On the last day of the shoot of EX MEMORIA, Sara Kestelman gave the key team some copies of her poems about the loss of her parents.Everyone was incredibly moved, and MiaBays asked Sara if we could reproduce the poems in materials for the film as they are so poignant about a child’s loss of her parents, and particularly pertinent in many ways to EX MEMORIA’s subjects.Here are the poems by kind permission of Sara Kestelman:
LIPSTICK
On the day my mother died
I slipped my arms
into her cardigan -
black wool mixed with silk
her favourite
on her small frame serving as a coat -
and on my lips
the lipstick from her bag,
her lips on mine
and so for every day since
until the summer robs me
of the extra layer
and the lipstick is no more
Cookie
Kestelman
LondonMAY1997
ORPHAN
Orphaned now, both darling parents gone - each on the fifteenth day of a month, she in March, he only fifteen months later in June - I think of sunny times recent and past - the paradise of France golden sands, azure sea and of the intense heat of the interior in Vence and childhood memories of walks on mountain path of pines and pine cones and endless watching regimented armies of giant ants constructing complex kingdoms on deserted and abandoned railway track long since transformed into modern road, unrecognisable now from my 50's youth! Picnics by the sea, the local bus twisting its way along the perilous descent to Cagnes-sur-mer and then on foot picking our way through shoulder high groves of bristling bamboo. No metal road then but dusty little paths of dark red earth leading to the pebbled beach, the welcome shade of pine trees at the sea’s edge now long gone too to make way for the greater sweep of building from Monte -Carlo, Menton, Nice and Cannes to Juan-les-Pins, Cap d ’Antibes and on....
My mother in her jade green heavy cotton bathing costume paddling in the sea picking shells and pebbles and pretty little bits of smooth edged coloured glass to add to her collection back home in Belsize Park Gardens, London NW3.
My father striding out along the beach always slightly ahead wherever we went, always searching for the better place, the more distant cove; or the restaurant just-around-the-corner, just-a-little-further-down-the-road... As we struggled to keep up, my mother and I, negotiating baskets of groceries or picnic things or any of the other different armfuls of a day.
Or my father swimming steadfastly out to sea or with me on the pedalo boat crazy with only newspaper hats upon our heads to protect us from the wicked rays of the midday sun shoulders and knees burnt crimson returning to shouts of anger and relief from my Mother and their friends who waited frantic with disbelief on the beach: ‘What possessed you,’ they cried ‘to take a little child who cannot swim so far out to sea in the heat of the day?’ My father defensive in dismay, my mother biffing him about the head with something soft and snatching me, her baby, up onto her knee.
My father sweet and sensitive, delightfully imaginative in the child’s world and yet sometimes uncomprehending, at a loss somehow, the funny, witty, brilliant side of him flip-flopped all too easily into impatience and sometimes rage with my mother and me whenever we were slower than he to engage and grapple with the intellectual ideas he danced with so effortlessly.
My mother unerringly intuitive with her cubs, an awesome loyalty antennae ceaselessly on the alert, deliciously inventive in every way, a memory brimful of detail feeding her unique sense of black stroke white, wrong stroke right, and with a compassion and generosity that forged itself through friends and family, her huge heart binding us all to her until her death. Rudderless now, we’ve already begun to drift apart.
On one of our annual sojourns in the south of France to the rented apartments and studios in Vence, inspiration for the lovely paintings of goats, of peasants and vines and fishermen in their boats before my father moved on from the figurative to the pure abstract form, and before my mother’s health prevented her from spending extended time in the heat of the sun, he once stepped of the train, (once and never again!), en route from Paris to Nice, to buy some bananas from a platform stall - exotic and wonderful after all the bland deprivation of the bleak war years. He stepped off unaware I was behind him in the corridor, not knowing I was watching first anxious and then with horror as the train began to move no warning whistle, as it began to edge away, gathering speed, and my father running, and me screaming, as he managed to scramble aboard. ‘How could you leave her?’ my mother cried ‘But I didn’t know that she was there!’ ‘But why? Why didn’t you?’, her harsh reply. Neither parent from that point on allowed out of my sight.
They were married for sixty-two years. There were ups and downs of course, great joy and pride, times of sadness too, sadness and disappointments, worry and tears, but they were blessed in one another devoted, trusting friends each full of laughter and vitality to the bitter end.
‘What will you want me to do...?’ I ventured to ask some years ago - ‘should you have the unthinkable misfortune to be unable to communicate precisely and exactly what you might wish me to do for you?’ ‘Just give me the pills!’ my mother said, she looked me direct in the eye, her sharp bright button brown eyes on mine just a hint of a smile. ‘But...’ I shrugged helplessly and shook my head, ‘the law, you see so far won’t permit.’ ‘The law’s an ass!’, she too shrugged in reply - ‘anyway, you asked, that’s all I have to say.’ But then she added: ‘Or I suppose you may just shove a pillow over my face!’ Was there a twinkle in her eye? Dear God, did she really think that I would be able to snuff her out? A fond embrace and then a feather pillow over her face?
In hospital, at the end of her life she told the loving hospital staff not to resuscitate her should she fall: ‘My daughter will be sensible and practical’ she claimed, ‘My husband will understand.’ She told me this herself, again the direct look in the eye. I was proud that she felt so certain she could rely on me. I thanked her, told her how much I loved and admired her and promised that I wouldn’t fail. And when she refused at first to let them operate and the doctors gave assurance that drugs would keep the pain at bay I went to tell her - she sat up in her bed and said: ‘But I don’t want drugs to keep me alive!’ ‘No, I know’, I said, ‘but they’ll contain the pain and ultimately they’ll help you on your way.’ ‘Ah, good,’ she said, and squeezed my hand, ‘Please thank them for me and thank you too.’ She was wrong about my father though - he didn’t understand.
When I asked HIM what he’d like me to do for him at his end he had a very different view: ‘Don’t worry about me’, he’d said ‘should your mother die before I do I’ll make up my bed and just camp out here.’ - and in a sense I suppose he did camp out at number 74, learning to cook his little meals for one...
She had longed to return to India and never did. He was planning a trip to his beloved Dieppe in the days before he died. On his easel the start of a new painting, his first in almost two years: a picture very much in embryo, white of the primer bleaching through the powerful dynamic of subtle shades of greys - unfinished business - and it touches me to think of him working in his studio in his green paint-splashed apron aged ninety-two, maybe even on the morning of his final day, maybe using his last walk to form his next strategy, certainly in his last hours speaking to the doctors about his work.
Clearing out my parents home, their home and mine for such a very long time, sorting through the fabrics in my mother’s workroom I found the bolt of exquisite cream stitched silk she’d bought for me in preparation for the wedding - that was never to be.
I also found hidden deep in a drawer my father’s love letters to her - letters peppered with finely drawn funny little sketches from France and Spain. And then wrapped and folded away I found the little 60's dress, very short and plain of pale cream lace, old lace my grandmother’s maybe, over cream stitched silk... So she had designed and cut and made the wedding dress and then the engagement broken off, without a word she’d quietly put it away where it lay in its secret place for all these years.
I took my parents ashes to the South of France. Hers pale silver, his deeper, darker. Yin and Yang! Glittering in the sunlight and beautiful, like the subtle ghostly marriage of greys in his final painting. In Ste. Colombe, Vence, Alpes Maritimes facing the famous and beloved Baous mountain range, in the company of loving friends as close as family, I mingled them and spread them beneath an olive tree and with them a little wooden box inside their reading glasses; a paintbrush; a thimble; a palette knife; a pencil; a tiny teddy-bear; a reel of thread and some ribbon still in the little brown haberdashery John Barnes paper bag! On the top we lay Mo’s old felt beret and over them all brilliant bright red rose petals freshly cut that day.
My mother once told my father that he was her life. In his last year without her he came to realise that she was his.
A handful of her ashes returned to India last year. And earlier this year in my garden we planted a little Mimosa tree for Dorothy. In May on my birthday a handful more of her ashes beneath the tree in her memory. In June, just four weeks later, and a handful more of his.
I was formed by these two golden people. I am blessed in them. The memory of them lives on in me.
