Danusha V. Goska

Bora

"Bora" appeared in the Fall, 2006, edition of the magazine Slovakia.
Publisher Helene Baine Cincebeaux invites inquiries about Slovakia
Helene's Webpages are: www.helenezx.homestead.com and www.our-Slovakia.com.
Helene is also happy to respond to inquiries on Slovak surnames.

I remember grass green cords of goose poop paving every pathway. I remember gold teeth winking and flashing and me drowning in kisses. I remember, from fields, intense heat rising, charted with clouds of butterflies. I remember villagers gathered to stare as if we were Hungarians back to drink their blood, Janosik to leap over flame; as if we were Russians in tanks they stared. I remember waves of rye shifting shade as sun played over it, beating against our thighs; boldly scratching our cheeks with bristly blue tassels. Moving against the heavy waves was as moving through ocean. But most of all I remember Bora, and how I've never been afraid to grow old.

We turn back the wrought iron gate, and it whines. I am timid, hang back, hands in pockets. Mommy – I've never seen her so young. My momma juggles oak chests and bill collectors, no helpers; some new force propels her now, skipping, like a child.

We are visiting another old - woman - all - in - black - from - her - babushka - to - her - shoes - whose - exact - relation - to - me - I - might - never - clearly - know. She sits like a pumpkin on a split plank bench in full sun. Fuzzy yellow chicks tap the earth around her feet with the jerky urgency of typewriter keys. Absent-mindedly, she's tossing them corn from some hidden inner fold of her multiplicity of embroidered aprons. She's reading a dirty book. I know it's a dirty book; a distressed naked woman and a masterful armed man sport on the cover.

"Tetka."

The book crashes to the dust; the chicks get all the rest of the corn. Fuzzy yellow balls scrambling after kernels dodge dancing feet. Slovak women embrace the suddenly flesh dream after fifty years into a good-bye felt as final as death.

In a dusty, tiny kitchen a bullet-slender bottle hits the table hard. It wears no label. Entering this room's stillness and lace-speckled light is like a dip into a cool pool after the heat and squawking of the green street. Bora rolls into her garden with a shallow pan and gathers striped, green, globular berries. She brings them back in and places them before us, with sugar. I peer through frosted, spattered translucence to fat, dark seeds. We sit and drink and eat and sing. I don't know any of the words, but mouth the sounds, for all hundred verses, as I did to the phonograph records back in America.

The slivovica blows the top of my head off. It always does.

Mommy whispers, as if Bora could understand English, "Don't worry; it's our third house today; we'll be done by nightfall."

I wonder if I'll have any brain cells left to give.

"Ai, Pavlina moja. You see all I have. Some wheat, the gooseberries, those walnut trees over there, and the plums. The potatoes. Chicken, geese, some rabbits. That's it; that's all. You can't do as much when you get to be my age." I'd never know her age. I know she was old when she placed flowers on the ox cart that carried my mother to the ship; she's been old for both of us.

She pulls up her sleeve. "My arm isn't what it once was. And my husband; he chopped everything down. Said he knew we were both fixing to die, and wouldn't need it any more. He took an ax and chopped down the smokehouse, the woodshed, the outhouse. I have to crap in the fields now. My sons won't come and build me a new one; they won't do anything for me as long as I go to church. It'll get them into too much trouble and they'll lose their apartments in town. Say I should join the Party like them, and get a modern apartment in Topo__any ... with linoleum floors and an elevator. All of them. All five. I've got only five sons left. You remember the two that died, God bless you. And the four girls."

Eleven kids. I count the rooms over and over: the big bedroom, clean and white; this charred kitchen. One, two. One, two rooms. Eleven kids.

"The Communists aren't so bad, I guess. When you left, we had to walk twenty miles to get milk. That was the Depression. Then the war. That was bad. We had some resistance fighters right here in our jail. The Germans hired local boys to guard them. So you know what I did? I went down there with my broom and whaled on them. 'Tetka, tetka, what can we do? We're hungry and the Germans give us food!' They whined, just like babies. But having been hungry myself, I could see their point.

"All in all I'd say the Russians have been better than the Germans. The Germans didn't do anything when some of their soldiers raped one of us, but when the Russians gang raped a woman, there'd be some kind of a hearing. But even so, I will not stop going to church.

"That's right; my man chopped everything down. Took the wood and built himself a coffin. He'd lie in it at night, with candles at both ends, and call the neighbors in to pay their last respects. He hollered at me to get in there with him; said I was gonna die soon, too. I said, 'Are you crazy? As fat as I am? I'd bust the walls of your fine creation!' He was half right; he died before spring. They said it was a brain tumor."

Her laughter rings round like ripples in a well, like her, it has no edge to it, no target.

"Whadshesay? Whadshesay?" I pump my bilingual mother's sleeve over and over; she's my vending machine of meaning.

"So, what do you think? Can I find another man? Well, till then, I have my romances. Take a look at this book, Pavlina. You think you have stuff like this just in America? No, no, we've been modernizing out here in this village.

"But I will not stop going to church, no. And, besides, with all the fertilizer, my wheat is doing very nicely, thank you. See that painting in there? It's the most precious thing I have."

We stand, as best we can after the slivovica, and walk into the bedroom, full to its brim with a fat, feather-quilted bed. Above the bed hangs a Madonna in a gilded frame. My jaw drops. Italian? Renaissance? "My man brought it back during the war. The Germans dropped it while retreating. It's been on that wall ever since." She notes my awe. "You like it, don't you? Here." Bora removes her boots and heaves herself up onto the bed. "Take it back with you to America."

"No!" Mommy shouts. She jumps up on the bed and vigorously wrestles Bora down. Over and over, for the next three weeks, my mother will turn down this painting. "Look, " she'll tell me. "Customs would never let us get it out of the country."

We go outside. "Yes, this is all I can do now."

Bora cultivates an acre, by hand. We are up to our knees in something that she knows how to grow; that my mother once harvested, and that I can't even identify. "See this?" A chewed up leaf is in her hand, an iridescent black beetle perched upon it. "That's from your country, little one," she chides me, laughing. "You sent us grain that was spiked with beetles!" Bora crushes the beetle against her thumbnail. "Everyone invades us eventually. Your country just did it long distance, and with kindness." She sighs and holds my face in her surprisingly smooth palm. "Ai. Ai. But you can't talk to me. You've forgotten our language." No, I could never forget what I had never learned. "You look so much like my little Pavlinka, sitting on that ox cart. But you're an Ameri_anka."

It tears away from me now; it's suddenly a two dimensional image that crinkles up like a magazine page, an especially striking photo of some Old World peasant – the viewer is surprised – you didn't think people like that still existed – some unbelievably bright colors – maybe they used a special filter? – and a girl looking up at an old woman, the girl so pleased she could almost burst her skin – what is this trying to say? It must be ironic, somehow, no? It crumples into a ball and tosses itself away and I am in the insistent present. If forced it returns dimmed; details are missing. But year after year, something summons this memory; it materializes like a Halloween prankster. Someone mentions "brain tumor" and I laugh. People think I'm callous. No more than you can say when you fall asleep, I cannot say when I lose this memory – when I passed out from the slivovica, when my mother became too sad and suddenly, without explanation, demanded that we leave.

All I have of Bora you now have, too: the beetles, the laughter. No, wait. That's not true.

We close the wrought iron gate. It whines. I want to know that of all these angels in black, and gold teeth, I have her. "Mommy, what is Bora to me?"

"I told you. When momma got mad at me I used to run to her. I was one of those kernels of corn in her apron..."

"No, what is she to me? Is she my blood?"

"Of course! She's your grandfather's sister. Doesn't that make her your blood?"

Now can't you see why I've never bought the American silliness about what it means to be a woman, that I wear rain boots when it rains, and flirt still, and why I've never been afraid to grow old?