The years of persecution as retold by my mother is a litany of the men who have insulted her, done wrong by her. She began to relate the episodes, short scenes, backwards in time, and I imagined that if she spoke long enough, ultimately, she would return to the story of her marriage to my father. The episodes are familiar, like an old folk song. Though some episodes are new, they don't seem new, they are all similar, just variations on a theme.

She began with a new one, not much different than the others, with a doctor who sat beside her at a dinner party talking to the other guests about emphysema. At some point she interjected something, challenging him, something which she had just read in that week's Science Times section of the New York Times, which she reads religiously daily, and he retorted, "what do you know about medicine."

Another, which I'd recalled her telling me on the phone a few months earlier, was a very religious man who in his very religious way seemed to be wooing her with a sabbath meal, which he carried up eight floors to her apartment, regaling her with a several course meal, full of sabbath song, until late in the night, longer than she wished to entertain a guest, sitting and singing more sabbath songs, when she would have rather been sleeping.

There was one she retold, which I remembered from years back, about an artist she was interviewing for an article she was working on, who she suspected was interested in her. And one of the days she spent simply observing him working in his studio, when he ordered in Chinese food for lunch and didn't even offer any to her.

And she went on, while I peeled carrots in her kitchen, feeling exhausted and hot, finding myself growing depressed, that depression that comes from unmet expectations; I had been excited to come back home, but not to this. She too seemed to grow embittered in her tone as she droned on, the words I had long stopped paying attention to. "What does this all have to do with anything?" I asked.

"Well," she mused aloud in her same thoughtful tone of voice. "What all these men have in common, is that they are all men who somehow passed through my life, and they were all just full of bullshit."

Predictably, if I let this continue, the stories would be about my father. I opened the kitchen cabinet where I knew she kept aspirin, and took out a bottle. "What are you doing," she asked as I had clearly intruded, since beside the aspirin were the brown medicine bottles which held her anti-depressants.

"I have a headache and I need to lie down." I went to my old bedroom and lay on the bed. I realized I’d only been at my mother’s house for an hour, but it had already seemed too long, impossible to stay longer, and I needed to leave. Leave not just her house, but this family, this history, this past, to stop listening to these old stories which just repeated themselves like a broken record driving everyone crazy. I wanted to go back to my place in Tashkent and I concentrated on the peace, the quiet there and the pounding in my head subsided, I felt a cool breeze coming in through the open window and I felt myself drifting into sleep.

Before long, mother started calling my name from the kitchen. And I closed my eyes, pretending I couldn't hear. The thing is, everytime I would come to her home, she would shout across rooms, usually just to ask you to do something like clear the table or take out the garbage, and she would call and call until you responded. It had gotten to the point that I'd even just imagine her calling across rooms, like an aural hallucination, and I'd gotten into the habit of not coming, but surely enough, she would come to the door of wherever it was I was ignoring her call.

"While you're here, can you clean out your closet? There's too much stuff in in it. When I open it, things fall out.” I responded weakly in the sweetest voice I could muster, "do you mind if I rest for a while? I've had a long flight over and I'm tired." I thought, maybe I could take advantage of the time at my mother's, where there really was nothing to do, to get some rest and be fresh for the evening, when I'd see my sister and some friends at some exciting restaurant downtown.

"Look at this closet," she openned the door of a closet, piled with boxes and bags of proably old homeworks and diaries and term-papers from ages ago. "Your things are in it, your brother's things are in it and it's a complete mess."

"Sure, mom, I just need to rest a bit. Could you please let me rest."

"You can't just leave a mess here like this and then run around the world as you please. I have to live with this mess that you leave behind..." she began to raise her voice. "I could just as easily throw it out."

"Then throw it out, if that will make you happy," I said and even with my eyes closed I could feel her still standing at the door glowering.

"You should show some respect," she said perfectly calmly in that calm before the storm voice, and I was beginning to feel like I was yet another character in one of her stories. Surely enough, she reverted to a shrill tone, "I dealt with your father's disrespect for years, with him shitting on me for years. I don't tolerate that from anyone anymore."

Finally, I sat up, uncertain. There was not going to be a discussion here. I had no option but to clean out the closet in order to get some peace in this house -- and there was no rest to be had here. "You're acting so strange," I said. "Why must you make such a big deal of this -- I came off a plane yesterday, is it disrespectful to want to rest a bit?"

"No, I think you're acting strangely. I think you're a little touched. Maybe being over there for so long has affected you." She definitely knew how to touch a chord, because in my mother's house I felt that perhaps I was crazy. I felt like Alice in wonderland, growing big, growing small, being an adult and then being a child again. I walked past my mother standing in the doorway of the bedroom, to the front door of the apartment, where my knapsack and my sneakers were. From behind me, I could hear her ranting, "I'm not taking this kind of disrespect anymore, from now on," and "Where do you think you're going?"

I picked up my shoes, didn't even put them on, just figured I'd put them on once in the elevator or in the staiwell, opened the locks on the door and walked out. I could hear her continued shouting while I walked away, thinking of how many times over the years, the same conversations, the same demands to do housework, and how I always did it, since childhood. But as a child, there was never any place really to run; you could storm out of the house and, at the end of the day, return back for dinner, despite whatever might have transpired. That was where you had your meals, so you had to go back. And your parents could always expect you back.

But things had changed. I didn't live here, I didn't eat here, not in this apartment, not in this country. Perhaps my mother had forgotten that, forgotten that I'd grown up. And I didn't know when I would see my mother next. I wondered if I had made an irreversible mistake. Maybe she was right, maybe I had become a little crazy living overseas.

Labels: The persecution of the jews

  ¶ 12:41 AM