I think I might be the only person in this world who knew how to love Lilia. Purely, I mean. Simply. Love that hasn’t been cut with pity or duty or mistaken for blood.

       And she loved me the most, too. As a thank you, maybe. Made sure everyone knew it: her husband, her daughter, her son. That’s why they’re standing there, beyond the iron gates, and I’m crying alone in the car. I couldn’t bring myself to look at that coffin. Not with her coat still on the hook in the hallway. The smell of her laundry detergent in the blue November air. The way she danced her little knee dance when we met again after a long time. I don’t know what to do with it all.

       But more than anything, I’m not attending my grandmother’s funeral because I can’t bear to listen to another person talk as if they know the slightest thing about her. All the aunts and great aunts and old neighbours, smacking their cloying smiles at me, pushing through the graveyard in their Sunday clothes. “It was better this way,” “So quick, she didn’t have the time to be afraid,” “At least it didn’t hurt, you know?” As if one moment of peace, of not feeling the heat snap out of your body, erases a life of not being loved how you deserved. 

––––––

It started at the root for Lilia. Spoilt from the beginning. Her father let her down first, as fathers often do. She was the daughter of two peasants, born in a clay house in the North of Romania, not long after Ceaușescu pounded his fists into power. My knowledge of her childhood is sparse. She was a great storyteller, but she didn’t like talking about those first years she spent in Cozmești. She could paint only one picture: her bare feet through chewed-up pastures and her mouth wet with grapes from her father’s vineyard. Other than that, she never mentioned him. Not in prayer or in passing. A shrug and a wince whenever I asked, “Biba, what did you say your dad’s name was, again? Cosmin?” “Constantin,” she’d spit out.

       For a long time, I assumed that he was absent. That she didn’t have enough stories of him to tell. It wasn’t until last Christmas, when we cleaned out the attic, that I finally caught a glimpse of his callous face. “Is this Constantin?” I asked.

       “Mm,” she said, glass-eyed and sleepy, dosed up on pain meds.

       “You never talk about him.”

       “What is there to talk about?”

       “I don’t know,” I said. “What was he like?”

       “Like nothing,” she said, running her thumb along the left side of the photograph where her mother’s paper eyes were staring back at her. “He almost killed my momma once.” There was a short silence. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her robe. “He hit her so hard, I thought she was dead. I was crying, and he was digging a hole in the garden.”

––––––

She loved her mother beyond reason. Too much, if there’s such a thing. We all saw how the pink in her cheeks drained after we buried Anica. It happened when Lilia was sixty-two. “By the end,” she kept saying, for the six more years she lived, “my mother couldn’t tell me from the cleaning lady or the nurse.”

       I wouldn’t dare say a bad thing about Anica. My grandma would scold me for it. But I will say this: if there were any balance or justice in this universe, it would have made Lilia an only child. As it was, she grew up as the younger sister of a boy named Gică, the single crumb of bread in his mother’s empty palm. A Bachelor of Science in Engineering, the first in his bloodline to pursue an education further than secondary school. You can see him in the pictures, towering over her. The gentle arch of his eyebrows and his pressed linen shirt. Such eager hands clutched around his mother’s shoulders, they look like a big and a small spoon crammed into one teacup.

       And then there’s Lilia. It takes a beat to even notice her. To make her out in the dark of Gică’s shadow. With her salty hair, and her skinned knees, and the dust between her fingers, not from reading books but playing in the mud. And there’s a half-smile on her lips, a vague sadness. She is unsure of why she feels the way she does. Because she’s not unloved by her mother but rather loved less. Not enough. Not as much.

––––––

It’s not surprising then that when she left her parents’ home, Lilia would find a man she’d spend the rest of her days begging to love her. They met in the factory where they both laboured. She was twenty, and he was twenty-four. He liked her for her quick wit and hot temper. She liked him because, once, on a white December evening, he offered to walk her home after work.

       If things could have been simple, they might have shared a glass of țuică in a bar, and he might have tucked her hair behind her ear, and she might have blushed. And then, as he put an arm around her and rubbed at the sleeves of her blouse to keep her warm, she might have let him kiss the freckle on her cheekbone. But things couldn’t be simple because Lilia had broken the most complicated of laws: she’d been born a woman. A lack of freedom and bodily autonomy had been sold to her as a perk of the “good” life she’d been living and her even better future.

       She knew he didn’t want to marry her. She let this slip into my ears one haze of an evening when she’d had a sip of wine. But “What will people say?” she’d asked him. “What will become of me? A baby born out of wedlock?” He watched the tears burn through her lids, lifting a hand towards, though not quite touching, the dimple on her chin. “My father’s going to kill me if you don’t marry me. I’ll be the laughingstock of my village. I hope you know.”

       It lasted thirty-nine years. And though I shouldn’t delude myself into thinking this was some tale of passion and devotion, it’s hard to believe that in that whole mouthful of time, no sprout of love has ever pierced through my grandpa’s hardened core. She died in his arms. He hasn’t stepped inside their bedroom since. Can’t set his foot down on that patch on the floor. You should see his eyes this morning, swollen cât două cepe, as we say in Romanian.

       But marriage was a different affair back then, more of a currency. The government rewarded them for it with matchbox-sized apartments stacked on top of each other like the concrete cells of an organism that was too big, too god-like to question. Romance was a thing of the past, of the poets and novelists Ceaușescu had banned. Who thinks of roses and love songs when there’s a ration of sugar and flour between the two of them?

––––––

My mum was a good kid, quiet and obedient, who, like all kids, had been hardwired to love her mother. Her big brown eyes, crusted at the corners from sleep, locked onto Lilia like she could fill the whole sky with the flat of her thumb. But love was, to Lilia, in 1976, as familiar as a foreign tongue. Something she’d been starved of for so long, she’d lost the hunger. Love, disdain, need, pain, they all cast the same dull light from where she stood. When the baby stretched her arm out, Lilia flinched. When the baby cried, Lilia left her alone to squint at the ceiling. When the baby laughed, Lilia didn’t know what to do. So, she didn’t do anything.

       I don’t like hearing or telling these stories. I don’t like picturing my mum in her chequered uniform, her tattered shoes and choppy bowl-cut, rushing home from school to chime about how well she did, only for her mother not to lift her eyes off the stew pot. The gap between them at the dinner table, forgotten birthdays, no lullabies, no Santa Claus. How Lilia would tell her daughter until her dying day, “You were a good girl. It’s a shame we couldn’t bond.”

       Ten years later, my grandparents had a son. He wasn’t planned any more than my mum was, but given the circumstances, he was not unwelcome. “It’s better to have two,” my grandpa said. “At least they’ll have each other when we’re gone.” By then, Lilia had barely made a dent in her thirties. A lonely woman with a dry throat and a firm conviction that being a mother was less of a blessing and more of a responsibility. Something you did, much like marrying or working in a factory, not because you wanted to, but because you had no choice. A mother had to feed her baby, put her baby to sleep, change her baby’s diaper. And still, the baby would wind up loving her father more. That was what the past had taught Lilia.

       Still, it’s odd to think that when her son arrived, he didn’t stir in her the nameless sorrows of her own childhood. That, in her naïve ways, she didn’t see the thick brows and sharp line of his nose and think back to her brother Gică, then feel the urge to love him as stupidly and unconditionally as Anica had loved her son. It’s true, Lilia held her boy longer than she’d held her daughter. Spent more money on blue clothes than she had on pink. But my uncle was rowdy and defiant, nothing like his older sister. And he didn’t take his mother’s coldness with as much grace as she did. He scribbled on walls and knocked her porcelain down. He bounced his ball against the bathroom door until the neighbours came knocking. There had to be a punishment. “It wasn’t easy,” she said, “to discipline a boy who didn’t see much of his father.”

––––––

Then something changed in 1996. I was born the autumn before my mother’s twenty-first birthday. My parents had eloped, and so, a few months later, when they arrived on my grandparents’ doorstep with a baby in hand, my grandma dropped the stew pot on the floor and leaned against the stove. I spent the first year of my life as they had before me, in that cupboard we called an apartment, but with my mum, dad, ten-year-old uncle and grandparents, all staring down at me as I slept on the sofa.

       I don’t know what it was. I must have opened a door inside her, for in the eighteen years she helped my mother raise me, especially after my dad left, I can’t find a single memory of Lilia that doesn’t feel like home. Not once do I recall asking her for something and not receiving it. Or leaning in to kiss one of her cheeks without her turning the other. Or laughing without her joining. Or saying “I love you” and not hearing it back.

       The Lilia I know, my Biba, as I called her, used to roam the farmer’s market from one end to the other until she found the sweetest watermelon and the plumpest peaches in town because she knew I liked fresh fruit in the summer. Every day, at lunch, we’d huddle in her kitchen, and as she fried potatoes, sliced the cabbage and salted it, I laid my worries at her feet because she took them from me. “Silly girl. I’ll never let anything bad happen to you.”

       I remember that toothy knife she cut everything with, and the fancy jam I liked. They only sold it at Carrefour, for a day’s worth of her pension, but she bought it for me when I won that writing prize. It lasted until spring, then grew a dusting of mould flowers. She didn’t let me wear black nail polish to my high school graduation but ironed my gown on the bed as I stomped into the bedroom. “You look like a dead vampire.” “‘All vampires are dead, Biba.” “Ah, yes? And do vampires leave the house with crinkled clothes?” The day I left for uni, she came to the airport, passed something small from her pocket to mine, shushing and shielding me. “Don’t spend it all at once,” she whispered. But when it touched my skin, it felt too soft, too harmless. I grabbed it and pulled it out for everyone to see. It was a napkin. “Oh,” she said. “Wrong pocket.” And we laughed so hard and for so long, I almost missed my flight.

       When I found out she was ill, I felt as if a bite was taken out of me. They didn’t tell me at first, and I didn’t believe until I came home one day to find her hair peeling off in the bathtub, her lips bruising, the muscle tissue melting off her bones. From then on, I came home every few months, a twelve-hour journey to the North of Romania from the North of England. And it is, in these short increments, that I learned more about this alternate version of her. Never before this past year had I noticed how much she resented my grandpa, how she snapped at my uncle, how she never came close to my mum. How when the four of us walked into a room, it was me, and only me, Lilia got up to kiss and hug.

       I’d hide in the bathroom to yell into the pit of my elbow until a knock would come. “What are you doing?” my mum would say. “She keeps asking for you.”

       Because, yes, she was being difficult. Of course, she was being difficult. “But why do you have to raise your voice at her? She’s ill. For fuck’s sake! What do you want her to do if she can’t?”

       “She’s not trying,” they said.

       “She is trying. She tried and vomited. What do you want me to do? Force it down her throat?”

       “Yeah, well,” my uncle said. “Easy for you to say, isn’t it? You don’t live here. You’ve never even seen the worst of her.”

       Since her stubbornness and petulance stirred echoes of the Lilia they knew in their childhood, my mum and uncle slipped back into the skins of the teenagers who used to rebel against her. My mum did make appointments with the best doctors in the country, blew her salary on hospital trips and miracle herbs. My uncle, too, drove for sixteen hours at a time from Botoșani to Bucharest and Bucharest to Iași. After the tenth time he sped home to see why his mother wasn’t picking up the phone, he almost lost his job. But outside these efforts, there was little patience. They were upset with her for “not fighting hard enough,” and furious with themselves for not knowing how to be nice to her.

       Had I been a better granddaughter, I would have moved back home for good. Maybe that’s the real reason I won’t go to her funeral. The guilt is rotting me. I was the only one who understood how much she needed the warmth of a hand to close around her knuckles, the weight of a shoulder to rest her head on when it got heavy and hard. Yet I wasn’t there. And now the bells are tolling, and her body lies still in a wooden box. And I’ll have to live knowing she died with cold fingers and a bent neck, and her husband, her daughter, her son, blinking cluelessly at her. I wonder now what might have been had her dad not been a drunk. Had her mother not given birth to a boy first. Had she married another man. Had she been a better mother. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Because Lilia is gone now. And everyone has run out of time to love her.

Elisa Báláu is a Romanian-British writer and translator with a PhD in English and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. She studies exophony, the practice of writing creatively in a language other than one's mother tongue. Her work has been longlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She's working on her first novel.