The Rhythm of Memory (5 page)

“How old are you, may I ask?”

“Twenty years, sir.”

“Have you a job?”

“No, sir, I am a student of literature at the university in Concepción.”

Don Fernando did not find the irony of what the young Octavio had just said the least bit amusing. “And how will you support a wife and child on a student’s allowance?”

“We will manage, sir. I have always worked hard. I received one of the university’s few scholarships—”

Don Fernando cut the young man off. “You think you can exist on such a pittance for long?”

Tiny beads of perspiration were beginning to form on Octavio’s forehead. He wanted to reach for his handkerchief, but feared revealing the extent of his nervousness.

“Love must come before money,” Octavio said with a strong voice. He desperately wanted Salomé to think him brave and not cowardly in front of her father. “I realize that your daughter and I come from different backgrounds, but I love her. I am devoted to her. I will dedicate my life to making her happy. I would hope that you would see that I am an intelligent person who has worked to better himself through education and has the sincerest of intentions—”

“What I see,” Don Fernando interjected, his voice bordering on a boom, “is that you are a man who has defiled my daughter, filled her head with nonsensical poetic notions, and that you are a ridiculous student who has absolutely no idea how the world works!”

Doña Olivia was standing next to her husband, her face frozen with disbelief. How, she wondered, could her daughter have returned to them this way? She felt wounded that her daughter had not confided in her. She tried to hide her true feelings that, perhaps, her initial instinct had been right. They should never have sent her to a school so far away from home.

By speaking, Doña Olivia hoped to restore some sense of calm to the situation. “Don Octavio,” she said quietly, “how are we to know that your love for our daughter is sincere?”

Octavio turned from the stern gaze of Salomé’s parents and looked deeply into the eyes of his beloved.

“She is whom I rise for each morning, whom I think of when I hear songs of love. I have never known such sweetness before, never
dreamt that I could find a creature that could captivate both my mind and my soul. Grant me permission to be her husband and I will cherish the title. I will protect her. I will always see that she is safe, that she is loved, and that her life is full of wonder and joy.”

Doña Olivia was moved by the young boy who stood before her, but her husband was clearly not.

“I am a fifty-three-year-old man and I know that providing food and a roof over your family’s head requires more than just love.”

“Papa…” Salomé interrupted.

“No, it’s all right,” Octavio reassured her, as he slipped his hand into hers. He was trying to appear strong, though clearly Don Fernando intimidated him. He had little to impress the old man with. He knew that after he completed his degree from the university, he would have limited career opportunities. He could be a teacher or perhaps a journalist, but neither would provide her with the childhood luxuries she had been accustomed to.

Yet, somehow, Octavio believed it would all work out. Perhaps because he had always been something of a dreamer. Perhaps it was his innate belief that life and love were intended to have a happy ending. So, he stood there and gazed into his future father-in-law’s disapproving eyes and said with his most inspired voice, “Let us have an agreement, Dr. Herrera. Allow me to marry your daughter before her belly gets so big that a church wedding will not be possible and I will vow that, by the time the child is born, I will have a job that will ensure your daughter and grandchild of the life they deserve.”

Don Fernando remained skeptical of the young man, but in the end, fearing the disgrace of an unmarried, pregnant daughter, he reluctantly agreed.

M
IKKELI
, F
INLAND

J
ANUARY
1942

They chose her because she was the youngest and she could not yet form complete sentences. A little blond girl incapable of asking for an explanation.

Still, it was difficult for them. The most difficult thing they would ever have to do.

Kaija, their first and only daughter, had been born in the snow. Beyond the dark forests and the frozen lakes, under a patch of blue-white sky.

The day of her birth had begun much like any other. Sirka had risen early, her round belly camouflaged by a long flannel dress and wool sweater, her pale blond hair swept into a loose bun. She had been mindful not to wake her husband, Toivo, who slept soundly, his red beard spilling majestically over the white sheets she had embroidered the month before they were wed.

In the adjacent room, their three sons divided themselves between two beds that Sirka had carefully arranged to ensure they would be close to the hearth. She had knitted woolen slippers for them from coarse, unbleached yarn and given them the blanket from her own, sparse bed.

Today, they planned to go skating. They would pile on their sweaters, slip into their worn boots made from reindeer skin, and
allow their mother to rub their cheeks with cod-liver oil, as they prepared to go to the lake three kilometers away.

But for now, except for Sirka, the small house nestled in the dark forest did not yet stir. She stood for a moment and looked over her sons. In their slumber, they had returned to the way she remembered them as infants. Their mouths half-open, their cheeks flushed and smooth. Inside her womb, the child also slept peacefully. Sirka rested her hands on her belly and wondered to herself if maybe this time she would be blessed with a girl. Someone who might look like her, someone who would one day grow up and become her best friend.

Sirka had few memories of her own mother, who had died from pneumonia when Sirka was only five. The only thing she had to remember her mother by was a small wooden crucifix that hung from a thin, black string. She had worn it around her neck ever since her father had given it to her, never taking it off, even when she went to bathe. Even when Toivo unwrapped her from her nightgown and held her naked in his arms. Aside from her gold wedding band, Sirka considered it her most valuable possession. A gift from someone who had left her before she was old enough to form a memory. A gift from someone she hoped loved her from beyond a snowy grave.

She noticed that the wooden crucifix had become even smoother and more beautiful over the years. A soft rosewood, the color of mulled wine. When she was nervous or when she knelt down at night to pray, Sirka clutched it around her fingers, felt the neat angles of its simple, perfect shape, and sensed, for a brief fleeting moment, that she was being watched over, cared for, and was safe.

Her whole life, she had feared being alone. The mere thought of being left alone in their small wooden house was enough to terrify
her, so she received the news of her pregnancy with great relief and delight. The youngest boy would be going to school next fall, and she was thankful that she would have the baby to keep her company.

She was not unaware that another child would be a strain on the family. But she had been shocked by the intensity of Toivo’s response when she’d informed him that she was pregnant. It was the first time she had seen him cry.

He tried to assure her that he was crying tears of joy, but she knew better. She saw how his face had been transformed over the past months. He hadn’t been the same since he had been sent home from the Russian front. He had left home a year and a half earlier a tall, strong man with broad shoulders and arms that resembled the thick tree trunks he had chopped since he was a small boy. But he returned a thin, frail man with sunken cheeks and a shattered foot.

The evening he first returned home, she stood in the doorway for what seemed like a long time, too shocked even to invite him in. He appeared ghostlike. The white clothes, the pallid skin. Even his eyes seemed lost in a sea of white. The frost had penetrated him to the bone.

She unwrapped his bandages herself that first evening. His white uniform was soiled with dried patches of blood, the tracings of dry earth and dirty snow; his red-raw fingers grasped a single crutch that supported his slender form. She took his fur-lined hat from him and laid it by the fire and placed his crutch in the corner. Silently, her fingers replacing words, she motioned to him to sit on one of their small wooden chairs, placing his swollen foot in between her thighs. She could feel the heat emanating from the flesh buried deep beneath the layers of cloth as she peeled the bandages off slowly, placing the strips of fabric in a pot of boiling water that rested on a stool beside her knees.

He winced as she got closer to the foot. His eyes darted between the face of the wife he had longed for months to gaze upon and his bloody, disfigured foot.

“You shouldn’t look at it, Sirka,” he whispered, his voice faint from the difficult journey.

“Hush, be still!” she chided in a voice that quavered despite an attempt to be strong.

“I don’t want you to see this!” he said, wiggling his leg so that the foot slipped from her thighs.

But she grabbed his ankle, her strength surprising even herself.

“If you get an infection, you will die, Toivo! So stay still and let me clean the wound and then sterilize these bandages!”

He became quiet again. He had little energy left to argue with her, and he did not want to awaken the three sleeping boys.

“It’s not so bad,” she whispered to him, trying to force back the tears that were beginning to well in her eyes. The battered, oozing mass of his foot lay there, exposed in the orange glow of the fire, two toes curling against Sirka’s white apron, the other three gone forever, replaced by gouges and ribbons of blue and purple, striating the flesh like the lines of an ancient stone.

“It will heal, Toivo,” she said, her voice trembling as she placed his foot in a pot of warm, soapy water.

“Never. I’ll be a cripple for the rest of my life.”

“You can walk, Toivo, don’t be ridiculous.” And she paused, regaining her composure. “Thank God you’re alive, Toivo. We must thank God for that!”

She raised his foot from the soaking water and kissed it gently.

“Shall I wake the boys? They will be so happy to see their father!” she said, her face blushing slightly. Although only five months had passed since he’d joined the army against the Russians, to Sirka it seemed like an eternity since she had last been with her
husband. How nervous she seemed with him now! It was as if Toivo were someone from her past she had forced herself to forget, for the wait for his return had been nearly too much for her to bear.

Yet, now, she not only had to reacquaint herself with his presence, but also to deal with the reality that he would never be able to farm or fish as he once had. Their lives would be difficult, but she truly believed that God would watch over them and that somehow, no matter how difficult it might seem, they would manage.

Now, nearly a year after his return, she had become pregnant again. But this time, unlike with her other pregnancies, the news of the arriving baby seemed to paralyze Toivo. Nearly every day and every night she would see his face lined with worry. “How will we feed another mouth, Sirka?” he asked her one evening as they lay in their birchwood bed. “The five of us are already existing on scraps alone.”

Sirka just stared at him. There was little she could say. She knew how little food they had. The tin canisters of flour and sugar had been empty for months. The boys had stopped fighting each morning over the pieces of flat bread she broke into tiny slivers, which had become so small that they had quietly realized it wasn’t worth the quarrel.

Every morning, she performed the same ritual, dividing the scraps from the day before into small rations. In actuality, the parts were not even. She gave the boys a fraction more than Toivo because they were growing, and took for herself only the crumbs. Had it not been for the baby, she would have eaten nothing at all.

She tried to convince Toivo that they would all be all right. That God would watch over them. He did his best to smile and
agree with her, but the lines in his face and the furrows on his tired forehead only betrayed his tension and despair.

The boys were beginning to stir, and through the crocheted curtains, she saw the sun beginning to weave through the branches. The Karelian birches were silver with snow.

It was a perfect day for skating. The sun would be out for a few hours, and Lake Saimaa was so beautiful when frozen. She enjoyed the summers, when Toivo would row her and the children into its center and they would sing old folk songs. But in her heart, Sirka preferred winter. Then, the lake stretched like a sheet of platinum, the tiny waves frozen underneath a thin glaze of ice.

How she loved the forest! She loved the sounds of the snow crushing underneath her footsteps. She loved the howl of the wind as it navigated its way through the drifts and the plateaus of frozen earth. So, even though Toivo urged her to stay at home that day, Sirka insisted that she join him and the boys. She was too far along in her pregnancy to skate, but she sat majestically on the small bench of the kick sleigh with a woolen blanket wrapped over her lap as the boys pushed her through the forest.

The boys laced their boots and thrust their small hands into their mittens. Toivo placed his one good foot in a skating boot, leaving the other to trail along in a shoe. “Hold my crutch,” he called out to his pregnant wife, as he tossed her the wooden support over the ice. Sirka sat there watching the four of them slipping and sliding over the shimmering ice, their laughter slicing through the cold.

Yet, now, Sirka’s back was beginning to ache. A low, deep pain that she brushed off as a mere muscle spasm. But the pain began
to increase, and in the blue light of winter, her cheeks lost their flush, her pallor now like the snow.

She had planned not to say anything. When they returned home, she would boil herself a cup of water and sing to the baby inside her. Her breasts were heavy, and she was grateful that, once the child was born, she would be able to feed at least one of her children with her milk.