Read Online The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mira Bartók
Ads: Link
yogurt? How ’bout a nice little peach?”
Toda’s kitchen smells of Bulgarian rose, a distillation she makes from hundreds of petals, then stores in miniature glass vials. Each vial is encased in a slim wooden bottle painted with a red rose, the word bulgaria burned into the side. The bottle tops look like the onion domes that crown my grandfather’s Russian Orthodox church. His side of the family is not Jewish, a fact, I gather, he is proud of, since he sometimes calls my grandma a “fat-ass money-grubbing son-of-a-bitch kike.”
Aunt Toda is talking to me but I can’t understand. I find her a little scary, her coarse stubby hands and ruddy face, her dark skirts and mustache, the little white hairs poking out from her chin. She tells me in broken English that I have “the gift.” She leads me to the back of the house, past icons lit by small red candles—the “Not-Made-by-Hands” bloody Christ, the “Tenderness Mother of God,” and “St. Theodosius,” patron saint of Grandpa’s and her church. Toda smudges the hallway mirror with ash from her finger to ward off evil. She smudges every shiny surface she sees. We go to where she keeps her concoctions and herbal tinctures, her seedlings under glass, strange roots floating in oil; I breathe in essence of rose, the scent of oranges, cloves, and something from the dark center of the earth.
“You are old enough now,” she says. “Sit.”
Toda teaches me the ancient doctrine of signatures. How God made plants to cure men’s ills. He gives us clues to guide us in selecting the right ones. Something in the way they look, an external “signature,” suggests the inner virtue of the plant. Red clover heals the blood, walnuts heal the brain; kidney beans cure the kidneys. Is there a plant that could heal my mother? Toda pulls out dried herbs and roots from different drawers, tells me to crush them between my fingers and hold them up to smell. She opens a book and turns the pages to a picture of plants surrounding a human figure, lines drawn to each corresponding body part. What marked me frombirth, made me special in the eyes of God? Is it the birth defect I have, the way my arms bend out from the elbow when they should fall straight? Or the bump I have on the side of each foot? Is it the moon-shaped scar above my knee? Did I possess a special sign that could make my mother happy and well?
Toda shows me how to lay hands on the infirmed, how to concentrate and summon all my inner power, let it flow into their sick and dying bodies, and into their souls.
After my lesson, Toda takes out jars of legumes and seeds, trays of herbs and roots, and sets them on the big oak table in the kitchen. I help her sort, bundle, and count. “Bad peas here, good peas in the pot.” Grandpa returns from the garden with a basket of peppers and goes into the living room to take a nap. I can hear him hacking up phlegm.
“He’s got the bad lung,” says Toda. “I make him something to take home.”
A lion roars on Grandpa’s Wild Kingdom show; the sound mingles with his coughing while the narrator drones on about survival on the African savanna. I separate peas and beans for my great-aunt, just like I do for Grandpa at his house. Toda looks like Baba Yaga, the witch in the Russian fairy-tale book our father sent from far away. She has the same heavy skirts and red babushka. She makes me divide and sort, divide and sort, cut, separate, and soak; I do everything I’m told. But I have a glimmer of hope burning inside me now. I will find a miracle to save my mother. I would go into the dark forest to search for magic plants to save her, spin a room of golden thread in a single night, weave a thousand golden shirts, cross a bridge of fire.
Grandpa snores in the living room, Aunt Toda naps in a chair by the sink, while I dream and sort, dream and sort, a thousand petals simmering atop the stove.
If I’m not at school, no matter what I’m doing, if my grandfather gets the call, we
Toda’s kitchen smells of Bulgarian rose, a distillation she makes from hundreds of petals, then stores in miniature glass vials. Each vial is encased in a slim wooden bottle painted with a red rose, the word bulgaria burned into the side. The bottle tops look like the onion domes that crown my grandfather’s Russian Orthodox church. His side of the family is not Jewish, a fact, I gather, he is proud of, since he sometimes calls my grandma a “fat-ass money-grubbing son-of-a-bitch kike.”
Aunt Toda is talking to me but I can’t understand. I find her a little scary, her coarse stubby hands and ruddy face, her dark skirts and mustache, the little white hairs poking out from her chin. She tells me in broken English that I have “the gift.” She leads me to the back of the house, past icons lit by small red candles—the “Not-Made-by-Hands” bloody Christ, the “Tenderness Mother of God,” and “St. Theodosius,” patron saint of Grandpa’s and her church. Toda smudges the hallway mirror with ash from her finger to ward off evil. She smudges every shiny surface she sees. We go to where she keeps her concoctions and herbal tinctures, her seedlings under glass, strange roots floating in oil; I breathe in essence of rose, the scent of oranges, cloves, and something from the dark center of the earth.
“You are old enough now,” she says. “Sit.”
Toda teaches me the ancient doctrine of signatures. How God made plants to cure men’s ills. He gives us clues to guide us in selecting the right ones. Something in the way they look, an external “signature,” suggests the inner virtue of the plant. Red clover heals the blood, walnuts heal the brain; kidney beans cure the kidneys. Is there a plant that could heal my mother? Toda pulls out dried herbs and roots from different drawers, tells me to crush them between my fingers and hold them up to smell. She opens a book and turns the pages to a picture of plants surrounding a human figure, lines drawn to each corresponding body part. What marked me frombirth, made me special in the eyes of God? Is it the birth defect I have, the way my arms bend out from the elbow when they should fall straight? Or the bump I have on the side of each foot? Is it the moon-shaped scar above my knee? Did I possess a special sign that could make my mother happy and well?
Toda shows me how to lay hands on the infirmed, how to concentrate and summon all my inner power, let it flow into their sick and dying bodies, and into their souls.
After my lesson, Toda takes out jars of legumes and seeds, trays of herbs and roots, and sets them on the big oak table in the kitchen. I help her sort, bundle, and count. “Bad peas here, good peas in the pot.” Grandpa returns from the garden with a basket of peppers and goes into the living room to take a nap. I can hear him hacking up phlegm.
“He’s got the bad lung,” says Toda. “I make him something to take home.”
A lion roars on Grandpa’s Wild Kingdom show; the sound mingles with his coughing while the narrator drones on about survival on the African savanna. I separate peas and beans for my great-aunt, just like I do for Grandpa at his house. Toda looks like Baba Yaga, the witch in the Russian fairy-tale book our father sent from far away. She has the same heavy skirts and red babushka. She makes me divide and sort, divide and sort, cut, separate, and soak; I do everything I’m told. But I have a glimmer of hope burning inside me now. I will find a miracle to save my mother. I would go into the dark forest to search for magic plants to save her, spin a room of golden thread in a single night, weave a thousand golden shirts, cross a bridge of fire.
Grandpa snores in the living room, Aunt Toda naps in a chair by the sink, while I dream and sort, dream and sort, a thousand petals simmering atop the stove.
If I’m not at school, no matter what I’m doing, if my grandfather gets the call, we
Similar Books
