The Word

Of all the years — of the mornings and the bells and the slow changes in Anja’s body and the children growing in directions I could not have predicted — the thing I keep returning to is a four-year-old at a kitchen table with a set of coloured chalks.

It was in the fourth year of Mira’s life. She was drawing with a set her aunt had sent us, and the light in the kitchen was the late-afternoon light, and Pavel was not in the room — he was outside doing whatever eight-year-old boys do when they want to be told to come inside.

I was peeling something. I do not remember what. An onion, probably, or a beet. The knife was in my right hand and my left hand was on the thing I was peeling and I was looking at Mira because I liked to look at her when she was drawing. She drew the way small children draw, with her whole arm.

She looked up at me.

She said a word.

I will not write the word here. I could not spell it then and I cannot spell it now, and even if I could put it on the page it would not be the word, because the word was a sound a four-year-old girl made in a kitchen in the afternoon, and that sound is not transferable. But I will tell you what I knew when she said it.

I knew that it was a word. Not a noise. Not a sound a child makes when she is practicing the shapes her mouth can make. A word. A word that meant a thing, and the thing was a specific thing, and Mira looking at me when she said it was the way a person looks at another person when they expect to be understood.

I was not understood. I was not. I smiled at her and I said yes in the way a parent says yes when a child says something that does not need an answer, and she smiled back and put her head down and went on drawing.

I kept peeling. I finished peeling. I put the thing I was peeling into the pot. The pot was already on the stove. Anja came into the kitchen a little later and asked what I had been doing and I said nothing, I was just peeling, and this was a true answer because I had already, in the small gap between the word and the pot, set the moment aside, the way a person sets aside a thing that does not belong to the day they are having.

I did not think of the word again for a long time. I thought of it at Mira’s wedding, briefly, when she was twenty-three, and the thought was: she used to say things I did not understand, when she was small. That was all. The thought did not last. The wedding was a loud day.

The next time I thought of it was now.

I am not telling you about the word because the word was strange. Whether the word was strange is a question I do not care to answer. I am telling you about the afternoon because I cannot tell you about every afternoon.

There were a lot of afternoons.

There were the mornings when she came downstairs with her hair on one side. There were the evenings when she would not eat what I had made and I pretended not to mind. There were the times I carried her home from places she had fallen asleep in, and the summers we pulled weeds in the garden, and the winters we waited in the kitchen for something to finish cooking. There were the questions she asked me that I did not answer because the question was bigger than I understood the question to be.

I cannot tell you about any of those. I am telling you about the afternoon with the word instead, because the afternoon with the word is the one I can hold in a sentence, and when I hold it I can feel the weight of the others.

A father who had not had those afternoons is not me. A father who had different afternoons — a different daughter, a Mira who drew with different chalks, a Mira who said different words on different Thursdays — would be a different father. I do not know who he is. I suspect his days with his daughter would have had a different shape, and the different shape would have made him into a different man, and I would not be willing to be him.

And she would not be her. A Mira who had had a different father would have grown into a different woman. We made each other, in the thousand afternoons.

I am the father who was at the table when she said the word. I am also the father who carried her home, and the father who said yes to the questions I did not understand, and the father who pretended not to mind when she would not eat. They add up to this man. This man is the one who is speaking.

That is Mira. I have not told you about the others yet.