The Rhythm of Memory

by Alyson Richman

  “Yes,” she said hesitantly.

  “Well, these symptoms are indicative of premature ovarian failure.”

  “What?” Her eyes were now wide open and her face drained of color.

  “It basically means that you are going through early menopause.”

  “Menopause? But I’m barely thirty-five years old!”

  “While there are several theories as to the etiology, no one really knows what causes this premature failure. There does seem to be a hereditary component.” He paused. “Do you know when your mother went through menopause?”

  Kaija was silent. Her eyes fixated on a chart on the wall. A cross section of a woman’s uterus with a hundred arrows pointing to various things every woman was supposed to have. She suddenly felt empty.

  “My mother? No, I don’t. I have no idea. I was adopted.”

  “I see,” he said kindly. “But, Kaija, this is not all bad. You have one child already. You should consider yourself lucky. Some women I see will never be able to conceive at all.”

  Kaija was fighting back her urge to cry. This was all too awful for words. Only days before, she believed she was with child, and now she was being told that she would never be able to have more children.

  “This can’t be. This just can’t be,” she said over and over. “I am a young woman.”

  The doctor rose and clicked his pen. He gave her chart one last glance and pushed back his spectacles.

  “I am sorry about this, but there isn’t much we can do. I’m going to write out a prescription for some estrogen replacement and recommend that you take some calcium supplements. You should pick them up with the nurse on your way out.”

  Kaija nodded.

  Alone in the cold, white-walled room of the clinic, with the lone poster, the only color in the room, Kaija began to cry. She wept into her palms, whimpering until her face was pink and her features swollen.

  She didn’t know how she could return home and face Samuel. He would be there when she returned, as he had taken off the day to look after Sabine. He would ask her if she had good news and she would need to tell him that her suspicions had been wrong.

  But how could she tell him that they would have no other children between them ever again? It would crush him. They had always spoken of a large family and now she would be failing him.

  She left the clinic without picking up her prescription. The cold air on her face felt refreshing, and she wondered if it would wash away the evidence of her tears.

  She was wrong about that. Samuel knew her better than anyone, yet still not better than herself. She would learn that soon enough.

  “What is it, darling?”

  She began to cry in his arms.

  “No baby? Is that all? Well, we’ll try again. Again and again if necessary.”

  And that made her cry even more.

  That evening, Samuel held his wife, trying to comfort her in his arms. “You should hold your tears for a real tragedy, Kaija. I assure you everything is going to be fine.”

  Kaija wanted to scream at him, “No, everything is not going to be fine! You don’t know that! You think that! You think you can placate everyone with your gentle words and your knowing eyes, but you can’t! You can’t this time!” But she couldn’t even manage a single word, let alone all the anger that was inside her. Every word she tried to manage just got stuck in her throat.

  “We’ll try again soon, Kaija,” he murmured time and time again in her ear. Each time she cried deeper and grew more despondent, until finally she fell asleep. Like a small child, curled up in his lap.

  Twenty-nine

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  JANUARY 1975

  The first few weeks that followed Kaija’s visit to the doctor were the most difficult for her. She hated feeling that she was keeping something from Samuel. Every night, when she lay down beside him, she felt strange, as if she were bringing a third person to bed with them. She detested herself for keeping her condition a secret, but her fear of disappointing Samuel ran even deeper. So she contained it deeply within her, a small ball of fire that ate away at her once placid disposition, leaving her a bundle of raw, aching nerves.

  The doctor had not bothered to inform her of the symptoms that accompany an early menopause. The flashes, the bouts of heat that radiated through her body like steaming needles. Some mornings, she would rise and find her face unrecognizable. Her skin, once porcelain white, frequently developed spotty, red patches. One morning, dipping her hands into a sink of cold water, splashing furiously to bring down the heat, she collapsed on the cold tile floor.

  From two doors beyond, she heard Sabine beginning to call for her.

  “Mama! Mama!” she cried. “Mama!”

  She rose from the tile, like a weary mermaid from the sea, wrapping her robe tightly around her waist and drying her face with a soft, cotton towel. Walking through the hallway, she could see the snow falling through one of the large windows below.

  “What is it, älskling?” she asked as she scooped the child up into her arms, burying her face in the child’s smooth, ivory skin.

  She inhaled Sabine’s natural fragrance. It reminded her of milk and orange flowers, so sweet and delicious, like the summer air after a rain.

  The child felt heavy in her arms. She could barely lift her anymore. Her round, chubby limbs and cherubic smile warmed Kaija’s heart, but the mere thought that the girl would soon be too old to coddle saddened her deeply, and her emotions got the best of her. Kaija began to cry.

  “There will be no more children,” Kaija thought to herself as the tears fell over her red and splotchy cheeks. She wondered how Samuel would feel as the years passed and the large house they had bought for themselves echoed in its emptiness. The rooms they had always imagined filling with the beds of several children and their bookshelves and toys were now half-filled with only Sabine’s belongings. She wondered if he would grow to resent her or, even worse, wish that he had never married her. Instead, secretly wishing he had chosen another woman, someone whose womb had the capacity to bear more than one.

  She had tried to mask her despondency, to get these ridiculous notions out of her head. She thought if she cooked more and spent more time with Sabine in the outdoors, her sprits might lift and she would forget about her diagnosis. However, somehow Kaija’s thoughts always returned to her fate. It was ironic, she thought one afternoon when Sabine was napping and she sat at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, how her adopted father had told her to have compassion for a woman whose womb is barren. She had never liked her adopted mother, and even in her memories, with the knowledge of her pitiful state, she never warmed to her. But now, wasn’t she very much like the woman she had, for so many years, despised? Hadn’t her moods begun to blacken and her face become more weary? Hadn’t she been less pleasant to Samuel lately?

  She wondered if Samuel or the child had noticed the change within her. She would need to try harder, she said to herself. She needed to maintain her spirits for the sake of Sabine and Samuel. She would not repeat the mistakes of either of the women who had raised her. No matter what, she would keep her grief tucked neatly within her and would not, at any cost, contaminate those whom she loved.

  Thirty

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  JANUARY 1975

  She arrived at his office on Skolgatan Street nervous and full of doubt that this doctor—this so-called war-torture specialist—could possibly help her. Dr. Rudin’s office was on the other side of the town, on a small cobblestone street not far from the village church. A place that was so nondescript she would never have found it unless someone had told her it was there.

  One of the social workers overseeing the Ribeiro-Herrera family’s transition to Swedish life had recommended Salomé see Dr. Samuel Rudin. And then, by coincidence, Salomé met an Argentinean man at the market who also mentioned his name. “He saved my life,” the Argentine said to her frankly. “I couldn’t make peace with what happened to me over there. But this doctor he
lped.”

  Salomé had resisted at first. The thought of seeing a psychiatrist seemed ridiculous to her. “The nightmares will subside eventually,” she said to herself. “It has been less than a year. The memories will eventually fade.”

  But the reverse occurred. With each passing week, the nightmares seemed to intensify. Salomé would awaken at night, her brow beaded with perspiration, her nightgown wet against her breast. She could no longer listen to the radio since hearing The Magic Flute playing on the local airwaves.

  The mere overture had been enough to terrify her and cause tremors throughout her body. Upon hearing those seemingly light, airy notes, everything came flooding back to her. She could not control herself. She smashed the radio to the ground. She held her hands over her ears, yet the music inside her head just wouldn’t stop.

  Halfway up the stairway to the front door, she thought about turning back. “If I go home, nothing will have changed,” she thought, reconsidering her decision to abandon her appointment. So, as tempting as it was for her to return home and not follow through with her first therapy session, Salomé Herrera gathered all her strength and pushed open the heavy, brown door.

  She was so tired. It had been over ten months since they had arrived in Sweden, and she still felt nothing. She had gone through the motions of packing, emigrating, relocating to a new apartment, and unpacking the few things they had brought from Chile, and still she felt nothing.

  The only time she felt anything was when her husband went to touch her and her skin felt on fire. The guards had made sure that everything that had once brought her happiness or comfort now either disgusted or terrified her. The only thing that remained unspoiled was the affection she had for her children. When her husband touched her, she couldn’t help but remember what they had done to her. They had blasphemed two things that had once been beautiful and unblemished in her life. But instead of being angry or being depressed, she was left with an overwhelming sense of nothingness. As if they had returned her hollow, carved her out from the inside, scooped out all her joy, her confidence, her sensuality, and spit it on the cement with the shit and the urine without the slightest bit of remorse.

  So the physical scars—the small lacerations on her skin, the small raised bumps on her breasts and her abdomen—were but superficial in comparison to the internal ones. She was empty and she was tired of feeling that way. And the only things that ever seemed capable of filling this emptiness were her nightmares.

  “I cannot stand the sound of music,” Salomé told Samuel bluntly in Spanish. She was struggling to mask her apprehension and, at the same time, settle comfortably on the long, black couch. “That is why I’m here.”

  “The sound of music?” he asked her softly, picking up his writing pad and a pen. “And why is that?” The tape recorder that documented Samuel’s sessions with his patients hummed quietly in the corner.

  “Have you ever heard the sound of a woman screaming because she is having electrical wires placed in her genitalia, while a recording is playing of some Teutonic soprano singing the ‘Queen of the Night Aria’?” She paused and looked up to the ceiling. The exposed rafters were made of heavy, brown wood, and Salomé suddenly felt incredibly small. “Have you ever heard such a horrific duet? A harmony of cries and screams, pitched against an orchestra of fairy notes, a whitewash of strings and woodwinds?”

  Samuel was silent for a moment, his pen twisting in the air like the propeller of a miniature plane. “No, I have not.” He paused. “Tell me, what does it sound like?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What does it sound like?’ ” Salomé’s face was now buried in her palms. “It is the sound of hell! And it never ends. I can still hear it in my head, the sound of the screaming, the pleading, the begging for mercy—all that merging with the same notes, over and over again.

  “You have no idea,” she said, shaking her head, the black curls falling over her eyes. “They piped in the recordings to each of our cells, but the main interrogation room bordered next to mine. I heard far more than most of the other inmates. Every night, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the faces of my children in front of me. I tried to imagine other sounds, like the music of Calandrelli, how I once danced the tango in my husband’s arms.”

  “And did this help?”

  Salomé fidgeted against the leather upholstery. “I suppose it did at first. But I was there for several weeks. By the end, I could no longer remember any music. The sound of ‘Papageno’ had pecked out the sane channels of my mind and replaced it with madness. Since we’ve arrived in Sweden, I’ve been unable to listen to music of any kind. They have taken that away from me.” She paused. She looked at her palms. The skin where she had grasped the bars to her prison cell had healed. Over the past several months, new layers of skin had replaced the small ridge of tiny calluses. But, underneath her dress, in her most intimate areas, Salomé knew there were scars that were never going to heal.

  “They have taken almost everything else as well.”

  “Were your children and husband abducted?” Samuel asked.

  “No,” she said flatly. “They only took me.”

  “I have had patients who have lost their spouses, their children,” he said gently. He let his words fall softly and Salomé winced.

  Salomé was silent for a moment. “I suppose you’ve heard a thousand stories and you probably grade them in your head on the varying degrees of horror.”

  “No, Salomé, I don’t do that.”

  “A woman who knows her children have been tortured is a thousand times worse off than I,” she said quietly.

  “No, Salomé, what happened to you was horrible and you need to accept that it was terrible and it was wrong.”

  “Well, that’s pretty undisputable.”

  “But you also need to accept that you can’t change the past and that you have to learn to live with your memories.”

  Salomé shook her head. “Doctor, I would rather I learned how to forget them.”

  “You can’t forget them. You may be able to temporarily push them out of your consciousness, but eventually they will resurface.” Samuel paused. “Trauma and the repercussions of that trauma can lie dormant in a body for years. Eventually, however, it needs to come out. Eventually, every person who has been a victim of brutality will have to reconcile themselves to their past.”

  Salomé fidgeted. “You’re going to be the only person who knows my story. I am not going to share it with my husband, my friends, or even write it down for my own sake. Only here will I tell it.”

  Samuel nodded. “We’ll take this slowly, Salomé. One session at a time.” He looked gently at his patient, seeing through her determined expression of stoicism, noticing that she was actually fighting back her urge to cry.

  Thirty-one

  VESTERÅS, SWEDEN

  FEBRUARY 1975

  “Doctor Rudin, I had only been detained six hours, but it seemed I had been away a lifetime. By the time I arrived home, it was nightfall and Octavio and the children were frantic and near tears.

  “My face was bruised and my clothes streaked with car grease and tar. But I still had my wits about me.”

  Samuel smiled slightly, nodding his head and writing on his pad.

  “I knew that I would alarm the children if I just announced that I had been abducted by the secret police, so I told them I had been in a small bicycle accident and that I just need to wash up and take a bath. I ordered Consuela to hurry them to bed so that I could be alone with Octavio.”

  “He must have been worried, not knowing where you had gone.”

  “Yes, he was, and he realized immediately that I had not been in an accident, that something far more terrible had taken place. ‘Salomé?’ he asked softly, so that neither the children nor the maid could hear him. ‘Was it the DINA?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ I told him, and I began to cry. I had been terrified for so many hours that only then did I feel safe enough to weep. ‘What have they done to my precious Fayum?’ he w
hispered as he held me. Through his shirt, I could hear his heart pounding, his skin reddening with anger at those who had abducted me.

  “ ‘You cannot do anything. You cannot strike back at them,’ I told him. ‘This is not the old Chile. We are no longer free. Pinochet has made it a police state. We cannot trust anyone but ourselves and our family. Not even the neighbors. Who knows what they’ve already said about us.’

  “ ‘But what did they want from you? Whoever could have said anything about you, my darling?’

  “ ‘It was not me,’ I told him, and I began to cry because never in my life had I been so afraid. So completely terrified. ‘It’s you they want.’

  “ ‘Me?’

  “ ‘They know about your meetings with Allende. They know you coached him.’

  “ ‘How could they know that, Salomé? We told no one. How could they know that information?’ I could see the fear in his eyes.

  “ ‘I don’t know, Octavio. Maybe someone at the studio saw you with Neruda. Maybe someone remembered seeing you at the café with Allende and his campaign managers. After all, you have a very recognizable face. But that is why I am saying that we can trust no one. Maybe one of Allende’s assistants told them in an interrogation like mine. Someone has betrayed us and the police are using me to get to you.’

  “ ‘Cowards!’ he said, and I had to tell him again to whisper. ‘They take a man’s wife to get to him,’ and he began to cry because he saw me standing there in front of him bruised and shaken, the victim of an injustice that he was powerless, at this point, to correct.

  “ ‘What can I do, Salomé, to make them leave us alone? What did they want?’

  “ ‘They want a man in your position to openly support Pinochet. A man with your appeal would be a perfect face for a poster or television commercial. If you support him, they believe it will be a gesture of good faith,’ I said hesitantly.