The Yale Review

4 8 Y ‘ ‘ A S A R E R I G H T F I T ’ ’ B E N J A M I N S . G R O S S B E R G Because in her delirium, she raked my beard with her nails and called me aba, I know my mother traveled backwards into her death. Because I leaned over her on the hospital bed and had the presence of mind not to fear, at least not then, being near her, I felt the restlessness of her back-and-forth turning, as of a body working itself into a narrow channel or a groove, to rest, that cannot rest. What she saw, where she was then, I can’t know – not from the bedrail where I stood as if they were rails of a stadium, and I, high up, watched her on a field below. Probably she was in the Palestine of her childhood, a location I will not try to imagine here. She was twice removed from me, not simply inside herself, but inside in a place before I could have known her, where her needs, her concerns had nothing to do with me, and another middle-aged man with a beard had leaned over her, leaned in to lift her as from a crib, before he went o√ to war. She’d said a few times that I resemble him with my thick lips and straight hairline, the features passed through her. So I go ahead. I forget all I think I know about time and become the man who leaned over her once 4 9 R returned to lean over her again, glad that, in her delirium, she recognizes me, her fatherson , light brown beard, thick lips, straight hairline, the creases around eyes and mouth that are common to joy and grief. ...