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The old man was in the graveyard again. Vera could hear him singing and humming to himself, the top of his olive green porkpie hat occasionally popping into view over the hydrangea bushes that separated her yard from the cemetery property.
She put down her needlework and listened. Snatches of Tosca floated on hot humid air, the old man’s quavery tenor breaking into moments of unexpected clarity, hinting at its evident former melodious grace. Vera recognized the aria – the rebel artist Cavaradossi’s plaintive pre-dawn meditation on his short life and doomed love, while he sits, sleepless, awaiting his execution. It was an emotional moment that transported her into the mood of the opera’s closing scenes: salvation betrayed, and Tosca’s melodramatic fatal plunge into the turbid Tiber river below. It was never clear to Vera whether the tempestuous diva understood, at the end, how much of her story traced back to her own jealous, suspicious nature, how much her own actions affected the tragedy of her life
The lemonade Vera sipped was tepid. The glass, covered in condensation from melted ice slipped from her fingers onto the grass beside her lawn chair. Vera sighed. She picked up the glass and headed for the kitchen.
She rinsed out the glass, filled it with ice cubes, poured lemonade from the blue ceramic pitcher she kept replenished all summer long. She turned toward the door, then impulsively reached for another glass and filled that, too. She walked out past the lawn chair, stepping around the ants swarming at the remains of her spilled drink, through the wrought iron arched gate and down two stone steps into the graveyard.
She had not come this way for a long time, three years or more. The last time, Sven had walked with her through the old section that sloped away toward the stand of birches ringed with wildflowers. The children’s cemetery. The tiny plots were haphazardly arranged, filling in the available space in no particular order. Working the stony soil around prehistoric glacier boulder deposits was clearly more practical than lining up the dead children in walkable rows. Most of the graves dated from the mid- to late 1800s. No one tended them, crabgrass and weeds receiving only intermittent attention from the hired teenaged caretaker. Many of the headstones were cracked, worn smooth by the winds of the last century and a half, or pocked by acid rain, some heaved askew by decades of freeze and thaw cycles.
Sven and Vera had picked their way among the graves, noting the dates and ages in silence. Hannah, 1848-1851; Noah, 1867-1872; Elizabeth, 1850-1861; Ebenezer, 1860, three days old. Finally, Sven had grown impatient.
“This is morbid,” he had said, stepping around a broken angel’s wing partially concealed by flowering ragweed. “What’s the point?”
“It’s history, Sven,” Vera had replied, more primly than she had intended. “Evidence of hard times, disease, a precarious existence, statistics made real. Can’t you feel the heartbreak here?”
“No, I can’t.” He had gone back to the city then, to the apartment, no longer secret, that had precipitated their separation six months before. They had parted amicably, like mature enlightened individuals moving on to the next phase of their lives. No dramatic scenes, recriminations, accusations, tears. Just a bittersweet lingering sense, for Vera, of undeniable failure, of idealism undermined by narcissistic temptation. With Sven’s duplicity revealed, their once open arrangement sank to the level of ordinary bourgeois expectations, and could no longer be maintained.
Still, it puzzled Vera that Sven, the philosopher, had not recognized the larger implications of their midlife breakup.
“If we can’t do this on an individual level, if we can’t, in the end, be genuinely truthful with one another, then what hope is there for society? How do we ever achieve a world without war?”
“Maybe we don’t. Maybe we have an elemental need for deception, and for war. Being genuinely truthful may not be all that desirable. It can be suicidal for corporate executives and government leaders.” Sven had raked a manicured hand through his abundant white hair, in a gesture that would remain frozen in time and memory for her for years to come. “Sometimes a thing is just what it is, Vera,” he had said, not unkindly but without smiling. “Sometimes it stands for nothing but itself.”
They stayed in touch, but she knew then that he would never come to her country house again.
“Would you like some lemonade? It’s such a hot day.” Vera extended the glass to the old man. He had stopped singing. Had he heard or sensed her approach?
“Thank you,” he said, with a polite nod, a slight, courtly inclination of the head reminiscent of the old-world manners Vera had been exposed to among people of her parents’ generation.
“Your wife?”
“Fifty-seven years.” He looked up at her, meeting her inquiring gaze with watery hazel eyes. Vera noted the immaculate green workshirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow to expose sinewy, still muscular arms, the matching twill pants faded at the knees but sharply creased and pressed.
“I am Vera. I live right there, the other side of the fence.” She wiped the moisture off her palm on her unbleached cotton skirt, extended her hand.
“Arturo diGiacomo,” he replied formally. His fingers, gripping her hand, were calloused but surprisingly smooth, like warm polished wood.
They sipped their drinks in silence. “You come here often,” Vera finally observed, not knowing what else to say.
“Every day. I come every day,” Arturo looked away, as if embarrassed by the admission. “Where else I got to go?”
“Did you and …Rosa have children?” Vera glanced at the headstone for the name.
“My boy, he die forty years ago, in Vietnam, 1967. M I A,” he pronounced the letters distinctly, placing each syllable into the air between them. “Then the Army say, no, he is dead. But no body, just two medals.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling awkward in the presence of so much sorrow.
“You got kids?” Arturo squinted into the afternoon light.
Vera considered. Does a daughter who denies her mother’s existence count? “No,” she said. “No kids. Only me.”
Only me, she thought, giving in to unexpected emotion, a wash of feeling like a wave catching her in the back of the head, hard and cold. Everyone she loved was gone: parents, brother, dead. Solange, best friend from childhood, taken by cancer. Nina, the third of their tight group, immersed in a late marriage that seemed to exclude everything but her menopausal passion. Vera’s own unforgiving daughter, shaken by the unwanted knowledge of her mother’s youthful infidelities, good as dead. Do you even know who my father is? Or are you only reasonably sure, like hippie parenthood by committee? The words were still fresh, their sting unabated all these years later; their gross injustice was irrelevant in light of the damage done to an already tenuous connection.
And Sven. And Sven. Not dead, no, but irretrievably gone.
“I lost my father two years ago,” she said, suddenly feeling that most recent departure sharply among the others. Lost, indeed, to his private world of anger and grief when her mother died, lost in his retreat to solitary pursuits, his stamp collecting, his perpetual tea drinking, his obsession with chess (by correspondence with other loners), his nostalgic inner life fed by the record collection of old Russian songs played at low volume every waking moment. And now she missed all that, along with the grudging but beatific smile, all the more precious for having been so rarely available to her.
“Go talk with him,” Arturo suggested. “He is here?” He motioned at the graves all around them.
“No, not here, but not too far. About thirty miles,” she replied.
“Me and my Rosa, we talk every day.” He handed Vera the empty glass. “Thank you for the drink.”
*
The cemetery at the Russian Orthodox convent, where all the members of Vera’s family were buried, was laid out on an orderly grid. Grassy footpaths separated rows of headstones and crosses, the terrain crisscrossed at regular intervals by packed dirt roads just wide enough for hearse, backhoe, or visiting car. The property consisted of the cemetery , a modest church, a few rental cottages, a small brick nursing home , two three-story wooden buildings that housed a handful of elderly nuns and held the convent office and dining room. All of it was surrounded by a stone wall four feet high, and a swath of forested land, the trees receding slowly but inexorably at the far end to make room for more graves.
Vera’s father’s grave was in the military section, among the Cossacks and war heroes, anti-Soviet resistance fighters, and their wives. She thought it ironic, her father (no Cossack), having, by his own account, never even held a weapon, let alone seen combat. Pacifist or coward, she was not sure which described his status more accurately. It was a matter of perspective that she had been left to consider on her own; he would not talk about it. But his name was listed among General Vlasov’s idealistic (some said deluded) followers, who found refuge in Europe and then America, after Germany was defeated, World War II ended, and it became clear that return to Stalin’s Russia meant death, either by hard gulag labor or ready firing squad.
She walked slowly among the familiar graves, past the sky-blue memorial chapel with its gilded miniature dome and Orthodox cross and perpetually lit votive candles. Some headstones displayed framed photographs of mustached fighters in full regalia, one or two on horseback, in knee-high boots and long coats, chests adorned with loaded cartridge belts, managing to look, she thought, ferocious and somehow ridiculous at the same time. Some of the early graves, dating from the 1950s, were more humble, marked only with a name on a painted white wooden cross, with late 19th century birth dates. Many of these appeared neglected, left to the care of the aging nuns when family members died or moved away.
Vera’s parents lay side by side, the plots spanned by a single granite headstone inscribed in simple Cyrillic letters. No photographs or inspirational messages, no carved flowers or angels. Before each, she had planted a rosebush, white for her mother, red for her father; small white garden stones covered the rest of each bed. Inevitably, weeds had sprung up, pushing defiantly between the stones, resisting the imposition of order on their own chaotic survival impulse.
Bending to pull at a patch of crabgrass, Vera wondered why it was her father she missed so keenly. Was it because her mother had died so long ago, when Vera was in college? Or because her mother had never seemed entirely comfortable with the parenting role, too young, impatient, inconsistent in both bestowing affection and imposing discipline. Vera admitted she had been a difficult child, withdrawn and rebellious, prickly, resentful, and no doubt hard to love. Could her own feelings have been different if she and her mother had grown to know each other as adults? Could she have been a better parent to her own daughter, averting or at least softening the conflict between them?
But her father, too, had never been demonstrative, his love implied, not stated. He had been her intellectual guide, had taught her algebra and geometry long before those subjects appeared on her school curriculum, made sure she had her own library card. “Read this,” he had said, placing a copy of David Copperfield in her nine-year-old hands. “It’s good.” He had read poetry, aloud, to anyone within earshot – reciting Pushkin or Pasternak or the latest contributor to the Russian daily paper. As a teenager, when her spindly height and serious manner had made her uninviting to boys, he had taught her ballroom dancing, stepping out with her onto the floor crowded with couples, making her giddy with joy at having the most elegant partner in the room. That’s enough, she thought. Surely, that’s enough.
The sun was hot on her neck and arms, the sky cloudless, the air unmoving. Vera perched on the corner of a nearby monument, in the welcome shade of a mulberry tree. She closed her eyes. What had seemed like total silence in the nearly deserted cemetery now filled with sound – birds called and replied to one another from the shelter of the woods, cicadas trilled; in the distance, a lawnmower buzzed, a dog barked.
“Papa,” she said out loud, opening her eyes, expecting – what? A presence, some insubstantial sign, some stirring of memory or emotion. Something.
Nothing happened. There were only the birds, the insects, the dog. She gathered her things and went home.
*
Vera opened the back porch door, key in hand, and nearly tripped over the paper grocery sack on the floor. Inside, she could see two eggplants, a few green peppers, some squat spiny cucumbers, a dozen or so plum tomatoes, an aromatic bunch of basil. Arturo, she thought with a smile, depositing the bounty on her kitchen counter.
The next day, it rained. Vera stayed indoors. She changed her sheets, cleaned the bathroom, leafed through knitting books for ideas for a new sweater project. She wanted something complex and beautiful, something she could take her time completing with richly colored, luxurious yarn once the weather cooled; her last several creations had sold for good money at the upscale consignment shop in the nearby artists’ colony.
In the afternoon, she put Carmen on the CD player and went into the kitchen. Humming along with the opera, she made eggplant relish and gazpacho, chopping, stirring, tasting, while the gypsy sang of liberty and love and followed the inevitable course of her own destruction. Vera peeled blanched peaches, rolled out pastry. Carmen died in her jealous lover’s embrace, another victim of heedless self-indulgence, the final impassioned notes of Don Jose’s confession resonating in the aromatic air of Vera’s house as she removed the almond-topped turnovers from the oven. It had been a good day.
By morning, the weather had cleared. Vera walked purposefully across the yard, carrying two turnovers in a clean kitchen towel.
“Hello, Arturo,” she said. “Thank you for the beautiful vegetables.”
“I have too much vegetables.” He fanned his face with his hat, accepting the pastries she held out to him with the other hand. “And I see you got no garden.”
“It was a cold spring, a lot of rain. Then it got too late…” she trailed off.
“Not too late for old Italian farmer like me,” he smiled.
“I went to the cemetery, like you said, to see my father,” she offered , looking away, her eyes scanning the tree line as if looking for something, then coming back to rest on Rosa’s headstone. “He was not there.”
Arturo put his hat back on his head and tapped his chest with two fingers. “Look for him here, in your heart,” he said.
What did that mean, exactly? Look for him in your heart. She had lived her life on impulse, following no discernible plan, no direction, embracing opportunities as they arose – jobs, marriages, trips, lovers. Vera had sometimes felt a reserved admiration – no, a curiosity – about people who laid out their life plan and stuck to it, like commuter trains arriving at well-lit stations according to a prearranged timetable. She had never lived like that, never analyzed her decisions or mapped her moves. Oh, there had been a plan, once, but it had vanished with the last vestiges of her adolescent innocence. Stuff happened to you, things changed, you moved on. Life was now, a maze of unexpected turns that took you ever forward by twists of chance until you hit a dead end, and that was that. The point of life was to live it, she felt – to vibrate like a plucked string responding to an irresistible force. It had never occurred to her to question the source, or the nature, of that force, to know who or what was doing the plucking. She did not, in the end, believe in God.
Thinking about Arturo’s admonition, words formed themselves in her mind, something vaguely remembered about an unexamined life not being worth living. Had she read this, or was it a remnant of a discussion with Sven? In any case, she could not disagree more. What was the point of constant retrospection? No word could be unsaid, no deed reversed. We could strive not to repeat our own mistakes too many times, although this, too, seemed difficult. The impulse for foolish actions seemed to spring in her from the same inexhaustible place, resistant to good intentions or justifiable caution. If she had learned anything along the way, it was that sometimes the best thing to do was nothing at all, until the options became clearer or the obstacles fell away.
Back in the house, she sat at the kitchen table, thinking, ignoring several days’ worth of unopened mail. Arturo seemed content, serene, even, in his grief. Had she ever been content? In the early years of her conventional marriages, yes, to a point. And then with Sven, surely, for a while. But keeping an eye out for adventure precluded ever being entirely satisfied with where you were. It was one thing to think about other people’s sorrow over dead children and departed loved ones, but she knew this was little more than an intellectual exercise for her, like empathetic words murmured at funerals to grieving acquaintances, requiring no emotional investment. It was possible, then, that in the ordinary, compassionate sense, she did not have a heart. The thought left her unmoved, as if she had performed a remote appraisal of someone else, unconnected to her own feelings. Confirming, perhaps, the possibility of its essential truth.
She roused herself from these musings to answer the soft knocking at her kitchen door. Arturo stood on her doorstep, her neatly folded towel held out in front of his chest like a suitor’s offering, a few wild roses laid sweetly across the top.
“Come in, Arturo, sit down” she said, accepting the gift with a smile. She reached up to the narrow display shelf above the sink, choosing the smallest vase for the short-stemmed flowers. No more than a clay cup, really – midnight blue painted with gold stars, its handle long ago broken off and discarded. She filled it with water, arranged the pale pink blooms, ignoring the ineffectual prickling of their spiny stems. She sat, clearing a space amid the clutter, placing the humble bouquet on the table between them.
“You make this?” Arturo asked politely, running a finger along the cup’s uneven edges, as if underlining its obviously handmade appearance.
“Not me. My daughter, in sixth grade…” Vera blushed, aware of her slip even as the words left her mouth, like a child caught in a lie from which there was no hope of escape.
The old man raised a hoary eyebrow. “Your daughter?”
“We don’t speak, a long time now. She – I made some mistakes. She doesn’t like me.” Vera stopped, undecided, not knowing how to explain something so clear in her own mind that resisted any simple verbal interpretation.
Arturo looked up at her. “You not speak? That is big mistake. People need to make peace, more love is good for everybody.”
“What do you know about it?” She was on her feet, her face coloring now in fierce helpless fury. “Is it your business? Just because I can’t spend my life talking to dead people, that doesn’t mean I don’t miss them.” She turned her back on him, hating the unwelcome tears, hating the aching in her throat threatening at any moment to erupt in uncontrollable wailing. Hating the man himself, his diminutive stature, his stocky legs and short arms, his pale rheumy eyes, his balding head, his half-baked old-country wisdom. Who was this meddlesome stupid old farmer, what could he tell her about the vanished, the unfulfilled, the irredeemable? She heard the scrape of his chair, then his footsteps backing toward the door, his voice repeating “Sorry, sorry nice lady,” as if she were a wild animal in need of careful handling.
“Vera!” she shouted at the softly, firmly closing door. “My name is Vera.” She tossed the clay cup into the trash, the soft thunk reverberating in the now silent space of her kitchen, punctuating the ripples of her ebbing anger like a stone in a pond. She paused and studied the contents of her trash can, numbly observed the cup settled among discarded paper towels, bright red cheese rinds, a bread wrapper, the stopper of indeterminate pressed material that passed for a wine cork. She lifted out the cup, shaking the flowers loose into the garbage, rinsed it out and replaced it on the shelf.
Later, as dusk approached, Vera picked up her needlework and went outside. She sat in her lawn chair, deep in mindless reverie, the work untouched on her lap. Gradually, she became aware of movement around her on the grass. Robins, a small flock of them, had settled near her immobile form, flying in one by one as if on assignment. They settled noiselessly on the ground, all facing away from her as if focused on a distant goal. From time to time, one would peck quickly, almost surreptitiously, at the ground, then resume its classic stance: head up, chest out, emitting the occasional low chirp. A signal, a warning?
She watched the birds. They were clearly not aware of her presence, or felt no threat in it. Every few moments, they would move, sometimes in tandem, sometimes individually, taking a few hops and stopping again, but always in the same direction. It seemed mysterious to her, as if the birds were pieces in an esoteric game, driven by a secret imperative toward an undisclosed destination.
***
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