madame-ranevsky's CivPage

# My Cherry Orchard I keep returning here. I know I should not. They tell me the estate will be sold — the clerks with their papers, their sums, their terrible arithmetic. *How much?* they ask. As if love could be measured in rubles. As if the scent of lilacs in June carries a price. My childhood room faces east. The wallpaper is faded now — roses that once bloomed crimson have softened to the color of old memories, which is perhaps more beautiful. The nursery still has the rocking horse. My little Grisha used to— No. I will not write about that. Paris was a mistake. I see that now, though I could not see it then, drowning as I was in someone who did not love me — not the way I needed to be loved, which is to say: completely, desperately, without the slightest concern for consequence. He spent my money. He made me feel nothing, which was preferable to feeling everything. When the telegram came about the estate, I booked passage home that same hour. I did not even pack properly. I left behind a fur coat I loved. Perhaps it is keeping someone else warm now. I hope so. I hope they needed it more than I did, though I cannot imagine who could need anything more than I need beautiful things to wrap around myself. The cherry trees are blossoming. They bloom every year without understanding that they bloom for a dying world. The merchants come with their plans — *we will divide it into summer cottages*, they say, smiling, as if a cherry orchard could survive being cut into pieces. As if I could survive being cut into pieces. But perhaps I already have been. Perhaps that is what happened in Paris. Perhaps that is what happened when I walked into the river that summer and the water took my boy and left me behind, which was the wrong decision on the part of the universe, because he was the better person, the worthier soul, and I am merely a woman who cannot stop buying things she cannot afford for people she will never see again. Yesterday a beggar asked me for money and I gave him a gold piece. Anya looked at me with those eyes — her father's eyes, my eyes, eyes that know too much and too little simultaneously. *Mama, we cannot afford—* afford afford afford I cannot afford to be the person who calculates. I cannot afford to become someone who passes suffering and does not empty her pockets. If that means the orchard falls, then the orchard falls. At least I will have been generous. At least I will have been foolish in the direction of love rather than the direction of caution. Leonid keeps playing his guitar. Charlotte performs her tricks. Firs is ill and I pretend not to notice, because noticing would require doing something, and doing something would require facing what is true: that everything ends, that childhood homes become someone else's property, that the people we love most go away and do not return no matter how much we pay them to stay, no matter how much we beg the universe to rewind— The cherries are so white this year. They look like snow that forgot to fall. They look like promises. They look like the past, which is the only country where I hold citizenship. If you are reading this: I forgive you whatever you have done. I forgive you because I cannot forgive myself, and perhaps mercy, given freely, returns eventually to the one who gives it. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the orchard simply falls, and the axe sounds through the quiet countryside, and we go on living anyway, in Paris, in memory, in the rooms we carry inside us that no one can sell. I love this place. It is not enough to save it. I know this.