Her Mother's Hands E-Book

Karmele Jaio

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 197

Beschreibung

Have you ever had the feeling of not truly knowing your nearest and dearest? The precarious balance in the life of Nerea, a thirty-something journalist, breaks down when her mother, Luisa, is hospitalised with total amnesia. Nerea, who feels guilty for not having recognised the symptoms that afflicted her mother, now finds a person almost unknown to her. Luisa is haunted by memories of a romance from her youth and soon Nerea begins to discover that the two women share much more than they believe.Her Mother's Hands is an examination of the deepest human bonds and a beautiful and moving tribute to life.Amaren eskuak is Jaio's debut novel, and remains one of the bestselling books in the Basque literary scene in recent years. The novel has been adapted for the big screen, filmed by Mireia Gabilondo, and presented at the Donostia Zinemaldia, the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

Leseprobe

Contents

About Karmele Jaio

About Kristin Addis

Title Page

Dedication

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Copyright

Karmele Jaio is a Basque journalist and writer. Her first published book was a collection of short stories,Hamabost Zauri[Fifteen Wounds], published in 2004. Since then, she has published other short stories, novels, and poetry. Her short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, includingBest European Fiction 2017, and have been adapted for the theatre (Ecografías[Ultrasound], 2010).Her Mother’s Hands(published originally in Basque in 2006 asAmaren eskuak) was her first novel, and was well received by readers and critics alike. This novel was a bestseller and won a number of awards, including the Igartza Prize and the Euskadi de Plata award. It has also been adapted for film, and was presented at the 2013 San Sebastian International Film Festival.

Kristin Addis has worked for nearly thirty years as a translator. She translates primarily between Spanish or Basque and English, and is one of few who translate directly from Basque into English. She specialises in literary translation, which she especially enjoys, and has translated short stories, novels, and poetry. She has also translated various works about the Basque language and culture. Kristin has spent many years in the Basque Country; she currently resides in Iowa with her family.

Her Mother’s Hands

Translated from Basque by Kristin Addis

Karmele Jaio

For Karmele Eiguren and Joseba Jaio

1

The little girl is on the beach, at the water’s edge. She has built a wall of wet sand and given it the shape of the prow of a boat. She sits inside, gazing at the white waves. Her legs are stretched out in front of her. Her feet are wrinkled, as are her hands. The water advances. A wave attacks the prow from the left but the girl repairs it immediately and remains on her knees, one strap of her bathing suit falling from her shoulder, ready to respond quickly to the next attack. She knows that the sea will win the battle in the end and that the waves will wash away her ship of sand like a tongue licks away ice cream, but even so, she defends her small realm with tooth and claw. With her jaw firmly set.

When Nerea sees herself in the photograph from the beach, it brings back the smell of the summers she spent at the seaside as a child. She smells the cream her mother used to put on her, feels the slide of her mother’s hand putting it on her back. She remembers her father lying under the beach umbrella or walking along the water’s edge, while her mother lay in the hammock. Like today. Her mother is lying down today as well, right in front of her, but in a hospital bed, not a hammock. The old photo she brought to show her mother is in her purse, and she sits without moving in the white hospital chair, looking at her mother’s hands.

Her mother’s hands rest on top of the sheet. Without moving. As if made of stone. As if the blood in her veins had turned to stagnant water. Her hands cover the name of the hospital, as if she wanted to hide where she is. As if even in her sleep, she were trying not to worry anyone. Just as through the years she hid so many sighs and tears, drying them on her kitchen apron, Nerea’s mother is now trying to hide with her hands the wordhospitalprinted on the cloth. But through her fingers she has left part of the word visible.Tal. And Nerea smiles to read it, becausetale means ‘story’ in the language of her husband, and because it occurs to her that ever since her mother was admitted, she has been living in a sort of story. The smile freezes on Nerea’s lips then, as she gazes at her mother’s hands.

Her mother seems to have been living in a story ever since she was admitted. In her eyes one can see little girls playing on the school playground, and hear their shrieks and laughter. When she opens her eyes, she smiles at Xabier and Nerea, but she does not recognise her children. Nevertheless, she smiles at them, and this lightens the load of their sadness a little. Just a little.

Her mother has spent more than a week now between these blue and white sheets, and Nerea thinks if things don’t change much, they may well still be here at Christmas. She and her mother are now alone in the room. Her mother is asleep. She sleeps almost the whole day, like little children do. The bed by the window is empty and only coughs from nearby rooms break the silence. Nerea hears her own breath and her mother’s, in and out, and the sound of their breathing makes it impossible for her to concentrate on reading the magazines she brought, or look calmly at the pictures either. So she sits still, gazing at her mother’s hands. The veins in her hands look like highways full of curves.

These are hands that have sheltered, the way the nest in the branches shelters the bird. Her mother’s hand cupping her chin. This is how Nerea pictures her mother’s protection. Her mother’s hand on her chin in a black and white photograph.

She looks at the empty bed before her and imagines a little girl jumping on it with her younger brother. They are throwing pillows at each other and laughing. Children’s laughter. They fill the room with laughter. She hears her mother’s voice in the distance, asking them not to make noise. The downstairs neighbours will come up. But they keep jumping and laughing, like on the school playground.

Suddenly she sees herself laughing. Jumping on the bed. Her little brother has disappeared from her side. As has her mother’s voice from afar. All of a sudden she leaps upwards and, as if wings had sprung from her shoulders, she ends up high above the ground, hanging in the air. And she sees herself, as if pushed by the wind, flying out the hospital window.

Like a gull that crosses the ocean seeking fish, she flies over the city as if seeking something. After passing over red rooftops and smoky chimneys, she enters the living room of an old house through a half-open window. An old Telefunken television stands in the middle of the room with a framed photograph on top of it. There they are. There she finds her mother’s hands. They are black and white hands and they rest on a young girl’s chin. And suddenly everything goes black and white around her, and she hears a voice from afar, saying ‘Nerea, raise your head,’ asking her to look at the photographer, please, and the smell of those hands enters her nostrils, the smell of bleach and Marseille soap. And she hears a tune. It comes from the kitchen radio. Her mother is listening to the radio in the kitchen and darning her brother’s soccer socks for the millionth time, her glasses on the end of her nose. Nerea closes her eyes and opens them, and again sees her mother’s hand, but now it holds a pencil sharpened with a knife and she is writing the household accounts in an old notebook,tomatoes five pesetas,eggs seven pesetas, and she underlines the total hard, almost breaking the point of the pencil. Now she sees her mother in a bedroom, sitting on the edge of a small bed. She strokes the forehead of the little girl in the bed, while singing her a song. She won’t stop until the little girl falls asleep.

As soon as she hears the singing, Nerea looks at her mother there between the blue and white hospital sheets. But her mother’s lips are not moving. She lies absolutely still in the hospital bed. Nevertheless, Nerea still hears the song from far away. It won’t stop until the little girl falls asleep. And just for a moment, she feels the hands before her caress her forehead. Even though they look like stone.

A telephone call turned her world upside down eight days ago. It might have been nine; she has lost track of time since then, but the moment is etched on her mind. She was walking down the street and the voice on the other end of the telephone hit her in the stomach like a shot. Her legs suddenly stopped walking and she simply stood in the middle of the street without moving, as if a tree had fallen in her path. Just like she used to stop in the middle of the hallway when her mother tried to take her to the doctor as a child, moving neither forward nor back. Feet turned to stone. It is her brother’s voice. They found their mother on the street. Lost. ‘They found her lost like a child,’ says her brother on the other end of the phone. His voice is calm and neutral. He sounds as if he’s reading a report at the office. As if he were afraid that allowing any drama in his voice would suddenly open a reservoir of emotions. He would prefer to have them all seep out through the cracks. Slowly. She calls Lewis and asks him to pick up their daughter from school. She can’t, she’ll explain later, her mother is in the hospital.In hospital.

She arrived at the hospital eight days ago, telephone still in hand. She asked the nurse anxiously if Luisa Izagirre had been admitted, and the nurse had told her that they had taken her from the emergency room straight to Neurology. It sounded like a heavy word. Neurology. At least half a kilo. A pound, as her mother and Aunt Dolores would say. And she truly feels the weight of a one-pound stone on her neck, because even though she hadn’t wanted to accept it, she had been worried that something was happening to her mother. This makes her feel guilty. The first time she saw herself in the bathroom mirror at the hospital, she understood that she was guilty, because she had not accepted – until her mother was admitted to the hospital – that a red flag had gone up, and she had been wondering if something was happening to her mother. But she had done nothing. Like a child, she had stuck her fingers in her ears in order not to hear. The signs were right before her eyes and she hadn’t wanted to see them.

How many times this week has she remembered the day when her mother was making croquettes and lost her train of thought? She had gone into the kitchen in her mother’s house and found her staring at a ball of dough in her hands as if frozen, with no idea whether to put it in the flour, the egg, or the breadcrumbs. As if her mind had gone completely blank for a moment. ‘Mum, in the flour,’ she murmured, and she still doesn’t know how she ever dared to tell her mother how to make croquettes. Tell an Izagirre. The youngest daughter of the Izagirre Restaurant family. Her mother looked right at her, with the dough still in her hand, and it seemed to Nerea she might have stayed like that forever if the pan hadn’t begun to smoke. She still can’t forget the lost look in her mother’s eyes. It’s etched on her mind. When her mother grasped the situation, she smiled to hide her fear, and Nerea smiled back so her mother wouldn’t see the worry on her face. The red flag had been up since then but, like a child, she had covered her eyes with her hands so she wouldn’t see it waving. And now she drags the weight of the wordneurology like a punishment, from the hospital to the office, from the office home, from home back to the hospital, leaving behind a dark trail of guilt. A trail darker than the dark blue worn by fishermen.

Sitting in the white chair at the hospital, she spends the day looking at her mother’s hands as if she believed those hands would speak to her. As if, in those hands, she would find the answers to the thousands of questions she had never asked her mother. As if she would be able to hear the words and thoughts her mother had hidden for so many years. Simply by looking at her hands, the hands that now cover the first two syllables of the wordhospital. She can readtalbetween her mother’s fingers.Tale, a story in Nerea’s husband’s language. Nerea smiles because it seems that her mother has lived in a story since she was admitted, but her smile freezes as she looks at the bed by the window. The sheets are rumpled, as if someone has been jumping on the bed.

2

She wakes with a headache. Her brains are tied in a knot. She was dreaming all night. As she sits on the side of the bed and begins to put on her slippers, she tries to remember what she dreamed, but nothing comes to her. She imagines a giant question mark over her head like the ones in the cartoons Maialen watches. Lewis is still half asleep in the bed. He mumbles something but she doesn’t understand. Not because he said it in English, but because he barely moved his lips. She looks at her husband, waiting for him to speak again, but Lewis says nothing more and goes back to sleep after moving into the now-empty, warm side of the bed. The English must have imperialism in their blood, she thinks. Lewis always takes over her side of the bed as soon as she leaves it empty. Sometimes she thinks he is hoping she’ll get up just so he can have it.

She puts the coffee on and goes to her daughter’s room. Maialen is still asleep. A book has fallen to the floor under her bed. It isAlice in Wonderland, which Lewis reads to her at night. A page folded over when the book fell. Nerea picks up the book and smooths the page with her hand. The page is illustrated. Alice is looking at a cat sitting in a tree and she asks it a question. Nerea begins to read:

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.’

Nerea raises her head from the book. The conversation has made her remember a nightmare from the night before. She also was asking someone something in her dreams and waited for an answer looking up, like Alice. But she can’t remember whom she was asking. Or what she was asking either. Sitting on her knees, she looks at the cat’s wide smile. Until she remembers the coffee. Then she puts the book on the night table and goes to the kitchen. The smell of coffee fills the whole house.

While she drinks her coffee, she can’t get the image of the cat out of her mind. And its smile. If one doesn’t know where one wants to get to, it doesn’t matter which way one goes. That’s what the cat said. That’s stupid, she thinks. It’s stupid to sit here thinking about what a cat in a story said, with all she has to do today. It’s Lewis’ fault. Almost every night he reads a chapter to Maialen while they wait for her to get home from work. She should ask him to read some other story to their daughter, she thinks, before Alice drives them all mad, but she knows what he will say. He grew up with this story, his mother used to tell it to him when he was little, in Oxford, and he wants his daughter to know it as well as he does. Besides, when she’s away from home, she can hardly control what bedtime stories Lewis tells their daughter.

Yesterday she was late getting home. Late home from the office, as usual. Maialen was asleep by then, as she often is. After spending the morning at the hospital, Nerea had spent the entire afternoon in the editorial office at the newspaper since she was on the late shift. Lewis opened the door as she was about to put her key in the lock. Seeing her husband saying good evening by the door made her think of an English butler, he stands so tall and straight, he is so polite, so attentive. The years he has spent away from his country have done nothing to nullify Lewis’ English soul. Even now, when he walks past her, she sometimes thinks she can smell tea and biscuits.

She goes to Maialen’s room and peeks in at her sleeping quietly. It makes her think of the way her mother was sleeping in the hospital.

When she gets home late from work, she always asks Lewis about their day. And when Lewis starts to tell her all about it, she wonders how they would manage if he weren’t home all day working on his translations. What would happen if he worked outside the home too and came home late, as she does when she has to work the late shift at the newspaper? She shivers. That’s why she doesn’t want to think about it too much. She envies Lewis, working at home, playing with Maialen all afternoon, reading her stories at night. But Lewis has often told her he’d rather work outside the home, getting out of the house is often a relief. He says it in English.A relief. And he repeats it in Spanish, with the English accent he will never lose. There is only one word he says without an English accent: Maialen. He has no translation for it in his mind.

They always speak English to each other because they spoke English when they met, the year Nerea was studying at Oxford, but Lewis knows more and more Spanish and even a little Basque. This year he started studying at a Basque language school, almost under duress. Nerea convinced her husband with the argument that he would need it to understand the homework his daughter would bring home from school, but it wasn’t easy to convince him. She doesn’t know if her husband will ever understand how important the language is to her. She doesn’t know if he will ever understand the effort so many people have made and still make to keep the language alive. How could he understand, she often thinks, when English is spoken all over the world? How will he ever understand that her language is as fragile as a newborn, that it needs protection as much as their daughter does?

Nerea often laughs at him for the English accent he can’t get rid of. Maybe because she remembers how, when they first met in England, Lewis had laughed at her accent and her friend Maite’s. Lewis used to say that in addition to drinking beer like men, they both sounded very funny when they spoke English. And then he laughed. Lewis laughed with beer foam on his lips. When Lewis first met these foreign women in the pub, he was astonished at the way they drank. He later confessed it was the first time he had seen such a thing: after drinking so much beer, instead of starting to dance or shout, they stayed on their stools by the bar, one hand on the pitcher of beer and the other holding a cigarette, getting up only to go to the bathroom. Like men. Like English men.Like English men.

Maite had tried to explain to Lewis that Basque girls were more practiced at such things than the local girls, that they often went totxosnas, refreshment stands at festivals, as if Lewis knew whattxosnas were. Nerea had met Lewis in Oxford through Maite. Maite was her best friend there, her fellow student, flatmate and greatest support. Nerea often thinks that without Maite’s support, she would barely have made it through the year she spent abroad. The year she spent in Oxford was not an easy one for her.

She had arrived there hurt and empty. After the boyfriend she had dated for four years at home had disappeared, she had made the decision to go to Oxford to study. Karlos had disappeared into thin air. One day he was there, and the next he had disappeared from the country and from ordinary life. She had gone to Oxford hoping to erase the memories that left a sour taste in her mouth. But the wounds she tried to cover with beer foam in the pubs there ran deeper than she had thought. The kind that open again just when you think they’ve scarred over.

They had started going out when Nerea was seventeen, and when she was a week short of turning twenty-two, Karlos disappeared. He gave her no explanation. Like the other two young men from the same town who disappeared with him, he gave no one any explanation. The political situation of the time sucked Karlos in like a drain sucks in water and carried him off to some hidden underground place. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, he fell and has lived in a different world ever since. Nerea has tried a million times to imagine what that world must be like. No one around her asked about Karlos after he disappeared, except his dog Blackie and the police. The police came to her house and asked her a million questions, trying to figure out where Karlos had gone. But they never found him. She did, though. Nerea found him every night in her worst nightmares.

The questions surrounding Karlos’ disappearance played in her mind on an endless loop and she often wondered, if she hadn’t taken the opportunity to go study at Oxford, whether she would have gone on forever like that, waiting for Karlos, a member of the local widows’ club. She had fled, but her nightmares had followed her. Karlos appeared in her dreams, smoke or fire all around him, carrying a weapon. She saw him sweating, hiding, fleeing, running wounded in the mountains. Other times she would see him walking on a crowded street in a big city, wearing dark glasses so the police wouldn’t recognise him. She sometimes even dreamed he appeared at the door of her apartment in Oxford, begging her to please let him sleep there, he had nowhere to sleep, please. Saying ‘just one night and you’ll never see me again.’ Nerea would wake up in a sweat. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ her flatmate Maite would say then, smoothing her clammy forehead without knowing what else to say.