Memorycemetery

Many times I was about to sit and write a very personal memory: about my father; but every time something stopped me from doing that.

Death underlines life. If life is the sum of our memories and experiencies, where should be total. My first teacher taught me how to do it in primary school. Write numbers you want to add right under each other. When you put them all, draw a line and add numbers in each column. Under the line there will be one number, “total”. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do when it comes to a life of somebody you know well. It’s amazing, actually, how scarce my memories are. He was a very kind and simple man. What I remember is just little things: my father caught just in his underwear on his way to toilet late in the night; his shaking hands when he hold my newborn son for the first time; he is sleeping on a sofa in living room, covering his face with a newspaper. Little, random and unsignificant memories. I remember him reading me his poems impromptu, or running around our house in a search for a pen. He would write his poems on anything: old receipts, shits of paper, newspaper clippings… he would leave them anywhere: you could find them in the kitchen, in the toilet, under the bed, on TV, on the floor, between book pages… He was a hardworking man, killing himself with a hell of a job (that was my first impression of it, when he took me there: hell, as he worked on a metal plant. Fumes, dirt, unbearable heat and red liquid metall running under the overpass he had to stay on long shifts). But he would always say: I’m a poet. Indeed, he was. I never was fond of his poems and everybody in my family annoyed by them, though. He, probably, didn’t have a talent, but there was no shortage of enthusiasm and commitment. He stuffed with his poems a pillow case, and then few shoeboxes, and then plastic shopping bags when he ran out of boxes. Nobody wanted to listen to him.

After he retired he started to drink a lot. My mother went to visit her friends to another city. When she came back, he was dead. Sitting behind the kitchen table, still holding his pen. On the table there were his poem and a bottle of moonshine vodka, both unfinished. It was a messy sight. The weather was hot. He sat there dead for over 3 days. Postmortem examination shown he had a weak heart.

When I came to his funerals, I asked my mother about that unfinished poem. She told me she thrown it away; without reading even. It really hurt me. Only staying there, by his coffin, I understood how much I loved him, and how much we have a common: something I always denied to admit before. I can’t still completely comprehend what he is dead. Memory of my father is like a missing tooth I can feel with my tongue: gaping hole where was something. Something is missing in my life.

I wanted to say many things about my father; and probably different from that words I wrote. It’s difficult to fish for right words, and I really should have a strong flash light to have a look for the “better”, more meaningful memories lurking in the dark corners of forgotten days on my childhood. I feel like something is there; something very important. There should be a memory about him which would explain it all. If I would find it, I will understand a whole lot more; I will become a better man: I will become more myself. Sometimes I feel like I got it, I have the answer to the question I always wanted to ask my father, but never did. In such moments I am afraid if I’m on the right way; I have to stop every now and then to see if this precious something is still there. My task therefore is similar to Orpheus’: when he descended in search of Eurydice, he had to bring his experience back from the dark labyrinths of Hades to the light of day, in order to give it form, and shape, and reality. On the way back from underworld Orpheus turned around to see if Eurydice was still with him during his return to the light, and in doing so, lost her. “Impatience is the failing of one who wants to withdraw from the absence of time”- wrote Maurice Blanchot. I could not say better.

I remember last time when I saw him: through the window of train. It slowly started to move, and he was walking with it along the platform, holding his 2 fingers as V; V for victorious, as he always did when he was saying goodbye. A gesture of a gladiator, it had completely different meaning when he was doing it. He was the one who asked me a question I couldn’t answer though: sitting on a bench and waiting for our delayed train, he read me his poem and when suddenly asked me: “You travelled a lot and saw many things. Tell me why do we live? What is our life for?”. I still was thinking about it when train sped up and I lost him out of sight; I lost him out of sight forever.

Boris Kislitsin

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