The Small Backs of Children (11 page)

The performance artist sits, motionless, in the empty kitchen of a Russian and a Czech who are strangers to her. Deposited here by the poet to help save the life of the writer. In a city that holds no meaning for her. Looking out the window at an overcast sky, heavy with almost-rain. A very old stone bridge. Water. Birds. Lamps. An emptied-out self. She’s tired. She doesn’t know these people, this city. She’s drinking vodka in the morning from a small antique shot glass.

Somehow the burden of it—handing over her identity, agreeing to wait a month to be taken home—somehow, though it depresses her mind, it thrills her flesh. As if her body knows something she does not. She hates the flesh thrill, resents it, and yet she cannot not feel it. Like a fire just getting born. Something she carries against her chest like a beating heart. Letting her know she is alive.

The performance artist pulls the letter from the painter out from beneath her shirt. She has kept it there, in her bra against
her tit, for three days. Day and night. Her skin smell on the envelope comforts her. At least she has this. This letter from the painter. Strange lifeline in this insane story they’ve abandoned her inside. On purpose she has not opened it. Especially not in front of the poet. On purpose she has guarded its contents like intimacy itself. For she loves him. She loves him more than her own life. She loves this man they have ejected from their fucking reality, so much that she almost can’t breathe thinking about him. In her heart and beyond she knows she is the only one who truly knows him. The only one willing to go all the way with him. Through the crucible of sex and art. Through the excess of him. Through the story of all their tangled-up lives, down into the hell of him, like Persephone. The man who nearly murdered his wife. The unapologetic alcoholic artist. A love unto death, if necessary. And he will fucking love this. That she did this thing. He will see that she is like him. And when this all ends, well, she’ll go wherever with him. No one will be able to stop her. And the two of them will make art and make love and leave the world of the rest of them. She drinks, and drinks, until things liquefy.

She brings the letter to her face, closes her eyes, and smells it. She can see his face, feel his body. Something like sapphires under her tongue. She slips a finger underneath where he has licked the paper with his own spit. She opens the envelope. She pulls the paper—thin white—from the envelope, her heart beating, beating:

Well, here it is.

I am leaving you.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in Paris in the arms of another woman. One I’ve known for years. One of many. This thing between us, it wasn’t anything. And now it’s gone sour, too complicated. I’ll have none of it. You are too close to the black hole of my past.

You know I am no good with words, so this will be abbreviated, but true. Or true enough. Fuck words anyway.

I’m giving you something though. A diptych of a life.

I will not be seeing you again. I’ve cleared all trace of you from my loft, and when I return, if you come here, I won’t let you in. Don’t try. I will never visit your loft again either. If I see you in the street, I won’t acknowledge you. You no longer exist. But I am giving you something. For your art. Try to remember that.

This will hurt.

1.

The year before I shot her, there was a night when we had an argument. One in a series. We were both skunk-ass drunk. At one point she grabbed a knife and ran into the bathroom—locked herself in there. I threw my weight against the door but nothing happened. I laughed. Then I slumped down on the floor against the door and fell asleep. When she opened the door, the first thing I saw was her blond bush—eye level. Then she thrust out her fucking arm and I saw my name, with blood like a dot-to-dot, carved into her arm. She immediately
went back into the hole of the bathroom. I walked to the kitchen, grabbed a serrated bread knife, and hacked her name into my own arm in stick-man strokes. I still have the scar of her. The word of her. On my arm. In certain light.

2.

A year later, one night, I was deep into my drunk in the living room. It was peaceful. I was naked. She was in the bedroom asleep. I’d picked up a gun earlier in the day from a junkie I knew. A 9mm Beretta. I had the gun resting on my thigh, near my dick. I’d had it that way for hours. I heard her stir. She came into the living room. She was naked. The years of . . . what is it? Passion? Chaos? Death? In the air between us. I don’t know why. I pointed the gun at the wife of her. She lifted her hand up. I shot. I hit her hand and her shoulder. In the dark, she dropped to the floor like a beautiful felled black-and-blue goose. We didn’t move like that, the smell of the shot hanging in the air, for long minutes. Love is a gun.

There. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

Perhaps you can make your performance of this man and this woman into something. Art is everything.

You know, every street in Paris is wet. Every person in Paris has a dog. Every hand in Paris holds a cigarette. Every mouth in Paris is a kiss.

Last night I dreamt myself covered in paint; the paint may have been blood. It was warm, like a bath almost. It seemed to look good on my skin. Beauty. Death. The same. Drink
yourself drowned. Cut your skin with knives. Fuck with your genitals. Paint a painting. Shoot a gun. American.

I tell you, it scares me what I have done to her.

It terrifies me, even.

And yet I am not sorry.

I am as deeply unsorry as a person could be.

There is nothing that one human will not do to another.

Ce n’est pas rien. Au revoir.

The performance artist. Her idea of herself . . . drifts weightless as an astronaut in her skull. Her chest hollows. Her body goes slowly numb. Her hair. Her face. Her hands. Nothing. The air she is breathing. Useless. Thoughtless.

She folds the letter back up and places it again against her skin. She pats it against her chest as if she is much older. She looks out of the window, but sight . . . sight just isn’t in her right now. She stands up. Puts a coat on. In a regular way. Thinking, it isn’t necessary. Just be molecules. Light. She gently wraps her neck in a blue wool scarf hanging next to the door—someone’s. She opens the door to the flat. Steps out. Closes it. She walks down the hallway. Down several flights of stairs, her feet on the steps not connected to anything.

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.

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 mother 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.