Her Hands
On my grandmother’s wedding day, a drizzling Sunday one October, dozens gathered at the bride’s family home. It was a two story, wide-roomed house in a small village at the foot of Bulgaria’s Old Mountain. Gardens unfolded outside the house: the walnut and the cherry trees, the hazelnut bush, the vines heavy with grapes. It was 1947, two years after the first communist government had come to power. A poor, red-cheeked maiden, my grandmother was marrying an orphaned soldier just back from the frontlines of World War II.
As was the unwritten village law, before the celebration began, the bride and the groom were sent to a backroom. This was the way my grandmother first came to know sexual intimacy– while everyone waited outside to see the proof that she was “honest”. The bloody sheets were the evidence, and they waved them like a flag out of the window. Only then did the bagpipes cry a slow song and the bride was taken for a wife.
A black and white photograph from the wedding day shows my grandparents in a way I don’t remember them: grandfather in a dark suit jacket and a bright collar shirt, holding the back of the chair where grandmother sits with her shoulders too straight, without the headscarf, and shoes she’d only wear when she went to town. Shy smiles seize their youthful faces.
In the distilled snapshots of my memories, my grandparents wear the sandals they made from pigskin, or black rubber galoshes, depending on the day’s work and the season. There are the
eletzy, the sleeveless buttoned sweaters grandma knitted from raw sheep wool spun into yarn on a wooden spindle. There are her gingham skirts, the faded apron, the flowered headscarf. And there are their hands, the clearest of all mind pictures I have kept. Their skin rutted and creased, spotted by ruthless sun and the passage of time, the palms engraved with the press of soil, roots, and seeds. These were the hands of people who fed their children with earth’s yield.
One afternoon in December news traveled from the homeland to my San Francisco home that my last living grandmother had passed, the one whose name I was given at birth.- The distance too great and unaffordable to travel, I sat silently. I pictured her hands. With my eyes shut, I could see them in finest detail. On their backs was a map of the slow way to many harvests, wrinkled and twisted and bulged. Deep lines carved the palms, the roads of an uneasy journey. One line was deeper and sharper than all others. It pierced through the middle of grandmother’s palm and down, disappearing into the wrist. This was the line palm readers called the line of life.
Somewhere in its beginning, grandmother was the girl who had to leave school soon after she learned to read and write. Her widowed mother couldn’t afford to put her four daughters through school. They became hands in the fields, weeding, plowing, and harvesting to keep one another alive. The youngest of the sisters, grandmother was later sent to town to become a wealthy family’s maid. When she returned to her village after a few years, she met the soldier with whom she would spend her life. Their wedding portrait was taken shortly after that.
Their union came three decades after the Red Revolution, a time when Lenin and Stalin were the names in many mouths. Bulgaria had recently been pronounced a people’s republic. Most Eastern European countries had just embraced governments modeled after the Soviet Union’s. Russian became a mandatory second language to learn in Bulgarian schools. The Christian Orthodox church that had flourished in the country for centuries was pushed to the margins. Christianity was deemed the religion of fascism and the capitalist enemy, and faith in something different than the Party was no longer encouraged. The only god now was the Party, and capitalism– the hell no one would have to go to.
But for the young and the poor like my grandparents, communism was a promise of a new world, a just, equal, classless society where poverty would never again exist. The “bright future,” the Party called it, and they put their hearts to it. Farmers, growers, builders, machinists and factory workers, fresh out of war, kept at a future that never arrived.
For grandfather, the belief in the new world was a flame that ignited his lively eyes, brought heat to his gestures. He was proud and convinced– righteous– when he spoke of Stalin or the great bratushki, the Russian soldiers he met at war, or the cooperatives where everyone produced for the common good, for each other. A bookkeeper at the county’s office, he was soon made the Party secretary of the village.
For grandmother communism was little more than being a supportive and respected wife. Otherwise, she was a busy woman, raising two boys, cooking meals at the village kindergarten, running a household and seeding next year’s fruit in the fields. She couldn’t worry too much about politics and regimens. Her daily concern was the bug that was eating the corn, or the rain that might come and how much, or the baby goats ridden by a new illness.
They both rose before the birds, always together, to feed geese and hens, to send the sheep off to pasture. Then rode the donkey drawn cart to the fields to plow and weed. It was the only vehicle they ever owned, a pastel red cart with blue and golden ornaments painted on its sides by the local master. If they got hungry while at work in the gardens, they picked an apple, reached for a handful of cherries, or cracked walnuts between rocks. A shower was never built in their village house. They bathed in a metal cask brought into the middle of the room for the weekly occasion, and scooped water from large pots to rinse one another off.
In the hallway of the family house, a large, bronze-framed portrait of Stalin had replaced the icons of the Virgin Mary and the young Jesus that belonged to grandmother’s mother. There, under Stalin’s eagle gaze my father and uncle received gifts when they were boys. The gifts came on New Year’s Eve, not Christmas– a day of no public mention or celebration during communism. And although in most homes the gifts were delivered by Grandfather Frost– a good old man with cotton beard and a red mantle who wasn’t Santa– in my father’s childhood home they were said to come from Uncle Stalin.
Just another short distance down grandmother’s line of life, and her two sons could not wait to get away from the village that their mother hardly left. Her boys went to school in town, hurried to move to bigger cities, smoked cigarettes, and rode motorcycles. They secretly tuned into radio stations in Lisbon and Istanbul to listen to the Beatles. They tried reading smuggled western literature without getting caught. When they did, they had their heads shaved in front of classmates, a public embarrassment. To them, communism was no longer a belief, simply the backdrop of living a life. Awareness had already begun to surface that along with private property, the Party had taken away freedom and opportunity.
Grandmother was half a century old when I arrived to the world, the lines on her palms already deeply carved. By then her hands had kneaded the dough for many breads and seeded the harvest for many meals. On my school breaks, I took the train from the city and spent weeks in the village. I watched grandmother milk the she-goats, pour the fresh milk in glass jars, and mix in the live culture. She left the jars under a rug. When we went to unveil them after a few hours, a miracle had happened: the milk had become yogurt. On some days the yogurt jars remained empty, but large slabs of cheese hung in a dripping cloth hooked under the awning.
There was a deep well in the front yard of the house. Its ample water greened the cabbage, the grape vines, the tomato clusters and the pumpkin leaves spreading out in the house gardens. It was a wide, round, cement well with a wooden winch. I watched grandmother crank up buckets from the bottomless abyss. The buckets traveled up with a wobble, splashing ice-cold sparkles of water until grandmother’s hand tamed them to rest at the top. It was her grandest fear that I would fall into the well. When she wasn’t looking, I sometimes bent over its edge and stared down into the mirror of its surface trying to see the giant toad that she told me lived in the water. “He waits for children like you. If you bend down, he’ll jump at you like nobody’s business.”
At sundown, after they had herded the sheep inside and fed the livestock, she sat down on the wooden bench by the fire to pick wool or knit socks. The pitch-dark village nights were story time and I sat quiet, waiting.
“It was a good, good life,” grandmother would say. “Our village was a different village when we were young. You should have seen the square on Sundays. The who-o-ole village came out, all, young and old. We danced until we dropped down.”
I pictured the line dances, long spirals weaving inwards, the precise steps of dozens of pigskin shoes moving in synchronism around the village square, the
meghdan. I could hear the bagpipes, the
tupan drums, the sonorous
kaval. Landscapes of an epoch never witnessed, never to return.
When I was a child, villages had already shrunk and quieted down as the young left them for the cities. Line dances became a living history. I saw them at weddings, on TV, or performed for the cameras of tourists. But they were no longer the heart and the soul of a village. As the elders passed on, homes stood empty and desolate, walls crumbling and gardens growing wild. Each year that I returned for a visit, the village had become quieter; more taps had gone dry. Even the creek had slowed down and lowered its waters, their cooling freshness no longer in high demand.
Yet, it was there, in my grandmother’s vanishing village, where I felt the tingles of first love. “You are too young to wear lipstick,” grandmother said, and, “Be wary of men! They are not what you think. Not everyone is like your grandfather; he is an honest man. Be home at sundown.” When she was young, she liked to remind me, in the whole village there was only one woman who would go out with different men. And everyone knew who she was, everyone. “And now?” she shook her head, ”I hear, I hear how it is now on the town. Men change women like handkerchiefs.”
I hid my heart’s desire from grandmother. I didn’t say a word about the softness that seized my knees when he walked down the road by our house, the same boy that would keep my heart hostage for years to come. I was twelve. Grandma pretended she didn’t notice, until she couldn’t.
“You are not ripe enough to be burning in this fever,” she hissed in a low voice, as if the walls could hear.
“See you at sundown, grandma.”
She was often deeply asleep when I came home. But in the middle of the night, I heard her gentle steps into the room where I slept, nearing the bed. She bent over me as I kept my eyes shut, stood motionless for a moment, then pulled the blanket over to cover my shoulders.
At the sudden decline of summer to fall, I returned to the city. I wore a dark colored uniform to school, identical to everyone else’s, and the mandatory red tie that symbolized my belonging and my growth as a “pioneer”, a child of the Party. We all looked like everyone else, to demonstrate equality. Our clothes and shoes were made in the same state companies, in the same dull colors, and sold in identical stores in every city and town. To get good marks, I wrote papers heavy with clichés about the greatness of the party, the partisans who brought us freedom, and the bright future of the working class. I sang songs about the Party in the school’s choir.
We girls were not allowed to wear our hair down, even if it barely reached bellow the ears. Once, after putting makeup on one night of summer camp with my other thirteen-year-old classmates, I was tried by the student collective. My parents were called in to discuss my degenerative behavior. Good morale and discipline were the way to the “bright future.” Obeying the code was a way of getting through life.
Grandmother sent letters in the winter, once the season allowed her the time to write. Her symbols were crooked, whirled in the old fashion. “I am sorry I have not written in so long,” she would say. “They cut the power off again, so I write under the candle. We are well. There are plenty of potatoes this year, but the chickens are falling ill. And for next year the cooperative has given us land too far away.”
By the time the regime tumbled in the early winter of 1989, my grandparents had already sensed, though silently, that the “bright future” would not arrive, not even in their children’s lifetime. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Prague Revolution were the messengers of the uprisings in our own little Bulgaria, which didn’t make big press but were nevertheless our end of communism. I was fourteen then, grandmother sixty-four. Hers was the generation that had first embraced communism; mine was the one that whispered jokes about communists and craved the world that we were banned from, the sleek shiny things in colored packages, the happiness that one could buy.
My parents and I had seen the iron boot smash those suspected to be enemies of the Party. Once someone was stamped with such verdict, the whole family and their offspring were under the Party’s dreadful watch. Perhaps that was why the unstoppable people power that was unleashed on the streets and toppled the system surpassed our bravest dreams. But the change was even more shocking for my grandparents. Nothing had prepared them or their peers for what was coming.
The elders took the greatest blow of the “transition”, a time without end in sight. Raging inflation swallowed my grandparents’ monthly pensions in a single purchase. The savings they had put aside their whole lives could buy them a week of food, but not medication or the electricity bill. The prices grew so much and so quickly that to them they were meaningless numbers. In the autumn of their lives, this was a stark realization. Not only had the fall of communism brought their dreams to a dead end. They were left impoverished, defeated. Made further vulnerable by age, their survival was left to the mercy of their sons and daughter-in-laws.
“Aah, where are the good times?” grandfather groaned, suddenly an old man whose naps on the couch by the wood stove grew a little longer each day. “We had it good, we had enough. Enough for ourselves, for our children. Now who cares about us? What has this life come to be?”
This was a mantra he repeated again and again, until his words turned to a feeble whimpering in the days before his passing.
Once a woman of fertile fields and air that smelled like lavender, warm soil and sheep herds, my widowed grandmother spent the last decade of her life between the walls of a city apartment, under the care of her gracious younger son. She was reduced to a small woman with slouched shoulders who sunk in a chair for endless soap opera episodes, a recent phenomenon on Bulgarian television. Her hands crossed on her lap and she sat motionless, long after the TV was switched silent.
There was a place in her mind where grandfather, the village house, and the fields were still alive, as real as they had ever been. She returned to that place more often as her body weakened and her mind grew foggy. A large smile would flush her face. “Yes, the vines are nice and heavy this year. The wine will be thick. And we have just finished putting the tomato spread in jars. We’ve made enough for two winters. Enough for everyone, my children.”
At the end of grandmother’s journey, almost precisely twenty years after the fall of the regime, communism lived in my cousin’s history book. To grandmothers’ youngest granddaughter, it was a few pages in 6th grade, notes quickly stored in the mind corner where knowledge of unlived history is kept. She after all grew up with Big Brother, Survivor, and the new glossy Bulgarian shows tailored after American ones. Even I, seventeen years older, appeared ancient to her with my stories about the two channels of state-owned television showing Russian and Czech films about the bravery of the Red Army.
Like the regime that had come and gone in her lifetime, grandmother too was beginning to live in history. A history recorded on the lines of her palms, and revived in my mind with sudden shocks of detail: Her hand placed shyly on grandfather’s knee for the wedding day portrait. Her hands propped playfully against her waist for a dance of ruchenitza. Or pulling masterfully on the goat’s udder, milk squirting in the silver pot. Or bleeding fiercely from the sudden cuts of sharp stems, her nails the color of soil.
Hers were now the eternal hands of any caring woman. Those that kneaded the bread, straightened the collar around a loved one’s neck, prepared a traveler’s bag ahead of time. The hands that pulled the blankets over a sleeping child’s shoulders, and only then came to rest.
To create a wordscape, a writer often needs the solitude of fragrant gardens, seaside dunes, the moon and other places where no one is invited. But this is a guest house where stories are shared and you are invited to journey along. If you're in a hurry, come back when you're not. Slowness and a quiet mind are requested here. Make some tea. Sink deep in the couch of imagination.
