Fourteen #3
“And even more than liberty, what I want to have is peace.” Irine wiped a finger under her eye again.
Amy pushed the water toward her. Irine ignored it.
“The only time in my life,” she said, “that I almost died was when I tried to claim a liberty that was not actually mine. But for the rest of my life, even when it has been difficult—as long as I have accepted what is possible, I have always had peace.”
Amy looked at her dim, purple-ish eyes.
“I want my daughter to have a good life. This is what all parents want, is it not?”
“Of course,” Amy said.
“That boy of yours,” Irine said, “this is what you want for him, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” she said again.
“Well your boy, your boy in America—he has a good life already written down for him. This is—this means, I am sure you worry, all parents worry, but your child goes to a university that, if I am to believe my eyes, costs more money for one year than I will make in my entire life. And when he is done he will have some kind of job, and he will make his own decisions about what he can do and what he can think and if he fails there will be someone to catch him, correct? You will catch him. Am I correct?”
To push back on Ferry’s advantages or limitations—that wasn’t the point of this, Amy knew.
And anyway Irine was basically correct. Although he had been abandoned, again and again, by his drug-addicted mother.
Although it was possible that he was going to lose her for good any day now.
Although he would spend the rest of his life wondering why she had continued to use even though she loved him.
Yet even with all that, he had been born into a luck that was incomprehensible for most people in any part of the world in any history of it.
A luck she had once assumed would last forever. A house that wouldn’t fall.
“My daughter is brilliant,” Irine said. “She is the most brilliant—she speaks English as well as you can, and although she does not like to do it she can also speak Russian, and she speaks French. And on her most recent exams she got the highest grades in her entire district. Not just in her school. She is studying computer engineering, and the things she knows how to do—I can’t even tell you.
She can do math sums in her head that would take most people ten minutes with a calculator.
She can look up at the stars and tell you the name of every one.
In Georgian and in Greek! She knows more at seventeen than most people learn in their entire lives and she has only just gotten started. ”
“Yes,” Amy said.
“But there are still things that she does not know. Things that she cannot know,” Irine said. “Because she is seventeen.”
“But maybe there’s some beauty in that?”
Irine looked at Amy like she was a moron.
“There is nothing beautiful in that,” she said.
“My daughter believes that it can be different. And what I am telling you is that it cannot be different, and the way to have a peaceful life in this country is to understand that it will not ever be different here. That if you want peace and safety you must compromise with the part of yourself that thought you deserved something more. You must tell yourself—”
And here, Irine seemed to run out of steam. She just stared off in the distance for a moment, over Amy’s shoulder. Her eyes were watery, and her face was ashen.
When Irine began speaking again, her voice was close to a whisper.
“I have tried to tell my daughter what my experience has taught me to be true. She can have a free life somewhere else or a peaceful life here, but she cannot have both. But she will not listen to me. She believes that everything I have lived through is worth nothing.”
It was two in the morning. The cold had seeped into the apartment through the drafty windows and the chinks in the floorboards. But Maia’s world could not be the world her mother lived in. This was not the way the future worked.
Amy thought about the distance between herself and Ferry, what she understood of the world and what he did.
It was true, she knew, that she had seen and suffered through many things that he could not possibly understand.
It was true that the world that she had tried to prepare him for in a million small ways was not the one in which he would live as an adult.
She could not know the world as it would be.
She could not know the world that was his.
But still, she knew how the world could punch you in the gut when you were looking the other way. She did know that!
But she had never told him. She had only wanted to protect him from it.
Through the floorboards, a lone hound started to howl, and then another joined in, howling and then barking manically.
“She is home,” Irine said.
Clomping up the stairs, opening the door. Maia in her beautiful gothness, her dyed black hair loose around her shoulders, makeup smeared down her face, her kneesocks ripped, her leather jacket looking way too thin for the weather.
“Shen gadats’q’vit’e sakhlshi misvla,” Irine said.
Maia nodded. “I just wanted to let you know I’m alive.”
“You wanted to let me know? Ras guliskmobt?”
“Before I go out.”
“It’s two in the morning!” Irine said. “Bad midikhar!”
“Out,” Maia said.
“Maia,” Irine said, and she sounded so tired. “Maia, please.”
“Maia, maybe you should stay here?” said Amy, even though she had no business saying anything.
“Maia, gtkhov. Gtkhovt shets’q’vit’ot es.”
“No, I’m not staying,” Maia said. “I just wanted you to see I’m alive.” She turned and went back down the stairs.
The downstairs dogs began to howl again.
In the dim light of the pendant lamp, Irine’s face stayed unchanged.
She lit another cigarette, and Amy watched her smoke it.
There was nothing she could say to change anything and nothing she could say that would help, so she said nothing.
And of course she didn’t like this woman with the heart problem chain-smoking in the middle of the night, but who was she to stop her?
When her cigarette was smoked to the filter, she stubbed it out and poured the water glass over the smoldering ash tray.
Then she stood and pulled the string on the pendant lamp, extinguishing it.
Still, the moon beamed in through the kitchen window, so Amy wasn’t in total darkness.
She was able to watch Irine’s thin form as she stood, rinsed her hands in the dripping sink, and disappeared up the stairs.