My son turned up to his father's funeral in a woman's pink dress, and would not tell me why in front of anybody. When the chapel had emptied he took something out of the pocket of it, wrapped in tissue paper, and by the time he finished talking I was on my knees on the flagstones.
PART 1 — THE DRESS
My husband Emeric was ill for eleven months.
I watched a man who could carry a washing machine up a flight of stairs get to the point where I had to hold his cup for him, and if you have done that you know there is nothing to say about it and if you have not then nothing I write will do it.
Our only son is Nikolai. Niko. He is thirty and he was his father's shadow from the day he could walk.
He took the illness worse than I did, which I did not expect and which I understood later.
Four months before Emeric died, I came back from the pharmacy on a Tuesday afternoon and I could hear them from the drive.
Not arguing. Shouting. Neither of those men had ever raised his voice in that house.
Niko was standing in the hall with a suitcase and his face was soaked.
"I can't believe you asked me that."
"I've got no other way to do it," Emeric said.
"Then you've lost your son."
He went out and pulled that door so hard our wedding photograph came off the wall in the hall and the glass cracked across one corner.
I went in to Emeric and I asked him what had happened, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed in his dressing gown, and he said:
"Astrid. This is between me and the boy. Please don't ask me. Please."
I asked him four more times over four months. He never moved.
Niko went three states away, to Ordway, and got a job there inside a fortnight, and every time I rang him he said the same thing.
"Mom, I love you. Don't ask me to forgive him."
I did not know what I was being asked not to ask about.
Those four months were the worst of my life and the illness was not the worst part of them.
I had a dying man in my front room who would not look at me properly, and a son three states away who rang every Sunday at seven and would not tell me why he had gone.
I made up about eleven explanations. I want to put some of them down, because I think anybody would.
I decided Emeric had asked him for money and been refused. I decided there was another woman somewhere and Niko had found out. I decided, for about nine days in the January, that my husband had asked our son to help him die, and I sat with that one alone and did not say it to a single person, and it made me look at Emeric across a room in a way I am ashamed of now.
I went through his desk in the February. I am not proud of it and I would do it again.
I found nothing, because the only thing in that desk was a photograph in an envelope and I looked at it for four seconds and decided it was somebody's aunt.
Emeric's sister was in my hand in the February and I put her back in the drawer.
Twice in those four months I asked him whether he was going to sort it out with Niko before — and I could never finish that sentence, and he always waited for me not to finish it.
The second time, in the January, he said, "I've left it with him. He'll do what he decides."
That is the only sentence my husband gave me about any of it in four months and at the time I thought it meant nothing at all.
And Emeric got thinner, and then he got the hospital bed in the front room, and then in the March he died, at eleven past four in the morning, with my hand on his chest.
I rang Niko afterward and said whatever it was, please come and say goodbye.
There was a silence on that line long enough that I checked the screen.
Then he said, "I'll come. But I need you to let me do it my way and not ask me anything until it's over."
I said all right, because I would have said all right to anything.
The service was at Ashgate on the Friday. About seventy people.
I sat in the front row and watched those doors.
He was late. Eleven minutes. And I sat there in a church with my husband in a box in front of me and thought, he is not coming, he has decided, and whatever it is is bigger than this.
Then the doors opened.
Niko came in wearing a woman's dress.
Pink. Not a costume. A good dress, tea-length, forty years out of fashion and beautifully made, with covered buttons at the cuff, and it did not fit him properly across the shoulders and he had not tried to make it fit.
My whole face went hot. The rows went off like a kettle behind me.
I got up and said, "Nikolai. What are you doing. This is your father's funeral."
He did not answer me. He did not look at me.
He walked all the way up that aisle and put both hands flat on the lid of that coffin and cried so hard his shoulders went.
And he said, into the wood, loud enough for the first three rows:
"I'm sorry I didn't come sooner, Dad. I'm sorry."
I did not ask him anything else. I am not sure why. Something in the way he was holding that coffin.
We buried my husband and the people came back to the hall and then they went, one by one, and I stood in the chapel doorway saying thank you for coming for about forty minutes.
And when there were about eleven people left, Niko came and stood in front of me with his hands shaking.
"You've been asking why we fought," he said. "Dad asked me not to tell you until he was gone."
He put his hand in the pocket of that dress — it has pockets, which I noticed, and which for some reason is the detail I remember best — and took out something small and flat, wrapped in tissue paper.
"I'll understand if you hate us both after this," he said.
And by the time he finished telling me, I was down on the flagstones.
PART 2 — HALLOW GREEN, 1991
I had met her.
That is what took my legs out from under me in that doorway, and I need to go back thirty-four years to explain it.
Emeric and I married in the June of 1989. I was twenty-two.
Two years later, in the September of 1991, there was a wedding — his cousin Beñat, at Hallow Green Hall, about forty-five guests, the kind of wedding where the same nine people are in every photograph.
I was twenty-four and I had been a Kolbe for two years and I still did not properly know who anybody was.
There was a woman there I had not been introduced to.
Forty-five people at that thing and I remember her more clearly than the bride. She was in her early thirties, tall, dark hair set properly, and she had a way of standing very straight that I registered at the time as confidence and that I now understand was something else entirely.
She talked to me for about twenty minutes by the drinks table, which nobody else in that family did, because at twenty-four I was the quiet one who had married Emeric.
She asked me what I did. She asked me follow-up questions about it. She was funny about the band.
I asked Emeric afterward who she was and he said, "Works with Dad. Rozalind."
I said she was lovely and he said "mm" and went to get a drink.
Later they lined everybody up outside the hall for the family photograph.
The photographer was arranging people — you at the back, you two swap — and Rozalind came over and stepped into the line at the end, next to Emeric's father.
And Wilma Kolbe, my mother-in-law, came out of that line, took hold of Rozalind's wrist, and walked her out of the frame.
Not roughly. She did not have to be rough. She took her by the wrist the way you would move a chair.
And she said, in an ordinary speaking voice that carried across all forty-five of those people:
"Step out. You're not family here and you know it. Move, before people start asking questions."
Nobody said anything.
Forty-five people. Emeric's father looked at the grass. Beñat's mother, who was standing next to me, adjusted her hat.
And Emeric — my husband of two years, standing beside me with my hand on his arm — looked directly at the ground and did not move a muscle.
Rozalind stood out of that line, about four feet to the side, and she did not leave. That is the thing I have thought about most in the last year. She did not leave. She stood there and waited while the photographer took three photographs, and then she went back inside and got her coat.
I was in that line. Second row, third from the left, in a green dress.
And I said nothing, because I did not understand what I was looking at.
That is true and it is also not a defence, and I have had a year to work out the difference.
I was twenty-four. I heard a woman tell another woman she was not family in a tone that made forty-five people look at the grass, and my entire reaction was that it was awkward and that Wilma could be very hard.
I never saw Rozalind again.
I asked about her twice over the years, in a passing way. The first time Emeric said she had left the company. The second time, years later, he said, "She died, Astrid," and got up and went out to the garage.
I thought I was asking about a colleague.
PART 3 — WHAT WAS IN THE TISSUE PAPER
It was a photograph. Three and a half by five, in a paper sleeve, soft at the corners from being handled.
A woman in her twenties, outdoors, squinting, laughing at whoever was holding the camera. Short-sleeved blouse. She is wearing that dress.
On the back, in pencil, in handwriting I did not recognise: R. — August 1981.
Rozalind Kolbe was my husband's sister.
She was born in 1958 and Emeric was born in 1961, and there are photographs in a box in my attic of the two of them as children that I have looked at perhaps a hundred times over thirty-six years, and I was told, in 1990, when I asked, that the older one was a cousin who went abroad.
In 1978 Rozalind was twenty and Emeric was seventeen.
I do not know the details of that year and I am not going to invent them, because the two people who could have told me are dead and my son only knows what his father told him in a front room over about three hours in the November.
What I know is this.
In 1978 Rozalind told her family who she was. Ambrus Kolbe put her out of that house and Wilma Kolbe agreed with him, and the arrangement the family arrived at over the following eighteen months was that she had gone abroad.
Emeric was seventeen and he went along with it.
That is the whole of his crime at seventeen and I want to be fair about a seventeen-year-old in 1978 in a house like that one.
The part he could not live with is what came after.
Because she did not go abroad. She lived forty minutes away for sixteen years.
And Emeric saw her. Not often. Four or five times a year, at the start — coffee, in a town where neither of them knew anybody. He kept it from his parents and he kept it from me.
Then it thinned out. That is the word Niko used, because it is the word his father used. It thinned out.
By 1991 it was twice a year. She came to Beñat's wedding because Ambrus was there and she had decided, apparently, that she would stand in one family photograph.
After Hallow Green it was once. Then it was a card.
She died in the November of 1994, at thirty-six, of an infection that started as something ordinary. She was in hospital nine days. Nobody in that family went.
Emeric found out in the January. Two months after.
He did not go to the grave for eleven years. When he finally went, in 2005, he went alone, on a Tuesday, and told me he was going to a supplier in Verrick Falls.
That is the second thing that took my legs. Thirty-six years of marriage and I now have to go back through it and work out which Tuesdays were suppliers.
PART 4 — WHAT HE ASKED
In the November, four months before he died, Emeric told all of it to our son over about three hours while I was at my sister's.
Then he asked him for something.
He asked Niko to wear that dress to his funeral.
It had been in a box in the loft above the garage since 1994, because when Rozalind died her landlord cleared the flat and a woman who had been her friend rang the only Kolbe in the book and Emeric drove over in the night and took two boxes and never opened them.
He wanted it worn, in that chapel, in front of seventy people, most of whom are Kolbes.
And he wanted Niko to tell me afterward.
My son said no.
He said no for four months and he said it in that hall with a suitcase in his hand, and I want to set out exactly what his objection was, because when he finally said it to me on those flagstones it was not what I expected.
Niko was not refusing out of embarrassment. I asked him that directly, later, and he said if his father had asked him to walk into that chapel naked with his aunt's name on his chest he would have done it and been proud.
What he could not do was the timing.
He said, "He wanted me to stand up in a room and take what she took, and he wanted it to happen after he was dead so he wouldn't have to be in the room for it. And he wanted you told when you couldn't ask him anything."
He said, "That's not repentance, Mom. That's a performance he doesn't have to attend."
And when he put it that way in the November, Emeric — who was very ill by then and who had four months left — said the thing that broke it completely, which is that he could not face me.
Thirty-six years and he could not face me.
So my son picked up a suitcase.
He said one more thing on those flagstones and then he did not say anything else about it for a long time.
He said, "He was my whole life. And I found out he watched a woman get pulled out of a photograph and he looked at the grass. He was seventeen once and I can forgive seventeen. He was fifty-eight when she'd been dead twenty years and he still hadn't said her name in his own kitchen."
Then why did he come.
He told me that in the June, three months after the funeral, sitting in my kitchen.
He said in the end it was not for his father at all.
He said, "Somebody had to be in that room in it. She never got to be."
PART 5 — THE PHOTOGRAPH
The dress is on a hanger in my wardrobe.
I have not done anything with it and I am not going to for a while. Niko offered to take it and I said not yet, and he did not push.
The photograph is in a frame in the front room, on the shelf where the wedding one used to be. The wedding one is still in the hall with the cracked corner, because I have not had the glass done, because Emeric put that crack there on the day my son left, and I am not ready.
I have found four more photographs of her since. Three in the attic boxes, mislabelled in my mother-in-law's handwriting. One in an envelope in Emeric's desk that he had clearly had out recently.
I went to the grave in the May.
It is at a municipal cemetery in a town called Ordway — which is, and I did not know this until I looked it up, eleven minutes from where my son has been living for the last year.
The stone has a name on it that was not hers. The one her parents put on it.
I have started the process of having it changed. It is not simple. It requires the consent of the next of kin, and the next of kin were Ambrus and Wilma, who are dead, and then it is Emeric, who is dead, and so now it is my son, who has signed everything he has been given inside a day.
It is going to take another year and cost about two thousand dollars and I have the paperwork on the kitchen table.
Niko moved back in the September.
The three months before that were not gentle and I am not going to make them look it.
The family talked. Of course they did. Seventy people were in that chapel and by the Sunday there were two versions going round Verrick Falls: that my son had had some sort of breakdown, and that my son had come out at his father's funeral in the worst possible way.
Nobody asked him. Eleven people asked me. Not one of them asked him.
Beñat's wife rang me in the April and spent four minutes being sympathetic and then asked, in a lowered voice, whether Niko was "all right in himself."
I said he was fine and that the dress had belonged to his aunt Rozalind.
There was a silence on that line of about three seconds and then she said she had to go.
That is the other thing I found out this year, and it is the one that has changed how I see that whole side of the family.
They knew.
Not all of them and not the younger ones. But Beñat knew, and Beñat's mother knew, and two of the cousins who were standing in that photograph line in 1991 knew exactly who they were looking at.
Forty-five people in a garden and maybe nine of them knew, and the nine said nothing, and the other thirty-six were allowed to believe they had seen an awkward moment with a colleague.
That is how it is done. It is not a conspiracy. It is nine people who know and thirty-six people who are given something else to look at, and it works for thirty-four years.
I have had one conversation about it with Beñat, in the June, at his own kitchen table, and he cried and said he was sixteen and I said he was sixteen in 1978 and forty-nine in 1991, and he did not have an answer for that, and we have not spoken since.
He and I talk about Emeric. We do not agree about him and I have stopped trying to bring us to an agreement.
I loved that man for thirty-six years and he was kind to me every single day and he was also a man who let his sister stand four feet outside a family photograph and then looked at the grass.
Both of those are true and I have to hold them and my son does not, and that is the difference between a wife and a child and I have stopped expecting it to close.
You're not family here and you know it.
Wilma Kolbe said that to her own daughter, in an ordinary voice, in a garden, in front of forty-five people, and every single one of us heard it perfectly and looked at the grass.
I was second row, third from the left, in a green dress.
I have that photograph. It came to me with Wilma's things in 2004 and it has been in a box in my attic for twenty-one years.
Nine people in it. Everybody smiling.
May you like
And a foot and a half of empty grass at the end of the line, where the photographer left a gap, because she had been standing there when he framed it.
THE END
