The Secret
“When I go back home, I have to tell her.” Mutters grandma Diddy while chewing the meat with her old teeth. Masha wipes the elder’s chin carefully and replies automatically:
“You are at your ho-“
“This place is different.” She interrupts Masha.“Back there was a fireplace, we sat around the… around this…” Her fingers pat the mahogany table looking for a clue.
“The table.” Sometimes Masha has to remind her of the simple words. Life has a cruel sense of humor – Diddy’s brain once translating Zweig brilliantly is now rotting due to the rapid development of Alzheimer.
“Yes. We sat around it, we laughed and laughed…” The grandma’s eyes are wandering around the dish as if she is trying to reconstruct the past with the pieces of meat. She sees it all in this round mirror: meeting Tony in the ballroom, and he asks her for a dance; their daughter, Lily, playing in the living room; seeing her dancing in a bride’s dress; her granddaughter loving her: “Grandma Diddy, you are sweeter than a strawberry!”
“Strawberries for dessert!” Masha gently caresses her grandma’s hair and places the bowl on the table. Diddy loves eating sweets. She seems happy.
The silence resonates within the walls. It spills through the girl’s ears, down her whole body filling her with a numb feeling of melancholy. Masha is afraid of death, of getting old. Diddy is the only living relative she has. The old house helps her to conquer the fears from her past.
Grandma Diddy eats her strawberries with satisfaction and thinks about her lovely granddaughter. She spreads her cracked lips into a smile. It would have been wonderful if this angel stayed in the house. But Lily went somewhere and took her kid with her. Before that she shared with her… a secret!
“When I go back home, I have to tell her.” Grandma Diddy interrupts the silence suddenly and locks her eyebrows pensively. Masha rolls her eyes. Perhaps it is the usual gibberish, but the girl’s intuition leads her asking:
“What do you have to tell whom?”
“Only the girl has to know. It is not my secret.”
“Who told you this secret?”
“Lily did. But… I have not seen her for a long time. Where is she?”
Pause. Masha inhales deeply and answers: “She passed away a little bit after my dad. What secret? What are you talking about?” Masha waits patiently staring into the grandma’s blurred gaze. Her heart beats fast, she must know her mother’s secret.
“She told me to tell the girl. To tell… her…that…” Grandma Diddy stops and narrows her eyes. She feels the blood pressure in her head. But she cannot entrust Lily’s last secret to an unknown person. She must go back home and tell Masha, her granddaughter, that Lily is not her true mother. That she is adopted. The old woman judgingly measures the girl in front of her and asks suspiciously:
“Who are you?”
