Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“Not yet,” she whispered back. “I will as soon as I get her alone.”

Later that evening, when everyone else had retired upstairs, she asked her mother to join her for tea. She served it in the familiar porcelain cups of her childhood, which her mother had brought as a gift on a previous visit; though when she had first produced six misshapen bundles from her suitcase and proceeded to unwrap the thick layers of woolen stockings, all the while smiling slyly, like a magician about to bestow some momentous surprise, Mrs. Caldwell had looked at the row of hatching cups and failed to recognize them. They were not as she remembered them from the countless teatimes in the dark, tight entrapment of their Moscow kitchen. There, radiant with gold, bright with paradisiacal flowers and birds, they had stood out as something singular, something precious, that had required conscious handling and admiration amidst the mundane oppression of grimy pots and aluminum forks. Now they were only half a dozen gaudy cups, one of them chipped, lost in her light, spacious kitchen, whose every glass-paneled cabinet glittered with much finer china. All the same, she thanked her mother profusely, and afterward made sure to use the crudely painted cups whenever the two of them had tea together.

Old people, she knew, became so attached to their old things.

“Have you thought more of our proposal?” she asked, and blew on her tea. “There is no one to take care of you in Moscow, and at your age… Of course, seventy-four isn’t old, but I worry.”

“I know it makes sense,” her mother said smiling, “but I’m so settled there—it’s my whole life. Did I tell you, by the way, they finally finished with that construction across the road. Only took them half a century. It’s a giant parking garage now, lots of silver Mercedes going in and out. But I sometimes wonder: What was it supposed to be, I mean in the beginning? Something else, don’t you think? Remember, your father used to joke—”

Mrs. Caldwell waited for her chatter to subside.

“Yes, but our proposal?” she asked again.

“Well, I just hate the idea of our apartment lying empty, going to ruin, your father’s books and pipes gathering dust—”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Caldwell, “but of course the apartment would have to be sold.”

Her mother blinked at her.

“But you see, it can never be sold,” she said, speaking with exaggerated slowness, as if to someone foreign. “Because it’s our home. And then, your children—it’s all I can leave them, you see. I know it’s small and poor, nothing like this—”

Mrs. Caldwell gently moved her hand over her mother’s.

“Mama,” she said. “It’s over, that part of life, it’s just—it’s like one’s childhood or youth, you will always remember it, but you can’t, and you shouldn’t, ever go back. And my children don’t even speak Russian.”

“But I don’t understand. What do you mean?” her mother muttered, and looked at Mrs. Caldwell with frightened eyes, as though she might have misheard the entire conversation. “You want me to sell our apartment?”

“I think that would be best,” Mrs. Caldwell replied softly.

(Her mother thought: Does she not remember? Does she not know? Any place is only a place, four walls, a door, a window—it’s the accumulated living, the weight of memories, that make it magic, that make it yours . The air you breathe within your four walls is like no other air, and your past is not past, and the love you have felt all your life is bright within, and you never age, and you never, ever forget. But she left, and she has forgotten. I shouldn’t have given her my cups. No one can have a future without a past. She is only forty-three, but she has misplaced her childhood and now she looks so old.)

She looks so old, Mrs. Caldwell thought, and lowered her eyes, her chest tightening. The silence hung thick between them.

“This needs to be sweeter,” her mother said in a tone of abrupt disapproval, and put a sugar cube into her cup, and stirred it without looking up. Mrs. Caldwell waited for her to speak, but she said nothing else, just drank her tea in silence, her face askew. Having taken the last sip, she stood up, carried the empty cup to the sink, and set about carefully scraping the soggy tea leaves into the trash.

“Please, just leave everything,” Mrs. Caldwell called out. “I’ll take care of it.”

But her mother was still standing by the trash, staring into it.

“You threw away the turkey leftovers again?” she asked. “You promised not to.”

“But they were mostly bones,” Mrs. Caldwell replied with a slight shrug. “No one would have eaten them tomorrow.”

“I would have,” her mother said, and now her voice was oddly close to weeping. “Why, why must you always throw everything away? It’s not becoming. It’s a wasteful person’s habit. It’s—it’s a sin.”

“But Mama—” Mrs. Caldwell began, deeply shocked.

Without another glance at her daughter, the old woman quit the kitchen.

As she grew older, Mrs. Caldwell noticed a curious thing: time moved differently in different parts of the house. In little-frequented rooms, where living was thin, it pooled like calm, standing water, hardly ever changing; when you peered inside, it would give you back a reflection of yourself at another age. Thus, from the ballroom’s threshold, she sometimes glimpsed a young woman, almost a girl, sitting on the floor by the flames that had turned to ashes many years before, lifting a hesitant hand to the golden choker on her neck, awed by the splendor of it all, afraid to be happy. Other places served as frames to a single bright moment, a flash of desire or pain or fear. The moments themselves were in the past, and the rooms had flowed by on the current of years, obscured by layers of subsequent, dimmer living, no longer supporting the memory precisely; the earthy gloom of the wine cellar had been banished in the glare of new fluorescent lamps, and the twins’ bedroom had long shed its giraffes and monkeys, the cribs replaced by the efficiency of bunk beds, the twins themselves gangly teenagers now. But there time had stopped in its tracks, briefly blinded, and to this day, whenever she entered the cellar to pick a bottle of Riesling for dinner or happened to glance at a clock hanging above Rich’s desk, she felt touched by an emotion—only an echo of the past emotion, to be sure, yet always there.

She preferred other rooms, where life had not gouged out a permanent scar and where several layers of time coexisted in peace: recollections overlapping, comforting her with a steady knowledge of now and then, nothing lost yet nothing over—a good life having been lived, a good life being lived still. In the girls’ room, she imagined she could see the vanished mermaid wallpaper as a playful shimmer under the current green paint, Celia’s earlier stuffed animals sharing the shelves with her later piles of books, Emma’s elaborate architectural drawings hanging over her kindergarten stick figures in their houses of squares and triangles. She thought her firstborn’s room like that too—a decade and a half of warm, innocent memories present at once, from a toddler napping cheek to cheek with his toy hedgehog to an eighteen-year-old arranging, with shy pride, his chess trophies on the dresser, all visible simultaneously in her mind’s eye, reassuring her with a sense of a happy, wholesome childhood she had helped shape and protect; and when, in his sophomore year, Eugene brought Adriana, his Romanian girlfriend of the past three months, home for a short Christmas visit, it was solely out of reluctance to muddy the memories, not out of any sense of old-fashioned propriety, that she gave Adriana the guest bedroom.