When I was a young girl, no more than six, my mother died in childbirth. While at this age that I have reached, such an idea seems tragic in the way drought seems tragic, or hail—tragic indeed, but unavoidable, part of nature’s cycle—of course, at that age…

I remember her so vaguely now, Lise, my mother. What I felt for her is like the ghost of a feeling, more memory than knowledge. No, one cannot remember love, only having loved.

She was fair, where I was dark, and had I been older I might have laughed to see the rightness of it—like a shadow I followed her, everywhere she went. Then one day she was gone.

I could not have been with her, where I could myself remember, for more than three years. So little time. I have lived three years over and over again, since then, every time I breathe is another three years. I am older now than she ever was. A terribly strange though, is it not?

I saw it happen. It had been so many hours she had been in the room with the wise woman—or was it? Hours to a six year old could have been minutes. So many hours, and I was so worried, I snuck in, so small that no one noticed me.

I saw everything. The room bare and gray, the thick wool curtains drawn. My mother on the bed, red and perspiring, yelling cry. I saw her opening like a world and then, nothing happened. Then there was no noise at all.

My father told me, I didn’t remember, that I was disconsolate for days, so disconsolate in fact that at last he sent for a priest to comfort me.

This priest’s face was the face peering at me from across the table in the tent I had shared with my husband.