The Japanese Lover(17)
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After her three years at Lark House, Irina had finally begun to feel safe. She had not spent so long in one place since her arrival in the United States fourteen years earlier; she knew this tranquility could not last and savored every moment of this truce in her life. Not everything was idyllic, but compared to her past problems, those of the present were trivial. She had to have her wisdom teeth out, but her medical insurance did not cover dental treatment. She knew Seth Belasco was in love with her and that it would be increasingly difficult to keep him in check without losing his valuable friendship. Voigt, who had always been relaxed and friendly, had in recent months become so bad tempered that some of the residents were meeting secretly to find a tactful way to get rid of him, although Catherine Hope thought he should be given time, and for the moment her opinion prevailed. The director had twice been operated on for hemorrhoids, only partially successfully, and this had embittered him.
Irina’s most urgent problem was an invasion of mice in the old Berkeley house where she rented a room. She could hear them scratching behind the cracked walls and underneath the wooden floorboards. At her neighbor Tim’s insistence, the other tenants decided to lay traps, because it seemed inhumane to poison the creatures. Irina argued that the traps were just as cruel, and had the added disadvantage that somebody had to dispose of the corpses, but no one listened to her. Once, one of the tiny animals survived in a trap and was rescued by Tim, who passed it on to Irina, tears in his eyes. He was someone who ate only vegetables and nuts, because he could not bear the idea of harming any living thing, much less cooking it. Irina had to bandage up the mouse’s broken foot, keep it in a cage with cotton wool, and take care of it until it had recovered from the shock and could walk properly and be released back with the others.
Some of Irina’s duties at Lark House irritated her, such as the bureaucratic paperwork for the insurance companies or fighting with residents’ relatives, who would complain over anything in order to assuage their sense of guilt at having abandoned their loved ones. Worst of all for Irina were the compulsory computer lessons, because no sooner had she learned something than the technology made another leap forward and she was left behind yet again. She had no complaints about the residents in her care. As Cathy had predicted on her first day at Lark House, she was never bored.
“There’s a difference between being old and being ancient. It doesn’t have to do with age, but physical and mental health,” Cathy explained. “Those who are old can remain independent, but those who are ancient need help and supervision; there comes a moment when they’re like children again.”
Irina learned a lot from both the elderly and the ancient. Nearly all of them were sentimental, amusing, and had no fear of seeming ridiculous; Irina laughed with them and sometimes cried for them. Many had led interesting lives, or invented them. In general if they seemed very lost it was because they were hard of hearing. Irina made sure their hearing-aid batteries never ran out.
“What’s the worst thing about growing old?” she would ask them.
They never thought about their age, was a common reply; they had once been adolescents, then they were thirty, fifty, sixty, and never gave it a thought, so why should they do so now? Some of them were very restricted, finding it hard to walk or move, and yet there was nowhere they wanted to go. Others were absentminded, confused, or forgetful, but this worried their carers and relatives more than it did them. Catherine Hope insisted that the residents of the second and third levels remain active, and it was Irina’s job to keep them interested, entertained, and connected.
“However old one is, we need a goal in our lives. It’s the best cure for many ills,” Cathy insisted. In her case, the goal had always been to help others, and her accident had not altered this in the slightest.
On Friday mornings, Irina used to accompany the most active residents on their street protests, to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. She also took part in the vigils for noble causes and in the knitting club; all the women who could wield a pair of needles (apart from Alma Belasco) were knitting cardigans for Syrian refugees. The recurring theme was peace; there was argument about everything apart from that. In Lark House there were 244 disillusioned Democrats who had voted to reelect Barack Obama but criticized him for being indecisive, for not having closed the Guantánamo facility, for deporting Latino immigrants, for the use of drones; there were more than enough reasons to send letters to the president and Congress. The half-dozen Republicans were careful not to voice their opinions out loud.
Irina was also responsible for helping with the spiritual needs of the residents. Many of them who were from a religious tradition sought refuge in it, even if they had spent sixty years denying God, while others sought comfort in esoteric and psychological alternatives typical of the Age of Aquarius. Irina brought in guides and masters for transcendental meditation, courses in miracles, the I Ching, the development of intuition, Kabbalah, the mystic tarot, animism, reincarnation, psychic perception, universal energy, and extraterrestrial life. She was the organizer of religious festivals, a potpourri of rituals drawn from several beliefs, so that no one could possibly feel excluded. At the summer solstice, she took a group of the women to the local woods, where they danced barefoot in circles to the sound of tambourines, with flowers in their hair. The rangers knew them and were happy to take photos of them hugging trees and talking to Gaia, Mother Earth, and with their own dead. Irina stopped mocking them inwardly the day she heard her grandparents in the trunk of a sequoia, one of those millenarian giants that unite our world to that of the spirits, as the octogenarian dancers had been quick to remind her. Costea and Petruta did not have much to say when they were alive, and nor did they from within the tree, but what little they did convey convinced their granddaughter that they were watching over her. At the winter solstice, Irina improvised ceremonies inside Lark House, as Cathy had warned her of a possible outbreak of pneumonia if they celebrated in the damp, windy woods at that time of year.