Transgressions (23 page)

It wouldn’t have been the same for
him,
she thought. What would he have done if he had pulled his prick out of her only to find it bleeding? Would the fear of one kind of blood have led him to another? Hammers and nails. Rape and crucifixion—maybe Catholic girls have learned more about life than they realize. The thought of him took her to the window, but she had slept through the day and the semicircle of houses was lit up with a different rhythm: a dozen households eating evening meals and watching flickering TV screens, no telling one window from the next. When she found what she thought must be his it was like all the rest. Lit but impenetrable.

She slid her finger up inside herself, feeling the wad of compressed cotton and the moistness already gathering at its edge. She ran her finger down the glass, leaving a smear on the pane.

“See that,” she said softly into the glass. “My blood’s stronger than your sperm.”

But whether she really believed it or simply needed to hear the sound of her own voice in the night was hard to know.

fifteen

S
he lowered the printer onto the kitchen table, feeling her back give slightly under the weight. It took her a while to reconnect all the cables—input to output, the right male to the right female—but eventually she cracked it, and the computer hummed to life. The smell of fresh coffee was everywhere. Midnight Thursday and she was ready to start work.

It had taken some time to reach this point. The first night had been taken up with the pain and the blood—such a river of it that she began to wonder what exactly it was that her body was rejecting. With one threat gone it allowed her the space to contemplate another. But the twenty-four-hour AIDS hotline told her only what she already knew. If she was infected it would take two months for it to show, and then she would need to come in for a test. What were the chances? Well, that, of course, depended on who he was and where he had been before. Which in turn led her to wonder where he was now. The rest of the night had passed in an orchestration of surveillance: checking the windows, prowling the staircase, alert to every whisper of the floorboards.

So it was that inch by inch, hour by hour, the house became new again, and because even fear dulls when there is nothing to fuel it, and there is a limit to how long one can live on one’s nerves, she began to relax. By the second night, she could discern a rhythm to the hours of darkness—the way the world fell gradually asleep around midnight or one, leaving only the hum of occasional night traffic until even that died away in the dead hours between two and four. At that time you could almost believe that you were alone in the world, that your isolation made you unique, special, and that there was something to be learned from inhabiting the still dark center, a kind of wisdom or calm.

As the familiarity brought comfort she began to feel almost privileged. She checked his window less often and each time she did it was dark. Maybe she had helped him to sleep at night after all.

But not her. She was getting used to it. So it was that on the third evening she climbed the stairs to the attic. And this time it was not the ketchup stains that brought her down again but the more practical fact that the night was colder than the day and the central heating didn’t work so well at the top of the house. So she decided to move. Besides, she thought, as she dismantled the plugs and wrapped up the cables, she was not the only woman being persecuted in this house, and it had begun to feel almost unsisterly leaving Mirka alone and captive while she was doing so much to make herself free.

 

The room was damp and small, no more than six feet by four, no window or skylight, only a grimy overhead bulb that was kept burning constantly. There was a bucket in one corner and a makeshift iron bed with a thin mattress and a few threadbare blankets.

The woman lay still, the naked light harsh and unflattering to her features. But the fat man wasn’t looking at her face. He had pulled back the cover and was studying the way that sleep had dragged her skirt up over her thighs. He grunted with appreciation. He liked the way women slept when they were drugged—careless, abandoned, as if they were too shagged out to move. Like after sex.

He checked the damaged hand that she was cradling by her side. The dressing was holding and the blood was stanched. No worries there. He was good at his job. Both the hurting and the tending. It was always a surprise to him how the better you do one, the more they need the other. Nobody screams forever. Even in his dreams.

“Keep your hands off her, Christopher.” The voice came from behind the grille high up in the door. “You heard what they said. She’s not like the other one.”

The fat man lifted his head toward the peephole and grimaced. “Not yet, you mean. But what happens when her American husband comes to find her, eh? Then I bet we get to play with both of them.”

He grinned and ran a finger up her thigh toward her crotch. The woman didn’t stir.

Nothing like anticipation, she thought, as she refilled her coffee cup. The perfect mechanism of fear—never letting you rest, always threatening something worse. Except the fat man was enough of a caricature for the reader to understand that whatever goes around comes around, and that there would be a time when the bad guys had better keep their hands on their balls, too. Simple rules of the genre. One good cut deserves another. Not that Mirka would be the one to do the cutting. That was man’s work, of course. How many adjectives could a translator come up with to describe a scream? She’d find out soon enough.

She flicked back the sheet and checked outside. The binoculars tracked over a landscape of darkness. Was he really asleep? Three nights on and no sign. He had listened to what she had said. Or maybe he had recognized the change in her. If fear has a smell, then presumably one also notices the lack of it. She topped off the coffee with a hit of whiskey and went back to the screen. Back in the capital, Jake was waiting, impatient for revenge. Well, she thought, let him wait awhile longer. Now was the season for the women to be awake in the night and find their own voices to put against the men’s. Mirka’s story. All it needed was a little imagination. Chances are, in the hands of a good translator, you probably wouldn’t notice the seams.

 

In a country of rationing, the jailers were scarcely more comfortable than the jailed. On his camp bed in the corridor the fat man was snoring, his jacket wrapped around him, making up for what the blanket couldn’t cover. His companion stepped over him, peering into the cell through the grille before putting down the tray and unbolting the locks.

She was lying in exactly the same position—back to the door, the damaged hand cradled up by her side. That made five hours without moving. He knew because he checked her regularly. Poor slob. He’d warned Christopher not to give her more than two pills. Christ, they’d be in real trouble if she died on them. No payment then. Better try and wake her up. She’d be pretty hungry by now.

Mirka registered the sound of the key in the door and closed her eyes. In her head the ache of her finger throbbed in time to her pulse. She used her good hand to push the sleeping pills, which she had retrieved from her cheek after the fat man had left her, farther under the pillow.

The first few hours had been the worst. Then the temptation to take them had been almost unbearable. She couldn’t think straight with the pain. But she was more scared of sleep than of agony. Of what they might do to her when she was unconscious. In the end she had found that if she held her hand upward in a certain position against her stomach then the pain lessened, and she could cope with it. So she had lain like that, immobile, face to the wall, willing herself to look at the blood-soaked gauze until the sight of it became almost normal. She was a woman with nine fingers and a stump. And nothing she could do would ever change that fact.

Little fingers. As a child she remembered tales her grandmother had told about how some women were born with the beginnings of a sixth digit on their hands—how it was known as the devil’s teat, the suckling of evil, a mark of a witch in the making, and how, in certain country areas, they were still superstitious enough to have it hacked off at birth.

For years after, she had checked the edges of her hands to see if there was any scar to mark her out as one of them. Even then she knew that she was no witch in the making. Or that if she was, her witchcraft would take on a different physical manifestation.

She had been lovely even as a child—delicate, with honey-colored hair and good bones—but at puberty her beauty had ripened into a voluptuousness so immediate and exotic that it disturbed the peace of the family and brought the local boys, like a pack of dogs, sniffing around the front door.

She knew she could have had whichever one she wanted, and so, of course, she wanted none of them. It wasn’t that she was cruel, simply that she didn’t know what else to do. All she knew was that she yearned for something better. Even then she had an idea as to how to get it. While her friends contented themselves with shop jobs or secretarial posts in local government, she slaved away over inadequate English books, turning down dates in favor of extra study and evenings spent in the company of short wave American and British radio: the language of cultural propaganda but still more subtle than the type she was used to.

Finally, in her early twenties, she used her uncle’s connections as a Party member and a bureaucrat in the Foreign Office to get herself a visa for a holiday to America. If she’d given it a few more years, history would have done it for her, but she was not to know that, and anyway, had she waited, she and Jake would never have found themselves on the same express subway train heading downtown from Eighty-sixth Street.

He had been off duty at the time, sitting reading a newspaper, some punk had started bothering her, picking up on her funny accent, offering to show her the sights and not taking no for an answer. Jake stepped in and set him straight.

He was different right from the start—older, colder, his control marking him out as a professional in a man’s world. He was so at odds with the notion of chivalry that once he had saved her he seemed not to notice her further. It was this apparent indifference, of course, that made him so irresistible.

In the end it was she who had told
him
that she needed a drink, allowing herself to take hold of his arm as he propelled her out of the car and up the steamy subway steps. During that first date he reminded her of a dozen clean-cut American movie stars she had seen on flickering screens—traditional tough guys who didn’t whine or pout when they didn’t get what they wanted but simply went out and took it. It was such a recognizable fantasy that she immediately took his dislocation for strength. It was only later that she realized it was based on other things—fear, repressed anger, and the seeing of too many unseeable things. But by then she was already in love, as much with the idea of being his savior as with the man himself (another myth from another movie), and she had thrown off everything to stand by her man.

“They’ll say I trapped you into it to get a green card,” she had teased him the night before their marriage as they lay together in a sweat made up from sex and a lack of air-conditioning in his small Brooklyn apartment, traffic and neon providing an urban son et lumière.

“Well, at least they can’t accuse you of doing it for my money,” he had replied, already reaching for her again.

Strange how you could fall out of love as easily as you fall into it. How long had it taken for her to realize her mistake? That not only could she not soothe his pain but neither could she satisfy him. American men. They were not supposed to be so complicated. Hadn’t the free market and rock ’n’ roll given them everything they wanted? Freedom of choice ought to have left no time for neurosis. His painful emotional complexity was her first indication that capitalism was not, after all, the panacea it had been cracked up to be.

Even the sex was confusing. His need for her was almost pathological, as if he somehow believed that the possession of her body was the same as her soul, and that to make sure he hadn’t lost one he had to have the other all the time. Within the first year sex turned from a revelation into a habit and from a habit into a nightmare. Desire.

Need. Jealousy. And performance fucking. She came across the term later in a novel and laughed out loud at its accuracy. It struck her later that this too probably came from watching too many movies—too long spent watching Michael Douglas’s bare ass heaving up and down to the music of money, while the women writhed and groaned happily underneath. She had tried to talk about it with him once but he would have none of it. Sex isn’t for talking about, he would say angrily. It wrecks the spontaneity. But he already knew by then that it was over and that he was in danger of losing her.

Still, at least now he would have a part of her for always—the devil’s teat gift wrapped in a red-spotted handkerchief and delivered to his door. How would he feel? His horror would probably be less than his rage.

Jake’s rages. The other side of the pain. What
a joy
it was not to have to put up with them anymore. Leaving him had been wonderful. She had felt like an adult for the first time in her life. This was her American dream come true. Independence. She had liked being in the city alone. She had got herself a job in a fancy art gallery specializing in the flood of new Eastern treasures that was hitting the market, where her looks and her languages had earned her enough to rent a small apartment in the Village. Before long she found herself wooed by a Brazilian diplomat—an older, softer man, with olive skin and long tapered fingers. Someone who looked after her, took her out to restaurants, treating her with care, in and out of bed. There was an elegance to their lovemaking that spoke as much about her pleasure as his own. He did not expect ownership in return. Nor reassurance nor congratulation every time he did it. If there was less passion, then there was also less pain. For her, by then, it was the right trade-off.

And so she had been happy. Until the day the phone rang and she heard her own language on the other end of the line. What supreme bad luck, she thought. To find herself a prisoner back in the country she had done so much to escape from, a pawn in some unknown game of revenge for an angry unsavable man whom she no longer loved. And who, if only he could realize it, no longer loved her either. No. There was no white knight in this story. If Jake did come to save her it would only be to imprison her again. Waiting for him would be signing another kind of death warrant.

The door closed and she heard the man put down the tray on the metal table. She steeled herself not to flinch at his touch.

He put a hand on her shoulder and shook her. “Wake up.”

A different voice. Native but not city. Not the one with the chopper. Under the pillow she checked the pills. Then she opened her eyes and turned. The pain in her hand roared up like a flame and brought involuntary tears to her eyes. She looked up into his face and thought she caught a flicker of feeling.

“Does it still hurt?”

No. This man wasn’t like the other. This man seemed almost embarrassed by the thought of the pain they had caused. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“Sit up. You’ll feel better if you eat something.”

The dialect was more pronounced now. In the lilt of his voice she felt the heat of the cooking range in her grandmother’s kitchen and saw a host of sallow teenage boys with transistors to their ears, dying of boredom as they loitered in the local square. I know you, she thought. I’ve met you a hundred times: a village boy with village hunger. I know exactly what you want.

She felt a quiet ache in her womb. Hunger or fear? She would find out. “I don’t think I can get up. Could you . . .” she said, and she used the familiar pronoun, “could you please—”