Читать книгу Fleeting Snow - Pavel Villikovsky - Страница 25

2.h

Afterwards Mother and I waited for the train in a park by the station. I expected Mother to be relieved to have the coat literally off her hands and that she would, now unburdened, perhaps take me for a walk around town, but she just sat next to me on the bench without a word, squinting in the sun. Eventually she said: ‘Who does she think she is? Is she the only one in the world who’s had to watch someone dear to her die?’ But her question wasn’t addressed to me. She didn’t even glance at me, she knew I couldn’t answer.

Honestly selfish as children are, they lay claim to their mother in her entirety, without allowing her an independent, separate purpose in life. A mother exists in order to be mother, that’s what she is for. Only years later, when we are much older, do we realise that she is a complete person in her own right, like anyone else, like us, that she exists even when we can’t see her and don’t need her, and we learn to accept that. I had never understood the fur coat story but I hadn’t given it much thought either; I thought we had gone on a day trip and this was just a small chore to be dealt with. Now that we had got it out of the way, I stopped thinking about it and couldn’t understand what Mother was talking about. I didn’t realise that this was the noise generated by the soul-producing factory.

It was a brilliant sunny day, with train engines whistling and puffing beyond the trees, and before we boarded our carriage, Mother bought me some ice cream from a street seller plying his trade from a tricycle. I didn’t even notice that it had started to snow.