The Small Backs of Children (2 page)

When violence comes to the door of a child’s house it is not comprehensible to her. Even if she has some small awareness of the war or violence or danger surrounding them, the truth is that the faces and hands of the people in her family, the horses in the barn, the mouse she is secretly keeping as a pet, the potatoes frozen underground, the kick ball made from animal skin and straw and twine, the glass in the windows and the shivering walls of the house are infinitely more real to her. She cannot help it. The sound of a mother’s voice singing her to sleep, the alto of a father reading a poem, the smell of a brother’s skin just before dreams, the moon’s giant eye, all of these overshadow whatever violence is at the door. Think of Anne Frank writing about trees.

When violence came to the village near the girl’s family’s house, there was no stopping it coming to her door, her body, as well. The six-year-old body of a girl.

Seventeen times against the wall or in the barn:
You move or
scream or say anything I will kill them all. In front of you. First I will torture them and then I will kill them.
Her eyes as dead as she can make them. Her arms as limp as she can make them. Her heart as hidden as she can make it. A soldier’s cock entering the thin white flesh of a girl, into the small red cave of her, the fist of her heart pounding out be-dead, be-dead, be-dead.

Counting.

In the world around them, violences became perpetual. Men were sent to icehouse prisons. Women and children were raped repeatedly. Children were bought and sold on the open market. Systemized violence became part of ordinary experience, so that it was not unusual to see—not blood and body parts, but displaced fear and horror in micromotions. The tremor of a hand or the twitch of an eye; bullet marks in the side of a house; women with scars around their eyes and mouths as deep as archeological finds; little boys who could not sit in chairs.

There were blood and body parts too.

And the end to reality every other day.

America—that great maker of realities—blind and deaf to all of it.

A story that never existed, since no one ever saw it represented.

And then, one day, her family was blown to bits.

An inconsequential blast.

Just an anonymous explosion.

Behind the girl, a photojournalist on a prestigious assignment. In that moment the girl’s mouth opened wide as a child’s scream,
but no scream emerged, either in the instant of the blast or forever after. Her breath caught in her lungs like an animal’s. Her eyes locked, her skin blanched, bloodless, her hands and arms flying upward, without control.

There were people around on that day to whom she could have run. There were, of course, soldiers; surely even amid their brutality there was one kind heart, one man who could still remember his family and would at least send her to an orphanage. There were other people nearby, neighbors from the village, watching or hiding. And, without her seeing them, there were foreigners: underground photojournalists chasing the perfect image, reporters dying to lasso the story, “human rights” workers milling about in “safe houses.”

But she did not run toward any people. None of the people there had anything to do with her. When the blast happened, she ran to the woods. In her smallness and her quickness she disappeared, a girl’s body torn from the heart of love.

What luck for the photographer. To be so accidentally present. And what cocksure instincts, her editor would say. Right on the money. You can see how she got the assignment.

We think of children as innocent and helpless, she scribbled on a note to her editor, but really this is and isn’t true. Think of how many children survive the darkest atrocities and violences. Hundreds of thousands of children. Armies of them. Not news. She folded the note in two and sealed it in with the undeveloped film before handing it over to the press shipper.

In the moment of the blast, the girl could have died with her family.

But she did not.

And so, now, she runs.

In her running, her mind leaves her.

And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf.

There is a great white silent empty in her running.

She runs.

She runs to the dark oncoming line of the forest.

Her hands making little man fists of anger.

The edge of the forest coming into focus.

Her teeth clenching in her mouth.

The moon, Ménuo, big white eye in the dark.

It is snowing.

Miraculously, the snow will cover her tracks.

The branches of trees opening their arms.

Her panting.

Finally the forest holds her.

She keeps running.

The forest is black and white—illuminated through the trees by the moon.

She runs until her legs and lungs cry
child
.

She stops.

She looks up at the night sky, visible through the treetops.

She looks at her own breath making fog in front of her face.

Then she walks and walks, placing her hands on the bark of trees for courage.

Tree by tree, her breathing comes back to her.

She has no thoughts, just this body.

The forest is made of tunnels. Each tunnel opens into a deeper place in the woods, and the deeper she goes, the more surefooted she feels. Many times she has been hunting in these woods, and even as her mind is filled with cotton and electricity she knows she is far from alone. There are, for one thing, trees. And animals. Deer, rabbits, hawks, wolves. Ménuo, the moon. And Saulé, on the other side of the night, the sun mother, goddess of all misfortunates, especially orphans. And Aušrine, the morning star, and Vakeriné, the evening star.

And of course the rebel camps.

So when her legs have nothing left, and her skin is as cold as a dead person’s, it is fortuitous that she is knocked to the ground by a boy made into a man by war. She thuds thankfully in a small heap to the forest floor. He puts the long hard of his rifle against her throat, which she cannot feel. He shines a flashlight in her face. He smells of boy and rifle and dirt and sweat. She cannot see him and is glad. She makes her body limp, she makes her eyes dead, and then she loses consciousness, smiling.

When she wakes, she is inside a small makeshift tent. She is on the dirt of a floor, covered with blankets. Her feet and hands and cheeks feel very hot and they sting. A woman wearing the clothing of a man is petting her head, saying
ssshhh.
Almost like a mother.
Drink this.
She sees a submachine gun hanging from the woman’s shoulder, rocking slightly, accompanying the woman’s voice. In the corner of the tent, a man is being dressed
in women’s clothing, his gun and knife at his gut being wrapped with scarves. Then she sleeps again.

The next morning the sun is there and the woman is gone, and there is the same manboy with a rifle standing over her. She can smell it’s true. He gives her a nudge in the ribs with his foot. Get up, he says. She gets up and finds that she is wearing heavy boys’ clothes. He hands her a pair of boots that have straw and leaves stuffed into them. Then he tells her that he and another man will take her to the edge of the forest. Do not cry, he says. You are lucky to be alive. Luckier still not to be in a Gulag, little pig. I said we should put you in a hole in the ground to watch for the enemy—you could squeal if you saw anything. If you cannot fight, you are nothing. I said we should use you as bait. He spits on the ground. Then he takes his dick out and pisses right near her feet. The steam rises between them. I said we should kill you. I don’t care if you live or die.

She is not scared. She can hear him and she concentrates so hard on his face and mouth she can feel her eyes become bullets. She wants the boots. Violently. She wants the coat—stained and torn and smelling of piss. He grabs his dick and moves toward her and she readies herself to go dead, but he just rubs it on her arm. Harder. Faster. The reddened muscle of a boy. She counts the dead air. Soon he comes in a hard hot spurt on the coat. She puts the coat on without hesitation, looking him in the eye. There is a scarf on the ground with some of his piss seeping into it that she would snatch up even if it were on fire. She wraps and wraps it around her head, covering everything but her eyes. She
wants the pouch of dried-up bread, the canteen of dirty water, the broken knife. She wants everything he is giving to her.

They march her to the edge of the forest. They point to a spot across the whitened landscape. They say there is a farm there. From where they are, the spot looks like it could be anything. Or nothing. She begins to walk. She could be walking into a whitened oblivion. She wonders if they will shoot her after all. She thinks she hears them laughing. She turns only once to look back. He is pointing his rifle at her. She sees a wolf out of the corner of her eye, watching her, or maybe all of them, as it backs into the forest and she moves slowly forward, toward some unseen form in the distance.

My daughter. Say it—hold it in your mouth, look at the words:
born dead
.

To be told there is no pulse at the precise threshold of birth—water breaking. To be told to deliver anyway. Death.

The day birth came at last, the labor had lasted two days. I nearly gave in. I kept thinking, To what end? It seemed true that at any point I could simply surrender to the pain of an ordinary body and . . . leave. I looked at the people around me—my eyes puffy, my skin done in—and thought, I love you, I love you all, enough, good-bye. But I did not leave, and the dead girl was born.

I expected her to be blue, and cold. Lifeless. I expected her to feel dead weighted. I expected to die, quietly and with soft breathing, from holding her.

But she was not blue, and she was not cold; she was like the weight of the history of love in my arms. Her skin was flushed and her eyelashes were very, small, long. Her lips were in the
hue and shape of a rosebud. Her hair . . . she had a small halo of almost-hair. And her hands were curled in the shape of something tender and potential. I was holding life and death—those supposed opposites, those markers of narrative worth; a beginning, an ending—all at once in my arms.

I did not die.

But I could see the grief coming like a towering wave of water about to swallow the world. When grief comes, you must breathe underwater. I knew I didn’t have much time. You know, hospitals will not allow you to take a dead baby home with you. You must make arrangements, with the hospital or with a coroner or a morgue. They send in “grief counselors,” and, if you let them, god help you, clergymen.

I just wanted her body. I wanted her body more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. And so I did what I had to do.

I asked the poet—my lifelong rival, beloved friend, a borderline criminal—to steal her from that fucking place for me.

You will think it sounds impossible, but it was not. It was laughably simple. The poet was close friends with an attendant, an addict, at the morgue where I agreed to send her. The morgue had its own crematorium. In lieu of her lifeless body, a little pig covered in a soft blanket was sent down the metal road to the fire.

Instead, I took her to a place where a river empties into the sea. I drove there alone, with her perfect weight next to me in the passenger’s seat. I talked to her and sang to her and recited poems to her. When I got there—not anywhere anyone would be—I placed her in a backpack that also contained kindling and
sage and waited for night. The wind was unusually still, and the surf had the rise and fall of breathing. The moon’s giant eye looked on. It was the end of an Indian summer. I removed my clothes. I held her body to mine for a long time. Until it came, the great flood. Animal sounds came from my throat. Nearly all of the night we rocked that way.

When a dead calm came over me, I made a pyre of sticks and sage and the only thing I had to give to her, my hair. All of it I could sever. Great clumps of American blond. I placed her body and my hair atop the pyre and lit it on fire. I watched her burn. I did not cry while she burned. The smell of burning skin and ocean and sage. I did not look away. I collected the ashes in the morning and walked into the sea with them. So there was a moment when we were together in the same waters.

Then I entered a cataclysmic silence, a white vast, for nearly a year.

After grief—strange sister self—left me, I thought, stupidly, that I could live my life, and love the artists who are in it, and carry on by writing. I gathered them together for meals, for art events, for films and readings and gallery exhibits. I thought I could narrate over everything. This . . . what I am still doing now. I am writing a journal of the girl. But I don’t know if I can withstand it. I hear my husband and son in the kitchen, making dinner, setting plates, and I close my eyes. My heart is beating me up.

I am an American woman writer. I am in the room I write in. The room with midnight blue walls. Dark red carpet against deep brown hardwood floors. Two windows with long off-white
curtains. And books . . . books everywhere—on floor-to-ceiling shelves, on the floor, on the desk, piles of literature, art, photography, philosophy. The colors of their spines and covers the colors of skin, blood, fire, water, night. A black iron lotus Buddha with a broken hand that we glued back on—me and my husband, my now-husband. A good ironic metaphor. Various feathers from birds I have come upon: eagle, heron, crow, crane, and swan. Bowls of rocks. A photo. The cat’s food bowl. Desperate talismans, the colors of blood and night and the bottom of an ocean. And the scent of someone over-saging a room because they are afraid they will make something to death.

I think things like, Be brave. Hold on to voice. It’s your only chance. Pick up the glass of scotch. Bring the amber liquid to your mouth. Drink. Large. Hold it there. Close your eyes. Move your goddamn hands before your mind makes a mess of it.

I see an image of a dead girl—an arrested image.

My breath jackknifes for a moment.

It’s the girl. I don’t know if she will kill me or save me.