You Asked About Responsibility

You Asked About Responsibility

forever date

jp melville

Though not really a poem, I thought you might like to read this… friend...

Cold November rain falls early this Sunday morning.  No schedule.  No duties.  Awake before the light begins to rise in the dawn.  Coffee steaming before me.  A cigarette burning, which I inhale, hold, and exhale slowly.  Then sip my black coffee.  I have a candle burning so that I can write these notes.  I listen to the patter of the raindrops on the roof, in the naked branches of the trees, in the dark puddles outside on the ground.  Also, I hear voices from the bazaar, maybe a stone throw from this house, across the walls of two compounds.  Food and trade continue, some things never change.  Azerbaijan loses her Shusha and the Karabakh mountains to the Armenians, borders change, once people here had electricity.  Now, people must eat, war, no war, ceasefire or not, so the market opens and trade happens.  And the children wake, I hear them russling under thick covers, a voice, “Papa!”.  I blow out my candle, put out my cigarette, stand and finish my coffee, just as the dawn light weeps into a wet sky, and I go to greet them.

In their room, I sit on the edge of the bed and my daughter reaches up to me, so I pull her up and gather her in my arms, say to my son, “Come along now.  Hot chocolate, toast, and oranges today.”  In the large, living room, surrounded by ceiling high windows, the children sit quietly, staring through the streaked panes.  I prepare the breakfast and bring this to them, the bread fresh from yesterday evening when brought to us from the neighbour’s home, bread baked in an open wood burning hearth.  While they are eating, I quickly make some more coffee and then return to the table.  For the moment, this is enough with the world.  If I asked for more, all would be lost.

Much has been lost.  Not only some one million internally displaced Azeri peoples have lost their homes because of the war over possession of the mountains, but also the uprooted diaspora of international workers like myself, who heading boldly out into the world full of ideals, ready to make what is wrong right, only find that our wrongs are other people’s rights and that there are no answers and, much worse, having gone out into the world, that there is no ever returning home.  Our families no longer understand us, our sisters who thought that they would be aunts to children now never there, our parents who thought that our education would bring us mortgages and second cars and season ski tickets.  We no longer understand ourselves, angry that the toilets do not flush, frustrated that the wines we are accustomed to are no longer available, isolated because how we value our appearance, our weight, our fitness is not shared by the women or men around us.  So many pasts lost.  Pasts most painfully lost when we realize what our futures might have been, what we most fundamentally wished our futures might have been, when our dreams evaporate from us as phantoms.  Healing not possible when our pasts and our futures have been all that our lives had been built from and we have never learned to live in the present.

All of which is to say that I know that I am losing my woman.  She sleeps separately from all of us.  Goes to bed early.  Wakes late and groggy.  Conversations disjointed, without follow up, no sense of termination, moving on.  A door creaks and she comes shuffling now toward the table, wrapped in a blanket, sits, reaches for the cigarettes and lights herself a smoke, brushing her stray hair away from her face.

She looks at the children and her first words, “I am so curious about Olivia.  I wonder what she will turn out to be.”

The children continue eating, watching her carefully.

She turns her head to look outside and says, “I guess my leaves got wet.”  It is as though she is referring to the world of fallen leaves, yellowed and dead on the ground.  Or was she collecting leaves yesterday?  She smiles.  Happiness shared with sadness, two captured souls in one.  “We are pagans,” she says.

I have gotten up to get the camera and return to the table to take her picture.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“Your photo.”  I focus the lens.  “Parallel opposites.  Your imprisoned soul and your morning beauty,” I say.

She refuses that I take her photo and asks the children about their toast and hot chocolate.  They tell her that it is good.  She looks back out the window and says, “That Ali and Nino story.  All bullshit except when he fights and dies for a republic.  Stuff the sentimental shit.  Doesn’t do them or anybody any good.  I don’t know who the hell that Georgian was you met and his talking about a love story.  Bullshit.”

I sip on my coffee and do not risk anything, watching her.

She exhales from her cigarette, pauses, then says, “Woman’s point of view on the Asian soul is it sucks.  End of story, boys.”  She stubs out her cigarette with determination.  There is no conversation to follow the final word.  She turns to the children and asks them if they slept well and they chatter about small things.

As I light myself another cigarette, in this small instant, with the children and their mother and the rain and the hot chocolate and coffee steaming on the table, I cherish this moment and know not only is this all that I have, but also that this is enough.