June 24
I see it as if through the opposite end of a pair of binoculars.
It’s me.
It’s me with my arms tightly crossed across my chest.
My hands closed around my shoulders.
My upper body rocking, rocking.
It’s me, rocking and rocking.
The police entered the apartment. My big, heavy child was lying dead in his own blood among the broken chairs, the potting soil, the shards of glass and china, the plant parts, the cake remains, the spilled soda. That’s how I sat, I’d been sitting like that for an eternity already, that’s how I had to stay, I turned to stone sitting like that.
It’s not I who remembers. It is my body. How I was in the hospital later, horrified, horrified. They tried to straighten me out, sometimes by force, sometimes with medications. But my body was a muscle that had twisted itself around my core of horror, my fingers dug into my shoulders as if they wanted to take root there and grow into my skin. The aides cut my nails short and bandaged my hands, but the wounds on my shoulders wouldn’t heal; in a frenzy, my fingers dug deeper into the ulcerated, aching flesh. Hungrily, they ate their way deeper into the pain, I wanted the pain, I wanted to reach it, I wanted to reach it more and more because I had nothing else.
I know that I was limp and barely conscious for long stretches of time because of the medications. But that clutch lived inside me like a memory; I used all my energy trying to reestablish the hold on my shoulder, I fumbled for it from deep inside my blurred state; nothing else was clear to me except that and the rocking, the rocking of my upper body back and forth, being part of a rhythm, a rocking hold, as if something held me, as if I were part of an order.
Sometimes I could hear a thin whine coming from my lips and it frightened me as if an alien lived inside me. I emitted no other sounds. I was mute. I was mute for a long time, months, a year, I don’t know, I’ve never wanted to know much about this. I was in my own world and there was no time in my world, there was no beginning and no end. I was in my place, imprisoned and unreachable, I was inside the boy’s voice, I was filled by it, I was the voice box for his voice to rage through. I was spared the images, I couldn’t see them, they were twisted, dissolved, hacked into something so awful and despicable I could not look at it. But I could hear, and my whole being absorbed sounds and echoes. I heard the boy’s voice, sequence after sequence, I was spit-roasted over his voice as if over a flame, was lowered into it as though into a scalding bath. I heard the boy as he sounded on The Day and I heard him as he sounded when he was newborn and wouldn’t stop crying. I knew I had to sit with my arm muscles tense and tightly crossed over my chest and my hands gripping my shoulders. I had to keep rocking and rocking; it was the only way I could maintain myself.
They couldn’t understand this at the hospital. There, they thought that it was the rocking alone and my stubborn grip that was the source of my insanity, and they put a lot of effort into making me stop. They didn’t understand that, to the contrary, it was the only way I could protect myself from insanity. It was my defense. When they used force trying to straighten me out and even tied my hands, one to each bedpost, I was obliged to defend myself as if they were trying to drown or strangle me. I wrangled and spat and kicked and wriggled, not to fight with the staff but to protect myself from the voice inside, to get rid of the boy’s voice inside me, because it was tearing me to pieces. His voice told me what I was.
There was no way out for me. I was mute. No conversations could save me from my entrapment. The medications they gave me made my horror blurry and dim and made me lose the crucial strength in my arms and legs, made me twitch and shiver uncontrollably. What finally happened, what after a very long time gave me the courage to stop defending myself, was a miracle.
One day, a new aide came to my ward. He came into the room where I sat curled up around myself, rocking. It was late morning and my breakfast tray was still on the table by the window, I suppose he came in to fetch it. He stood there just inside the door and looked at me for a while and I noticed him too, I saw that it was a new face and that he looked so young he was almost still a boy. He also had curly black hair and brown eyes, so just a glimpse of him stirred something inside me. That’s what my boy might have looked like if everything hadn’t happened as it had. Yes, it could have been my boy standing there looking at me, it could have been he.
That’s when the miracle occurred.
He came up to me and put his face close to mine. “Come on, Mommy, let’s go for a walk, you and I,” he said.
Mommy, he said. He’d called me Mommy and the word cut into me like a scalpel, like a razor blade, it cut through all the walls and defenses, straight through me, and everything stopped and for an instant I stopped rocking and sat completely still staring at him.
It was like a sudden thaw, I think, what then happened in me. As when, on a chilly February day, the sun suddenly makes the ice melt from the rafters, and the titmouse starts to chirp. It happens only for a moment, a brief moment in the afternoon, then the cold will once more turn the water into ice. Everything takes a long time, I didn’t immediately release my grasp and I didn’t stop rocking and I didn’t start speaking, but I’d experienced that sudden thaw, I had paused for a moment and seen that aide, that boy, I’d glimpsed his face and brought it into my world. Slowly, for days and months, he made porous the stone I’d become, so wind could blow inside me, water could trickle through, and he finally made me step out of my own frozen grasp, as if out of a building, and take a few steps across the floor. When he came to see me every day, he simply inserted his arm into my hard-pressed elbow and he whispered: Come on, Mommy, let’s go for a stroll. And we did.
June 26
The days pass so slowly here I sometimes don’t know what to do with them. The days went by slowly at home too, but it was simpler there, I was sunk into a kind of meaninglessness in which I wasn’t expecting anything in particular, not from myself and not from life itself. I was in the apartment most of the time, walked around among the tracks and traces, through my dark, unlit city. I felt no real responsibility for how my days passed and what I did with them. My life was unmoored and I guess I thought I just had to accept that.
When I was about to be released from the mental institution, the counselor told me I ought to get a new apartment and move to another part of the city. She said I ought to start a new life and get away from the place where everything would remind me of what had happened, everything that bore witness and whispered of the past. There were neighbors who knew too, she hinted, neighbors with knowing glances I would have to greet on the stairs.
I’ve killed my own life, I’d wanted to say to the counselor, but in reality I just nodded to ward her off.
If I’d been able to speak then, if I’d had the words, I would’ve said that I’d killed my life and there is no new life, no other life, waiting for me. All I have are the traces and ruins from the past and that’s where I’ll be. That the neighbors know what I’ve done is nothing compared with the fact that I myself know.
When I returned to my life in what we call the real world, it was actually comforting that the neighbors knew. That they’d seen the rotating blue lights of the police cars and the ambulances, that they’d read about it in the paper. They also knew that I too had been a mother, they’d seen the boy with me, they’d witnessed our life together and held doors open, occasionally helped me carry things. What was hidden in the way they looked at me didn’t scare me much. The things hidden inside me were what frightened me most, my own story and everything lurking in the darkness where you couldn’t see anything, the hole where my story had been lost.