Excerpt
Actually, it is not a story that begins here, but a door that opens.
For what I lived through was not merely my own story, but that
of an entire era — one about which the young now know almost
nothing, yet which the generation that endured it, my generation,
carries within itself until death.
Two times met when I was born: the time of my second-born
sister’s death at nine months old, and the time of my conception,
when the feeling of loss, grief, and pain had become almost unbearable
within my mother. When little Magdika left, time faltered.
My mother’s arms learned emptiness then, while her body
— more stubborn than the soul — still chose life. Inside the house,
every movement became too loud, every silence too long. Too
many infants died sudden deaths beneath the hands of the Romanian
district nurse. She injected the little ones with excessive doses
of antibiotics, and in that very instant they turned blue, stiffened,
their tiny hearts ceased beating. My mother’s self-reproach was
just as strong; she should never have summoned the nurse, she
murmured — perhaps the child would have overcome the influenza.
Grief, bitterness, the convulsions of conscience sat upon her
chest even when she did not cry. As if they belonged there. And
they remained there until the end of her life.
Thus I grew within the womb, where petrified silence, paralyzing
helplessness, and the darkness of a grave held dominion. That kind
of silence which fears the past, the future, irresponsibility, helplessness,
malice, uncertainty, vulnerability.
When I was born, my mother had no strength to lift me. Not because
I was unimportant, but because she had already lost too much
to feel certain of anything. The whole world had become fragile for
her, and within it I, too, seemed fragile. Other hands lifted me.
A nursemaid’s hands. The inexperienced hands of a sixteen-year-old
girl from three houses away. She did not mourn. She was simply
there. And sometimes that is the greatest gift.
My mother loved me from afar. The way one gazes at a fiercely
shining star: knowing it is there, yet finding it too difficult to touch.
Though perhaps not impossible. So I learned — to observe.
Libros Libertad 