She opens the big wooden door to the stage of outside. St. Petersburg. She steps out onto the walkway. Just be light. She stops, closes her eyes, takes in a big breath . . . blows it out slowly, like tiny white moths from her mouth. Like all the body’s memories leaving as light. In her head: a man leaves.
She walks to the bridge.
Stands dead center.
History makes the distance from the bridge to the water epic, dramatic, artful.
She places her hands on the historic stone. She looks down at the water, a kind of gray that is nearly black, washing sins away. City smells float around her. Pedestrians are perfectly absent. It begins to rain, lightly. Her age makes her look like a painting. The girl in pain or love. She leans over the ledge of things, her stomach and chest pressed hard against the stone. She can see the pink-and-white flesh of her hands. The blue of the wool scarf. She can hear the water so precisely it is like voices. Why, when she was a child, didn’t anyone teach her to swim? But she knows why. She was the imperfect child. Dumbed and drooling. Love lost to her from the get-go. She does not know where her father ever went. Her mother lost to philanthropy and activism in a celebrity world. The stone underneath her is as hard as anything in the world. Her ribs under her clothes no longer feel necessary. She lets the air leave her lungs. Molecules. Light. All the world’s a stage. We are all of us without origin. Who’s to say we were ever here at all? She closes her eyes. She can feel the letter against her chest, near her breast, where her heart should be. And then she pushes forward. The toppling body of a young woman with nowhere left to perform love.
Sometimes it takes so little to make an ending.
Triptych
1.
Gunfire in the distance. The photographer is washing her face in the tiny bathroom of another random family’s home in Eastern Europe. Even as she’s been gone for more than a year, somehow the poet has found her, and wants to meet with her, about the girl in the photo. She doesn’t want to. She dries her face and looks in the mirror and sees the woman she was and the woman she is, at war with each other. She moves back into the family. All the motion and energy in the house moves toward dinner. None of them looks up, and she is glad to be this unnoticed. She wishes she could lose her identity altogether. Potatoes go into a pot. A mother’s roughened hands. Rabbit—its neck snapped an hour ago—in the oven. A father stokes the fire and smokes a pipe. Cedar and tobacco. The daughter sets the table. The son cleans a gun. Out of the corner of her eye the photographer is always looking doorward. For trouble. She shoots a look over to her camera, dangling from a hook on the wall. This image maker. This thief. This lover. She thinks of the event that took place yesterday that nearly destroyed the son, and of the photos she took, and how she smuggled the film out as if she were smuggling humans to safety.
After dinner, the son, a teenager, begins to tell the story of the event. We knew that the soldiers were using the real bullets; we knew that the tanks crushed the people. Freedom came from all of us in this square; all of us, teenagers who still went to school, like myself, the students, the teachers, the factory workers, the bus drivers, the mothers, widows, amputees, all of us! The father embraces the son. The mother claps as if she is at a play and her cheeks fill with blood. This is my son. The sister does a dance in front of the fire, some kind of domestic and darling resistance. Then the front door blows open and soldiers with rifles clamor in and fast as a shutter clicking first the photographer’s camera, and then her left cheekbone are smashed in by the butt of a rifle, changing her face forever.
2.
The man from the Tambov Gang drives the poet in a black BMW through the streets of his city speaking of its ghosts: Maksim Gorky. Pushkin’s wife. Sculptors, pianists, painters, musicians, poets. The oldest drama house in the country. Then he asks her if she knows of Maria Spiridonova. The Russian revolutionary? she asks. Yes, he says, the woman who shot in the face a general responsible for brutally suppressing a peasant uprising. Who was dragged facedown on cobbled steps, stripped and raped and whipped, cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts. Who was exiled to Siberia. Who spent most of her adult life in a state of being beaten. The poet puts her hand to her throat and asks, What became of her? History, he says. She was executed. And his voice and the night bleed into each other until they are out of the city, arriving at a redbrick house surrounded by oak trees and flax fields. When they leave the car, before they enter the house, he tells her that the materials she requires will be delivered to her the following day: the doctored passport, the travel papers, the false identification verifications. He says, And when you find the location of the girl, my men will pick her up and take her to the train station at Vilnius. But after tonight. He smiles.
As they enter the building, it does not alarm the poet that they go straight down into the basement. In her life, there are many nights in basements, where ordinary people act out physical fantasies in homemade dungeons or playrooms or simply low-lit rooms away from the socius. But when they get to the belly of things, a great dark room with a concrete floor covered in places with giant oriental carpets, a towering wooden cross beam hanging from the ceiling, and one large black wooden table in the center covered with a white linen cloth and more instruments of whipping than even she has ever seen, she is surprised. For there is not one man waiting, but nearly a dozen men, all wearing brown or black Cossacks with roped belts. She freezes behind the man from the Tambov Gang. Has she been led into real or imagined danger? He turns around, takes in her fear, and gently touches her arm. Leads her ahead of him. She bites the inside of her cheek. What is this? she says, trying to sound in control rather than captured. He gently eases her down by the shoulders into a chair. Sit, my friend. Do not be alarmed. You are among friends. But we are not the same as you. We punish the skin for different reasons. Maria Spiridonova flashes up in her mind’s eye. But she holds her face, her shoulders, still. Somehow. He continues. We are Khlysts. She feels the air in her lungs again. Khlysts. One of countless break-off religious sects that practices ecstatic ritual. Sexual orgies. Flagellation. Cleansing the soul through pain and sexual excess. She wrote a fucking poem about Khlysts. The poet quickly reexamines the room, looking for a woman. Each Khlyst cell, she dimly remembers, is led by a male and a female leader, the “Christ” and the “Mother of God.” Where is the fucking woman? The poet tries to recover her position in this story. Reaching down her own throat to rescue herself, to become the American poet dominatrix, she asks in a husky voice, Where is the Mother of God? The man from the Tambov Gang smiles, then bows, then goes to his knees before her. It’s me, she realizes. I’m the woman. He looks up at her. Remember what you promised, beautiful hard woman. We made this deal, you and I. He takes her hands in his. Suffering to cleanse suffering. They stare at each other. And then he speaks the name of a man, and one of the men steps forward, to be washed, anointed, and then tied to a cross and hung from the ceiling for her to beat clean.
3.
The Neva River flows from Lake Ladoga through St. Petersburg to the Gulf of Finland. It is the third largest river in Europe, after the Volga and the Danube. During midwinter, the river freezes. Grigori Rasputin drowned in the Neva in 1916; after assassins shot him several times and attempted to poison him, they beat him, wrapped him in a sheet, and dumped him into the freezing waters. Later his body was burned. Peter the Great died at the age of fifty-three after diving into the Neva River in winter to rescue drowning sailors. The icy waters are said to have exacerbated his bladder problems.
A young man found the body of the performance artist on the banks of the Neva thirty-three miles downstream from where she jumped, and pulled her up onto the shore with little effort. Though only sixteen, Afanasy already weighed two hundred pounds and stood six feet three in his socks. Afanasy sat on the bank and rubbed his head and rocked and puzzled over what to do; her body was bloated and stiff now, and he was not at all sure how to carry her home, like an oversize plank across his shoulders? When he arrived at the house, his m
other came running out and thought for a moment that she was looking at the Christ, then she saw that it was her only son, and she shouted his name and shouted his name and shrieked, What have you done? What have you done, my son? Sobbing and throwing her hands into the sky. For Afanasy had been born without any wits, and her manboy of a son had already crushed a village girl when he found her lying facedown in the snow, raped and bleeding. Even though she believed her beautiful too-big son, that he had tried to save her and keep her shivering body warm until help came, no one believed it was not him who killed her, and the only reason he was not sent to Siberia was that his mother had given them their life’s savings and begged with her very life to keep her dim-witted son with her. What use is he to you? And all the soldiers had laughed, perhaps the one who had raped the girl the hardest. But what if a second girl was discovered? And so mother and son built a fire at midnight and threw this unknown girl’s body into the flames. For a moment she appeared to sit up, no doubt due to the frozen tendons in her legs heating up in the fire, but for the boy with the softened mind and the distraught mother it was a terrible omen. The boy had nightmares the rest of his life of a girl coming out of a fire to kill him, and the mother never forgave herself for letting this girl’s name slip from existence. And the performance artist’s body went from water through ice to fire, and then into ash, and as the morning came and the sky went white whatever she had been was covered with snow.
White Space
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.
Motherlands
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 know
s 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.
Atomization
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.