Between Dog and Wolf by Sokolov Sasha; Boguslawski Alexander;

Author:Sokolov, Sasha; Boguslawski, Alexander; [Sokolov, Sasha; Boguslawski, Alexander;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sex, parties, students, college students, Fiction, Donal Ryan, Dublin, Amsterdam, suicide, motherhood
ISBN: 9781843516156
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

My grandmother’s reverie for love came from the fact that she had found it at seventeen and it had taken her from a claustrophobic home where, as the eldest girl, she cooked and cleaned instead of going to school, and into the exciting life of my grandfather’s attic room. They had survived the war together, the confusion of it, the instability of it, the fuddle and shifting of rights and wrongs, the pervading, constant fear for your own life. My grandfather was the love of her life. For my grandmother, love, for both sexes, was the ultimate goal and the ultimate achievement; without that, everything fell apart. For her, my mother’s failure was in love. She had chosen the wrong man, or failed to keep him, and her bad motherhood was merely an extension of that.

Brian was not an escape for me, though. I was not running from a home, a mammy and a daddy and a set of moral codes, but searching for it. For my grandmother, freedom was the goal, an opening out from the ideas of her parents, but all I wanted was some of those rules, constraints, some idea of order, some daddy to pat my head. He was just like my mum though, a child himself and unfixable. I know all that, all the things Amelia would have said to me if I had told the truth to her.

What my grandmother said to me, the night I turned up on her doorstep with mascara on my cheeks, semen in my pants, and a backpack, was: ‘Well, who is right for you then, Cassy? Who will love you my darling? You will need someone to love you.’ My grandfather said nothing. We read together the next day as we used to. Two days later though, he interrupted the dinnertime quiet with, ‘I have been thinking Cassandra – Pouske and I, we were actually through a lot you know? When I think on it … but I think we were all right. We could come through it, because we were together. You can come through a lot if you are together.’

I try to finish up these thoughts before I get up this morning, so that I don’t carry them around with me all day. It is nearly 2 PM, though. I need to get up soon. I suddenly see my life the way an old person might see their last years: a dragging on of time after the real living has been done. No one knows whether I get up today or not. It makes no difference.

It was not gentle and good the way some love looks, but at least with Brian I was living, I was feeling things. And little details, like what we had for breakfast, mattered.

I remember the number. I call him and hang up and then I call again. This time he answers quickly.

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