The Morningside

by Téa Obreht

An old familiar dread was waiting for me this morning. I couldn’t tell where it came from. It hadn’t followed me out of a dream—at least not one I could remember—but when I got up, there it was in everything. The airless heat of the motel room. The halo of sunlight around the window shades. The vacant smile of the girl at the front desk when she took the key from my hand.

How funny, I thought. Here I’d had a very different, very specific memory of the first time I saw her, and all the while, this picture had been out there, confirming an entirely incompatible truth. Some stranger, whose name I did not know and face I would never see, had held all of us together in the palm of their hand: Bezi, my mother, me. Even Ena, offscreen.

For years, I had lived in fear that she would find the talismans I’d hidden around our flat, mistake them for trash, and throw them away without my knowledge, thus nullifying their effect. Or, worse, confront me about them. “What the hell is this?” she would say. I, having imagined this precise moment, would be ready. “Looks like your old perfume bottle.” “What’s it doing behind the stove?” “I have no idea.” “I could have sworn I threw it out years ago.” “Huh.” That was meant to be my innocent, ignorant closer—because what else was there to say? “You actually did throw it out, Mama, but I dug it out of the trash because you really loved that perfume, and Signora Tesseretti said that I need at least three meaningful objects to make a good protection”?

She was prideful about her endurance, her mind stretched by the constant tally of what she had done, was doing, and had yet to do.

There were exactly three reliable things at the Morningside. The first was Sanitation. No matter how bad things got, Sanitation was right on schedule. They did get stalled in disputes with the city, though, so if more than a week went by between pickups, it was necessary to start up the rusted little car Ena kept in the sub-basement garage and drive the trash over to the landfill, six bags at a time, until the sidewalk in front of the building was clear. The second was Bezi Duras. She was from Back Home, too, but had come to Island City years ago, well before the war, and so could scarcely line up five words of Ours, and then only in a disgraceful accent. She lived in the penthouse, with its private elevator. You could rely on her to be on time and polite, and to never, ever summon you for help. “In ten years I haven’t been up there,” Ena said. “If she needs something done, she gets her own people to do it.” The third were the gawkers. Only a few varieties of thistle persisted in the courtyard flower beds now, but the Morningside had once been renowned for its gardens. They had been impressive enough to attract the admiration of passersby, who would stick their heads through the main gate whenever it opened to admit a car. People still wanted this kind of access. Students from the old university down the street were always asking to be let in to photograph the gargoyles or to peruse the library collection, or to sketch the lobby. Ena no longer had patience for any of these...

Bezi Duras owned three behemoth hounds. She indulged them in better food than the rest of us had gotten in a long time, and they slept all day in the sun upstairs.

didn’t know much about love, but this felt like it to me. A persistent keeping-around of the object of your affection. A surrounding of the self.

How strange to hear her talking about memories of which I was part, but which were not part of me.

This was part of Ena’s magic. Familiarities you had come to take for granted were transformed by the act of her storytelling. Her version of things became the only one. She could change the reality of something you thought you’d known all your life.

“Took him long enough,” I said. “Well—few things take longer than a man owning up to a mistake.”

Here, on the other hand, was a thing that could not be considered good, no matter how you tilted the prism. Something had happened to Bezi Duras. Some violence. Somebody—or something—had hurt her horribly. Horribly enough to leave massive purple wounds. These wounds were kept hidden, a secret known only to Bezi herself. And by showing up at the wrong place at the wrong time, I had robbed her of her solitude in that secret. Worse still: Bezi Duras hadn’t seen me. She had no idea, as she knotted her hair and leaned toward her mirror, that not fifteen feet below her the girl gathering up bucket and rags and retreating into the cool sanctum of 32F had intruded on her greatest vulnerability.

There was Bezi Duras. Looking at Ena. Then looking at me. Smiling only with her mouth. I made the mistake of meeting her gaze. If her voice had erupted in my head, I would not have been surprised. It seemed already present in everything, an oceanic boom all around me. She knew. She knew I was hiding something. In fact, there might be nothing Bezi Duras did not know. That my mother was a foundling. That I had failed to kick the habit of laying out protections. That a man I’d never seen before had pulled down his pants in front of me in a Paraiso alleyway, and that I had run away shouting, as well as a thousand other secrets I had willed myself to forget, all the little sins that had scattered into the unlit corners of my heart: That I used to cry myself to sleep, praying for my father’s return. That I knew the taste of flesh because I had once eaten meat—inadvertently, when a patron of the hotel where my mother worked had offered me a bite of it as I passed her table, and I (three or so, underfoot) had leaned in and gummed it off the end of her fork without a second thought, to the horror of my mother, who was watching from the corner, or so she kept telling me, because I had no memory of this event, though my mother had relived it often enough for me to form a kind of half reel of it, all in the third person. All this knowledge Bezi Duras carried through the main gate and out into the street, where the dogs hauled her up the darkening hill and out of sight.

You can’t just force these things, Sil. You have to drift into them, and you’re not ready. There’s a world underneath the world. You can’t ask and ask and ask to see it. Otherwise, these glimpses of it, they turn bad.”

Plans required belief. You had to believe that you could lay out steps toward an outcome of your choosing. My mother knew better than that. The pronouncement of intent, the hubris of self-determination—these did not fit her notion of the universe. On the few occasions when she had been forced to plan something more consequential than dinner, she had set a limited horizon. Get from Vesvere to Safar, but plan no further. Get from Safar to Paraiso, and leave it at that. She hadn’t even planned our move to Island City; she’d merely accepted the opportunity to apply to the Repopulation Program when it came.

“Do you want help?” the stranger had said. Did I want it? Of course. So, the right answer, according to everything I understood about the exchange rate of the universe, was obviously: “No.”

“You know, sometimes you’re so far away from what you once were, you need the slightest little reminder that your past was real?”

May finally understood the difference between people who were from the city and people who were of it—people whose presence in its history had left as much of an imprint on the city as it had on them.

The tragedy had turned from national to private grief, and there was no place for him in it anymore. He was a spectator, adjacent to but not of it. How could he explain that his heartbreak felt much closer than this?

The years went on, and the past continued to get bigger, and the future continued to constrict.

But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? It wasn’t enough just to know that Ena had been telling the truth. It had been wonderful to stand, however briefly, in the lighted rooms of Ena’s heart and know things as she knew them. But she was dead now. And were you really part of something if you were part of it alone?

I don’t want you wasting time with mannerless little shits from Back Home.”

I had never admired anyone more, nor respected anyone less.

“This isn’t—right. You’re not telling the whole story.” “I’m not interested in telling a story, Clare. I’m interested in asking questions that give the truth an opportunity to surface.

“It’s always dangerous to give people a way to tell themselves stories about you before they get to know you. Always.”

And I realized that I’d brought you into life at a time when everyone else’s debts had come due. Only, the debtors weren’t around anymore to pay up. So it’d be you doing the paying.

The past is immense. But it means less and less. So we go on without. And that’s fine, Sil. It’s fine.”