The Small Backs of Children (10 page)

The widow is in the kitchen making soapy circles with her hands on plates at the sink. I can hear her humming. How long have I lived here with her? How old am I? Am I still a girl?

I am looking at the widow’s book of paintings of the crucifixion of Christ. It is beautiful, this book of Christ paintings. It is the size of my entire torso. Death, I’ve learned, she lives in all of us the moment we are born. The pink wrinkled skin of a squirming infant can’t hide it. It’s just true. Maybe that is why there are almost no paintings of babies—except the Christ child, and what kind of baby is that? A fat little fiction—a baby that comes from the sky through the body of a dim-witted woman.

All bodies are death bodies. But the best death body of all is the crucifixion. A beautiful womanman hanging naked from a cross, stuck with nails, bleeding, thorn headed. Of all of them, I love the Velázquez the most. I am looking at it now. I lower my head to the image and close my eyes and rest my cheek upon his body. I put my mouth to the page and lick it. I wish it was in me.

I can feel my body. I can feel the heat at my chest and ribs and belly. I follow the heat story with my hand. I can make fire between my legs any time I like. I open my eyes and raise my head from the page of the Christ body. I look at it. I don’t care about this puny faith. I have died and been resurrected hundreds of times. What’s the Christ story compared to the bloodsong of one girl? How flimsy that story is. I believe in Velázquez. With our hands and art. I believe we must make the stories of ourselves.

My name is Menas. This is my story.

There was a bomb.

Once I asked the widow, when I could not find the story in any of her carefully collected news accounts: where is the story of my bomb? There is no war, she told me. There’s been no war for fifty years. There is only the occupation, and what that has meant to people. Your family killed. My husband sent to Siberia. The bomb that killed your family? . . . Listen to me. No one knows where it came from.

What has happened to us—there is no story.

But there was a family. My father the poet. My mother the weaver. My brother, my other, child gone to ash. I am like a blast particle—a piece of matter that was not destroyed, a piece of something looking for form.

There is the widow and her house and how I came here. Through the violence of men, through the forest, across a snow-covered field. I do not believe in the word
meilè
—love. Nor
tëvynei
—love for one’s country. Nor
vaikams
—love for children.
Motinos
—maternal love. None of them. In the place of love there is art.

There is my body and what has happened to it.

There is painting.

I paint on wood. Sometimes the widow and I pull the sides of abandoned houses apart. My paintings are of girls. In one painting a girl is chewing off her own arm, her hand caught in a steel trap. In another, a girl’s mouth has a house in it. Unlike a photograph, my girl faces are blurry. I want them to be blurry. I always make myself stop from putting them right, for what will it mean? Right for whom? By whose hands? The face of a girl should be blurry. Like she’s running.

There is a history to art, I’ve learned. Religion. Philosophy. Myth. Photography. I am reading about them. But there are chapters, whole books, missing. I see the stories of women, but they are always stuck inside the stories of men. Why is that?

The widow fills a kettle and puts it on the stove.

I pull down from the shelves a book of world mythology and my sadness grows. Artemis, why the paler sister of Apollo, whom she brought through blood into the world from her mother’s womb with her own hands? I turn to the section about my part of the world, and in the mythology of my so-called people—the goddesses—what use are they? Why did I ever like these stories? What is Gabija, goddess of fire, who protects against unclean people? I do not need this protection. It is a trick to place fear there. What use is Laima, goddess of fate, luck, childbirth, marriage, and death, if she keeps women inside the house, away from the open space of the world? Saulė—saint of orphans, symbol of the sun . . . who cannot teach me what the fire inside me is. Who would have me put it out, or give it to a man? Still, I
have torn pictures of them all from books and pasted them next to my own paintings in the barn, hoping for company. Though I find it hard to trust them. I wonder about what they want.

The kettle sings. The widow pours hot water into a cup filled with tea leaves.

History, mythology, literature, all the pictures and stories in time: women as witches and monsters, women as prizes and slaves, women as frozen bodies. A woman burning on a stick, queens about to lose their heads. Where are the artists? Where are the bodies who would break out of the story and rescue the others? Where are the daughters with fire in them?

I reach for another book: Indian mythology. It’s easy to find the page I want. I have looked at it so many times I can smell my skin on it. It is a painting of Kali. Great mother. Killer. Next to her image, her story.

Once upon a time, there was a war. A young woman named Durga was facing a demon named Raktabija. Durga wounded the demon, in lots of ways and with many weapons, but she made things worse, because for every drop of blood that was spilt, the demon made a copy of himself. The battlefield was filled with him. Durga, in need of help, prayed for Kali to fight the demons. With a gaping mouth and red eyes, Kali killed the demon by sucking the blood from his body and putting the many demons in her mouth. She ate them. Then she danced on the field of battle, stepping on the dead bodies.

I do not care about India, or Hinduism, or Buddhism. I do not need a savior.

It’s the art of her.

I stare and stare at it. I can feel the blood under my skin. Her picture gets inside me, so that we are not two, but one. No longer a picture, but a mirror. I open my mouth. I stare at the image until it is everything, and I go, I mean I literally leave and go wherever the image takes me, and I am glad, for I have no ties to this world. Such images make me a different kind of alive. I become the thing I am looking at. Her body my body. I touch between my legs. Heat. My mouth fills with spit.

Bloodthirsty warrior mother. I envy her tongue and might. Can this house even hold the two us?

The widow drinks tea and reads from an underground newspaper; she says Democracy is coming.

I’ve never written about this. I’ve not told anyone. To my knowledge, the experience exists only in memory between us, a writer and a photographer, but it has no representation, so it may not even be real.

The camera had nothing to do with anything. It didn’t matter.

I’m lying. It did matter. It mattered that she used a camera. It mattered so much that my mouth fills with spit as I think of her, even now.

For example. She walked into the white room of our motel. She stripped the mattress white.

This is important. The whiteness. And her volition.

She was dressed in tight black pants, tight black sleeveless cotton shirt, Gap-like and stiff and new. Her hair the precise wheat color of mine, only short and raging. Her eyes the precise transparent blue of mine, but more driven. Us both Geminis but not quite twinning. Sexual questions between us—her insistently straight, me bisexual—the what of it.

Her camera gave her self-possession. I did not expect her to direct things; I thought she would want me to. But immediately she said lie down on the mattress. I did it. Her voice was calm and quiet. She said take off your pants. I did it. She said take off your shirt. I did it. Sweat formed on my upper lip simply from her asking me to do ordinary things. From language out of the mouth of a woman. She said touch yourself. I petted myself lightly. Heat. She said close your eyes. I did. I heard the first click of the camera. She said—but it was not as if she was saying it—it was the power of the camera in front of her face giving her the means to direct things—squeeze the meat of your pussy until you are wet. I did. That’s when I felt her eye on me close in—the lens of her. She said take one of your tits out of your bra and squeeze it like it’s full of milk. I did. She said milk it. I did. My mouth opened barely. My pussy became wet.

She said take off your panties. She said take off your bra.

I heard her steady the camera. She said whatever you do, don’t open your eyes again. I don’t. Everything becomes present and past tense, like in a photo.

She says play with your tits. First, I squeeze the full-palmed whole of each breast, kneading them up and out as if I am readying them to be devoured. They become swollen and my nipples harden. I pinch my own tits over and over again thinking I will make them red for her, I will make them mouthable and hard and huge and reddened. I picture them as I play with them. I keep working them until I can feel them becoming the picture I want. I can hear the camera and I can feel her moving in and out and in and out. When she is near I feel heat, and while I am
pinching my tits I can’t help it: I undulate my hips and my pussy begins to cream.

She says play with your tits again so I start to shake them by holding my nipples and jiggling my tits. This makes me arch and moan and I lift my hips up to where I imagine she might be. Then I cup each tit with each of my hands and jiggle it for her like a porn-paid woman might for some sap of a man. She says put your hand up yourself and I do, and my pussy becomes swollen and like a begging mouth.

I moan and whine.

I can feel her photographing me. I can hear the shutter clicks. I think I might lose my mind.

I pull my own tits up so hard it makes me cry out. I push them together and I wait and wait doing that until I cannot wait any longer and then I shove one tit up to my mouth and suck my own nipple. I bite and suck myself. I say
please
and spit covers things. I can feel her lens very close to me but not touching me and I think a little this is what it is like to go insane.

Or this is desire, convulsive.

It is no wonder men cheat.

It is no wonder women cheat.

Desire is larger than god.

Ask a believer.

While I’m sucking myself hard and wild like an animal or infant, I suddenly hear her say play with yourself.

I let go of my tits and they drop like fallen faith.

I move my hands down. She says pull yourself apart first and show me. She says show me your clit, I want to see your swollen
clit. I do it. I drive my hips toward her voice. I think I hear her use a zoom. I fuck the air showing her my clit and my wide-open pussy, as slowly as possible. The throbbing seems like it’s bringing me close to death.

She says finger your clit. She says play with it between your thumb and forefinger, hard. I do it. She says with your other hand shove your fingers up into yourself. I do. I think I am maybe panting and sighing or crying. My fingers are swimming. I’m creaming. She says taste yourself. I do. She says now lift your legs up show me all of yourself. Make yourself come for me.

I can’t see her, but I know the camera is nearly touching me at the site of all creation.

If a camera could record smell and heat and taste.

Click. And click. Clicking like sparks.

I begin to cry inside my ecstatic state, I am close to release, she knows it, she photographs it a frame at a time, I picture the obscene position I am in, I am close to surrender without touching anyone or anything except this woman with her lens.

When I come I make an animal sound and the shiver overtakes me endlessly. The cum shoots from my body in a way that has never happened before. Like a man’s. I come and I cry. The shivering lasts several minutes. This opening that is me, it opens and closes in violent contractions, the dark of the inside of me meeting the light of the white walls, the production of an image, the intimacy of art, the space between two women, everything balanced in its dark and light. My eyes still closed, I feel the weight of her body, finally. She lies on top of me, naked. That’s
all. She doesn’t move. She asks me not to move. She cries, and her tears fall on my face, wetted whispers.

When I open my eyes she is back in a chair in the corner, sitting like a beautiful and quiet bird. Taking film from the camera. As if it was all the camera.

She never speaks to me that way again.

This is the only night between us like this.

After the poet has slept the sleep of crossing countries.

After she has moved through the rooms and faces, the déjà vu and pulse, the light and shadow of Prague—the mother of cities—and entered its black-and-blue night.

After she has taken the performance artist—spoiled brat—to the apartment of a Russian washed-up gymnast turned sculptor—dearest friend—who will take the young woman in for as long as it takes. An apartment shared with a post-op Czech transsexual. Overlooking the river Neva.

After she has dined with her friend the poet journalist from
Krasny 100%
. They talk the talk of outsider writers. The poet is warm in her chest.

After she has gotten drunk with the poet journalist and his friends—a collage artist and his contortionist cousin—after she has witnessed the sexual excess of all of them together in a five-star hotel room, the impossible bend and lurch of the cousin’s body, her eating herself, her howl still animal in her head. How
travel loosens sexuality until it hops like a parasite from host to host, feeding, always feeding.

After she has made her way into the further night of this city—walking with sex smeared against her pants and thighs, and alcohol still blurring her vision and the taste of blood, cum, and ecstasy still tangy on her tongue—this city haunted by its own past, the ever-lit-up Crystal Palace with its winding bulbs and sword spires, the opulent squares and palaces seemingly divorced from modernity, the pieces of land fondled by the finger of the Neva River, kissed by the tides of the Baltic Sea. City of waters. Canals. Rivers. Lakes. Floating city. City of a night sky reflected in waters. City of lost names: Petrograd. Leningrad. City of revolutions: Decembrist. February. October. Bolshevik. Lenin’s Great Terror. Stalin’s Red Purge. City of Dostoyevsky. Akhmatova. The Stray Dog Café. Pushkin. Gogol. Tchaikovsky. Shostakovich. Nabokov. City of white nights. City of the stone of tsars carved through with animals and poverty and piss-stained alleyways. City of women trafficked like fruit. City of locally grown poppies and the sweet stench of Black. City of child junkies. City of gypsies. City of porn with the thick-tongued accents of Soviet-era fantasies. City of war and sexuality. City of domination and submission.

City of the Tambov Gang.

She has not come here for the Summer Literary Seminars. Not this time.

Greshniki. The Sinners Club. A gay club styled as an old mansion taking up four floors. The motto of the club: “We’re
all sinners. We’re all equal.” So many rooms: a dance floor with mirrors, a balcony, a restaurant, a video Internet bar with free wireless access, and a “dark room.” Young naked men dance all night on the stage, their flex and thick getting under the skin. Her sitting at a table.

This is where she is to meet the man from the Tambov Gang. When he walks up she is writing a poem.

I’ve weaved my way to stand

between two seated, manly queens

dressed down in thin denim.

The boy on stage, sexual

and sure, enters his finale.

I’m drunk. I’ve never felt

such love in any room.

I join the thick applause,

cry and lurch a little, ignore

a hissed sit down! sit down!

and pursed lips from the drink

I’ve spilled with a light hip-check,

launch more hoarse cheers,

monstrous American daughter

with real tits, tears without salt,

snotty air-whistles, a real cunt.

When the man from the Tambov Gang touches her arm, she looks up and she is startled by his exquisite androgyny. It takes her American breath away.

“You will drink, then?” His voice a masterpiece of Slavic history.

“Yes,” she offers, letting her hands go slack on the tabletop.

He looks to the bar, snaps his fingers, and sits.

The music’s beat massages the soles of her feet, the chairs. She can feel it in her palms on the table.

“Do you have a light?” He leans toward her with a brown cigarette.

The poet commits chivalry. Pulls the silver lighter from her leather jacket pocket. Lights the cigarette. Smiles at his smile curling under the veil of smoke. He is wearing gray sleeveless mesh. His arms are . . . written. Tattooed in a language she sees as beautiful skin symbols. He looks at the stage. Laughs deeply. Then throws his beautiful head back into a deeper laugh, his blond sculpted hair like oiled wood shavings, his lips full and wet, his neck smooth and exposed. He turns back to her.

“It is good like vodka, yes? It is like holding something very good in your mouth, before you swallow, these boys . . .” He laughs again. “ . . . these beautiful boys.”

The poet examines the thinness of his skin. She thinks perhaps she can see the veins gleaming. The skin of Russians and Baltic peoples—so white it carries other colors. Blue. Green.

Four vodkas arrive. In shot glasses. No ice. As they do here. He says, “We drink Zyr first. It is not perfect, but it is not American either, yes?” Laughing, he drinks the shot in a single gulp, and she follows, holding the cold in her mouth, letting her teeth
take it. They eat little crackers immediately. In the way of this part of the world. “Again?” They kill the next two. He laughs. He looks at her—around the whole of her, his eyes outlining. Then he says, “Next is coming the Jewel of Russia Classic . . . you will not be able to stand it.” He smokes the cigarette and the music thuds up through their spines and the boys move and move and she wants more and more.

They drink four shots of the Jewel of Russia before he says, “We talk now?” But another four vodkas have arrived, and he holds his hand up with something like the power of history. “No. We drink.
This.
This is something the world did not expect.” He holds his glass to hers and taps it. The sound coming from his mouth:
za ná-shoo dróo-zhboo
. He has made a toast. They drink.

In the poet’s mouth the vodka becomes a poem: a slight oiliness. A hint of apple. Faintly sweet. And the burn. Pleasing. She closes her eyes and lingers there. She opens her eyes and mouth and says, “What is this?”

“Chopin. Isn’t that simple? Distilled from potatoes, of course. Stubborn Poles. But what they have done to us all! The irony.” And his laugh fills the space around them like a cave swallowing a body whole.

“Now. We talk. Yes?”

“Yes.” The word emerging from her lips like something she can taste.

He puts his cigarette in an ashtray, crosses his arms over his chest and leans back a bit in his chair, lifting his chin up, looking
down on her, but not with malice. “I have a question for you. Why do you seek this girl? This girl is unknown to you, yes? Is it a little pet that you want? Or will she be . . . a commodity, perhaps?” He smiles, barely.

“Nothing like that. We just want to get her out. I can’t explain.” The words sound impotent even to her.

“I see. Just another American taking the world’s children from harm to safety. What a wondrous benevolence. Just like your American movie stars, yes? The power of American . . . love.” He picks the cigarette back up, takes a graceful drag, and blows a smoke ring upward. She stares at its slow, blue ascension. “And money!” His laugh thunderous. “You know, you do not look what I expected.”

“No? How so?” She curls around his words, cautious as prey.

“You do not look as . . . commanding as I hear you are.”

She feels him study the face of her, the neck, the collarbone, her hands.

“But then, this is a facet to your personality behind closed doors, is it not?” Again he throws his head back, laughing deep enough to drug someone unconscious.

She wonders briefly how he knows this. Then decides it is part of his job to know, and anyway, it is mind-bogglingly flattering. Think of it: a worldwide reputation. The admiration of this lyric-mouthed Russian androgyne gangster. She wishes he would look through her hard enough to slice her open.

The wickedly beautiful man from the Tambov Gang then puts his glass down hard on the table. He looks at her seriously. “I make you this deal. I give you the papers you need. The passport.
The transport instructions. Who will be your help. And then,” he leans in like a thief, “we go then. You and I. From here, tonight. I want that you will help me with something. I want to put the power into your”—he covers her hand with his—“capable American hands.”

There is no good reason to agree to this. In anyone else’s life it would signal danger. Maybe even death. But this is not anyone else’s life, and she has lived hers on the edges of things . . . and what is a life if one cannot walk into the night with a stranger? Following the universal instincts of leather life, then, she turns her palm up underneath his hand until it is nearly a handshake and says, “For you, then?”

“No. Alas, not for me, beautiful hard woman.” He stares at her. His eyes echo the waterways of this city, centuries haunting the pupils. “For someone I know who has suffered enough that he cannot feel his own skin. Do you know this kind of suffering?”

The poet nods her head. Suffering happens in all places, doesn’t it, all times, in the flesh of any skin, in the hollow of what should be a heart.

“His family, killed. Like so many . . . Bosnian. But choose your country these days. No?”

The poet nods again.

“There is only one cure for this suffering. Violence for violence. I think you can help him to feel his skin again. Even for one night only. For me you can do this?”

The poet nods.

“Good.” He puts his hand on her shoulder. They both look
at the boy body on stage, its cock and hips, its torso, its incomprehensible physical truth. Then he turns to her and slaps her cheek—the blood rushing to the surface of her skin—“But the money too, of course!”

The poet nods.