Excerpt from the book
Prologue
I have two memories of my grandmother. The first is blurry and unclear. I'm just a little girl. I stand in our house under the staircase, the tiles cold to my bare feet, and colourful bits of clothing drift down on me from above. They sail through the air, catch on the railing and fall at my feet. Grandma is running around, collecting sweaters, stockings, skirts, petticoats and huge
panties and panties, and stuffs them into a bag without a care in the world. I'm gonna run out and start collecting, too. As I hand my grandmother the white overalls, I look at her and see tears streaming down her cheeks. I've known since then that adults cry too.
The second memory is quite clear and preceded one of the most important decisions I have ever made in my life.
A woman is lying in a hospital bed. I only know she's a grandmother because my father told me. His eyes are closed, but he's not sleeping. Her chest heaves with wheezing breaths and the paper skin on her arms is stained with reddish-purple spots. I try to breathe only shallowly because the air in the room is soaked with the smell of urine, sweat and disinfectant. I'm gonna look into that pale face and see if I can tell
a woman from her childhood memory. Grandma opens her eyes and looks at me
"Blanka, Blanka." She smiles.
My name is Bohdana. Confused, I turn to my father.
"Blanche," my grandmother repeats, but when I shake my head, my father grips my arm.
I'll take a look at him.
He'll avert his eyes.
"Blanka was her sister," he says impatiently. "She already died."
I know he's lying. A quizzical look and a flash of a previous memory gave it away.
Because when my grandmother picked up the last piece of laundry, she straightened up, wiped her tears and screamed up the stairs: "You're driving me away. You're driving everyone away. Blanka's not here for you either. In the end, you will be alone."
My grandmother lived another two months, but my father never took me to the hospital again.
I was thirteen, when I'm in a smelly room with four beds, where drug-addled patients dozed off in a long-term care facility, she saw her end and understood, that the people around me have lived through the days that affected it, how they live and how they are today. That my family has a history, too. And that I don't know anything about her.
And that's when I started to look back into the past and to remember the present.
I've become a collector of memories. In a large red notebook with blue lines I started to write down my thoughts and all the events that had happened to us, even though they seemed quite insignificant at the time. It was only in the string of passing years that it became clear that whatever happened was important because, like the flap of a butterfly's wings, it could trigger a typhoon on the other side of the world,
so even a mere word can often wound and scar a relationship between two people forever.
Sometimes I wrote whole pages in a day, sometimes I wrote only a few lines after a long pause, but each time I had in mind the person for whom my writings were intended. A man who was lost in a past I knew nothing about and whom I needed very, very much.
One - Daughter
Our house is on the edge of town at the end of a dead end street. Beyond the garden, overgrown with old trees, uncut bushes and rarely mown grass, there is only a dirt road, a meadow and an endless forest. The fence and the walls of the house are covered with ivy, so when viewed from the opposite end of the street the house blends in with its surroundings and is hard to see. But when you come closer, you see him. It is large and solid, and the dark windows look out from the green leaves at the newcomers as if
watched and examined them to see if they were worthy to pass through the iron gate, enter the front garden, and walk along the cobbled pavement, with moss and grass growing through the joints, to the three stone steps leading to the front door.
From the outside, the house resembles my father. He too seemingly blends into his surroundings, but as you approach him, you see his greatness, feel his power and penetrating gaze.
In one way, however, my father differs from our house. When the house opens its doors, you are surprised by light, friendliness, cosiness and a comforting feeling of home. Father never opens his door. I have no idea what's behind them.
Our house is magical. I know this because on the fourteenth of September, nineteen hundred and eighty, the day I was born, exactly one year and one day had passed since my parents had moved in. My father was well over forty and my mother just a few years younger. I was born after twenty-five years of marriage and grew up as an only child. On the back of one of my first photographs, my mother wrote that
I am a miracle and a gift from heaven.
I was a burden to my father.
