the news. She looked ashamed, apologetic, horrified for Regina. “I didn’t mean to do this to you,” she said. She did mean to try to make Regina stay, but not like that.

She died three months later. Aunt Masha and some of her mother’s other friends would come to help, and there was a hired nurse who came twice a week, but it was Regina who stayed with her mother most of the time, who had to witness the rapid transformation of her large, strong mother into a withered corpse. “At least she didn’t suffer,” her mother’s friends kept telling Regina. It’s true, she didn’t suffer — thanks to their decision to forgo debilitating and largely useless treatment, and the morphine that Regina managed to buy after selling most of her great-grandfather’s paintings, but still the horror of witnessing her mother being erased as a human being was indescribable.

Years earlier, Regina translated an American bestseller Dealing with Death . Chapter one was titled “Stages of Dying.” The encroachment of death was described in a series of detailed steps that seemed to be ridiculously specific.

Two to three weeks before death the patient will take to his/her bed and spend most of the time sleeping.

One to two weeks before death the patient will lose his/her appetite and become disoriented.

One to two days before death, his/her eyes will become glazed.

A few hours before death the body temperature will drop and the skin of the knees, feet, and hands will become a mottled bluish-purple.

It can’t be like this, Regina had thought back when she was laboring over the sentences. It can’t possibly be the same for everybody!

But apparently it was like that. And it was the same for everybody. Regina’s mother took to her bed three weeks before she died. “Regina, can I sleep for a little while longer?” she would ask with the pleading expression of a young child. Two weeks before she died she stopped eating. “Oh, yes, this soup is very good, can I finish it later?” Shortly after that the confusion set in. “How do you tell time? Take this clock, what are you supposed to do with the numbers? Add them up?” And then: “Are you my mother? But you are!”

She would refer to Regina as her mother more and more often, the closer to death she got.

“Mama, where were you?”

“I just went to the bathroom.”

“But I wanted you. I cried — that’s how much I wanted you!”

Is this the only experience of motherhood I’m going to get? Regina thought as she turned away to hide her tears. She tried to feel maternal as she stroked the warm fluff on her mother’s head; as she held her hand, shriveled and cold like an autumn leaf; as she whispered “It’s okay.” She couldn’t. She didn’t feel like a mother; she felt like a child instead, a frightened, abandoned child.

On the day of her death, her mother’s eyes lost focus and filmed over. Then her feet and hands became a mottled bluish-purple. Then she died.

She hit all the marks described in that book.

There was something insulting, something demeaning, about the universality of death. Regina’s mother, who had always refused to follow the rules and live her life like everybody else, couldn’t escape dying exactly like everybody else. Regina plunged into depression and anger. Or, rather, she wallowed in anger while she had the strength and sank into depression when the anger exhausted her.

Her mother’s old friends took care of the funeral and tried to take care of Regina as well, but she couldn’t bear their attention. Aunt Masha was especially persistent. Regina had to tell her she was going to visit her father in Canada and she said the same thing to her editor Inga, to avoid their visits and calls. The truth was that she didn’t even tell her father. She didn’t tell her friends either. She had mentioned that her mother was sick, but she didn’t tell them how serious it was. And when her mother died, Regina simply couldn’t bear making that phone call. “Vadik, my mom died.” “Sergey, my mom died.” “Vica, my mom died.” The mere thought of dialing a number and saying those words out loud made her shudder with revulsion. How could you possibly express the horror of what had happened in those three ordinary words? Regina abandoned her work, ignored her e-mails, didn’t answer the phone, and just stayed on the sofa crying until she fell asleep. She barely ate. She’d lost eighteen pounds by the time Vadik knocked on her door about six weeks after the funeral. He had a connection in Moscow on his way back to New York from Minsk, where he was interviewing some Belarusian programmers, and he had tried to contact Regina, but since she wasn’t answering her phone or e-mails, he’d come to her place. She was so weak from hunger and exhaustion that she could barely make it to the door. “Vadik,” Regina said when she opened the door, “my mom died,” and folded over sobbing. Vadik canceled his plans, changed his return ticket, and stayed in her apartment for about a week, and then he insisted that she visit all of them in New York. He even offered to pay for her ticket and help with the visa.