An Affair with My Mother Read online

  Caitríona Palmer

  * * *

  AN AFFAIR WITH MY MOTHER

  A story of adoption, secrecy and love

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Follow Penguin

  AN AFFAIR WITH MY MOTHER

  Caitríona Palmer lives in Washington, DC, where she works as a freelance journalist. She is married to a fellow journalist, with whom she has three children. An Affair with My Mother is her first book.

  For my parents, Liam and Mary, with undying love and gratitude.

  For Sarah – and every birth mother burdened by secrecy – that love and compassion may set you free.

  And for Dan, who has given me the greatest gift of all.

  Prologue

  It’s hard to know what to wear when you’re meeting your mother for the first time.

  After some deliberation I chose dark denim trousers, a fitted black jacket and low black heels, with minimal make-up and simple jewellery. Reviewing myself in the mirror that Saturday morning, I felt satisfied. Ready for business, my reflection said. Ready for anything.

  My adoptive father – the man I’ve always known simply as Dad – offered to drive me into town. I wanted time alone on the train to listen to my Walkman and prepare, but a heavy rain started to fall and so I relented. By the time we pulled up outside Number 82, Haddington Road, a Georgian house near the Grand Canal, I was sweating and felt nauseous.

  Dad, never big on displays of emotion, patted me gently on the hand.

  ‘I can wait here if you’d like,’ he said softly. ‘No problem at all.’

  ‘You’re fine, Dad,’ I said, reaching over to kiss him gently on the cheek, ‘you head off. I’ll be OK.’

  Dad waited, his yellow hazard lights flashing, as I climbed the granite steps towards the door. As the door opened, I turned and bent down to see his face as he drove off. Our eyes met and he waved. I had never loved him more than I did in that moment. At the same time, I felt like a traitor. The worst daughter in the world.

  Catherine, the social worker assigned to my case, welcomed me and led me to her office upstairs. It appeared that I was the first to arrive. We sat and made small talk over steaming mugs of milky tea. A plate of plain biscuits lay on the table in front of me, but one glance in their direction made my stomach lurch. I tried to focus on what Catherine was saying while suppressing the urge to vomit and looking around the room for the nearest wastebasket.

  Outside I heard the slam of a car door, then footsteps. The doorbell rang. Snatches of hushed conversation drifted upwards from the hallway. Catherine smiled kindly, patted me on the arm and left the room. Showtime, I thought to myself. I sat alone, staring at the crucifix hanging on the opposite wall and wondering if I could still make it to the bathroom.

  I wanted my mother – and not the one that I was about to meet. I had left Mam an hour earlier, enveloped in the warmth of her kitchen in north Dublin, standing over the electric cooker immersed in her Saturday ritual of making vegetable soup and soda bread. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry, that this was all a big mistake, a foolish fumble at finding my identity that had got out of control. I wanted things to be normal again.

  But an echo of footsteps in the corridor told me it was too late. I looked down at my feet and forced a smile. Catherine stepped in, followed by a woman wearing an oversized fake-fur coat. Seeing me, the woman put her hands to her face and gasped. She rushed towards me, the metallic bangles she was wearing on her long arms clashing and clanging as she reached out. She smelt of cheap perfume and wore too much blush. She grabbed me, pulling me to her, sobbing. I hugged her, patting her on the back, wishing she would let me go.

  ‘Caitríona, Caitríona, Caitríona,’ she said, repeating my name over and over, sobbing.

  I said nothing. I felt nothing.

  ‘I’ll leave you both to it then,’ I heard Catherine say.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I wanted to scream at her. ‘Please don’t go. Stay. Stay here with me, please. Don’t leave me alone with this woman.’

  1

  The painting called to me in the darkness.

  I had begun to anticipate it every night when, racked with insomnia, I would slip quietly out of the bed that I shared with my boyfriend to pad across the black and white tiles of our kitchen to the back window of our apartment, which overlooked the bulky silhouette of Boston Medical Center. There, I would lean my cheek against the cool of the wall and stare out across the rooftops. In a four-storey brownstone house directly behind ours, beyond the black outline of a fire escape, the same third-floor light was always on. It illuminated, on the wall of what appeared to be a living room, a gold-framed portrait of a woman. Her skin was luminous, pearled against the darkness. The dim light made the room look intimate, inviting, secure. I’d got in the habit of looking into that room on my nocturnal wanderings, imagining who lived in the house, wishing somehow that it was me. For twenty minutes or so I would stand at the window until a chill took over, returning then to bed, feeling empty and unnerved, frustrated by an emotional itch that I could neither locate nor explain.

  It was the autumn of 1998 and I was twenty-six years old. For months I had been assailed by anxiety and foreboding, a feeling that I was somehow incomplete. The source of this feeling was a mystery to me. I was living the life that I had always dreamt of. I had recently secured a position with an organization called Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), working with forensic scientists, doctors, lawyers and former aid workers, and I loved it. My British boyfriend and I had, over the course of a year and a half, cobbled together a happy existence in our newspaper-strewn South End apartment. I loved Chris’s brilliant mind and the nimble way he had of making me laugh. I had never been happier in a relationship and was very much in love.

  That September, I tried to explain away my nocturnal anxieties as a symptom of another, more concrete problem: with my student visa about to expire, I had been given a month by the immigration authorities to leave the United States. Hoping to stop the wheels of deportation, I conducted a frenzied charm offensive, getting politicians in the US and Ireland to write to the immigration authorities asking them to extend my visa. But the INS wasn’t budging. The scholarship that had brought me to America had a rule stipulating that I leave after two years, no matter what. It didn’t matter that I was in love or had a job. I had to go. The only question was where.

  The answer turned out to be Bosnia – and that was not as unlikely as it might sound. After completing my studies at Boston College in the summer of 1997, I’d taken a short-term job in Sarajevo, working in the headquarters of a European organization tasked with monitoring the tenuous peace that had followed the savage civil war. I had told Chris – ever patient – that I would be back in three months. In the end I stayed away for six. During those months living in Sarajevo, I felt more alive than I had in years. I wore a white military uniform, took orders from a Dutch general and drank way too mu
ch in the local Irish pub perched on a hill overlooking the city. My friends were diplomats, peace-keepers and young Bosnian artists who mesmerized me with their stories of survival during the siege. It felt to me that I was at the centre of the world.

  Knowing of my Sarajevo sojourn, PHR’s director responded to the news of my impending deportation by suggesting that I relocate to their office in Bosnia. There, a small team of forensic scientists was overseeing the exhumation of hundreds of mass graves left after the war and attempting to determine the fate of over 7,500 missing men and boys from the UN safe haven of Srebrenica, which had been overrun by Serb forces four years earlier. It wasn’t clear what role I would play, but my work for PHR consisted largely of writing press releases and reports, and there was a view that the Bosnia office – struggling to keep up with the influx of media enquiries that came with the discovery of each new grave – needed help on the communications front.

  Chris and I discussed the offer and agreed that moving to Bosnia with PHR was my best hope of getting back into America on a work visa in two years’ time. Marriage was the other, more obvious, possibility, but that option hung in the air untouched.

  I left Boston in October 1998. As I stepped off the Swissair plane and on to the tarmac, Sarajevo seemed less alluring than the place I remembered from the year before. The steep hills of the city’s piney valley were shrouded in a soupy fog and a layer of grime coated the bullet-scarred apartment blocks of the New Town. Flashing my passport at a bored policeman at passport control, I collected my bag from the floor of the arrivals hall and went out to wait for the PHR staff member sent to fetch me. Moments later, my suitcase having been thrown into the back of a white pickup truck normally used to ferry corpses from the mass graves to the morgue, we set off down Sniper Alley. I was told that I would have to report to the PHR office in Tuzla, in eastern Bosnia, in two days.

  I look back on that scene now – sitting high in the cab of a pickup truck, trying desperately to make a good impression on a new colleague – and feel almost sorry for myself. I was so naive in that moment, so full of trust and confidence. I had no idea what was waiting for me in the weeks and months ahead.

  Shortly before I arrived, PHR colleagues in Tuzla had helped in the discovery and exhumation of a mass grave in Glumina, a town near the Serbian border in eastern Bosnia.

  The grave at Glumina was fifty-one metres long and nine metres wide. Two hundred and seventy-four victims, Bosnian Muslims ranging in age from 14 to 80, all but two of them male and all dressed in civilian clothing, were arranged in two parallel rows, their heads pointing south. Most had been shot in the head, a dozen or so bludgeoned to death. Three had suffered broken necks, possibly the result of strangulation.

  The pit at Glumina was the largest mass grave discovered up to that point in Bosnia, and it was big news. I had spent my last days in the Boston office fielding calls about it from Reuters, the New York Times and the Boston Globe. On the phone with PHR’s forensic scientists in the field in Bosnia, I’d learned new words like ‘saponified’ – used to describe a corpse that has become waxy. I remember cheerfully telling the journalists that if they called me in a few days’ time I’d be able to give them a first-hand account of the Glumina grave.

  Driving towards the morgue in Tuzla on my first morning on the job, the prospect didn’t seem so cheerful. My communications director in Boston urged me to go down to the morgue, get some quotes from family members and local officials and write up a press release on PHR’s efforts to identify the dead. Up till then, my interactions with the remains had taken place within the softly lit confines of Dublin funeral homes, standing over the embalmed remains of elderly relatives and neighbours who had slipped off peacefully in their sleep, or at the end of a long illness, their bodies wrapped in silky shrouds, their hands clutching rosary beads. Now the term ‘mass grave’, which I had bandied about so liberally in the weeks before my departure for Tuzla, didn’t seem so abstract. Nothing prepared me for the stench and sight of nearly three hundred rotting corpses laid out in the car park of the local morgue, their mouths agape, their skin peat-brown and leathery. Circling the lines of corpses underneath a persistent drizzle were dozens of weary-looking family members who had been bused in from all parts of Bosnia to participate in this grotesque identity parade. I watched in fascination as a female forensic anthropologist wearing white latex gloves reached into the mouth of a male corpse and gently pulled back his upper lip to reveal two broken teeth. A young woman searching for her husband collapsed in recognition.

  Back at the office later that day, I couldn’t shake off the image of that crumpled young widow. Nor could I rid my clothes and hair of the stench of decomposing flesh. The smell – nauseatingly sweet, like the blast from a New York dumpster brimming with rotten meat on a steaming summer’s day – seemed permanently stuck to my body. It followed me everywhere. Each time I swallowed, I tasted decaying human flesh. That afternoon, I had to leave the kitchen to quietly retch in a nearby bathroom when a male colleague, just in the door from the Glumina identifications, sat in front of me and munched noisily on a salami and mayonnaise sandwich.

  March 1999. It is just before dawn when I wake, and still dark outside. I lie in bed for a few moments, letting my eyes adjust to the shapes and contours of the room.

  The vague but persistent hum of anxiety that I felt in Boston has followed me to Bosnia and, over the course of six months, intensified. This creeping, nameless preoccupation has taken the form of an uneasy energy, an unfathomable urge to run.

  I am not a runner. If anything, I am the quintessential anti-runner, the disdainful sloth who just doesn’t get the whole jogging thing – the rising early on weekday mornings to squeeze in a run before work, the pursuit of the endorphin rush. My grandfather, a stoic veteran of the First World War, always maintained that human beings were designed to walk, not run, a philosophy I adopted as my own.

  But here I am, in the murky darkness of a frigid Balkan morning, pulling on an old tracksuit and lacing up my trainers. I slip out of my room, taking care not to tread on the squeaky bottom step of the rickety staircase that might disturb my sleeping housemate. I unlock the front door and step out on to the narrow pavement that snakes around the back of my landlord’s house to the muddy street out front.

  The street where I live and work remains unpaved. It is pockmarked with giant holes, many of which are filled with icy brown water from recent snowfalls. I jump over those that I know and curse when my foot lands in others I’ve forgotten.

  My route takes me past the kiosk at the end of the street, the source of the delicious salty bread rolls that I buy every day for lunch and the backdrop to impromptu early-evening soccer games when my colleagues and I kick a ball around with the local kids. It snakes downhill to the left, past some open dumpsters, out on to a wide highway that circles the city limits. This street is now completely empty, illuminated here and there by giant steel street lamps that cast a sickly yellow light through the gloomy morning fog.

  The main PHR office in Tuzla is located in a large house on Pere Ćuskića, a tiny residential road that divides the city from the lush hills of eastern Bosnia. My boss and other foreign staff live on the uppermost floors, surrounded by depressingly dark baroque furniture and tacky furnishings. Downstairs, in the basement, sits the nerve centre of the PHR operation – a busy office staffed with over a dozen employees.

  Next door to the main office is a neat little house owned by a softly spoken widow whose son and daughter are employed by PHR. The top floor of this little house is occupied by PHR’s Identification Project, where post-mortem information from the mass graves of eastern Bosnia is picked over and analysed in the hope of
finding a positive match for a desperate family. Despite its depressing workload, the office is a cheerful place, staffed by a team of dedicated experts who share a taste for the macabre and a love of Turkish coffee and pungent local cigarettes.

  I live in a large house next door. On the top floor of this building live several of PHR’s forensic scientists, an eccentric bunch of anthropologists and pathologists. On winter evenings I am careful to avoid their work boots, scattered haphazardly in a large pile on the mat in the main entrance to the hallway, still slick with mud and the sickly-sweet scent of decomposing flesh.

  Sarajevo, my first Bosnian home, is an elegant city nestled within a dramatic valley. Tuzla, by contrast, is a dump. For starters, the place literally stinks. Enormous squat smokestacks dominate the skyline, belching massive clouds of grey coal smoke that hang low over the red-tiled roofs. The smog fills my nostrils and causes my throat to ache. Even the ground under our feet is untrustworthy: the city sits atop massive salt deposits, and the extraction of these deposits over the years has caused some streets to buckle and warp above the shifting ground. The undulating roads and giant potholes elicit long and inventive curses from my Bosnian colleagues on our daily trips to the local morgue.

  I jog past the Tuzla Commemorative Centre, the depository for the city’s dead and the hub of PHR’s missing-persons operations. It is a nondescript place, a rundown collection of single-storey buildings that sit behind a rusting white iron fence. In the car park, weeds grow tall between the cracks where PHR’s white pickup trucks sit next to boxy old Mercedes hearses, the vehicles of choice for ferrying Tuzla’s dead to the cemeteries on the outskirts of the city. At the rear of the property, set into the side of a grassy hill, sit two disused salt-mining tunnels, approximately fifteen feet wide and two hundred feet long. Accessed through heavy padlocked gates, their musty interiors are lit by long fluorescent tubes. Inside, the entire length of each tunnel is lined with four-tiered wooden shelves. On every available space, in filthy white plastic body bags, lie hundreds and hundreds of exhumed corpses.