A Sunday call home

Sunday, late morning in whatever city the work has parked me in, I called my mother in Bishkek. The ritual is sturdy. She answers as if she has been standing beside the phone. I can picture the light in her kitchen without seeing it. We begin with weather, because weather is safe and truly interesting when you miss a place. She reported wind. I reported a hotel room that smelled faintly of someone else’s tea.

Then the soft questions arrive, as they always do. Am I eating. Am I sleeping. When am I going to settle down into something she can describe to neighbors without a brochure. She does not say the word marriage like a demand. She says it like a chair she keeps dusting in case I want to sit. I laugh, she sighs, we both perform our halves of the old play. Affection lives in the choreography more than in any speech.

What we do not do is discuss the books in any detail. She knows I write about the Soviet past and the women left out of its clean versions. She does not ask for plots. I do not offer them. There is a tenderness in that avoidance, not a coldness. Some rooms in a family stay half-lit on purpose. I told her about a cardigan I mended. She told me about a neighbor’s tomatoes. We were, for twelve minutes, excellently ordinary.

When we hung up I sat with the phone warm in my hand and felt homesick in the uncomplicated way, which is rarer than the literary kind. I made coffee in the battered cezve I travel with and did not rush to turn the feeling into material. Not everything has to become a chapter. Some calls are only proof that I am still someone’s daughter on a Sunday.