“My world was tiny.”
—Isaac Babel, “The Story of My Dovecote”
to Ofelia Slomianski
It is two days before the mother will die. The son is sitting next to her in the living room of her spacious Mexico City apartment, right across from the Perisur shopping center. It is scorching hot: the windows are wide open. He is holding her skeletal hand as she looks unforgivingly into the empty space. What does Irma see? Does she register any sound? With the disease devouring her memory, her extraordinarily varied world is being reduced to a bare minimum.
A few months ago, in a sudden resurgence of intellectual stamina, Irma asked the nurse to phone her son.
“Irma has questions,” the nurse said. “She wants to know why she isn’t at home.”
“But she is at home,” the son replied.
“She doesn’t think so,” the nurse said. “Irma also wants to know when Isidoro will be released from prison.”
“Lemme talk to her.”
The son listened to the mother complain. “Isidoro is coming back. The police released him this morning.”
“Why?”
“He served his sentence. Estuvo en la cárcel. I will finally see him.”
“¿Dónde está papá?” she said when the son did not respond.
“Ma, he died three years ago.”
Irma changed the subject: “Why am I not in the right place?”
“What is the right place? You are in your house.”
“This isn’t mine. I don’t recognize any of my things …”
“Are you talking about the house in Copilco? That’s probably it. You haven’t been in that house for 30 years. You and Pa sold it. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t.”
This conversation took place while the son was still almost 3,000 miles away. Prior to it, Irma was barely able to enunciate half a dozen words: “sí,” “por qué,” “te amo” … All of them appeared anodyne to him, since the mother was always the owner of a rich memory and a superb vocabulary. She spoke many languages, he forgets exactly how many: Yiddish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, and Spanish. Maybe Russian and Ukrainian. During her university years, she learned Kiliwa, Mazatec, Nahuatl, Totonac, and Tzotzil. Once her husband died, though, all of them vanished, were erased, wiped out. And Irma lost a reason to live.
Then, just as magically, the mother falls back into a deep silence, and the phone appears dead.
Is this truly Irma’s apartment? The son is uncertain. With the mother under a spell, nothing feels normal. He has flown down to be next to Irma. In the hours since he arrived, the one language she responds to is Yiddish. The son talks to her about when she was a little girl in Colonia Álamos, the daughter of Polish immigrants, about the synagogue she attended until she got married, about her husband, who was a famous photographer and whose work is housed in international collections, about her three children (Irma hasn’t seen the middle one for years). He shows her family albums and also reminisces about her ethnographic research in Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo. Yet nothing generates even a passing facial gesture: Irma is as if dead.
Through the mame loshn, images appear to come back. She asks the son to sing for her. He is atrocious at keeping a tune, but the Yiddish melodies do come out of his mouth with a certain rhythm.
Irma smiles. She wants him to repeat “Tumbalalaika” not once but a zillion times. He opts for a YouTube version. The mother herself used to sing “Tumbalalaika” to the son to put him to sleep when he was little.
The roles have been reversed.
The son tells himself that if the mother has learned anything, it is how to love. But maybe she has learned it too well. Her love was pure but was, as experienced by others, sharp, unforgiving. Through love she could devastate others, erase them from existence. For an entire decade—or was it
longer?—the mother didn’t talk to the son. Utter silence. All those languages, for what? Irascible, she exiled him, and his family, from her inner circle. Why? He wishes with all his heart that he could ask her now, yet this isn’t a time for reckoning. She loved Isidoro. She loved her friends. She loved life. She surely loved the son, too.
He wonders what this Russian-Jewish song is about. He has never thought about it: a young lad who thinks the whole night long whom to take and not to shame.
Meydl, meydl, kh’vil bay dir fregn,
Vos ken vaksn, vaksn on regn?
Vos ken brenen un nit oyfhern?
Vos ken benken, beynen on trern?Tumbala, Tumbala, Tumbalalaika
Tumbala, Tumbala, Tumbalalaika,
Tumbalalaika, Shpilbalalaika,
Tumbalalaika, freylekh zol zayn.
Irma mumbles the next stanza, in which a boy asks a girl what can grow without rain, and what can burn without end, and what can yearn and cry without tears.
Perplexed, the son recalls a scene, decades ago, in which he was asked by Irma to buy bread at the corner market. It was late in the afternoon. He walked on his own, without much concern, chose a loaf from the shelf, paid for it, and started back. On the way, he saw a beautiful young girl. Was she new to the neighborhood? She looked at him from behind a tree. Every morning, the school bus passed in front of the market on Avenida Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, then made its way through the labyrinthine roads of Coyoacán. Although he would look for her for days, maybe months, he never saw her again. So what made him think of her, that girl whose image now seemed bucolic, even angelic? Was the girl bronze-skinned, or was his memory playing tricks? Did it make a difference?
He built his life away from the mother. Should he have stayed in Mexico City? Did the mother think of him as a prodigal son or as a traitor?
The son looks up: Irma is focused on a large framed photograph hanging near the kitchen. It depicts her husband on a pier. She is comforted.
Irma’s body is near its end. After singing, she says something to him and the nurse, who is always in the kitchen getting medicine ready, something barely intelligible. The son wonders if the mother has been waiting for him all this time. It’s been months since he last visited the apartment. Did she want to sing “Tumbalalaika” together one last time?
It won’t surprise him how painful the next couple of nights will be. Irma will stop eating. There will be a traffic jam, one of those typical on a Monday afternoon. The palliative care doctor will get stuck on Avenida Periférico, unable to deliver a dose of morphine. The son will go back and forth, leaving her for short intervals, overwhelmed with guilt—even though at a conscious level, he doesn’t recognize this—that she might die in Mexico City without him at her side.
“Tumbalalaika” will keep replaying in his head. The son sang the lyrics to his children when they were growing up. He has been to concerts in which it is the most popular song on the program. We carry messages across time, he will tell himself.
Irma spent a lifetime accumulating knowledge. In the end, the effort seems inconsequential, for all will be lost. The son thinks that in life we build things in order to destroy them and destroy them in order to rebuild. He is aware that, with Irma passing, any connection to their shared past will be grounded in him alone.
Though he sees himself as uncourageous, he will face the mother’s death stoically. It will unfold as if through a veil before his eyes. After her last breath, the mortuary committee will be notified. Less than half an hour later, the mother will be retrieved from her deathbed. When the son will kiss her one last time, he will try to come up with an assortment of words—anything, in any language, to express his emotions. How do you say “lips” in Dutch? Lippen. “I love you” in Polish? Kocham cię. “I don’t understand” in Tzotzil? Mu xha’i.
“Foolish lad,” he fantasizes Irma saying, “why do you have to ask?” Knowing exactly what comes next, he himself utters: “A stone can grow, grow without rain.”
His memory, also fallible, is a source of anxiety. Hasn’t he begun forgetting where he leaves things? Is it part of the normal cycle of aging, or is the same illness beginning to make itself felt in him? Is he doomed to suffer just as the mother has suffered, and will he speak incoherently to his own children when they come to him at the end?
“¿Dónde estás, Mamá?” the son will want to ask her before she departs. “Lemme talk to you. I know you have questions. The Torah is deeper than a well. You will rejoice the moment Papá comes back from prison to fetch you. Be patient and you will see him soon. He will elope with you, just as he did when you fell in love with him. Do you remember? Love can burn and never end. Papá will now take you to your real home.”
And then, “Is it true, as ‘Tumbalalaika’ claims, that a heart can yearn and cry without tears?”
Mostly the son will want to tell the mother not to forget him, though he knows it is the other way around. He will realize that, since he arrived in Mexico City, he hadn’t shed a single tear.
He will be at peace.
