Dobryd by Ann Charney

alien as anything could possibly be to the enlightened, prosperous milieu in which she had spent most of her life.
    Yet in spite of what she had endured, there was nothing passive or submissive about her. People always thought of her as someone very strong, someone to lean on in difficulties, a person who seemed in charge of her life.
    I had absolute faith in her. I knew she would take care of me and that with her I was always safe. The events of my childhood, terrible as they were, did not affect me as might be expected. My mother was always there, a protective barrier between me and all evil. Because of her presence and her strength, I grew up with the impression that mine had been a happy childhood. Strange as it seems, this was how I always thought of it.
    As a child I was never taken into her confidence, and I knew very little of what she thought or felt. When I compare her with the other adults I knew, she stands in my memory apart from them, illuminated by the energy and vitality that always emanated from her. In those days everyone who came near her seemed to me by comparison half-dead and because I belonged to her, I knew that nothing really terrible would happen to me.
    Somehow she left me and others with the impression that even during the war and immediately after it she did more than just survive. There was a sense of satisfaction about her life then. She had fought against impossible odds and won. Years later, in Canada, living in prosperity and peace, her sense of resolution and strength ebbed away. As I grew older I became familiar with her frailties and her limitations, but the impression from my childhood remained with me despite all the changes in her and in me.
    On the days she returned safely from Lwow, it was as if a spark had reanimated all of us. My aunt forgot her burden of grief and rejoiced, restored to the vital person she must once have been. At these moments, I could picture her as the young lady of her stories. The rest of the time she was as the war had made her—a frightened, superstitious woman, ageless and old at the same time. The simplest acts of everyday life had become terrifying obstacles for her, and she turned more and more to omens, old wives’ tales and the magic of repetition to help her through her days. I sensed even then that my aunt had lost touch with reality, but it was only much later that I became familiar with the terrifying world she inhabited.
    Yet, on the nights when my mother was about to return and my aunt was busy cooking for her, I would look at her and see, not someone familiar, but someone whom I regretted not knowing. I would have given anything to keep my aunt as she was just then, smiling, animated, in control.
    When my mother finally arrived, we both rushed at her, filled with excitement. Sometimes it seemed to me that my aunt was the true child in these moments. It was something about the way she would lose herself totally in the pleasure of my mother’s return, while I viewed them both from a certain distance.
    I watched my aunt. Her eyes turned an intense blue, the fair skin of her face flushed, her hands, always occupied, seemed suddenly fragile and fluttering. Surreptitiously, because she knew my mother disapproved of this habit, she lit a candle in the corner of the room, an offering for my mother’s safe return. In a few minutes, the emotions that caused this transformation subsided and she became her familiar self once again.
    After my mother had been going to Lwow for some time, I became dissatisfied with waiting for her, receiving my present, and listening to her adventures. I wanted to go with her. My pleading to take me along became a ritual of her departures. She always refused, of course, and her reasons were valid enough to satisfy any adult: the roads were bad, the trucks that picked her up were crowded and would not stop for a woman with a child, she wanted to keep me away from large crowds. But to a child, they meant nothing.