The Far Field

by Madhuri Vijay

Three years of a master’s degree at Columbia left him with a fondness for America, especially her jazz, her confidence, and her coffee, which, he liked to say happily, was the worst he’d ever tasted.

“To you, my dear friends, and to this rarest of nights.” He had the intelligent man’s faith in the weight of his own ideas, and the emotional man’s impatience with anyone who did not share them.

And in that lay the fundamental irony of our relationship, and the clearest evidence of how she saw the world: my mother considered me, her only child, a suitable accomplice for the greatest secret of her life, but when she prayed, she wanted to be alone.

I don’t know when my allegiance shifted, when I went from being his to being hers. All I know are the facts: I was my father’s daughter first, and then I became, gradually and irrevocably, my mother’s. It’s hard not to wonder how much might have been prevented if only I had loved him more, or, perhaps, loved her a little less. But that is useless thinking, and perilous. Better to let things stand as they were: she, my incandescent mother, and I, her little beast.

I remember faces floating from unlit corners to ask me questions to which my answer was always the same. Yes, I said when someone asked if I wanted another drink. Yes, I said when someone’s hot breath whispered into my neck, Does this feel good? I lived by the word, kept it ready under my tongue. Yes, I said when they asked if I would be all right.

He had turned into a reserved, polished version of the man I’d known all my life, and it was during those dinners that I saw him most clearly as others must have done: a handsome, tall, somber businessman of fifty-three, his hair not yet gray, leaning back in his chair, at ease with the world and his position in it. And I felt at these times a troubled wonder, the kind I imagine a parent feels for a grown child: pride, combined with the bittersweet notion that I had somehow, without noticing, without meaning to, lost him.

She seemed, I noticed, to live deep inside the fog, or it lived within her. I could see it in her slowed hands as she touched her brass idols, her diminished voice. Sometimes I had the feeling it was swallowing her, that soon she would vanish altogether.

It was the single most devastating habit she had, to withdraw, to take back the thrilling gift of her joy as casually as she bestowed it.

“When something big happens,” he repeated firmly, ignoring me, “whatever it is, I understand that a person’s first tendency is to freeze, to go numb and wait for something else, equally big, to come along and cancel out the first thing. Believe me, I understand. And I know that’s what you’re doing. But that’s the mistake, don’t you see? It’s faulty, wishful logic. There is no second thing. At least, not externally. There is, however, action. Action is the second thing. Without action, there is only waiting for death.”

And then I thought of him, returning night after night to an empty house. I thought of him driving alone to this restaurant on Sundays, sitting at this table, reading the menu he already knew by heart, waiting in silence for his food. And, because I’m trying to evade nothing here, I don’t think I ever loved him more than I did at that at that moment, when I pitied him most.

Was that the reason for Zoya’s coldness? Because she thought soldiers like Stalin, named for a revolutionary turned dictator, and I were the same breed of creature, to be held at arm’s length? Was that why she stopped laughing whenever I entered a room? No, it couldn’t be. I had no weapon. He and I were not the same.

I was struck by a sudden, savage resentment at her tone, which was pitying, yet I took a strange pleasure in it too. I sat with my head held high, tasting bitter pride in my own weakness, and hating myself for it at the same time, because, cynical and hardened as I believed myself to be at twenty-four, I had never stopped to consider that pity might, in fact, be just another facet of love.

I tried to resist, but her tenderness was as devastating as her viciousness could be, and I finally gave in and sank down, abandoning the pretense of toughness and self-control I’d been maintaining so rigidly for the past twenty-four hours. Wrapped in my mother’s arms, I broke down and sobbed.

I see us now during that trip as three people who had drawn a shining circle in the ground around themselves and were trying as hard as they could not to leave it. It was as though we had all made the same tacit decision, to pretend to be the kind of family we had never been, and, as the days went by, I started to fear that it would end.