About my grandmother
There she was, a chubby small woman, wrinkles — the map of her life and soul, laughing or arguing with neighbors defending me or complaining over trivia like ‘who said what’ behind her back. Her full brightly lit blue eyes, the color of the majestic sky, a small mouth, which I inherited, high Roman nose, firm expression, always compelling, determined. There she was.
Every time I walked into the dorm where my grandmother used to work as a concierge, I could see her from the polished glass window of the little room she occupied during her shifts. She would sit engrossed and absorbed in an evening paper as though she could read, but instead — she looked for those familiar words she remotely knew how to read and, of course, pictures. She loved looking at pictures. She would put on her glasses, which she called “reading” glasses, stare at the printed words and images and come up with incredible interpretations. Surprisingly, she was almost always right what the news was about. I thought it was one of her superpowers.
At other times I could see her knit, her back a little hunched, hands moving, eyes in great concentration, brain at peace, strands of yarn as though in the hands of a great magician. She was not very good at knitting either. But you could not tell that to my grandmother, you would just accept whatever she knitted and, most importantly, wore it afterward, no matter how ridiculous you may have looked. My only solace was that it was always summer in the Middle East, and there was little chance of me wearing the stuff until very cold into the season, which was almost never.
At other times I could see her play with a kitten. Cats adored my grandmother. Maybe she was a cat in her previous life. Maybe she is a cat now, after her death. She would gently caress the softest fur, whisper something in a kitten’s ear, as though it could listen and talk back to her, the kitten would purr and bounce back and forth on her lap and play with the yarn put aside on the table. She would often sleep with her cat, Musya, and her kittens, or adopt a stray cat she found on the streets, feed her, take care of her, build a little shelter in her garden. My grandmother was a cat lover.
I still have that image of her behind the glass. My grandmother at work. A small, chubby woman, no longer a beauty after she gave birth to my mother, but with a surprisingly sweet expression, a glow around her, that sort of ambiance that makes you want to talk to the person, pretend that she could read and knit, or that her dry biscuits were actually edible even if she often forgot about them in the oven and they burned.
There she was.
