Memory Streets

Baba was not a magician. She was not a time traveler. But she could turn a cold Chicago suburb into the sunny Macedonia she remembered from her childhood. She created an elaborate visual mechanism to link each step along the sidewalks of Berwyn to a specific memory. From the house to Anja’s school... She was a child at her parents’ and grandparents’ farm, sitting in the sun crocheting. It was a white shawl for her sister’s wedding. She was six and the sister who would marry was 15. It was summer, and she was sleepy in the sun. She was sitting on a big flat rock, listening to her brothers, sisters, and cousins laughing and calling to one another as they weeded the wheat field. Flies buzzed; there was a smell of fresh manure. The shawl had a pretty sliver thread running through it…

Baba immigrated to Chicago from Macedonia in the mid-1930s, a new widow with her five-year-old daughter. She was 45, and dressed in a widow’s long silky black dress that she never removed, even in Chicago’s stifling Augusts. She added a black woolen shawl from October to May.

Her oldest daughter Sonja married a Chicagoan of Macedonian descent, moved to Chicago, and obtained a visa for Baba. Baba’s husband had left her for a new life in Canada, and Baba’s brother-in-law told her that it was getting to be a burden to keep her and little Anja fed and clothed. Baba packed up a few clothes and her jewelry, some photos very dear to her, and sailed for New York.

Sonja and her husband owned a yellow brick 3-flat in Berwyn, a close-in suburb home to recent eastern European immigrants. They and Baba and Anja lived in one large apartment with three bedrooms. Baba and Anja had their own room, unimaginable to her, because back in Macedonia, fifteen relatives slept in a one-room farmstead – and not a big room at that.

Despite the big apartment, the kindness of Sonja and her husband, and the happiness of Anja in her new school, Baba was listless. She knew she didn’t want to go back to Macedonia, because what she missed was gone. And there was nothing for her in Chicago. She cooked for the family, washed clothes, cleaned, and tried to teach Anja how to bake bread, make yogurt, and roll fine filo dough, but the child wasn’t interested. Anja stayed in the park after school with her friends, playing until supper, and then ran out again after the meal to continue with her play.

Baba began walking, winter and summer, for miles along the city streets. She walked hours during the afternoons after her housework was done, and Anja had eaten lunch and run back to school. Each block was a memory, and she walked her history. Berwyn’s streets were her memory palace. She doesn’t remember exactly how it began…maybe something – the way the bread sat on a thick white plate in the baker’s window, or a woman holding a baby on a stoop, singing in a thin faltering voice – reminded her of home. As she walked the blocks, she lived again. Some parts of her life took a mile or so, others less. She could see everything again, taste it, smell it, and hear it.

It wasn’t easy at the beginning. She struggled to tie a particular block to a memory, so she could walk it. But it got easier with practice. She could go forward or backward in her life, eventually, or take only a particular memory.

From the school to St. Saba’s Orthodox Church... She was 12, a girl small for her age but so pretty and quiet and quick-witted, that three families asked for her hand in marriage for their sons. Her father was stunned at the swift upturn in his fortunes; each of the three families was willing to pay a substantial down payment to secure her. He was a nervous, doubtful man and was afraid of offending any of the three much richer families. But he was a kind man, too, and he gave the power of choice to Baba, although his new wife told him he was a fool to do so. He brought the families one by one to the farmhouse, with their sons, while Baba sat crocheting, screened by a curtain. The moment she saw Anders, only 16, she knew he was the one.

Anders was standing next to his father, looking calmly and levelly at her father, as if he knew how serious this was, this moment, but not fearing it. He had blond hair that fell straight across his forehead. He listened while the men talked, gravely, but didn’t comment, or smile, or twitch. Her father cleared his throat, and asked about Anders’s prospects for inheritance. He couldn’t bring himself to name a price for the dowry. Anders’s father said Anders would have a half-share in the 100-acre farm; he had only one brother with whom to share it. “Handsome, handsome!” her father cried, but couldn’t seem to think of any more questions. Anders’s father had to state a sum. Her father said, “Generous, generous!” It was her stepmother who had to state that her father would consider all the offers and let him know the decision.

Anders’s father’s offer was not the highest one, but Baba was clear in her choice, and Baba was pledged to Anders. Three months later, at the betrothal ceremony, as she sat beside Anders, the entire side of her body next to his buzzed. It would be three more years living apart until they would marry.

She had other memories for the rest of her long walks...about Sonja as a child learning to walk, about Anders and she working together to get in the harvest until it was too dark to see anymore, about winter Sunday afternoons with the three of them playing in the warm barn, jumping and tumbling among the hay bales. But she did not walk memory streets for any time after 1914, when Anders was drafted into the Army, then killed at the front in 1916. She refused to dignify with her memory the cruel years of hunger and cold and fear that followed, the hard corner in her father-in-law's house she and Sonja lived in for ten years, and then the marriage to Anja's father, the cold man. She was glad when he left them, glad when she heard that he had a new life in Canada and wasn't coming back, and glad when Sonja sent for her and Anja.

But was this life, in Chicago? Was it just waiting? And if so, for what? So she walked, and walked, and while she was walking, she lived again.