In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin

Author:Kim Chernin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 2004-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Rose Garden

The dream does not leave her face as we get out of the car and walk down toward the Rose Garden. I catch traces of it clinging to her eyes, the corner of her mouth, smoothing the faint traces of bitterness or grief which have left their characteristic mark, here and there, in the expressive tracery of her face. I am completely under her spell. The dream enters me, too. I feel what others must feel when she speaks in public. What I as a child felt, receiving from her this heritage. “In your own lifetime it will come,” she used to say to me in moments of closeness. “Can you imagine? You will live to see the revolution even if I do not.”

The day is warm. Arm in arm, we stand looking down over the rose garden at the bay. Below us, where the houses begin again, smoke rises in an unseasonal spiral and drifts in long, indolent wisps over the slate rooftops. It is early; few cars pass behind us on the street. The morning light is laid out everywhere like a sacrament.

She clasps my hand beneath both of her own, patting mine with a gentle rhythm as we walk down the steep, sloping concrete path between the first rows of bushes. But now at the edge of the garden she stops walking. “This, is the hardest work I’ve ever done. It might be easier to build the new society than to do every day this talking we are doing.”

“To say nothing of the fact that we stayed up so late.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? This tiredness comes from remembering. All these years, some things I put away from me. Now in our talking they are coming back.”

“Nina, you mean?”

“Nina, my mother, the dream we had. Everything.” She repeats the names of the flowers from the small signs beneath the bushes. MARMALADE. GREEN SLIPPERS. And now she stops with pleasure. “Rose of Freedom,” she reads, pointing to a dark, tense flower that has not yet opened. A trickle of water runs between the bushes; she bends down, wets her fingers, and sprinkles a handful of drops over the flowers.

Now, very carefully, she opens her purse, peers inside, rummages about until she finds a carefully folded handkerchief with a thin strand of pink and green embroidery at the edges. She pats her fingers dry and hands the handkerchief to me. “There,” she says, “you can see the work my mother would do. If she would write me a letter always something would be folded inside. This one came maybe for your sister. Now I give it to you.”

She is gazing at the flowers, her lips moving, repeating the names of the roses perhaps or finding the lullaby that has been haunting her all morning. And then: “Rose,” she says, as if with this single word she brought them into being. “For this flower I am not certain we had a Yiddish name.

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