no place hotter than a village cemetery
Smack dab in the middle of Oltenia, across the valley from the house I was raised in, lies the woman who raised me. Eighteen years she’s been here, and an eternity to go. It must have made her patient, more patient than I remember her ever being, because although I don’t visit that often she’s always glad to see me. I feel welcome as soon as I walk through the cemetery gate.
My eyes always start itching on the way there. I can’t go alone because I can’t drive, so I’ve learned to manage the tears and the way they make my voice shake. I don’t want to make everyone uncomfortable. The marrow deep summer heat is bad enough. I have no idea why I’m crying or what exactly hurts, after all this time, anyway. And if she could she’d tell me to stop it already. Which would only make me cry harder and she knows it. She’d find it annoying but in an endearing way.
*
Our grandmother used to love saying that she would die alone in that way that old people love to complain about their proximity to death and how nobody makes time for them. I don’t begrudge old people their “you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone” fantasies. I read somewhere that after a certain age it gets harder to sleep more than a few hours a night, so I imagine their minds have time to wander.
‘When I’m old and you’re off out into the world you’ll forget about me,’ she would tease. We always knew it was a trap. She wanted to watch us get up in arms about it, to run over and kiss her or fix her batik and that’s exactly what we did, every time.
‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll see,’ she’d say but she’d be smiling.
After she came home from the hospital I kept having the same dream. It would be morning and I would find her in the kitchen making crepes for breakfast. The cancer, gone. Relief and disbelief made me so dizzy, the sensation jolted me awake.
Over the years, I’ve learned to bring myself back to consciousness from bad dreams. One minute I’ll be sobbing, chest tight with grief, then next thing I know a switch flips and my dream-self realises that whatever is happening can’t be real, it’s too painful to be true, and I wake up. That summer was the only time my brain shook me awake because the dream was too good to bear.
Two years before she died I got attacked by a rooster. Our goats had just had kids and I spent hours in the animal’s courtyard watching them bounce around the enclosure to the horror of the geese and chicken. I loved to run my fingers through their soft wavy fur and watch the little curls snap back into shape in the wake of my fingers. One day, as I bent over my favourite baby goat to do exactly this, a rooster flew at my head and beaked my scalp.
My grandmother found me in the goats’ stable, where I had run for shelter, hand held tight over my right temple. I was crying and I anticipated the sound of her laugh, both mortifying and reassuring, letting me know that nothing had happened and that I was being, once again, a crybaby. But as she approached her eyes widened, taking over her small, wrinkled face, leaving no room for the smile I expected. She grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand away from my head. It was covered in blood. That night for dinner we ate chicken soup.
Wherever I tell this story – I tell it almost exactly like this, leaving out the fact that I watched her catch the rooster by the wings and wring its neck from a gap between two wood planks in the stable door (most of my friends have only come in contact with chicken at the supermarket, after their heads were already removed) – people express some type of concern or other. They think the incident was traumatic or in some way scarring, beyond the literal scar I still have tucked under my hair.
It’s difficult for me to explain that I had never, and haven’t since, felt more protected in my life. That I have never felt more certainty than I felt certain in that moment, that I was watched over and could not be harmed without immediate retribution.
To this day, I find it difficult to muster up resentment. I can’t bring myself to plot vengeance plans because some part of me still knows that I will be taken care of. Even as an adult I have caught myself thinking, upon finding out that someone who had wronged me was suffering, that it was her bringing me justice. Not God or karma or the universe, but my grandmother, striking anyone who was mean to me bloody from above.
*
Sometimes I think of her and I get thirsty for the water I used to cart from the village spring every summer evening. I get hungry for the plums that sat in bunches on the topmost branches, taunting us kids to take turns shaking the tree as hard as we could and see who could make them fall. They don’t sell these things in London.
They are weak currency in the cultural capital-based economic system I exist within these days, online and off. When people ask me about my childhood, the absence of my parents, my grandparents’ village, what they really want to hear about is trauma. They want to place me in “the wider context” of the ex-Soviet bloc, or else they want to revel in the minutiae of my “journey”. A heroine’s journey, from butt-fuck nowhere in Romania to Oxford university. There’s poetry in it, in my being so literary despite being raised by an illiterate woman. ‘Not in spite,’ someone will say, ‘but in honour.’
People love to narrativize events that have nothing to do with one another. They love to tell me that I wouldn’t be who I am today had I not lost all I have lost. I think they’re right, I would be different. I would be better. A better sister and a better daughter and a better friend. Maybe I’d be someone who doesn’t have to picture her dead grandmother in the shape of a demi-god, smiting people who may or may not gossip about her from the afterlife.
Someone who doesn’t have to stand in a village cemetery under the scorching sun of the Wallachian plain, every year. A visitor to the house she was raised in.