And then I am in two places at once. Looking out into my garden and being lifted onto my father’s shoulders so I can see the snow on the roofs. Walking to work but also walking in a different place, with fir trees and hills you can zoom down on, on your sled. Smelling the frost on my father’s coat, having snowball fights.

Loss walks with me, always has. I resign myself to my two worlds, but I long for the one I cannot have. Winter brings out my melancholy. Yearning increases with the dying of the light. And I long most of all, to undo myself for a while. Stop time for a sleep and dream of what I’ve lost. The sea, the fields, the land I belonged in. My father.

I love the life I have, and the people I have in it. But I think I would be happiest if every once in a while – a couple of days a month perhaps, I could simply unexist myself for a while. Dissolve into light, into air. Become something stark and ordinary. The shadow of a tree, the flight of crows.

He was wrong. His wife and children managed to leave the city in the last plane that was taking off. It was a cargo plane. They fled with only the clothes on thier backs and a handbag with their passports and a single doll. Sometimes, that’s all you get to take of a life you have had, or built. But when you consider the alternatives it is more than enough.
But he was trapped and spent the siege living in a larder (the only space in the house with no windows) living off raw flour, ripping up the hardwood floors to burn for heat (when he ran out of books to burn) and when there was nothing else to eat he chewed his shoelaces and the leather of his shoes. Even though he was in his thirties, during the time he spent in that self-imposed sanctuary and prison his hair turned completely white.

In the end, he got away. A Muslim friend of his managed to smuggle him out of the city and the country somehow. He was still alive, and he went to the new country to be reunited with his family and begin his life all over.

As winter draws in, and deadlines loom and the light dies earlier and earlier, I like to go back to this. Sometimes things turn out all right. Sometimes Hades turns a blind eye and we are permitted out of the Underworld. Occasioanlly the lost father is saved, and returned. Lives can be begun again. Sometimes you love and keep on loving. The tidal waves of rage and heat and grief that sweep through the collective don’t always destroy everything . Some friendships can survive a war, and vestiges of love and decency populate the jagged islands of our grief.

In January it will be a year since my grandmother has died. In some ways she died in October 2006 when her grasp on sanity started to slip and the person whom I thought of as my grandmother – that sharp-minded woman – just began vanishing, her mind taking more frequent and longer unsupervised jaunts. In some ways this was distressing – as when she began to relive the deaths of her children all over again, and would walk around the house demanding to be taken to them and not believing us when we told her they were buried. But in many other ways it was a pleasant change. She had by then outlived all her family and her friends, so for the first time in a decade she had a rich and fulfilling social life again.

The last time I saw her was in July 2007. She was very far gone. I spent a lot of time pretending I was different dead people and patting invisible dogs. I also spent a lot of time reassuring her that I hadn’t given birth to the baby and left it unsupervised somewhere. On the last evening we spent together we sat snuggling on the couch, listening to records of Gipsy songs and I mourned the woman I was losing, and the one I had lost and all the stories she could no longer tell.

My grandmother had a long and fractious relationship with death. She had tried to kill herself for real in her late thirties after her son had died and her hair turned white overnight. Someone had always managed to rescue her though, and I guess at one point she decided a la Dorothy Parker that she might as well live. But never being one to waste a good manipulation tactic she started predicting her imminent demise when she turned 60 (usually on the basis that she had dreamt of some deceased friend or relative who had come ‘to take her away’ or inform her that ‘it wouldn’t be long now’). I remember when I moved to England (she was in her 80s) she began every letter she sent me with ‘This will surely be the last letter you receive from me, because soon I will be dead’.

Ironically the woman who cried death outlived everybody (including her remaining child) and was so ridiculously, robustly healthy that in a way I thought she would never die. For all her assurances that old age was hell and that nobody needed her and that death would be a pleasant change she still clung to life with a mix of stubborness and spite and tenacity.

Until she turned 99 and began to get lonely and tired and spent a lot of time looking at photos and staring into space in a heartbreaking way.

Her birthday, last year’s October was her last lucid day on Earth. She got a phonecall from the President congratulating her on turning 100, and flowers, and a newspaper crew who came to interview her and everybody made a great fuss. She was delighted, and after that she more or less simply faded away. Spent most of her time sleeping, biding her time. She perked up to hear the baby was born and then a week later she passed away. And that was that. The end to that long life.

In some ways it hasn’t sunk in. Because she spent so long fading away, and because we lived apart her death hasn’t impacted my life visibly and I still catch myself thinking “I must call her”. And then I remember.

In Belgrade we’ve moved to a different house, so the rooms don’t echo of her. But sometimes some wave sweeps over me and my throat contracts like a heart and I find myself burying my face in her sweater. I know her coat and blouse in my closet are not phantoms, or sad soldiers on a battlefield but I still can’t bring myself to look at them for long all the same.

Mourning happens in pieces. People break and heal slowly as hearts and I have a whole storing house for grief.

I dreamt of her, the day before she died. In my dream she was sitting in a rowboat on a lake, drifting away. She doesn’t smile or wave, but our eyes meet across the water and we say all that we can say of goodbye.

Adolescents frequently experience themselves as outsiders but I also was one. And it is hard to explain what this felt like to those who were never immigrants, who never had to wait in long queues or answer pointless questions, or justify every aspect of their existence; those who never spent years walking between anger and hope and despair, not daring to put down roots lest they be uprooted; those who were not scrutinised and judged at every turn, who never had to assess their right to be in a place – to all these people I truly was an alien.

While England was not outwardly hostile to me it certainly wasn’t welcoming, and my adolescence in it was permeated with a feeling of not belonging. As though I was a ratty houseguest, grudgingly accomodated and put up with. And in my turn, in my struggle to find my bearings, I alternated between wanting to erase myself as much as possible and wanting to fit in.

It were surely the resilient, hopeful parts of me that propelled me to join drama in my school. It was fun to do, and it made me less shy. Theater appealed because it was another realm and I was always comfortable with make believe. There on that stage, in pretending to be others, I was free to explore who I could be without fear of embarassment, of slipping up and revealing some gaping inadequacy in myself. And as it turned out in the whispery pent dark behind the stage I was free to explore the boys.

The mix of excitement, hormones and pitch black was the ideal environment for physical overtures. And it was there, behind the set on the opening night of my school’s production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that I had my first kiss (French kiss no less!).

In my life pre-kiss I had been so anxious about this as only a pubescent girl can (why has no one kissed me yet? am I that ugly? what if I’m really undesirable? What if I don’t know what to do? What if I’m no good?). But when my kiss came (unexpectedly, shortly before curtain up when I was swept up in the embrace of a teenage boy who had murmured may I kiss you and introduced his lips to mine) it was marvellous. So marvellous in fact that I demanded more kisses right after (and the cast party was basically a two hour snogfest) because I realised that all my fears were unfounded. My body knew exactly what to do, and for the first time in years I didn’t feel awkward. Someone in this godforsaken country desired me, and it was exhilirating.

If I shut my eyes, I can still remember everything. The wave of trembly whooshy giddiness swept through my entire body -from the tips of my budding breasts to my toes. I remember the way my skin tingled and the rush of heat across my face and neck. I remember the tumult of butterflies taking wing in my stomach. I can still remember his hands on my waist and his tongue in my mouth and how each sensation seemed more delicious than the last- how I felt I was becoming unfettered from the earth and taking flight like a character in fairytales- an intrepid princess clinging to the tail of a firebird.

(And later when I caught a glimpse of myself – all shiny eyes and beestung lips and glowing skin- for the first time I thought I saw somebody beautiful).

Later still, when the giddiness and the size of my delicious secret made me feel like I was bursting at the seams and I had to tell someone and I told my aunt that “I had kissed a boy on the mouth! And then again! Only I’m not sure that it was the same boy because it was dark and I didn’t really know what I was kissing. But I liked it alot!” – she was not impressed. (One might even go so far as to say that she was horrified). But I was unstoppable – flying high, buoyed by my first taste of freedom. I had glimpsed a marvellous world, one where my right to be was not called into question.

And for years (until the advent of Him Who Shall Not Be Named) sex and intimacy retained that sense of joyful exploration. Of leaping off into the arms of the unknown. Unafraid and in freefall.

Do you remember your first kiss? Did it meet expectations?

Wakes up in someone. The sirensong in the blood. The yearning for oblivion. The long sleep.

On particularly bad nights I am right back to where I was years ago during the worst of it.

I think of him often, my Georgian cousin who killed himself a couple of weeks ago. Remember the way we were as children (me 2, him 11 or so) digging our fingers into wet sand, playing on the beach. The white horse he had. The tales of their adolescence his twin sister told me the first time I visited Georgia. And the sorrow for his reason for ending it- that he decided at 37 that he had achieved nothing in his life and there was no point in carrying on.

I feel torn, buckling under the crushing weight of double-grief – I am suffocating under the weight of it. I can’t sleep after settling the baby down because I’m too angry and sad so I stay up to cry. Or go to the living room to curl up with Third Cat who nestles herself against my abdomen and purrs and purrs and purrs (she’s lonely now that the baby is here and she’s not allowed in the bedroom, and delights at any opportunity to be given attention).

Realise that I’m cracking inside like the glaciers, breaking down piece by piece.

Sometimes when I think about him memories, fragments of memories surface for me.
An image of a visit to the cemetery some 15 years or so ago, when my mum and I came to lay fresh flowers because it was Dad’s birthday and we ran into my little half-brother with his mum. He was three years old, and all dressed up in neat little outfit completed with a little red bow-tie. He reminded me so much of a teddy bear in his toddlerhood my brother – he was all wide-blue-eyed and open-smiled and utterly, incorrigibly huggable. He was so sweet-tempered, so trusting, so ready to take your hand and follow you home that it constricts my heart to remember it.*

There are other memories, more torturous. Like the memories of my stepdad trying really hard to cheer me up with presents and a trip to the circus. My stepdad who was always courteous and dignified bringing me small gifts of various kinds of stationery (pink pens, I remember, a tiny notebook festooned with white hearts, and a little cardboard box shaped like a house whose roof lifted up)**; knowing in that moment that this was a man who would work hard on being part of my life and that I would need for my part to work on loving him, even though back then I wasn’t ready to love anyone again and I just wanted to unexist.

Remembering my stepdad (in suit, and tie, and polished shoes – a man dignified to a fault) coming to take me to the circus where we sat on roughhewn benches, with our feet on a popcorn-sprinkled sawdust floor). We sat side by side in this awkwardness of him trying very hard to make me happy and me knowing he was making this huge effort and wanting to make an effort ot be happy for him – the whole thing made ever more painful by the presence of the spectre that followed me always and shared the bench with us – the wormhole , the odd-shaped hole that held The Absence of Father In the known Universe.

* Hahaha, please note the extensive use of the past sense in that sentence – he is actually pretty sweet-tempered still for a badass, bitch! young man (I judge him not for I know not to what extremes then enforced wearing of red bow ties in childhood would have driven me.)

**Can I remember where I put my keys? No. Can I remember down to the last detail images of stationery from 20 years ago? Why yes, naturally.

crossposted from typepad until I figure out how to do a feed thing

Death was something that shaped the fabric of my family long before my father had died. It affected all our lives, from even before he was born. In the house where I grew up there were always so many more pictures of the dead than of the living [the dead needing remembering whereas the living were tiresome and under your feet all the time I suppose] .

Grief skips not generations. It gets handed down, like any other legacy. In Eastern Europe we are born with war and grief, and our losses form the fabric of our lives. They trail us like puppies and kittens.
In Eastern Europe life is often cheap and never safe. Fire and brimstone rains down from the sky at regular intervals and one loss begets another until they form a chain stretching all the way back past all love and memory and regret so that it’s hard to say where it all ends or starts.

Perhaps it starts with the boy who died, age 9 and never aged or angered anybody or did anything bad. Whose ghost broke with its nearness, its earnestness.
Don’t cry, the ghost child always said to those who heard it, please don’t cry.

The last time he appears is in a dream. In my grandmother’s dream she wakes up and sees her son playing with a toy truck.
The toy is for my brother, he says for when he’s born. And then though she tries to call him back and stop him he says goodbye and he leaves. In her dream she hears his footsteps across the floor, and then a door opens and shuts, and is gone.

In the morning when she wakes up there is indeed a child’s wooden toy by the bed, and some months later she discovers she is pregnant and in March 1946 she gives birth to another boy and gives him the same name, Giorgi and that is where another grief story starts.

I don’t know what’s the saddest thing. That my father was born and conceived to replace someone, or that he was told throughout his whole life from it’s very beginning how inadequate and second-best and what a failure at it he was. Or that my grandmother was never a whole person after that and could never love anyone [except perhaps the dog] for who they were again.

My own grief stories are different. Most begin with the sudden death of a man whom I loved above all others but never got to say goodbye to.

I was not yet 9 when my father died, but I had no sense at all of myself as a child. No sense either of how someone could simply Stop Being, vanish like water down a plughole.

In the days that followed, my father’s absence got hammered into me continuously with how nice everyone was being. How they went out of their way to show kindness. As though I had suddenly been replaced by a little girl all made of glass. And the long torturous consolation sessions in which my teachers took me out of the classroom and had long chats about what a wonderful man my father was and how we’d all miss him and that if crying would bring him back we’d all cry but crying wouldn’t. I remember that if I concentrated hard enough on the mouth shapes the moving lips of my teachers made then I could block out the sounds of the words themselves and at home I practiced with my mother saying “My father has died” until I could utter it without tears.

I remember crying only once. Sitting in my grandmother’s lap and wailing – just… screaming and sobbing for hours until I nearly drowned in my own pool of tears. She just rocked me and held me in silence. All of our grief was so big it needed a lot of space to show itself. It was no good at sharing.

When I go to the cemetary now, my heart tells me that my father is not there. That I’m just standing on a square of empty earth and that he inhabits the snow and silence and air. But back then, and for a long, long time the graveyard was my black hole. The space I could not go near unless I wanted it to suck me in and crush my bones.

And memory has places which are jagged and raw and lead like nerves straight to the heart. When struck they emit aching and there is one memory which gets me every time:

a green square of paper sellotaped to a gravestone, with a child’s scribble on it, fluttering in the snow and the wind.

The surface stillness may go on for days or weeks or months. And then sometimes, something happens a fragment of thought or feeling or memory erupts from the depths like a leaping marlin.

Today, I was shopping for my Secret Santa present for a collegaue at work, and trying to figure out the maximum amount of chocolate my £3 budget would stretch to, when someone jostled me and the Kinder Egg I had been holding fell. It dropped like a penny, and in that instant of its fall the fragments of memory resurfaced and I understood why it is I had avoided buying Kinder Eggs for well over a decade.

The autumn of 1989. On the eve of my Dad’s brain surgery, my mom was going to the hospital to see him. When he’d spoken to my mother he’d requested something of mine to take with him, so I gave her to take him a small thing. Small enough to be smuggled into theatre in a man’s clutched hand. A tiny plastic trinket really. A Kinder Egg toy.

And then he died. He suffered a massive haemorrhage in the brain, and he went into a coma, and he never woke up. And the impact of it hit the most in little ways.

Like the day after the day after he’d died. And there were quiet, somber people in the living room. My aunt dressed in black. And I was not sure that I could control my voice or my face, so I didn’t want to speak, but I had to come and say hello anyway. My aunt, wordless, offering me two Kinder Eggs. Me, wordless, taking them, and knowing in that fraction of an instant some of the enormity of what had happened. That my aunt who was always so aganst me eating sweets, who censored my consumption of chocolate should be giving me treats now. Not one Kinder egg. But two.

They are not a treat or a distraction, so much as a different kind of sadness. They turn to cardboard and ash in my mouth.

And later still, days or weeks, or months perhaps, for I have barely any recollections of that first year, I was at a friend’s house and he was attempting to cheer me up by showing me his Kinder Egg toy collection. But I don’t ever feel like I summon up the expected admiration.

The lined up toys struck me as something immesurably sad. Like rows of broken eggs. Or lines of corpses on an empty field.

Montenegro is the only place where I rise early- mostly due to the combined necessity of drought and heat. In Montenegro 6am is lovely and fresh and a bit cold. The sky is gentle-coloured and the grass is wet with dew. In fact the only thing that ruins the idyll is the annoying cockrel that screeches every half hour, and whenever he ends up as chicken soup it won’t be soon enough. By 9am the sun is still pleasant but by noon the heat will have become blistering and it won’t let up until about 4. Even the asphalt is hot enough to burn the feet. During those hours even the breeze seems to die.

The sunsets are lovely though. And the nights are alive with stars.

There are memories that are easy for me. Which float on the surface of things. Happy things. There are many of these.

Sitting on the ruined walls of a tall fortress, a sunny moment of May, laughing and listening to the songs from a wedding somewhere beyond the stones and trees. The blue eyes and the smile of the man I am with.

Or earlier. A return to a beloved place. A night of sleeping with my brother on the balcony, exchanging drunken ramblings and watching for shooting stars. Sending wishes with them hurtling through the space.

Or the first time I fell in love. The smell of rosemary and the long tail of a comet in the sky.

My childhood best friend. Our elaborate plans. Climbing trees of the flowering cherry, the wind like a hand in my hair and the flurry of blossoms, pink and white, drifting down. Climbing to the tallest branches. A hiding place beneath the green and white. A shout to the sky. We are Sultans of the World!

A summer place. Playing in the shallows with my father crouched and me standing on his shoulders so that he could throw me into the deep. The moment of flight. And the colour of water diving down, a thousand shades of blue/green. Naming them in my flight-fall. Jade, emerald, peridot, turquoise, aquamarine.

And others before that. Moonrise over the hills. Watching the sun sink into the sea. The end of drought and the hopeful green of everything after the rain.

The summer night of my childhood, black and velvet lit by the countless stars. Lying on the grass or a still sunwarm stone roof to watch them. The naming of the constellations and the immensity of the first thing I fell in love with.

And before that, further down and down. Reaching out a hand to sticky white fruit and watching the world roll by as my grandmother wheels my pram up the hill towards the park. The chubbyness of my knees and the little black shoes I am wearing.

Furtherdown still. Summer and sunlight. Sitting in a playpen in the grass, trying to solve a problem. And then reaching out to grab the net on the pen’s sides and pulling myself up and then letting go. And staying standing for the first time on my own and thinking Why, this isn’t so complicated after all Screeching to summon people to witness my feat and the colour of my mother’s shoes, and the yellow of the dress she is wearing.

And then down down down some more to the very first thing. A sunlit room. Feeling awake and full and happy. Experiencing emotions which seem all-encompassing. Drifting on the waves of happiness that seem to be all the world can contain. Feeling things in ways I cannot explain. Sensing the presence of the man in the doorway way before I can see him. And feeling the happiness attain another level- a greater bliss, and wiggling my limbs and gurgling to let him know how delighted I am that he is here.

And then there are the other memories.
The shadow sides.
The things I don’t like to remember at all.
The ones that hide, are hidden, in the deep.

And sometimes they rise up anyway. No skeletons in the closet for me, but in the sea. In my dreams sometimes, the rattling of their bones. They keep things for me.

The things that often seem so devastating that they can only be remembered in symbols. Whose true names ought not to be spoken.

Being little again, and the helplessness of it in the face of the events that sweep the face of the world, unstoppable. Pleading with God to let my father live, and hearing somewhere inside me in sadness and stillness, a No. Like stone. The rage at it.

Listening to my grandmother tell tales of war and how she had to flee Russia and knowing with a sudden, cold terrible sinking that I would lose my country also. Seeing then as though I was standing in it, villages on fire. And blood. And bullet-bitten stone. Curling up on myself because it’s the only thing I can hold on to. And saying the only thing I can think of. No. Please please please.

As though that has the power to change anything.

As though it could stop a beloved man from dying, being lost with the shutting of a door.

No no no

As though it could stop a country splitting.
Or rolling tides of refugees back into their homes.

No no no

As though it could stop the bombs from falling. Put out all the terrible fires.

No

As though it could stop the violence of a man, or his fist wrapped in my hair which jerks my head back and imprisons me and slams me down.

And no voice, no words for any of it except the chant inside the head.

The shadows of the doorways.
The ghosts under the sea.

The echo that never leaves.

And the only way to survive is to turn them into symbols, something unreal. THe beloved man only an image, a photograph. The refugees a child toy train, a truckload of stacked dolls. The fallen dead are matchstick men. The falling houses are toppling card towers.

And the man, the shadow man? Why he is not a human thing. He is a thing of stone and tin. And I am not me either.
I have abdicated. I have turned myself into the ray of moonlight on the floor.