Read The Small Backs of Children Online
Authors: Lidia Yuknavitch
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General
The Small Backs of Children (12 page)
| In the white, life moves in pieces. Little fragmentations and synchronicities and echo effects. The story you have of yourself is loosened and made random. There is something deeply comforting in this—to see your life again in glimpses and patterns that are free-flowing. Something beautiful happens when syntax and order, chronology and narrative sense give way. Part of me wants to stay here forever. | When the men come for me, I am in the barn painting. I am working on the painting of a girl with a house in her mouth. I am using images from memory. A house. And inside the house was a family. And inside the family was a girl. A girl who must have been me, and yet that girl is lost to me. In her place, I paint. I am this body of heat. These hands of fire. Like blood makes a body, I use blood and paint to make a girl. |
| I can hear something coming. And there is a faint, soft, sweet smell, like only a child’s skin can smell. The white seems to breathe. | When the men come I can hear them and smell them long before they reach the barn. There is a sound that is men. There is. At the door with guns there is nothing to do but what they say. I wait, but no harm comes. They tell me I am to go to America. They say a woman poet will take me. I look at my painting. My hands. I think about all the girls left to nothingness. |
| Then I see the girl. She is running toward me. Running with all her might. Her golden hair tendrils out wild behind her. The blue of her eyes like opals nearly shatters me. My legs feel weak. I take a step back, not sure if I can withstand her. | I look at the men. They smell of cologne and leather and hair cream. They look—they look like they are in a movie. How the men look in the widow’s books about the history of film. Am I in a movie, then? They say that they will return the following morning to take me to a train station in Vilnius. This American poet they speak of will be there. This will begin my journey. |
| What it has meant to stay alive when my daughter did not. What it has meant to suffer a heartbeat after carrying the weight and form of her inside my body, wedged just beneath that fist-shaped muscle. The girl runs toward me with a fierce velocity. Closer and closer with speed and light and then she runs straight into me, wrapping her arms around me tightly, taking my very breath away. | That night, the widow reads to me from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. She plays me music made by a man as black as night, even his name a song: Coltrane. She says this is the better story for my life, to go to this other country, to become an artist in the company of artists. She tells me to never forget where I came from, to carry the spirit of this place in my heart. Where do any of us come from? Is it a country? A mother? Or is it perhaps an image, a song, a story inside which we feel . . . named? |
| This is my death. This embrace. And I close my eyes and lower my head and wrap my body around her the way a mother fits a child, and I let the air leave my lungs thinking yes, like this, I will let go like this and it will make an ending. | Leaving the widow—this woman who delivered me from ash to art—it is heavy in my chest. This childless woman who stood in the place of a mother, like a painted symbol in a new language. How she gave me a story of my own blood, read to me, played music, let me go inside all the books and photographs and paintings and music of her house, how we pulled the boards from dead buildings so that I could paint on them, how we lived so smally, quietly, together in the eye of history, with no one to know us, with no one who killed us, just our two bodies present inside loss. |
| But the girl’s strength surpasses mine in a mythic burst. Any child is stronger than a mother, since the love we have for our children could kill us. She sends me an electrical jolt and grabs my hand and pulls me in a dead run farther into the white. | The night before I leave I give her the painting of the girl with the house in her mouth. She hangs it in the very center of the largest room. We don’t speak. Then she helps me burn every other painting I have ever made. |
| We run until I see a bonfire coming into focus. It is a good fire. I know this because the girl is laughing, and her laughter sings my bones. I begin to laugh too, until I am crying and laughing, and together we swing ’round in circles holding hands. Ashes ashes we all fall down! | Fire always looks like butterflies to me. |
| We laugh ourselves out, then sit quietly looking at each other, our breathing finding its rhythms again. Her smile—it is the end of me. I see what should happen next. I wait for the air to still, the fire’s warmth to cradle us. I look her in the eye. I take the longest breath of my life. Did I kill you? She shakes her head so simply: no. Are you happy? She nods her head yes. May I stay with you? | I don’t know why some of us live while others die. It all seems to me an accident, someone digging in the dirt with a spade, someone else given a gun to shoot him in the head. One girl goes to school and becomes a doctor, another is raped and beaten and left to rot in the snow like a dog. One family escapes war and finds a new home, a new nation, the price of freedom to erase the homeland from their memories; another family blown to bits without the barest notice. |
| And my girl stands up, takes my hand again, and walks me slowly and lovingly toward a window—a small yellow glow—a cluster of butterflies. I look back at her, and follow her gaze. | I will never again have a father, a mother, a brother. I will never again live in my home. My country is not in me except in the violence that has crossed my body. But the smell and feel of oak trees and flax fields, my feet in the river, the colors of this place in flowers and roots and leaves and berries that I have ground down and heated into pigment, the will to live so that I can paint . . . |
| The small yellow shape pulses with life. Still thinking of butterflies, I place my hand on the glass of the window, and then she places her smaller hand upon mine, and the years of pain and loss barrel up from my belly until they thicken and choke my throat, until my mouth opens and the wail of mother comes, and still she keeps her hand on mine and I can feel her hair brushing against my arm, and I am certain I am dying, either I am dying from this grief I have held so long or I am dying from the joy of her, and when the sound begins to quiet and drift away and my throat opens back up to ordinary air, I hear her say, “Look, Mama, open your eyes,” and I open my eyes and out the window is my writing. Words and words. Pages and pages of white, the roads and paths carved through in intricate hieroglyphics. This has been my life. It is not a black hole of grief. It is making art. | Art, she is in me. |
In a floating memory, the writer shuts off the light in her son’s bedroom, the boy finally breathing the sleep of little boys before they are asked to do the unthinkable, step into the story of men. She thinks of boys sleeping everywhere, how beyond-language beautiful they are. She knows she is like other mothers in part, but not entirely. In her there is a fracture. The fracture is another child. A girl. His sister who never was. Her chest constricts. Her heart beats past rupture. She can’t leave his room. Can’t walk into the hallway away from him. Who can count how long she stands there.
The first day of kindergarten she cried. She walked him and his miniature backpack into the field of small bodies. She kissed him good-bye. His eyes filled with tears. The kindergarten teacher led him into the classroom, telling her, “It will be okay.”
She walked to her car, got in, closed the door, and sat still for four hours. Waiting the wait of women who have carried death.
Explosions in the distance.
The poet shoves her hands in her pockets. She waits in some kind of holding room at a small rural train station. The room is the color of dirty snow or ash. There is a large and scarred mirror on one wall, a long gray-green table in the middle of the room, two chairs, and a picture of the city from the fifties. Above her head, exposed pipes. There is also a tinted window, which the poet suddenly realizes is probably surveillance glass; she wonders what interrogations happened here over the course of history. She looks at the cement floor for stains, traces of human.
The girl has a man on each arm. The one on her left has a cigarette eternally dangling between his lips. The man on her right is heavy beside her. She wonders if her shoulder, arm, are bruised from the weight of him.
The poet’s studious gaze moves from the floor to the green metal door of the room; the doorknob rattles and then the door opens and there are two men and a girl. The poet sucks in a breath sharply. My god. The girl is so beautiful it feels violent. Like god appearing to an atheist.
Gunfire muffled in the distance.
The girl is led to a chair, told to sit. She looks at the floor. Then slowly, from the floor up, she looks at this American woman standing in the room. In her black leather jacket with her short hair and slim frame, she looks like . . . Hollywood from the books.
One of the men—the heavy one—says something to the other in Russian. The lighter of the two looks at him for a long minute, then at the girl, then at the poet, then leaves the room. The poet hears him lock the door. Her neck hair bristles. She takes her hands out of her pockets. She looks at the mass of man in front of her. He pulls a wad of documents from inside his coat, puts them on the table. The poet studies what must be their paperwork. Then the man asks her, “Do you have the rest of the money?” The poet stares at him, her mind seizing around reality.
The girl’s toes curl up inside her shoes and she grips the underside of the chair.
An explosion rattles the walls, some distance and yet near.
The poet looks at the papers on the table and starts to narrate her position, but in the middle of her carefully crafted sentences a fist finds her face and she is sent hard to the floor. She tastes metal and her ears buzz. Then she is lifted from the floor like a puppet and punched in the gut. Then the door opens and the second man comes in and in his hands are thick braided ropes. While the lighter man moves toward her with the ropes, the heavy man hits her again twice in the face. Her eyes swim. Then he pulls out his gun and instructs her to strip if she wants to live. The poet doesn’t move and the man points the gun at the girl. The poet removes her clothes to save the girl. The poet closes her eyes and looks inward. When she opens her eyes she keeps her gaze locked on the eyes of her tormentor. Dead stare. Then they tie her wrists to two lengths of rope and bind her ankles together; the lengths of rope are then looped up and around metal pipes near the ceiling, so that her arms are extended on either side, her feet bound but still on the ground.
The girl opens her mouth and yells
Ne!
and is then sent across the room in a single blow, her head shattering the mirror.
The smaller man is instructed to leave. The man turned beast takes off his belt. He begins without ceremony to whip the poet. Welts rise red and swollen on her breasts, her torso, her belly and abdomen. She does not make a sound. Instead she bites the inside of her cheeks until blood fills her mouth.
When the girl comes to, she is flat on the cement floor. She thinks she sees what people call Christ being beaten in front of her. Velázquez. Then she remembers what is happening. Pieces of glass surround her head. She picks one up. Because she is small and quiet like animals are and no threat to the action—for what is a girl—neither the poet nor the man beating the poet hear her take off all of her clothes, so that when the man unzips his pants and moves toward the poet yelling obscenities in Russian, the girl’s voice surprises him.
Here
, she says, and lies down on the table, her sex hairless and her breasts barely rising, her spread legs unimaginably open.
Language leaves the poet at the image of the girl’s body.
The man laughs in a guttural slobber and lurches toward the body of the girl and throws himself on the slight of her. The poet starts yelling American obscenities in violent bursts, trying to make words kill things. The girl makes her eyes dead. And as the man pierces into her she stabs him in the side of the throat with the glass. Again. Again.
The man places the beef of his hand on the girl’s face trying to smother the life from her, then dies on top of her, his blood on her face and breasts. Stillness.
The girl stands on a chair and unties the poet. The poet’s arms drop around the shoulders of the girl, and for a moment the two look as if they are in an embrace. The poet lifts the girl’s face up and looks into her eyes. The poet opens her mouth. But no words come. Silence.
The poet and the girl re-dress, collect themselves.
When the door begins to rattle, the poet picks up a chair and stands ready to smash in the skull of whoever enters, and the girl raises her arm with glass in her hand, but as the door opens whoever it is turns to sound as an entire wall explodes around them.
Artillery fire. Or a stray missile. Or a bomb. Avisual. Reverse origin.
The poet and the girl run from the room through the blast hole, fire around their forms.
