After Love Read Online Free Page B
Author: Subhash Jaireth
lying on the floor and the pillow between your legs. âHe must be cold,â I said to myself, and came to you.â
âI love you,â I said.
âI know,â she replied.
Tonya, My Agitprop Mama
Anna
Vasu told me that he knew very little about his mother. Just like me.
There is a drawing in one of the scrapbooks I kept as a child. In the right-hand corner is my name and underneath the name of my school and the date. I called the drawing My Mama . The woman stands near a window looking out; her face is turned, strangely, away from the viewer. Outside is a small round hill covered in snow, bright in the sunlight. The drawing is in just four colours.
I was five when I drew it. Papa was surprised by my view but for Aunty Olga the reason was obvious. âYou were too young to know her face,â she said. She was right. Our family album did contain a few photos of my mother but they didnât mean much to me. Her presence in them was largely formal, as was her absence in my real life. I had been told that she died in an accident. This was thought enough for me to know.
One night in August, a few months before my sixteenth birthday, I took three large family albums to my room and spent hours looking at them. I wasnât sure why. Just curious , I would have told anyone who asked, but it wasnât as straightforward as that.
I was disappointed that the albums contained only a handful of pictures of my mother. A few days later Aunty Olga showed me an old suitcase packed with bundles of loose photos. I pulled them out but most of them were so yellow with age it was impossible to see anything clearly in them.
I did, however, find photos that I liked. I put them aside to look at again. Papa knew a professional photographer who worked with the newspaper Izvestia . He made me some large prints. The process, Papa explained to me, wasnât simple: the photographer had first obtained a contact negative of the photos on an emulsion plate and then used this to print the enlargements, carefully controlling the exposure time.
One evening after dinner I asked Papa and Aunty Olga to tell me more about these four. Aunty Olga couldnât tell me much. Papa, on the other hand, seemed to remember everything about them.
Photo 1: Winter, 1948, Kuntsevo. My mother, Tonya, was then twenty-seven. This photo was taken a day after her birthday and I canât see her face clearly. That day she wore a dark olive-green coat and matching hat. It had snowed for two days, Papa told me. One of his friends had a dacha and had invited them to spend a few days skiing. The photo was taken late in the afternoon when the snow had stopped falling and the sky was clear, revealing a sun weak as the light of a torch. My mother is standing shadowed, a dark figure silhouetted against the endless white of the snow.
Photo 2: Autumn, 1949, Tsvetnoi Boulevard. My mother is sitting on a bench, smiling and wearing a pale blouse and a long striped skirt under a light autumn coat, unbuttoned. She holds an ice-cream in her right hand. Papa says that everyone then was suffering from the severe shortage of food. What they received on the ration card was meagre, although his wartime injury meant that he got a bit more than others. But even then one could go to Gorky Street and get cones and cups of delicious ice-cream. In the photo the light is bright, with leaves, mostly maple, scattered across the bench, the grass and the gravel path. My motherâs hair is gathered into a ponytail and tied with a ribbon. I still canât see her face clearly.
Photo 3: Summer, 1950, Soboleva. My mother was born in this village, about fifty kilometres south of Leningrad, near a stream that froze in winter. She stands near the gate of a small wooden cottage, her right arm resting on it, her left touching her stomach. She is wearing a spotted summer dress with thin straps. Her hair has grown and is straight and smooth. She seems to have put on weight, but
âI love you,â I said.
âI know,â she replied.
Tonya, My Agitprop Mama
Anna
Vasu told me that he knew very little about his mother. Just like me.
There is a drawing in one of the scrapbooks I kept as a child. In the right-hand corner is my name and underneath the name of my school and the date. I called the drawing My Mama . The woman stands near a window looking out; her face is turned, strangely, away from the viewer. Outside is a small round hill covered in snow, bright in the sunlight. The drawing is in just four colours.
I was five when I drew it. Papa was surprised by my view but for Aunty Olga the reason was obvious. âYou were too young to know her face,â she said. She was right. Our family album did contain a few photos of my mother but they didnât mean much to me. Her presence in them was largely formal, as was her absence in my real life. I had been told that she died in an accident. This was thought enough for me to know.
One night in August, a few months before my sixteenth birthday, I took three large family albums to my room and spent hours looking at them. I wasnât sure why. Just curious , I would have told anyone who asked, but it wasnât as straightforward as that.
I was disappointed that the albums contained only a handful of pictures of my mother. A few days later Aunty Olga showed me an old suitcase packed with bundles of loose photos. I pulled them out but most of them were so yellow with age it was impossible to see anything clearly in them.
I did, however, find photos that I liked. I put them aside to look at again. Papa knew a professional photographer who worked with the newspaper Izvestia . He made me some large prints. The process, Papa explained to me, wasnât simple: the photographer had first obtained a contact negative of the photos on an emulsion plate and then used this to print the enlargements, carefully controlling the exposure time.
One evening after dinner I asked Papa and Aunty Olga to tell me more about these four. Aunty Olga couldnât tell me much. Papa, on the other hand, seemed to remember everything about them.
Photo 1: Winter, 1948, Kuntsevo. My mother, Tonya, was then twenty-seven. This photo was taken a day after her birthday and I canât see her face clearly. That day she wore a dark olive-green coat and matching hat. It had snowed for two days, Papa told me. One of his friends had a dacha and had invited them to spend a few days skiing. The photo was taken late in the afternoon when the snow had stopped falling and the sky was clear, revealing a sun weak as the light of a torch. My mother is standing shadowed, a dark figure silhouetted against the endless white of the snow.
Photo 2: Autumn, 1949, Tsvetnoi Boulevard. My mother is sitting on a bench, smiling and wearing a pale blouse and a long striped skirt under a light autumn coat, unbuttoned. She holds an ice-cream in her right hand. Papa says that everyone then was suffering from the severe shortage of food. What they received on the ration card was meagre, although his wartime injury meant that he got a bit more than others. But even then one could go to Gorky Street and get cones and cups of delicious ice-cream. In the photo the light is bright, with leaves, mostly maple, scattered across the bench, the grass and the gravel path. My motherâs hair is gathered into a ponytail and tied with a ribbon. I still canât see her face clearly.
Photo 3: Summer, 1950, Soboleva. My mother was born in this village, about fifty kilometres south of Leningrad, near a stream that froze in winter. She stands near the gate of a small wooden cottage, her right arm resting on it, her left touching her stomach. She is wearing a spotted summer dress with thin straps. Her hair has grown and is straight and smooth. She seems to have put on weight, but
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