Anniversary

Today is the 19th of June 2024.

Three decades to the date since I landed on New Zealand’s shores.

Twenty-eight years and eleven months old, eleven months married and six months pregnant.

According to records.

Faded pieces of paper showing my name, date and place of birth, date of marriage, date the residence visa was issued, arrival date.

They say nothing about a tall woman in blue maternity pants and a matching top, with jet-black hair tied in a ponytail, standing in the line of people inching off the plane at Auckland Airport.

I say nothing about her either. I hardly recognise her.

Was she tired?

I guess she must have been. Very tired after travelling from one side of the world to another, sitting on planes and in airports for three days.

Was she scared?

I am sure she was. Scared and worried. There is another photo of her, waking up in a motel room the following morning, and her eyes look swollen from crying.

I am trying to understand her motives, what made her plunge herself and her unborn child into the unknown so vast it might have been another planet.

But I couldn’t.

I have no way of reaching the woman whose records match mine.

The best I could do is explain her actions. Cite the usual, at the time, and to a certain extent still, common reasons that motivated her and many others to leave the same central European country she did. Only a few, however, ventured as far as she did.

But explaining is not the same as understanding.

To understand, we must relate. To explain, we only need to interpret. The first requires all we have, the second only cognition. And cognition is all I can summon, and even that only partially. Because even by sheer recognition, the odds were clearly stacked against her.

Or were they?

I ask myself whether my assessment of her actions would be different if the final outcome had been different? If the child she carried inside herself hadn’t died 24 years, two months, and two days after the day she landed?

I don’t have to think too hard to know the answer — yes, my assessment of her would be different. I would still deem her actions incredibly brave, the kind of bravery bordering on recklessness, but not completely deranged.

Because the different outcome, the one with that long-desired bright, golden future for her girl shining in its centre like a jewel, would exonerate it all.

Decorate dinner-table conversations held amongst in-laws and grandkids and friends with the distinguished patina of the wisdom that all’s well that ends well. There will be tears and laughter and jokes about daring, even downright crazy, decisions she made when young which, as everyone could see, have turned out for the best.

Only none of that will ever happen.

Which leaves only one question — would I have understood any of it without her? Without her blind, fierce determination, her naïve hope, her zeal? No — I probably would not.

But not even that could I afford her.

Because the price was too high. Far, far too high. Unreasonable. Cruel.

And because I could have lived without that knowledge. But not without my daughter.

And therefore, down she goes. Further, further down. That’s it. No more.

Even bearing witness, she had left to me!