The Separations, Part Four: A changing child
When the evacuation money runs out, we roadtrip to France, still unsure when we will see Tim again.
(This week, I pick up the story of our evacuation from Tashkent which I began last week. Brief recap: Forced to leave Uzbekistan, we flew to London with another diplomat and her daughter. The four of us lived together in our one-bedroom flat until… If you want to read about our previous forced separations, they are all in the archives!)
I had only just relaxed into the luxury of having another adult around, someone with whom to assess risks, someone whose company I enjoyed, when Victoria told me they had to leave. Her insurance would not cover any damage that occurred while her flat was unoccupied. She owned a flat in London and the tenant had left, but all of her furniture was in a storage facility that remained closed and inaccessible. This was why she was with us. The insurance company’s stance struck me as cruel, given the circumstances. “Your insurer wants you and Sasha to sleep on the floor? To not have cereal bowls? You can’t go.”
Yet I returned from an afternoon walk one afternoon to find all of their suitcases packed, and then they were gone. Theadora cried and I walked around in a heavy fog. I had been collecting books and chocolate eggs for the girls’ Easter baskets. I thought Theadora would have the company of another child on Easter. While there was a five-year gap between the girls, Theo enjoyed being an older sister. She played with Sasha in the bath, made sure she brushed her teeth, and read to her before bed. Now she just had me.
Once the initial wrench eased, I began to appreciate my newfound privacy and freedom. I didn’t have to close the door of the bathroom. I had half the dishes. We ate ice cream straight out of the tubs and watched Fame on my computer over dinner. While I scrubbed our cereal boxes free of virus, I listened to the podcast You’re Wrong About and started to think of Mike and Sarah as my imaginary friends.
When lots of people were outside and we walked down the middle of the road to avoid them, I thought how ironic it would be if we were walking down the middle of the road to avoid a virus and got hit by a car.
Theadora refused to sleep alone. When I had to stay up working until 1 or 2 am, she waited. She developed lengthy bedtime rituals; often taking an hour to organize all of her animals in the correct places. She worried over this obsession.
“Right now, there are a lot of things you cannot control,” I said. “You can’t control where you live. You can’t control when you see your father again. You can’t control when you can see your friends. You can’t control how you attend school. So maybe it’s comforting to control the things in your room because they’re something you can control. Does that make any sense?”
She burst into tears and came to climb in my lap. “Yes, I think that’s it.”
I rang Tim to tell him about my guilt. About how Theadora was now. “Don’t you remember how she used to be this happy flower of a person, sunny all of the time?”
“She’s still like that,” he said.
“No, she isn’t. She cries until 1 am every night.”
And he said quietly, “Oh.”
Theadora dreaded school so much that she was in tears every Sunday. When I asked why she hated school she said, “I don’t hate school!” and burst into tears. “I just hate this school, this situation. But I am not a person who hates school. That is not who I am.”
At night as we lay in bed we could hear our landlady Joanna, her husband Henry, and their four kids eating dinner, laughing, playing games. Doing all the things we didn’t.
I talked to Theadora too much, told her things I would have told a friend or a husband if someone were there. I tried to talk with friends instead, but there was so little time. And whenever I had a moment, they were still asleep in the US or Tanzania or Australia.
Some nights, when I was in a Zoom meeting, I could hear Theadora crying alone in the bedroom.
One afternoon before dinner, we heard an ambulance. We lived near a hospital; there were always ambulances. I watched at the window to see where the medics were heading this time. They carried a stretcher through our gates. It was for Michael, the 80-year-old man on the ground floor. Joanna said he walked to visit his wife in a nursing home every day, despite the restrictions. The medics emerged with him on a stretcher. Joanna raced out and stood behind the ambulance waving until it was out of sight. Later, she texted me that Michael had a fever, kidney infection, and covid-19. I worried about going downstairs, touching the shared doorknob. I used a disinfecting wipe every time, but still.
At last Joanna and I permitted our daughters to see each other. How many months had it been? Three? Four? We met Joanna and her daughter Arabella on Primrose Hill, stayed outdoors. As soon as the girls were told they could play together as long as they stayed two meters apart and masked, they took off across the field like wild things and disappeared. It took us nearly an hour to find them.
When we got home, the girls wanted to have dinner together outside, promising not to breathe on each other. They set cardboard boxes two meters apart in the tiny front garden and laid them with silverware (see photo). Theadora brought down her Sylvanian log cabin. Each girl had a book. I served them pasta and Arabella washed her own plate and silverware before returning it with a thank you note.
When it was time for Arabella to go back upstairs I heard Theadora say, “Good night, I love you!”
Theadora developed the symptoms of covid-19 so slowly that at first I didn’t put them all together. Her eyes turned demon red, for two straight weeks. She had diarrhea. Then one night when I ran my fingertips over her back in bed, the skin felt bumpy. When I turned on the light, I found a rash had spread across her back and stomach. It didn’t hurt or itch. Her biggest complaint was that eggs now tasted like poison.
She tested positive. Surprisingly, given that she literally slept on top of me, I tested negative. Twice. Even the doctor didn’t understand why. Maybe the virus knew she needed me well.
There were many doctors in the clinic in our old neighborhood, but I usually went to the same guy. He remembered me, because my newest book was about Viennese Jews fleeing Austria in 1939 and his grandmother was Austrian. “Wrong side, though,” he clarified. He gave me any referral I wanted, any test.
After he drew my blood I switched seats with Theadora and the doctor prodded her arms for a decent vein. When I told Theadora it would only hurt for a second, she turned to me with impatience and said, “Mum! I am not scared!”
Afterward, Theadora asked if we could please walk around Chiswick, because we used to live there. “I want to see places I know,” she said. So we walked down Chiswick High Road, all the way to her old theatre school. It was still closed, but she put her palms on the door and stared at the old posters. We walked down Turnham Green Terrace past the Tube station to say hello to the man selling flowers, who used to smile at us every day. I wondered if he had noticed we were missing. Finally, we walked down Woodstock Road, all the way to the house where we had lived on the top floor.
Our landlord Tony was out front, doing something with dead leaves. He didn’t look surprised to see us. We looked up at the windows of our flat and Theadora started to cry. Loudly. Sobbing. Tony looked at her. “She’s not well,” he said. I said she was homesick and asked if there were someone living in our old flat and he said yes, a Japanese man who worked as a sushi chef in a restaurant and only came home to sleep.
Theadora cried all the way home. “I want one home,” she said. “I don’t want to spend my entire life missing people.”
We did spend our entire life missing people. Even if we were to stop now, to settle somewhere now, we would still be missing people forever.
At midnight on a Saturday, I attended an online literary salon. Theadora stayed up with me, curled on my lap. When Daphne Merkin read a graphic sex scene, Theadora looked up and said, “I don’t think this is age appropriate.”
“Nothing about this year is age-appropriate,” I said.
One night I was presenting my new book to an audience of more than two hundred Jewish organizations in the US when I heard our door buzzer. It was after midnight. It buzzed and buzzed.
But there was nothing I could do. I could not leave my laptop. As I continued speaking, I heard the doorbell buzz again, and then running steps, loud voices. The door to our flat slammed open. Theadora ran past me to the kitchen, then back to the bathroom, carrying buckets and towels.
I tried to ignore this as I described the inspiration for my novel, the Jewish refugees who found their way to Bolivia during World War Two.
It was after 1 am when I finished.
I turned away from my computer to look at my daughter, now sitting on the sofa across from me, looking guilty.
“Let me guess. You forgot your bath was running.”
“Yes.”
“And you flooded the bathroom.”
Miserably, she nodded.
“And it leaked into the downstairs’ neighbors apartment.”
“Um, kind of?”
“How bad?”
“It got into their bed? And kind of woke them up?”
“Did you buzz Joanna?”
“Yes, and Henry came and helped me clean it all up. I didn’t want to interrupt you. Also? I don’t think we have any towels left.”
I looked at her.
“I’m so sorry!”
“Was that your way of getting back at them for yelling at you for leaving the front door open?”
“Mum!”
“I’m kidding. I know you wouldn’t.”
Michael’s son Derrick got cross when I got up too early to work, tiptoeing barefoot across the floor, and when I stayed up too late working. I began to think he didn’t want us to be awake at all.
“I’m glad you’re sorry.” I tried to look stern. “But I’m not all that sure that I am.”
“Mum!”
We started to laugh.
For five months, though, she was mostly alone in her room while I worked. For five months, she moved her little Sylvanian creatures around their houses by herself. I spent our daily walks listening to every plot twist of every Rick Reardon book ever written, to apologize for the entire rest of the day.
I didn’t have the luxury of not working, even if I wanted to stop, which I did not. I didn’t know how to stop. When the evacuation money ran out, we had to leave London. I had been collecting books for research and Theadora had been collecting Sylvanian homes and boats and schools, and I wondered aloud to Joanna how to get it all to France.
“I’ll drive you,” she offered immediately. “We’ll roadtrip. I’ll bring the kids.”
I couldn’t believe she actually meant it, until the day we had squeezed every last book and plush creature into her van, along with three of her children.
The trip was swift. There was no traffic in the Chunnel, and we peed only by the side of the road, avoiding service stations.
With Joanna and her family, dinners were lively and hilarious. Her kids were all vegan environmentalists into theatre and art. I had never seen Theadora so happy. One night at dinner, we talked about the climate crisis and I said that there was no hope of reversing it. That humanity was doomed.
Theadora burst into tears and ran upstairs.
“You have to give them hope,” Joanna said.
“But I don’t have any. So what, I should lie to them?”
She didn’t answer but her eyes said, yes.
Theadora sobbed and sobbed the last two nights, locking herself away and not even enjoying her last moments with her friends. She tended to get prematurely sad, in preparation. On their final night, she marched into the kitchen while I was cooking and said, “Mummy, I am not going to do this anymore. I refuse to lose one more friend.”
It was late August and Theadora was not enrolled in school. I thought, just then, the bright late summer sun streaming across the wooden table of our dining room, that it frightened me a little to think that no one would even notice if she didn’t go to school at all. We were between countries and school systems and no one, anywhere, was sure where we were.
Thanks, Jennifer. This made me realize how much I'm forgetting certain aspects of the lockdown period.