When you were young, Mama sent you away from the land of the dead and told you not to look back.
You remember the grey skirts they passed out at the border. Long lines like sinew, and waiting in them. The dark cavern sky of Asphodel. Sometimes the wind brought the honeyed scent of Elysian apples. But that is where heroes go, so you had to stay in line.
The Furies took your suitcase, your passports, your camel-haired blanket that smelled like electric fires and Father. The Furies talked in screaming bird voices to Mama. She was afraid. You remember your Mama afraid.
You remember Mama pulling you out of line, hands like cobwebs. They say you can go, baby, she said, her voice the reedy, remembered voice of shades. They said you’re still alive, baby. You have to go, baby. Baby, let go.
You left the land of the dead with only a hank of her skirt in your baby fist. You left bawling, feet dragging, crying for each vulture to devour you, and all around the reeds of Mama’s voice: don’t look back, don’t look back, baby, don’t look back.
And for a long time, you don’t. You grow up accidentally. There are funds for children of disaster to go to university, so you do, for a long time, until the university becomes your world, and you become a teacher. You have many dreadful students whom you love equally. You have a book-lined office and health insurance.
Mama, I promise I didn’t look back.
One night you have a fever that doesn’t get better, and a dream that a Fury is standing above you, paging through your passport. I don’t know, she says. It says you’re still alive.
Maybe the fever breaks something in your head, because you start to remember.
You remember the Furies breaking down your door. You remember Father on the living room floor while they let you and Mama put on coats.
You read books about what happened. It’s not enough. You read the official, passive-voice apology. It’s not enough.
You read book eleven of The Odyssey, where Odysseus must consult the dead sage, Tiresias. He goes to the edge of the underworld and slaughters sheep, to let the ghosts feast upon the blood. But the first ghost to arrive is his mother, Antikleia, whom he had not realized was dead.
You think about the questions you want to ask your mother. What’s your name? What’s my name? Where are we from? What happened to us? You read and reread that passage until your colleagues ask if you’re going to teach it.
You can’t stop looking back.
You don’t have blood, but you do have tomato sauce. You cook the only thing you remember from the labor camps: stewed beans, acidic with tomatoes. You would make it the way Mama did, only you don’t remember.
You don’t remember her face, but you remember your mother. You’ll know her out of all the breathless dead. Copy of The Odyssey in hand, you light the candles.
She does not look the way you remember. This shade is the age of one of your students. Your mother is a child.
But she recognizes you at once. You can tell from the way her hands flutter to her mouth.
Моја дијете, she says, in the voice of shades. Живиш ли још?
You do not remember this language at all.
You are sitting at your mismatched kitchen table. You are afraid to look at your shade mother. You did not have parents long enough to disappoint them; the fear that she may be disappointed is entirely novel. She is fluttering beside you like a moth, a cold spot in the air.
At any point in the past lifetime, you could have taken a class on this language.
You brought your mother back from the dead for one meal, and you can’t even talk to her.
There is an acridness as the beans burn. You do not open your eyes until you hear the sound of something soft on plastic. You look up to see your Mama dumping the burned beans into the trash.
Then she is off, chopping vegetables, going through your meager cabinets, taking down and tasting every spice you own. You have to show her how to light the stove and use the can opener, but mostly you just sit there, watching your silent, deft Mama as she makes something out of nothing, like alchemy. Before the candles are half-burned, she has a plate for you.
“You have to have some,” you say, and she says a string of unintelligible syllables that so clearly means, What, me? No, no, no, I could never, I’m not hungry at all. As though this child before you did not probably starve to death. But you have no experience arguing with a parent, so she wins; you eat the beans, and she watches you eat them like it’s enough.
You eat her share. Children always do, somehow. She is delighted to watch you eat. She keeps ladling beans onto your plate, long past the point when a normal human could finish them, and when you do not, she looks at you with such mildly reproachful eyes that you try anyway, try and try until they’re almost gone.
Your Mama, this stranger the age of your students, beams at you. If she is hungry, she does not say.
“I’m sorry,” you say. The food is hot as tears in your stomach. “None of this should have happened. I wish you could stay.”
Maybe she understands. Or maybe she just loves you. Either way, she holds your face in both hands, then chides at you to finish the beans. Пасуљ, she calls them. It is the only word you think you remember.
So you finish them, because she asked you to. Then you sit there with your Mama’s cold hands in yours. You sit there with your wordless mother until the candles go out.
