I don’t remember exactly why she chose to visit me every night because I wasn’t a child anymore. I had not spent my youth wandering about the hill behind my grandmother’s house, looking for watercress, gathering it in a pile nestled inside the folds of my skirt. I didn’t talk back to my elders, and in church on Sundays, I did not dare look up at Saint John the Baptist, his icon stretched across the Iconostasis, wider than all the other saints’, his stern glance appearing to scold me for the sins I was about to commit. I was sure I had behaved the way a young woman my age was supposed to: I had finished high school with an impressive average, I went to confession every month, and I was getting ready to become engaged to M. I had been living with my grandmother since my parents had passed away when I was very young, and I did not mind the chores. In any case, I thought hard and long about what may have invited her into my life, what may have whispered into her ear “it’s ok, go on,” but I just couldn’t think of anything. And despite all this, every night without waver, she’d come to my bed and blow her cold breath over me, and my muscles would start twitching and swelling and torturing me. My grandmother called it “night horrors” because I’d wake up livid in a pool of sweat, still shaking as if after a bad dream, but I’d remember her face, lit up in my bedroom’s chiaroscuro, her pale cheeks, her eyes shining silver, like two stars. She’d come to me, night after night, and drain me of all energy.
Day after day, I’d feel more and more lethargic and lovesick, longing for her, needing to touch her long cold arms, to feel the apple of her rounded knees, to smell the forest in her hair. Night after night, I’d become weaker and weaker, until I couldn’t leave my bedroom. I couldn’t lift my limbs, and my language sank deep into my throat refusing to come out. My grandmother prayed over me, brought the priest in, implored Saint John the Baptist to mitigate the sinful side of my destiny, but nothing helped. Winter came, and the snow weighed so heavily upon the roof that I would hear it crack and think it was her way of getting in, of letting me know she is near, stepping carefully on the mite-eaten beams as she descended, scratching the walls with her sharp nails only to get to me. When the house became very cold and no stove fire could melt down the frost inside, I began to feel better. She’d still appear at the foot of my bed, but the contours of her image began to blur. She did not mind Christ’s cross hanging at my head, or the thick waft of cold incense packing the room. She did not mind the holy water. In my weakness, I found the strength to offer her a smile, to lift a finger towards her, but she did not reciprocate my attempt, she did not meet me half way like she used to. Then, all of a sudden, she stopped coming over. I mourned her, but my body began to awake. My limbs started to regain strength, my voice bloomed new on my tongue, and the room started to warm up. By spring, she was only a dream.
And then one day when my grandmother was in church, I went to look for a broom in the storage room adjacent to my bedroom, and there, on a wall hidden by hanging coats and scarfs, I deciphered my grandmother’s handwriting. I read each word, and each sounded like the memory of my birth, my mother’s cradling arms, my very name: Vestitia, Navadaraia, Valnomia, Sina, Nicosda, Avezuha, Scorcoila, Tiha, Miha, Grompa, Slalo, Necauza, Hatavu, Hulila, Huva, Ghiana, Gluviana, Prava, Samca.
BIO
A Romanian immigrant to the US, Roxana Cazan is the author of a poetry book entitled The Accident of Birth (Main Street Rag, 2017) and the co-editor of Voices on the Move: An Anthology by and about Refugees (Solis Press, 2020). Her poems have been featured in Poets Reading the News, Connecticut River Review, Construction Magazine, Cold Creek Review, and others. She lives in Oklahoma City, OK.
