These are the last days of a cold and dry November. The sky seems as if it were made of ice. An invisible sunset strains to illuminate the gray expanse of the heavens beyond the distant hills. I hear my father taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly and deliberately. His gaze becomes vacant and drifts away from mine. I close my eyes and see my mother before me, radiating joy and smiling at me. I see her sitting beside me, just as she has all these years. Here, at this old dining table, we drank our afternoon coffee and planned the groceries for tomorrow’s lunch. Later, and what she loved the most, we would go outside to sit among her roses in the yard—yellow, pink, white, and red… fragrant and intoxicating.

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My mother kept returning to my thoughts, her tired smile striving to conceal illness, pain, and heavy suffering. She hid the truth and the cruelty of her disease. Besides the quiet struggle against the insidious illness, my mother had lost all her other battles as well, all at once. She lay in bed pale, exhausted, and tormented, casting a long glance at the photographs arranged on the dresser. The next day, she was gone.

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In my mind, I see my mother watching me from the window, undoubtedly preparing to call me, as it is nearly dark and time for us children to come home. She had tidied the house earlier but hadn’t found the time to sit down and gather her strength. So, while the sunset burns blindingly behind the high and distant hills, at the very moment the national television channel begins the breaking news with bombastic announcements about the Chernobyl disaster, my mother is struck by an inexplicable emotion at the sight of all that innocent beauty—the blood-red sunset in the distance and her children nearby, her flesh and blood. At that moment, two silent tears ran down her face. She was very young, and we were small children. But that was some forty years ago.

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My father leaves the room, closing the door behind him almost silently. Almost as quietly, he opens the bedroom door and even more quietly closes it behind him. He went there to cry, I think. He cannot cry in front of me. And I begin to cry, not letting out a single sound. So, we both cry alone, each locked in the rooms where we spent most time with her—me in the dining room, him in the bedroom. Behind the closed door, a long moment of silence descends, interrupted by my son Vanja entering loudly, stopping motionless in the middle of the room. When he sees that I am crying, he hugs me. And we would have stayed like that for who knows how long, had my father not entered the dining room. His eyes were red and swollen.

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“Ah, Vanja, is that you?” he asked. My son stepped away from me, turned to him, and without saying a word, hugged him. And in that moment, I noticed they have the same build and height, except my son has black hair while my father’s had long since turned gray, sometimes completely white, white as morning frost; and the difference between them was a full fifty years. My father sat at the large black dining table in a dark blue shirt, turned toward me, and looked at me with a dusty, almost pleading gaze that seemed to say: What now? How do we go on? All this made my heartbeat faster. I tried to calm myself, but my heart was pounding. Never before had I felt so helpless as in those few minutes while sitting still, trying to find the right words, with my heart racing madly, waiting to slow down. I was shaken when I looked at my son, who was entirely red and on the verge of desperate tears. Instinctively, I leaped from the chair. I could not step forward or back, so I turned toward my father, and I could not restrain myself from being moved and crying again when I saw transparent, fast-flowing tears streaming down my son’s face as he raised his hand to wipe them with his palm. I watched for sixty long seconds, lips stiff and pressed together, resembling a grimace etched onto my face, because I suddenly realized that life is heavy and false and strikes every day, never satisfied with merely shaking you—it wants to throw you to the ground for a full reckoning, and each time it wins, and you always lose. I was not a poet, fortunately.

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But I know there are wonderful, rare days when, for some unknown reason, you wake up in the morning feeling truly alive, and the world around you is beautiful, and you see the future full of happiness and good things, convinced you understand everything and find the courage to do what you have long wanted to do, finally making the decision you have always feared to make. We live for such days; we long for such days. Yet, the reality is different. The truth is, I cannot endure the cold, and I hate the wind, even if it is only a gentle breeze. Still, I put on my coat and scarf and went out to smoke a Marlboro. The white moon shone in the sky; I looked at the white stars for a few seconds, then returned home after walking on the frozen ground, in the cold and the silence.

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I enter, and the house seems empty, though I know it is not. My mother is not here to tell about all she had heard—confidential news, various chatter, trivial matters, and small expenses. To break the silence that has fallen over the house, barely disturbed by the almost inaudible sound of my father’s slow exhale and my son’s equally slow inhale, I say: Let’s look at the photo albums in which Mom so carefully arranged and organized the photographs. Without waiting for their consent or refusal, I open the bottom drawer of the dresser and pull out three photo albums, identical in size and shape but different in color: one dark red, one dark blue, and one dark green. I open the dark red one, and my father and son stand beside me. I pull out a black-and-white photograph from my parents’ wedding. I hand it to my father and watch how he holds it, as if it might suddenly slip from his hands. He grips it tightly—so tightly that the joints of his fingers turn white.

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The evening ripples like a black sea, a sea that heralds a storm. The invisible sun must have already set behind the hills; the light slowly fades, and surely it is getting colder outside. From my mother’s dark blue album, I pull out a color photograph showing the three of us—myself, her, and my son—all smiling. It is summer; we all wear thin-strapped T-shirts. In the photograph, my son is four years old, and we are teaching him to ride a bicycle without training wheels. I turn to look at my son, and he seems somehow different, transformed. How distant those summer afternoons feel, when we went to the city park to ride bicycles, the three musketeers, racing around—and how much Vanja enjoyed increasing his speed and arriving first at the finish line. How he laughed! How he laughed!