He dresses again. He looks out across white and on the white, peopled spots of black and gray and the hint of flesh. Faces? Holes for eyes and mouths. Is it a crowd? Fellow prisoners? Or just shapes? Trees?
He opens his mouth like it’s a shutter.
I was an artist.
I existed.
I made art.
The guard cocks a trigger in a perfectly synchronous motion. The sound prompts the man to join the sticklike figures nearly cracking from their own actions. He is now part of the still life: prisoners gathering wood.
He remembers washing a man’s back. The rag following the moles of his back as if they made some strange constellation, his own hand magnified to him, more than human, the man’s flesh taking the hand’s motions as a gentle whisper, like a woman’s gesture, a woman washing a body, he remembers the skin reddening where he rubbed. The giving over to love, isn’t it? The tiniest of gestures exploding like small compassionate bombs between them? Did he look upon the back of the man with longing? Where were the definitions of words going in this place? The black curls of the back of the man’s head, so black, so coarse, so like a forest that he wanted to rest his face there, calmly and without intention, as natural as putting a head to a pillow in bed at night with his wife.
And cupping his own elbows in the alone. Oh, to let go to death.
In his tenth year, he is scratching his name into a wooden plank in the wall—or thinks he is; the word he actually is scratching is Father—when somewhere nearby an elderly man, emaciated but for his oddly round and melon-hard belly, laughs out loud, a thunderous laugh, almost hideous. He does his best to ignore the monstrous laughing man, focusing instead on a single letter of his work. Finally he turns to the cackling jackal of a man and tells him to go fuck himself. Can’t the man see he is busy?
My dearest friend, the man says, I beg of you, forgive my intrusion. As it happens, I was just thinking that all my life has been given over to a pure insanity. You will wonder what I mean. In my case, it was science. Science! I have, as I say, given my life over to it, if you can believe the absurdity of that, the pursuit of that brand of knowledge in which the proven outscores the given. And at the age of seventy—at least I think that is the age, who knows in this place—it happened into my mind that the waste has not been these years in Siberia, but rather the years I spent toiling away in my lab, making “meanings” of things, working for the state believing with all my heart that physics was beyond anything, beyond patriotism or God, beyond the heart, the head, the concerns of the body, beyond any thought or drive. I am giving my life to the magnificent order of the universe, I thought, freely and with zeal! And when I saw you sitting there, friend, it reminded me of all my righteous-mindedness and idiotic sacrifice to the pinpoint world of microscopes and mathematics. He laughed again. Do you see?
In the time that he knew the old man, it seemed to him that there was not a single moment in which he was not talking. Narrating his knowledge, even in the face of its destruction and uselessness. It was as if an entire human history were pouring forth from his mouth. He believed himself to be dying, in fact, a cancer, yes, he was certain, his great and authentic big-headed knowledge of science assured him like second sight, even without his instruments, that his body was indeed being invaded, bombed, taken over, so to speak. Whether the old man was right, he hadn’t a clue. He only knew that he wished the old man would go on speaking forever, since he had discovered that his primary fear was that he was losing his aesthetic awareness, his ability to see pictures and chart the world image by image—he was afraid he was no longer a photographer.
Once he had dreamed of winning a prize, the prize. But that might have been a man he read about. He couldn’t be sure.
Buttercups and the lips of his wife.
Did he have a wife?
The day of their liberation came suddenly and without fanfare.
After the prisoners had forgotten their own names, officers began shooting prisoners at random, even as other officials were fleeing in jeeps, even as the camp was being overrun by liberation troops, their quarters burned to the ground, their leader handcuffed and scorned and whisked away for war crimes or picked up off the ground after suicides, still, the soldiers were shooting prisoners as best they could, and the old man still went on narrating everything he could remember about history, as he headed for a truck that would take him to safety, the photographer’s hand held out to him with a few fingers still tingling with life, the old man babbling away and becoming nonsensical, storming from the mouth with the last vestiges of history, saying something, what was it, something about Galileo, and wasn’t that extraordinary, that Galileo looked into a night sky and reversed an entire epoch, wasn’t it something? And who among us would ever raise their head to a night sky like that again, he was saying, when they shot him. And an intense memory seized him in that moment of danger—he was a photographer! He knew what the shot would be!—the old man’s head rocked back with the bullet shot and his mouth too red and agape, almost like he was laughing, toward a dead heaven, toward a godless sky, into the white.
And then the ping at his lower vertebrae, and then nothing.
Acknowledgments
My astonished gratitude to my agent and dear soul sister Rayhané Sanders and to the brilliant editor Calvert Morgan, without whom this book would not have made the leap into the hands of readers. Thank you for finding me and throwing a line into the waves.
Endless thanks to Chelsea Cain, Suzy Vitello, Monica Drake, Mary Wysong-Haeri, and Chuck Palahniuk for their support and help with this book. For years.
Of course my whole heart to Andy Mingo, who helped me transform what began as an epic poem whisper thing into an actual sort of novel. Deep in the woods of Oregon.
Thanks to Liz Fischer Greenhill, who read an early copy of the novel and helped keep me from fear with her heart-shimmer.
Gratitude to Raphael Dagold, who let me use and torque one of his astonishing poems in this story, and to Menas in Lithuania, whose paintings drove me down to the depths and back up.
I am in debt to the poets, novelists, painters, musicians, and filmmakers whose phrases are woven throughout this novel, including but not limited to H. D., Carolyn Forché, Walt Whitman, Marguerite Duras, Francis Bacon, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alain Resnais, and Doris Lessing.
And to my sister Brigid, who gave me literature, life.
And to Lily. Whose death rose writing in my hands.
About the Author
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the author of the widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water and the novel Dora: A Headcase. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Iowa Review, Mother Jones, Ms., the Sun, the Rumpus, PANK, Zyzzyva, Fiction International, and other publications. She teaches writing and literature in Portland, Oregon.
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Also by Lidia Yuknavitch
Dora: A Headcase
The Chronology of Water
Her Other Mouths
Liberty’s Excess
Real to Reel
Credits
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Cover photograph © Tom Merton / Getty Images
Copyright
THE SMALL BACKS OF CHILDREN. Copyright © 2015 by Lidia Yuknavitch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-238324-2
EPub Edition July 2015 ISBN 9780062383266
1516171819OV/RRD10987654321
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Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children
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