Two Homes, One Wolf

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photo: You’re a long way from home, Michael Chrisman

 

One win­ter morn­ing I put my jacket on and went out­side to shovel the snow, but it was so cold I had to go back into the house. I made some tea, hop­ing that it would make me feel warm, but it did not work. I walked through the house, down to the base­ment and up again. It did not help. I walked faster and faster until I was almost run­ning, but that did not help either.

And then, while I was rac­ing down the stairs to the base­ment, I remem­bered my mother. I have not thought of her for years and now, all of a sud­den, while I was almost fly­ing down the stairs, I could think of noth­ing else. In my mind’s eye I saw her stand­ing in the cor­ner, near the win­dow. She turned to me and said that I should go out­side. I replied that I’d rather stay at home. But why? she exclaimed. If a house were a good thing, the wolf would have one.

I’ve heard that say­ing before. It was one of hun­dreds she knew. Nothing could sur­prise her: good news, bad news, births, mar­riages, grad­u­a­tions, divorces, deaths — what­ever hap­pened, she would pro­duce a say­ing that was per­fect for the occasion.

But why did she want me to go out into the freez­ing cold? And why did she speak against hav­ing a house? Wasn’t she the one who adored our old apart­ment in Zemun, and kept it clean and tidy as long as she could? Mother, I wanted to ask her, isn’t buy­ing a house every immigrant’s dream? The house is the proof of suc­cess for fam­ily mem­bers back home, and it also rep­re­sents the new own­ers’ hope that now they’ll feel they belong here.

Soon after that, as I waited at the Calgary air­port for my flight to Frankfurt, the man sit­ting next to me said, “I hate planes.” He then told me, or rather he whis­pered, as if he were telling me a secret, “and I am afraid of fly­ing, but I have no choice. I can­not swim across the ocean, can I?”

He spoke with a rec­og­niz­able Russian accent. It sounded almost like my Serbian accent, and when I spoke, he gave me a big hug as if I were his best friend. “I knew,” he said, “that you’re one of us!”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“One of us,” he repeated. “You know, Slavs, Eastern Europeans, who else?”

“How did you know?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I didn’t. I saw you com­ing this way, sit­ting down on this chair, and some­thing inside me told me that you’re one of us.” He looked into my eyes. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I don’t know you,” I told him. “Why would I believe you?”

“But we’re broth­ers,” he said, “and not only because we’re Slavs. We’re also immi­grant broth­ers. You, just like me, have two hearts.”

I touched my chest. There was only one heart beat­ing in there, I was sure. “No two hearts in this body, buddy,” I told him.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “there are two of them. You know that say­ing — home is where the heart is? You know it, I’m sure.”

“I do,” I said. “Everybody does.”

“And that’s why immi­grants have two hearts,” he said with a note of tri­umph in his voice. “They have two homes. A new one in Canada and an old one some­where else in the world. Mine is in Moscow, and where’s yours?”

“In Belgrade,” I told him.

“You see,” he said, “and why didn’t you sell it when you moved to Canada?”

“How could I?” I answered. “It’s my home.”

A female voice invited pas­sen­gers to board the plane. Afraid that the man might try to sit next to me, I did not wait for him. I got up and joined the line of peo­ple who held their board­ing passes, then found my seat, sat down, opened a mag­a­zine and hid behind it.

Slowly I became aware that some­thing was hap­pen­ing inside me. I touched my chest again and this time I could feel my sec­ond heart, beat­ing like mad. So, Mother, I whis­pered, what should I do with two hearts, two homes and one wolf? But she did not say any­thing. I tried again; there was no reply. Instead, a voice asked me who I was talk­ing to. I put my mag­a­zine down and saw an old woman sit­ting next to me.

“I’m just try­ing to talk to my mother,” I said.

“Oh, dear,” the old woman said. “Where is she?”

“She’s up there.”

“Where, in first class?”

“No,” I said, “up there,” and I looked up at the ceiling.

The old woman looked up as well. The plane began to move faster and faster, and we just sat there, watch­ing the ceil­ing as if my mother, or per­haps a wolf, were to appear at that spot any moment now, soon.