My earliest memory is of a pot stand. It is set into a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting in a chair.
Discussions with my mother lead to just one pot stand, in a seaside cottage the summer I was eighteen months old. It was, she says, made of black iron and it stood beside a real step and the white-haired woman must be her own mother who died when I was six. This image of her is all that I have, and even then it is not so much an image as a sense. She may have been asleep, but I think she was reading. And there was something very quiet and covert about the pot stand, which was a pyramid affair with shelves for four pots. I can remember a little saucepan on the top shelf. I am tempted to say that there was a big saucepan on the bottom one, but this is pushing things a bit. I would give anything to remember what the lino was like.
At nine months, the baby puts her head in a pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the echo. She has discovered this all by herself. By way of celebration, I put my own head into the pot and say, Aaah Aaah Aaah. Then she does it again. Then I do it again. And so on.
The rest of my family don’t believe that I remember the pot stand, on the grounds that it is a stupid memory and, anyway, I was far too young. It is the job of families to reject each other’s memories, even the pleasant ones, and being the youngest I am sometimes forced to fight for the contents of my own head. But my brother broke his elbow that summer. My mother had to take him to hospital in Dublin and my grandmother looked after us while she was away. This was the first time in my life that I was without my mother for any length of time. If she had stayed, then am certain that I would not have remembered anything at all of that house — not the pot stand, and not my grandmother either.
We pilfer our own memories, we steal them from the world and salt them away.
I first left the baby when she was four months old. Some of the days when I was away, she spent with my mother. I wonder what image might remain with her from that time: a colour, a smell, a combination of shapes perhaps, affectless and still — and in the distance, someone. Just that. Someone.
And in the foreground? The carpet perhaps. I hope she remembers my parents’ carpet, the one I remember as a child, with a pattern of green leaves like stepping-stones all the way down the hall.
I have another, possibly earlier, memory of pulling the wallpaper off the wall from between the bars of my cot. My mother is absent from this scene too, but though the Pot Stand Memory is neither happy nor unhappy, this one is quite thrilling. I almost certainly ate the paper. The plaster underneath it was pink and powdery, and I imagine now that I can remember the shivery taste of it. I also remember the shape of the tear on the wall, or I think I do. At any rate, I see it in my mind’s eye — a seam on the left, stunningly straight, with four gammy strips pulled away, like a fat raggedy set of fingers, on the right.
I know this memory is, in some sense, true, but when I try to chase it, it disappears. It exists in peripheral vision, and presents itself only when I focus on something else — like typing, for example. When I stop writing this sentence and look up from the screen to try to see the pattern of the wallpaper — a blank. Memories, by their nature, may not be examined, and the mind’s eye is not the eye we use, for example, to cross the road.
I wonder if this is the way that the baby sees things: vaguely and all at once. I imagine it to be a very emotional way to exist in the world. Perhaps I am being romantic — but the visual world yields nothing but delight to her. There are (it seems) no horrors, no frights. Tiny babies see only in monochrome. I imagine colour leaking into her head like a slowly adjusted screen — tremendously slow, like a vegetable television growing silently in the corner of the room. I imagine her focus becoming sharper and deeper, like some infinitely stoned cameraman adjusting his lens. ‘Oh,’ she says — or something that is the precursor to ‘Oh’, a shallow inhalation, a stillness as she is caught by something, and begins to stalk it: careful, rapt — the most beautiful sound in the world: the sound of a baby’s wondering breath.
Something pulls in me when she is caught like this. For months I am a slave to her attention. The world is all colour, light and texture and I am her proud companion. I have no choice. None of us do. In a café, three women look over to smile at her, and then, as one, they look up. ‘Oh, she likes the light,’ says one, and this fact pleases us all. Immensely.
The light, of course, is horrible, and this is one of the reasons mothers think they are losing their minds: this pride in the baby looking at the light, this pride in the light as they introduce it to the baby, ‘Yes, the light!’ There is a certain zen to it; the world simple and new as we all stop to admire the baby admiring a wrought-iron candelabra with peculiar dangly bits and five — yes, five! — glowing, tulip-shaped bulbs.
She is years away from knowing from what ‘five’ might be, but maybe she already gets the ‘fiveness’ of it. This is the way her eyes move: One, one more! Another one! All of them! The other two. The first one again, another one! Something else.
Sometimes she holds her hand up like the baby Christ, and looks as though she contains everything, and understands it all. I do not ask to be forgiven, but still I feel redemption in the completeness of her gaze. And I feel the redemption in her fat baby wrists and her infinitely fine, fat baby’s hand. The baby is a blessing, but sometimes she does, she must, also bless, which is to say that she simply sees, and lifts her hand, as a sign.
I pick the baby up and we look in the wardrobe mirror, which has always been for her a complicated delight: What is it? It’s a baby! She smiles, it smiles back! (Complication upon complication! It’s me! It’s me! she says, and all her synapses, as I imagine, going ping! ping! ping!) She sees me smiling at her in the mirror; she sees her mother turning to smile at her in the room, and oh, it’s too much, she lunges forwards to examine the knob on the wardrobe door.
There are actually two knobs on the wardrobe. One is wooden and the other, for some reason, is an amber-coloured plastic. The baby goes from one to the other and back again. One of the first confusions in her young life was when myself and Martin both looked at her at the same time: ‘Oh no, there’s two of them.’ It almost felt unfair.
As she grew older, there was nothing she liked more than to be held by one of us and to look at the other, in a somewhat haughty way. Older still, she is completely content when the two of us are with her, quietly in a room. She has travelled from one, to two, perhaps to many. I think of this as she goes from the wooden knob to the amber one — a fairy tale of sameness and difference. This one. That one.
Of course, the first difference between this and the other is not between mother and father, or even between baby and ‘baby in the mirror’, but between one breast and . . . the other! If women had five teats, then mankind might, by now, be living on the moon.
Yesterday, it was warm, and I took off her socks and stood her on the grass. She loved this, but maybe not so much as I did — her first experience of grass. For her, this green stuff was just as different and as delicious as everything else — the ‘first’ was all mine. Sometimes, I feel as though I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world.
In the meantime, grass is green and springy and amazingly multiple and just itself. It might even be edible. Everything goes into her mouth. This is the taste of yellow. This is the taste of blue. Since she started moving about she has also experienced the taste of turf, of yesterday’s toast, and probably of mouse droppings, because it was weeks before I realised we were not alone in the house. Paper remains her ultimate goal, and she looks over her shoulder now to check if I am around. That wallpaper looks nice.
I really do wish I could remember my own wallpaper, instead of just the tear I made in it. The baby sleeps in my cot now — the one my father made over forty years ago with some half-inch dowel, and a fairly ingenious sliding mechanism for the side to be let down. I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I tried to remember what it was like to be inside; the view between the bars and the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing the cross bar at the top. The baby sucked, her eyelashes batting slowly over a drunken, surrendered gaze, and as my attention wandered I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very green I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was gone.
My mother, or someone, pulled the cot away from the wall and, in time, the wallpaper I do not remember was replaced with wallpaper that I do remember (flowers of blue, block-printed on white). Babies love pattern so much I have begun to regret my own attempts at tastefulness. Not a single curlicued carpet for her to crawl over, not a single flower on the wall. Even her toys are in primary colours and her mobile is from the Tate, cut-out shapes, like a Mondrian floating free.
Once I stop trying, I seem to remember my mother giving out to me about the ripped-up wall. She would have been upset about the wallpaper. Perhaps this is why I remember it. It was my first real experience of ‘NO!’
My own child thinks No! is a game. I say it once and she pauses. I say it twice and she looks at me. I say it three times and she laughs. The punch-line!
Tasteful as it is, she loves the mobile. It has a big red circle that spins slowly to blue, and a little square that goes from black to white. There are various rectangles that don’t particularly obsess her but, taken all in all, it is the thing she likes most in the world.
We moved when she was nearly eight months old, and it was another two weeks before I got round to stringing up the mobile for her again. When it was done, she shuddered with delight. It happened to her all in spasm. She realised, not only that the mobile was there, but also that it had once been gone. She remembered it. In order to do this she needed to see three things: the mobile in the old flat, the new room without the mobile, the new room with the mobile. Memory is not a single thing.
Martin says that his first memory, which is of one brother breaking a blue plastic jug over another brother’s head, is false. His mother tells him that they never did have a slender, pale blue plastic jug. He thinks he dreamt about the jug, and that the dream also contained the idea that this was his first memory, as he dreamt a subsequent ‘first memory’ of people waving to him from a plane while he stood in the garden below. He was convinced for years that this was real. This makes me think that we are very young when we search for our first memory — that single moment when we entered the stream of time.
My own mother, who is curator and container of many things, among them the memory of my pot stand, worries that she is getting forgetful. The distant past is closer all the time, she says. If this is true, then the memory of her own mother is getting stronger now; sitting in a house by the sea, surrounded by children who are variously delighted, or worried, or concentrating on other things.
When you think about it, the pots can’t have stayed there for long. I would have pulled them down. There would have been noise, though my memory of them is notably, and utterly, silent. Perhaps what I remember is the calm before a chaos of sound and recrimination. That delicious, slow moment, when a baby goes very, very quiet, knowing it is about to be found out.
The other morning, the baby (silently) reached the seedlings I have under the window, and she filled her mouth with a handful of hardy annuals and potting compost. I tried to prise her mouth open to get the stuff out. She clamped it shut. She bit me (by accident). She started to cry. When she cried, her mouth opened. She was undone by her own distress and this seemed so unfair to me that I left her to it. I hadn’t the heart. Besides, it said on the pack that the compost was sterilised.
But she will not let my finger into her mouth, now, even to check for a tooth (she is very proud of her teeth), and when she clamps it shut and turns away she is saying, ‘Me,’ loud and clear. ‘Oh,’ a friend said, when she started to crawl, ‘it’s the beginning of the end,’ and I knew what she meant. It is the beginning of the end of a romance between a woman who has forgotten who she is and a child who does not yet know.
Until one day there will come a moment, delightful or banal, ordinary or strange, that she will remember for the rest of her life.
Anne Enright, 'Time' in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 65-72.
Moj najzgodnejši spomin je stojalo za lonce. Postavljeno je v kot, z omaro na eni strani in ozko stopnico na drugi. Tu začne moja glava. Stopnica vodi v drugo sobo in na nasprotni strani sobe na stolu sedi sivolasa ženska.
Pogovori z mojo mamo vodijo do enega samega stojala za lonce, ki je bilo v obmorski hiški tistega poletja, ko sem bila stara osemnajst mesecev. Pravi, da je bilo narejeno iz črnega železa in da je stalo zraven prave stopnice, sivolasa ženska pa je gotovo njena mama, ki je umrla, ko sem imela šest let. Ta podoba je vse, kar mi je od nje ostalo, pa še to ni toliko podoba kot občutek. Morda je spala, ampak mislim, da je brala. Nekaj tihega in skrivnostnega je bilo na tem stojalu za posodo, tej piramidni zadevi s policami za štiri lonce. Spomnim se, da je bila na vrhnji polici majhna kozica. Rada bi rekla, da je bila na spodnji velika kozica, ampak bi že malo pretiravala. Vse bi dala, da bi se spomnila, kakšen je bil linolej.
Dojenčica pri devetih mesecih v lonec vtakne glavo in reče Aaa Aaa Aaa. To reče zelo nežno in posluša odmev. Čisto sama je to odkrila. Da proslaviva, dam še jaz glavo v lonec in rečem Aaa Aaa Aaa. Potem ona še enkrat ponovi. Potem jaz ponovim. In tako naprej.
Drugi v moji družini ne verjamejo, da se spominjam stojala za lonce, in sicer zato, ker je to neumen spomin in ker sem bila tako ali tako veliko premajhna. Naloga družin je, da si med sabo zanikajo spomine, tudi če so prijetni, in ker sem najmlajša, se moram včasih boriti za vsebino lastne glave. Ampak moj brat si je tisto poletje zlomil komolec. Mama ga je morala odpeljati v bolnišnico v Dublin in medtem ko je ni bilo, je za nas skrbela babica. Takrat sem bila prvič v življenju nekaj časa brez mame. Prepričana sem, da se, če bi mama ostala, ne bi spominjala prav ničesar iz tiste hiše – niti stojala za lonce, niti svoje babice.
Izmikamo lastne spomine, krademo jih svetu in shranimo na varno.
Hčerko sem za dlje časa prvič pustila samo, ko je bila stara štiri mesece. Del tistih dni, ko me ni bilo, je preživela z mojo mamo. Sprašujem se, katera podoba iz tega časa bo ostala z njo: barva, vonj, morda kombinacija oblik, brezizrazna in negibna – in v daljavi, nekdo. Le to. Nekdo.
In v ospredju? Mogoče preproga. Upam, da se bo spominjala preproge mojih staršev, tiste, ki se je sama spominjam iz otroštva, z vzorcem z zelenimi listi, ki kot kamni v potoku vodijo vse do konca hodnika.
Imam še en, morda še zgodnejši spomin kako sem s stene med stebrički moje posteljice trgala tapeto. Moja mama je tudi v tem prizoru odsotna, ampak za razliko od spomina-s-stojalom-za-lonce, ki ni niti vesel niti žalosten, je ta kar vznemirljiv. Skoraj zagotovo sem tapeto tudi pojedla. Omet pod njo je bil rožnat in prhek in predstavljam si, da se spomnim njegovega prašnega okusa. Spomnim se tudi oblike raztrganine na steni, vsaj tako se mi zdi. Vsekakor jo vidim v svojih mislih – spoj na levi, osupljivo raven, s štirimi nepravilnimi odtrganimi trakovi na desni, ki so bili kot debeli, grčavi prsti.
Vem, da je ta spomin na neki način resničen, a izgine, ko ga poskusim ujeti. Obstaja v perifernem vidu in se pokaže samo, kadar usmerjam pozornost v nekaj drugega – na primer v tipkanje. Ko neham pisati to poved in dvignem pogled od zaslona, da bi videla vzorec tapete, – ni tam ničesar. Spomini se po svoji naravi ne pustijo preučevati in kar vidimo v mislih, nam ne pomaga, ko želimo na primer prečkati cesto.
Sprašujem se, če tako vidi svet dojenčica: nejasno in vse hkrati. Predstavljam si, da je to zelo čustven način obstoja na tem svetu. Morda sem malo romantična – ampak vidni svet ji prinaša zgolj in samo radost. Zdi se, kot da ni ne grozot, ne strahov. Majhni dojenčki vidijo zgolj enobarvno. Predstavljam si, kako barva prodira v njeno glavo kot zaslon, ki se počasi ostri – izredno počasi, kot zelenjavna televizija, ki tiho raste v kotu sobe. Predstavljam si, kako je njen fokus vse bolj izostren in globok, kot da bi nek neverjetno zadet snemalec prilagajal svojo lečo. »O,« reče – ali nekaj, kar je predhodnik »O«, plitek vdih in mirovanje, ko nekaj zagleda in prične zasledovati: previden, zatopljen – najlepši zvok na svetu: zvok dojenčkovega začudenega diha.
Na tej njeni zamaknjenosti me nekaj pritegne. Že mesece sem sužnja njene pozornosti. Svet je ena sama barva, svetloba in tekstura in jaz sem njena ponosna spremljevalka. Nimam izbire. Nihče je nima. V kavarni tri ženske pogledajo v najino smer, da se ji nasmehnejo in nato hkrati pogledajo gor. »O, luč ji je všeč,« reče ena in to dejstvo nam vsem ugaja. Neskončno.
Luč je seveda grozna in to je eden od razlogov zakaj mame mislijo, da se jim meša: ponos, ker dojenček gleda v luč, ponos na luč, ko jo predstavijo dojenčku, »Ja, luč!« Nekakšen zen je v tem; svet je preprost in nov, ko se ustavimo in občudujemo dojenčka, ki občuduje lestenec iz kovanega železa z nenavadnimi visečimi delčki in petimi – ja, petimi! – žarečimi žarnicami v obliki tulipanov.
Še nekaj let ne bo vedela, kaj naj bi 'pet' pomenilo, ampak mogoče že zdaj dojema 'peterost' petice. Tako se premikajo njene oči: ena, še ena! In še ena! Vse skupaj! Druge dve. Spet prva, še ena! Nekaj drugega.
Včasih dvigne ročico kot mali Jezus in zdi se, kot da vse vsebuje in vse razume. Ne prosim za odpuščanje, a vseeno čutim odrešenje v popolnosti njenega pogleda. Čutim odrešenje v njenih debelih dojenčkastih zapestjih in njenih neznansko pretanjenih, debelih ročicah. Dojenčica je blagoslov, včasih pa mora tudi ona blagosloviti, kar pomeni, da preprosto vidi in kot znak dvigne ročico.
Dvignem jo in skupaj pogledava v ogledalo na omari, ki je zanjo vedno zapleteno veselje: Kaj je to? Dojenčica je! Ko se nasmehne, se ji nasmehne nazaj! (Zaplet na zaplet! To sem jaz! To sem jaz! reče, in predstavljam si, kako vse njene sinapse delajo ping! ping! ping!) Vidi, da se ji smehljam v ogledalu; vidi svojo mamo, kako se obrne k njej in se ji smehlja v sobi in potem je vse skupaj preveč in se požene naprej, da bi preučila kljuko na vratih omare.
Pravzaprav ima omara dve kljuki. Ena je lesena, druga pa je iz nekega razloga iz plastike v jantarjevi barvi. Dojenčica gre od ene do druge in nazaj. Ena prvih zmed njenega mladega življenja je bila, ko sva jo z Martinom oba naenkrat gledala: »O ne, dva sta.« Skoraj nepravično se je zdelo.
Ko je bila malo starejša, je bila najrajši v naročju enega in skorajda ošabno opazovala drugega. Zdaj, ko je še starejša, je popolnoma zadovoljna, ko sva oba z njo, tiho, v isti sobi. Odpotovala je od ena do dve, do morda mnogo. O tem razmišljam, ko pogleduje od lesene do jantarne kljuke – pravljica istosti in razlik. Ta. Tista.
Seveda prva razlika med tem in onim ni med materjo in očetom, niti med dojenčkom in »dojenčkom v ogledalu«, ampak med eno dojko in … drugo! Če bi imele ženske pet seskov, bi človeštvo do sedaj morda že živelo na Luni.
Včeraj je bilo toplo, zato sem ji sezula nogavice in jo postavila na travo. Zelo je uživala, a morda ne toliko kot jaz – to je bila njena prva izkušnja trave. Zanjo je bila ta zelena reč prav tako nova in slastna kot vse ostalo – ta »prvič« je bil samo moj. Včasih se mi zdi, kot da ji predstavljam svojo nostalgijo do sveta.
Medtem je trava zelena in prožna in neverjetno mnogotera in preprosto trava. Morda je celo užitna. Vse gre v njena usta. To je okus rumene. To je okus modre. Odkar se plazi, je okusila tudi zemljo, včerajšnji opečenec in verjetno tudi mišje kakce, ker je trajalo tedne, preden sem ugotovila, da v hiši nismo sami. Papir ostaja najvišji cilj in zdaj pogleduje čez ramo, da bi preverila, če sem kje blizu. Tista tapeta je videti mikavna.
Res si želim, da bi se spominjala svoje tapete in ne le luknje, ki sem jo vanjo naredila. Dojenčica zdaj spi v moji posteljici – tisti, ki jo je moj oče naredil pred več kot štiridesetimi leti z nekim dober centimeter dolgim lesenim vložkom in precej iznajdljivim drsnim mehanizmom za spuščanje stranice. Neke noči sem sedela ob posteljici in hranila dojenčico ter se poskušala spomniti, kako je bilo biti v njej ; razgled med stebrički in strgana tapeta na steni. Na neki točki je zibko nekdo pobarval na svetlo modro, a spominjam se zelene barve, v spomin sem skoraj uspela priklicati, kako sem žvečila prečko na vrhu. Dojenčica je sesala, njene trepalnice so počasi utripale nad opitim, predanim pogledom in ko so mi misli zatavale, sem pod okrušenim koščkom modre barve videla prav tisto zeleno, ki sem jo jedla kot otrok. Za trenutek me je preplavilo močno, oddaljeno čustvo in takoj zatem izginilo.
Moja mama, ali pa nekdo drug, je zibko odmaknila od stene in čez čas je tapeto, ki se je ne spominjam, zamenjala tapeta, ki se je spominjam (modre rože, ki so bile z lesenimi bloki potiskane na belo podlago). Dojenčki tako zelo obožujejo vzorce, da sem začela obžalovati svoje poskuse okusnosti. Niti ene perzijske preproge, po kateri bi se lahko plazila, niti ene rože na steni. Še njene igrače so v osnovnih barvah, njena obešanka pa je iz galerije Tate, z izrezanimi oblikami, kot Mondrianovo lebdeče drevo.
Ko se neham truditi, se mi zazdi, da se spomnim, da me je mama okregala zaradi raztrganega zidu. Gotovo je bila razburjena zaradi tapete. Mogoče se zato tega spomnim. To je bila moja prva prava izkušnja z »NE!«.
Moj otrok misli, da je Ne! igra. Ko rečem »ne« enkrat, se ustavi. Ko rečem dvakrat, me pogleda. Ko rečem trikrat, se zasmeji. Pa sva prišli do poante!
Prefinjenosti navkljub obožuje obešanko. Sestavljena je iz velikega rdečega kroga, ki se počasi zavrti v modro, in majhnega kvadrata, ki preide iz črne v belo. Poleg je tudi več trikotnikov, nad katerimi ni posebej prevzeta, ampak v splošnem je to njena najljubša stvar na svetu.
Preselili smo se, ko je bila stara skoraj osem mesecev, potem pa sta minila še dva tedna, preden sem ji uspela nazaj sestaviti obešanko. Ko je bila dokončana, je zadrhtela od zadovoljstva. Zanjo se je vse odvilo v valu. Ugotovila je, da ne samo da je obešanka tam, ampak tudi da je enkrat ni bilo. Spomnila se je je. Da je to dosegla, je morala videti tri stvari: obešanko v starem stanovanju, novo sobo brez obešanke, novo sobo z obešanko. Spomin ni samo ena stvar.
Martin pravi, da je njegov prvi spomin, kako je en brat na glavi drugega brata zlomil moder plastičen vrč, lažen. Njegova mama pravi, da nikoli niso imeli ozkega, svetlo modrega plastičnega vrča. Misli, da je sanjal o vrču in da je bila v teh sanjah tudi ideja, da je bil to njegov prvi spomin, ker je sanjal tudi svoj naslednji »prvi spomin«, kako so mu ljudje mahali iz letala, medtem ko je stal na vrtu. Leta je bil prepričan, da se je to res zgodilo. Ob tem razmišljam, kako mladi smo, ko že začnemo iskati svoj prvi spomin – trenutek, ko smo vstopili v tok časa.
Mojo mamo, ki je kuratorka in shranjevalka mnogih reči, med drugim spomina na moje stojalo za posodo, skrbi, da postaja pozabljiva. Pravi, da je daljna preteklost vse bližje. Če je to res, postaja spomin na njeno mamo vse močnejši; kako sedi v hiši ob morju, obkrožena z otroki, ki so v različni meri navdušeni ali zaskrbljeni ali se ukvarjajo z drugimi stvarmi.
Če prav premisliš, tista posoda ni mogla prav dolgo ostati tam. Potegnila bi jo dol. Ropotalo bi, čeprav je moj spomin nanje predvsem in povsem tih. Morda pa se spomnim miru pred zmešnjavo zvokov in oštevanja. Tisti slastni, počasni trenutek, ko postane dojenček zelo zelo tih, ker ve, da ga bodo zalotili.
Zadnjič je zjutraj (tiho) dosegla sadike, ki jih imam pod oknom, in si stlačila v usta pest trpežnih enoletnic in komposta za sajenje. Skušala sem ji odpreti usta, da bi ven zbrskala umazanijo. Tesno jih je stisnila skupaj. Ugriznila me je (po nesreči). Začela je jokati. Ko je jokala, so se ji usta odprla. Lastno vznemirjenje jo je porazilo, kar se mi je zdelo tako nepošteno, da sem jo pustila pri miru. Preprosto nisem imela srca. Poleg tega pa je na embalaži pisalo, da je kompost steriliziran.
A zdaj ne spusti mojega prsta v svoja usta, niti da bi preverila, če ji raste zob (zelo je ponosna na svoje zobe), in ko zapre ustnice in se obrne stran, jasno in glasno reče »Jaz,«. Ko se je začela plaziti, je prijateljica rekla: »O, to je začetek konca,« in vedela sem, kaj misli s tem. Je začetek konca romance med žensko, ki je pozabila, kdo je, in otrokom, ki tega še ne ve.
Dokler ne bo nekega dne prišel trenutek, čudovit ali banalen, običajen ali nenavaden, ki se ga bo spominjala do konca življenja.
My earliest memory is of a pot stand. It is set into a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting in a chair.
Discussions with my mother lead to just one pot stand, in a seaside cottage the summer I was eighteen months old. It was, she says, made of black iron and it stood beside a real step and the white-haired woman must be her own mother who died when I was six. This image of her is all that I have, and even then it is not so much an image as a sense. She may have been asleep, but I think she was reading. And there was something very quiet and covert about the pot stand, which was a pyramid affair with shelves for four pots. I can remember a little saucepan on the top shelf. I am tempted to say that there was a big saucepan on the bottom one, but this is pushing things a bit. I would give anything to remember what the lino was like.
At nine months, the baby puts her head in a pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the echo. She has discovered this all by herself. By way of celebration, I put my own head into the pot and say, Aaah Aaah Aaah. Then she does it again. Then I do it again. And so on.
The rest of my family don’t believe that I remember the pot stand, on the grounds that it is a stupid memory and, anyway, I was far too young. It is the job of families to reject each other’s memories, even the pleasant ones, and being the youngest I am sometimes forced to fight for the contents of my own head. But my brother broke his elbow that summer. My mother had to take him to hospital in Dublin and my grandmother looked after us while she was away. This was the first time in my life that I was without my mother for any length of time. If she had stayed, then am certain that I would not have remembered anything at all of that house — not the pot stand, and not my grandmother either.
We pilfer our own memories, we steal them from the world and salt them away.
I first left the baby when she was four months old. Some of the days when I was away, she spent with my mother. I wonder what image might remain with her from that time: a colour, a smell, a combination of shapes perhaps, affectless and still — and in the distance, someone. Just that. Someone.
And in the foreground? The carpet perhaps. I hope she remembers my parents’ carpet, the one I remember as a child, with a pattern of green leaves like stepping-stones all the way down the hall.
I have another, possibly earlier, memory of pulling the wallpaper off the wall from between the bars of my cot. My mother is absent from this scene too, but though the Pot Stand Memory is neither happy nor unhappy, this one is quite thrilling. I almost certainly ate the paper. The plaster underneath it was pink and powdery, and I imagine now that I can remember the shivery taste of it. I also remember the shape of the tear on the wall, or I think I do. At any rate, I see it in my mind’s eye — a seam on the left, stunningly straight, with four gammy strips pulled away, like a fat raggedy set of fingers, on the right.
I know this memory is, in some sense, true, but when I try to chase it, it disappears. It exists in peripheral vision, and presents itself only when I focus on something else — like typing, for example. When I stop writing this sentence and look up from the screen to try to see the pattern of the wallpaper — a blank. Memories, by their nature, may not be examined, and the mind’s eye is not the eye we use, for example, to cross the road.
I wonder if this is the way that the baby sees things: vaguely and all at once. I imagine it to be a very emotional way to exist in the world. Perhaps I am being romantic — but the visual world yields nothing but delight to her. There are (it seems) no horrors, no frights. Tiny babies see only in monochrome. I imagine colour leaking into her head like a slowly adjusted screen — tremendously slow, like a vegetable television growing silently in the corner of the room. I imagine her focus becoming sharper and deeper, like some infinitely stoned cameraman adjusting his lens. ‘Oh,’ she says — or something that is the precursor to ‘Oh’, a shallow inhalation, a stillness as she is caught by something, and begins to stalk it: careful, rapt — the most beautiful sound in the world: the sound of a baby’s wondering breath.
Something pulls in me when she is caught like this. For months I am a slave to her attention. The world is all colour, light and texture and I am her proud companion. I have no choice. None of us do. In a café, three women look over to smile at her, and then, as one, they look up. ‘Oh, she likes the light,’ says one, and this fact pleases us all. Immensely.
The light, of course, is horrible, and this is one of the reasons mothers think they are losing their minds: this pride in the baby looking at the light, this pride in the light as they introduce it to the baby, ‘Yes, the light!’ There is a certain zen to it; the world simple and new as we all stop to admire the baby admiring a wrought-iron candelabra with peculiar dangly bits and five — yes, five! — glowing, tulip-shaped bulbs.
She is years away from knowing from what ‘five’ might be, but maybe she already gets the ‘fiveness’ of it. This is the way her eyes move: One, one more! Another one! All of them! The other two. The first one again, another one! Something else.
Sometimes she holds her hand up like the baby Christ, and looks as though she contains everything, and understands it all. I do not ask to be forgiven, but still I feel redemption in the completeness of her gaze. And I feel the redemption in her fat baby wrists and her infinitely fine, fat baby’s hand. The baby is a blessing, but sometimes she does, she must, also bless, which is to say that she simply sees, and lifts her hand, as a sign.
I pick the baby up and we look in the wardrobe mirror, which has always been for her a complicated delight: What is it? It’s a baby! She smiles, it smiles back! (Complication upon complication! It’s me! It’s me! she says, and all her synapses, as I imagine, going ping! ping! ping!) She sees me smiling at her in the mirror; she sees her mother turning to smile at her in the room, and oh, it’s too much, she lunges forwards to examine the knob on the wardrobe door.
There are actually two knobs on the wardrobe. One is wooden and the other, for some reason, is an amber-coloured plastic. The baby goes from one to the other and back again. One of the first confusions in her young life was when myself and Martin both looked at her at the same time: ‘Oh no, there’s two of them.’ It almost felt unfair.
As she grew older, there was nothing she liked more than to be held by one of us and to look at the other, in a somewhat haughty way. Older still, she is completely content when the two of us are with her, quietly in a room. She has travelled from one, to two, perhaps to many. I think of this as she goes from the wooden knob to the amber one — a fairy tale of sameness and difference. This one. That one.
Of course, the first difference between this and the other is not between mother and father, or even between baby and ‘baby in the mirror’, but between one breast and . . . the other! If women had five teats, then mankind might, by now, be living on the moon.
Yesterday, it was warm, and I took off her socks and stood her on the grass. She loved this, but maybe not so much as I did — her first experience of grass. For her, this green stuff was just as different and as delicious as everything else — the ‘first’ was all mine. Sometimes, I feel as though I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world.
In the meantime, grass is green and springy and amazingly multiple and just itself. It might even be edible. Everything goes into her mouth. This is the taste of yellow. This is the taste of blue. Since she started moving about she has also experienced the taste of turf, of yesterday’s toast, and probably of mouse droppings, because it was weeks before I realised we were not alone in the house. Paper remains her ultimate goal, and she looks over her shoulder now to check if I am around. That wallpaper looks nice.
I really do wish I could remember my own wallpaper, instead of just the tear I made in it. The baby sleeps in my cot now — the one my father made over forty years ago with some half-inch dowel, and a fairly ingenious sliding mechanism for the side to be let down. I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I tried to remember what it was like to be inside; the view between the bars and the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing the cross bar at the top. The baby sucked, her eyelashes batting slowly over a drunken, surrendered gaze, and as my attention wandered I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very green I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was gone.
My mother, or someone, pulled the cot away from the wall and, in time, the wallpaper I do not remember was replaced with wallpaper that I do remember (flowers of blue, block-printed on white). Babies love pattern so much I have begun to regret my own attempts at tastefulness. Not a single curlicued carpet for her to crawl over, not a single flower on the wall. Even her toys are in primary colours and her mobile is from the Tate, cut-out shapes, like a Mondrian floating free.
Once I stop trying, I seem to remember my mother giving out to me about the ripped-up wall. She would have been upset about the wallpaper. Perhaps this is why I remember it. It was my first real experience of ‘NO!’
My own child thinks No! is a game. I say it once and she pauses. I say it twice and she looks at me. I say it three times and she laughs. The punch-line!
Tasteful as it is, she loves the mobile. It has a big red circle that spins slowly to blue, and a little square that goes from black to white. There are various rectangles that don’t particularly obsess her but, taken all in all, it is the thing she likes most in the world.
We moved when she was nearly eight months old, and it was another two weeks before I got round to stringing up the mobile for her again. When it was done, she shuddered with delight. It happened to her all in spasm. She realised, not only that the mobile was there, but also that it had once been gone. She remembered it. In order to do this she needed to see three things: the mobile in the old flat, the new room without the mobile, the new room with the mobile. Memory is not a single thing.
Martin says that his first memory, which is of one brother breaking a blue plastic jug over another brother’s head, is false. His mother tells him that they never did have a slender, pale blue plastic jug. He thinks he dreamt about the jug, and that the dream also contained the idea that this was his first memory, as he dreamt a subsequent ‘first memory’ of people waving to him from a plane while he stood in the garden below. He was convinced for years that this was real. This makes me think that we are very young when we search for our first memory — that single moment when we entered the stream of time.
My own mother, who is curator and container of many things, among them the memory of my pot stand, worries that she is getting forgetful. The distant past is closer all the time, she says. If this is true, then the memory of her own mother is getting stronger now; sitting in a house by the sea, surrounded by children who are variously delighted, or worried, or concentrating on other things.
When you think about it, the pots can’t have stayed there for long. I would have pulled them down. There would have been noise, though my memory of them is notably, and utterly, silent. Perhaps what I remember is the calm before a chaos of sound and recrimination. That delicious, slow moment, when a baby goes very, very quiet, knowing it is about to be found out.
The other morning, the baby (silently) reached the seedlings I have under the window, and she filled her mouth with a handful of hardy annuals and potting compost. I tried to prise her mouth open to get the stuff out. She clamped it shut. She bit me (by accident). She started to cry. When she cried, her mouth opened. She was undone by her own distress and this seemed so unfair to me that I left her to it. I hadn’t the heart. Besides, it said on the pack that the compost was sterilised.
But she will not let my finger into her mouth, now, even to check for a tooth (she is very proud of her teeth), and when she clamps it shut and turns away she is saying, ‘Me,’ loud and clear. ‘Oh,’ a friend said, when she started to crawl, ‘it’s the beginning of the end,’ and I knew what she meant. It is the beginning of the end of a romance between a woman who has forgotten who she is and a child who does not yet know.
Until one day there will come a moment, delightful or banal, ordinary or strange, that she will remember for the rest of her life.
Anne Enright, 'Time' in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 65-72.
Moj najzgodnejši spomin je stojalo za lonce. Postavljeno je v kot, z omaro na eni strani in ozko stopnico na drugi. Tu začne moja glava. Stopnica vodi v drugo sobo in na nasprotni strani sobe na stolu sedi sivolasa ženska.
Pogovori z mojo mamo vodijo do enega samega stojala za lonce, ki je bilo v obmorski hiški tistega poletja, ko sem bila stara osemnajst mesecev. Pravi, da je bilo narejeno iz črnega železa in da je stalo zraven prave stopnice, sivolasa ženska pa je gotovo njena mama, ki je umrla, ko sem imela šest let. Ta podoba je vse, kar mi je od nje ostalo, pa še to ni toliko podoba kot občutek. Morda je spala, ampak mislim, da je brala. Nekaj tihega in skrivnostnega je bilo na tem stojalu za posodo, tej piramidni zadevi s policami za štiri lonce. Spomnim se, da je bila na vrhnji polici majhna kozica. Rada bi rekla, da je bila na spodnji velika kozica, ampak bi že malo pretiravala. Vse bi dala, da bi se spomnila, kakšen je bil linolej.
Dojenčica pri devetih mesecih v lonec vtakne glavo in reče Aaa Aaa Aaa. To reče zelo nežno in posluša odmev. Čisto sama je to odkrila. Da proslaviva, dam še jaz glavo v lonec in rečem Aaa Aaa Aaa. Potem ona še enkrat ponovi. Potem jaz ponovim. In tako naprej.
Drugi v moji družini ne verjamejo, da se spominjam stojala za lonce, in sicer zato, ker je to neumen spomin in ker sem bila tako ali tako veliko premajhna. Naloga družin je, da si med sabo zanikajo spomine, tudi če so prijetni, in ker sem najmlajša, se moram včasih boriti za vsebino lastne glave. Ampak moj brat si je tisto poletje zlomil komolec. Mama ga je morala odpeljati v bolnišnico v Dublin in medtem ko je ni bilo, je za nas skrbela babica. Takrat sem bila prvič v življenju nekaj časa brez mame. Prepričana sem, da se, če bi mama ostala, ne bi spominjala prav ničesar iz tiste hiše – niti stojala za lonce, niti svoje babice.
Izmikamo lastne spomine, krademo jih svetu in shranimo na varno.
Hčerko sem za dlje časa prvič pustila samo, ko je bila stara štiri mesece. Del tistih dni, ko me ni bilo, je preživela z mojo mamo. Sprašujem se, katera podoba iz tega časa bo ostala z njo: barva, vonj, morda kombinacija oblik, brezizrazna in negibna – in v daljavi, nekdo. Le to. Nekdo.
In v ospredju? Mogoče preproga. Upam, da se bo spominjala preproge mojih staršev, tiste, ki se je sama spominjam iz otroštva, z vzorcem z zelenimi listi, ki kot kamni v potoku vodijo vse do konca hodnika.
Imam še en, morda še zgodnejši spomin kako sem s stene med stebrički moje posteljice trgala tapeto. Moja mama je tudi v tem prizoru odsotna, ampak za razliko od spomina-s-stojalom-za-lonce, ki ni niti vesel niti žalosten, je ta kar vznemirljiv. Skoraj zagotovo sem tapeto tudi pojedla. Omet pod njo je bil rožnat in prhek in predstavljam si, da se spomnim njegovega prašnega okusa. Spomnim se tudi oblike raztrganine na steni, vsaj tako se mi zdi. Vsekakor jo vidim v svojih mislih – spoj na levi, osupljivo raven, s štirimi nepravilnimi odtrganimi trakovi na desni, ki so bili kot debeli, grčavi prsti.
Vem, da je ta spomin na neki način resničen, a izgine, ko ga poskusim ujeti. Obstaja v perifernem vidu in se pokaže samo, kadar usmerjam pozornost v nekaj drugega – na primer v tipkanje. Ko neham pisati to poved in dvignem pogled od zaslona, da bi videla vzorec tapete, – ni tam ničesar. Spomini se po svoji naravi ne pustijo preučevati in kar vidimo v mislih, nam ne pomaga, ko želimo na primer prečkati cesto.
Sprašujem se, če tako vidi svet dojenčica: nejasno in vse hkrati. Predstavljam si, da je to zelo čustven način obstoja na tem svetu. Morda sem malo romantična – ampak vidni svet ji prinaša zgolj in samo radost. Zdi se, kot da ni ne grozot, ne strahov. Majhni dojenčki vidijo zgolj enobarvno. Predstavljam si, kako barva prodira v njeno glavo kot zaslon, ki se počasi ostri – izredno počasi, kot zelenjavna televizija, ki tiho raste v kotu sobe. Predstavljam si, kako je njen fokus vse bolj izostren in globok, kot da bi nek neverjetno zadet snemalec prilagajal svojo lečo. »O,« reče – ali nekaj, kar je predhodnik »O«, plitek vdih in mirovanje, ko nekaj zagleda in prične zasledovati: previden, zatopljen – najlepši zvok na svetu: zvok dojenčkovega začudenega diha.
Na tej njeni zamaknjenosti me nekaj pritegne. Že mesece sem sužnja njene pozornosti. Svet je ena sama barva, svetloba in tekstura in jaz sem njena ponosna spremljevalka. Nimam izbire. Nihče je nima. V kavarni tri ženske pogledajo v najino smer, da se ji nasmehnejo in nato hkrati pogledajo gor. »O, luč ji je všeč,« reče ena in to dejstvo nam vsem ugaja. Neskončno.
Luč je seveda grozna in to je eden od razlogov zakaj mame mislijo, da se jim meša: ponos, ker dojenček gleda v luč, ponos na luč, ko jo predstavijo dojenčku, »Ja, luč!« Nekakšen zen je v tem; svet je preprost in nov, ko se ustavimo in občudujemo dojenčka, ki občuduje lestenec iz kovanega železa z nenavadnimi visečimi delčki in petimi – ja, petimi! – žarečimi žarnicami v obliki tulipanov.
Še nekaj let ne bo vedela, kaj naj bi 'pet' pomenilo, ampak mogoče že zdaj dojema 'peterost' petice. Tako se premikajo njene oči: ena, še ena! In še ena! Vse skupaj! Druge dve. Spet prva, še ena! Nekaj drugega.
Včasih dvigne ročico kot mali Jezus in zdi se, kot da vse vsebuje in vse razume. Ne prosim za odpuščanje, a vseeno čutim odrešenje v popolnosti njenega pogleda. Čutim odrešenje v njenih debelih dojenčkastih zapestjih in njenih neznansko pretanjenih, debelih ročicah. Dojenčica je blagoslov, včasih pa mora tudi ona blagosloviti, kar pomeni, da preprosto vidi in kot znak dvigne ročico.
Dvignem jo in skupaj pogledava v ogledalo na omari, ki je zanjo vedno zapleteno veselje: Kaj je to? Dojenčica je! Ko se nasmehne, se ji nasmehne nazaj! (Zaplet na zaplet! To sem jaz! To sem jaz! reče, in predstavljam si, kako vse njene sinapse delajo ping! ping! ping!) Vidi, da se ji smehljam v ogledalu; vidi svojo mamo, kako se obrne k njej in se ji smehlja v sobi in potem je vse skupaj preveč in se požene naprej, da bi preučila kljuko na vratih omare.
Pravzaprav ima omara dve kljuki. Ena je lesena, druga pa je iz nekega razloga iz plastike v jantarjevi barvi. Dojenčica gre od ene do druge in nazaj. Ena prvih zmed njenega mladega življenja je bila, ko sva jo z Martinom oba naenkrat gledala: »O ne, dva sta.« Skoraj nepravično se je zdelo.
Ko je bila malo starejša, je bila najrajši v naročju enega in skorajda ošabno opazovala drugega. Zdaj, ko je še starejša, je popolnoma zadovoljna, ko sva oba z njo, tiho, v isti sobi. Odpotovala je od ena do dve, do morda mnogo. O tem razmišljam, ko pogleduje od lesene do jantarne kljuke – pravljica istosti in razlik. Ta. Tista.
Seveda prva razlika med tem in onim ni med materjo in očetom, niti med dojenčkom in »dojenčkom v ogledalu«, ampak med eno dojko in … drugo! Če bi imele ženske pet seskov, bi človeštvo do sedaj morda že živelo na Luni.
Včeraj je bilo toplo, zato sem ji sezula nogavice in jo postavila na travo. Zelo je uživala, a morda ne toliko kot jaz – to je bila njena prva izkušnja trave. Zanjo je bila ta zelena reč prav tako nova in slastna kot vse ostalo – ta »prvič« je bil samo moj. Včasih se mi zdi, kot da ji predstavljam svojo nostalgijo do sveta.
Medtem je trava zelena in prožna in neverjetno mnogotera in preprosto trava. Morda je celo užitna. Vse gre v njena usta. To je okus rumene. To je okus modre. Odkar se plazi, je okusila tudi zemljo, včerajšnji opečenec in verjetno tudi mišje kakce, ker je trajalo tedne, preden sem ugotovila, da v hiši nismo sami. Papir ostaja najvišji cilj in zdaj pogleduje čez ramo, da bi preverila, če sem kje blizu. Tista tapeta je videti mikavna.
Res si želim, da bi se spominjala svoje tapete in ne le luknje, ki sem jo vanjo naredila. Dojenčica zdaj spi v moji posteljici – tisti, ki jo je moj oče naredil pred več kot štiridesetimi leti z nekim dober centimeter dolgim lesenim vložkom in precej iznajdljivim drsnim mehanizmom za spuščanje stranice. Neke noči sem sedela ob posteljici in hranila dojenčico ter se poskušala spomniti, kako je bilo biti v njej ; razgled med stebrički in strgana tapeta na steni. Na neki točki je zibko nekdo pobarval na svetlo modro, a spominjam se zelene barve, v spomin sem skoraj uspela priklicati, kako sem žvečila prečko na vrhu. Dojenčica je sesala, njene trepalnice so počasi utripale nad opitim, predanim pogledom in ko so mi misli zatavale, sem pod okrušenim koščkom modre barve videla prav tisto zeleno, ki sem jo jedla kot otrok. Za trenutek me je preplavilo močno, oddaljeno čustvo in takoj zatem izginilo.
Moja mama, ali pa nekdo drug, je zibko odmaknila od stene in čez čas je tapeto, ki se je ne spominjam, zamenjala tapeta, ki se je spominjam (modre rože, ki so bile z lesenimi bloki potiskane na belo podlago). Dojenčki tako zelo obožujejo vzorce, da sem začela obžalovati svoje poskuse okusnosti. Niti ene perzijske preproge, po kateri bi se lahko plazila, niti ene rože na steni. Še njene igrače so v osnovnih barvah, njena obešanka pa je iz galerije Tate, z izrezanimi oblikami, kot Mondrianovo lebdeče drevo.
Ko se neham truditi, se mi zazdi, da se spomnim, da me je mama okregala zaradi raztrganega zidu. Gotovo je bila razburjena zaradi tapete. Mogoče se zato tega spomnim. To je bila moja prva prava izkušnja z »NE!«.
Moj otrok misli, da je Ne! igra. Ko rečem »ne« enkrat, se ustavi. Ko rečem dvakrat, me pogleda. Ko rečem trikrat, se zasmeji. Pa sva prišli do poante!
Prefinjenosti navkljub obožuje obešanko. Sestavljena je iz velikega rdečega kroga, ki se počasi zavrti v modro, in majhnega kvadrata, ki preide iz črne v belo. Poleg je tudi več trikotnikov, nad katerimi ni posebej prevzeta, ampak v splošnem je to njena najljubša stvar na svetu.
Preselili smo se, ko je bila stara skoraj osem mesecev, potem pa sta minila še dva tedna, preden sem ji uspela nazaj sestaviti obešanko. Ko je bila dokončana, je zadrhtela od zadovoljstva. Zanjo se je vse odvilo v valu. Ugotovila je, da ne samo da je obešanka tam, ampak tudi da je enkrat ni bilo. Spomnila se je je. Da je to dosegla, je morala videti tri stvari: obešanko v starem stanovanju, novo sobo brez obešanke, novo sobo z obešanko. Spomin ni samo ena stvar.
Martin pravi, da je njegov prvi spomin, kako je en brat na glavi drugega brata zlomil moder plastičen vrč, lažen. Njegova mama pravi, da nikoli niso imeli ozkega, svetlo modrega plastičnega vrča. Misli, da je sanjal o vrču in da je bila v teh sanjah tudi ideja, da je bil to njegov prvi spomin, ker je sanjal tudi svoj naslednji »prvi spomin«, kako so mu ljudje mahali iz letala, medtem ko je stal na vrtu. Leta je bil prepričan, da se je to res zgodilo. Ob tem razmišljam, kako mladi smo, ko že začnemo iskati svoj prvi spomin – trenutek, ko smo vstopili v tok časa.
Mojo mamo, ki je kuratorka in shranjevalka mnogih reči, med drugim spomina na moje stojalo za posodo, skrbi, da postaja pozabljiva. Pravi, da je daljna preteklost vse bližje. Če je to res, postaja spomin na njeno mamo vse močnejši; kako sedi v hiši ob morju, obkrožena z otroki, ki so v različni meri navdušeni ali zaskrbljeni ali se ukvarjajo z drugimi stvarmi.
Če prav premisliš, tista posoda ni mogla prav dolgo ostati tam. Potegnila bi jo dol. Ropotalo bi, čeprav je moj spomin nanje predvsem in povsem tih. Morda pa se spomnim miru pred zmešnjavo zvokov in oštevanja. Tisti slastni, počasni trenutek, ko postane dojenček zelo zelo tih, ker ve, da ga bodo zalotili.
Zadnjič je zjutraj (tiho) dosegla sadike, ki jih imam pod oknom, in si stlačila v usta pest trpežnih enoletnic in komposta za sajenje. Skušala sem ji odpreti usta, da bi ven zbrskala umazanijo. Tesno jih je stisnila skupaj. Ugriznila me je (po nesreči). Začela je jokati. Ko je jokala, so se ji usta odprla. Lastno vznemirjenje jo je porazilo, kar se mi je zdelo tako nepošteno, da sem jo pustila pri miru. Preprosto nisem imela srca. Poleg tega pa je na embalaži pisalo, da je kompost steriliziran.
A zdaj ne spusti mojega prsta v svoja usta, niti da bi preverila, če ji raste zob (zelo je ponosna na svoje zobe), in ko zapre ustnice in se obrne stran, jasno in glasno reče »Jaz,«. Ko se je začela plaziti, je prijateljica rekla: »O, to je začetek konca,« in vedela sem, kaj misli s tem. Je začetek konca romance med žensko, ki je pozabila, kdo je, in otrokom, ki tega še ne ve.
Dokler ne bo nekega dne prišel trenutek, čudovit ali banalen, običajen ali nenavaden, ki se ga bo spominjala do konca življenja.
Translation commentary
Vanja Gajić
“Time” is a nonfiction short story from Anne Enright’s book Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, that describes the author’s experiences with her baby daughter, and how the everyday occurrences of motherhood intertwine with the memories she has of her own early childhood. The text therefore switches between the present and past, recounting parallel events and employing stream of consciousness thought patterns, as the author meanders between her current reality of a mother watching her child experience the world and her memory of herself as a child experiencing the world. This structure provides an engrossing read that is at once fascinating and familiar, as the story structure reflects our own thought processes.
In my translation, I strived to be as faithful to the author’s writing as possible. I closely followed the language of the original, while also adapting it to preserve the semantic and stylistic aspects of the writing. Naturally, to successfully transfer a message from the source language into the target language, linguistic changes had to be made.
One of the main difficulties I encountered while translating the text, was the word baby, which is the only word the author uses to refer to her daughter and is therefore one of the key words in the story. This was problematic because while the word baby is neutral in English, and can refer to a male or female baby, Slovene distinguishes three grammatical genders. The word “baby” can therefore be translated into “dojenček” (male baby/baby boy) or dojenčica (female baby/baby girl). “Dojenčica” is not very commonly used in Slovene, so I was wary of relying on it too much in the translation. I contemplated translating baby into otrok (child) or hčerka (daughter) or alternating between the different translations to avoid the jarring effect of the repetition of a seldomly used word. One of the reviewers advised me to stick to a single term, as the author does, even if the word itself is not as idiomatic as in the original. It made most sense to opt for the translation that was semantically closest to the original where Enright uses baby to refer to a female baby, so I decided for the translation “dojenčica” and used it consistently.
Some difficulties also arose while interpreting the text. One such instance involved the description of the mechanism of the cot the author’s father had built. I struggled to picture how the cot was built based on the author’s description, and had trouble translating the word dowel, because the direct translation (moznik) is a very obscure, technical term in Slovene that most readers would not know. I therefore had to find a simpler, equivalent term, which was problematic as I did not fully understand what role the dowel played in the structure of the cot. Another such dilemma was the description of the taste of the wallpaper the author ate as a baby. Enright describes the plaster underneath it as “pink”, “powdery” and as having a “shivery taste”. I was not completely confident in my interpretation of what the author meant by using “shivery” to describe a taste. Shivery is an adjective usually used as a descriptor for movement. I ultimately chose to translate it with “prašen okus” (dusty taste), which hopefully paint a clear picture for the reader but also maintain the discrepancy the author employs by describing a taste as shivery, as the translation describes a taste with a texture.