Back, Amy repeats after her mother, mouthing the word without pronouncing it. But that means Zoe doesn’t want to visit.
For a second she is dizzy. She focuses and makes the room return. Underneath the basket are some papers, and inside there is a bottle of shampoo they must have taken from her dorm room, a new tube of lip balm, a washcloth with their grandfather’s initials and a cracked off-white sliver of soap. Amy shuts herself inside the bathroom. There is no lock, so she piles her drawstring pants and tunic up at the base of the door.
Naked, spindly as a spider, shivering, she catches a glimpse of her grimy body marred by cuts, bruises, and the residue from bandages and patches as she tiptoes sideways past the mirror. On her tiptoes she steps onto the tiles in the shower box. She throws up as soon as she starts the water, from the heat. But she is determined to be clean. With the toast she ate for breakfast a scummy halo at her feet she scratches at the circles of paste on her chest and the marks on her arms and digs shampoo tracks in her hair. She scrubs. Her wrists don’t hurt. Now she turns around and shuts her eyes, lets her heels come down, and the water washes over her neck and her shoulders, and she just breathes. She’s not weak anymore, and after lunch they take away her wheelchair.
Remember when we used to swing dance to that song from the Olympics? Remember our routine? You used to back away a little and crouch down, and then you’d leap into my arms, at the very very end. If you tried to leap into my arms now you would probably kill us both, which means we really are too big.
She starts with her Russian homework, which is just her favorite poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the briefest of instructions clipped to the top: Translate into English
Her eyes get wide, and she releases her shoulders. She clears her throat.
But only for the old things.
There are no boring people in this world
Each fate is like the history of a planet.
And no two planets are alike at all.
Each is distinct—you simply can’t compare it.
If someone lived without attracting notice
and made a friend of their obscurity—
then their uniqueness was precisely this.
Their very plainness made them interesting.
Each person has a world that’s all their own.
Each of those worlds must have its finest moment
and each must have its hour of bitter torment—
and yet, to us, both hours remain unknown.
When people die, they do not die alone.
They die along with their first kiss, first combat.
They take away their first day in the snow …
All gone, all gone—there’s just no way to stop it.
There may be much that’s fated to remain,
but something—something leaves us all the same.
The rules are cruel, the game nightmarish—
it isn’t people but whole worlds that perish.
Each time a Russian word meets an English word it generates a spark. And translation offers Amy a new kind of math, an alternative to the math of sacrifice that has ruled her life on her own until today. She can’t cancel out another person’s suffering or death with hers. What she can do is connect.
It will take Amy many years to truly learn this. But this poem does provide a start. Amy has a hazy vision of herself as phoenix, rising in an unknown land (in truth she pictures a flamingo, fledgling, slightly stooping as it scrabbles), and she knows she has finally found some solution, and she sobs freely, with relief.
The thing is there are new things, bigger things, more miracles—worlds. Did you know that eighty-five percent of plant life lives in the ocean? I bet even combined we haven’t seen half a percent of what can live on land.
PART TWO:
HOME
People say the world will end when midnight strikes December 31 of 1999, but Amy has come to hope it won’t, and then it doesn’t, and then she graduates from the University of Tulsa and she flies to Berlin
She is eighteen, it is June 1, 2000, and the world’s unfolding and in bloom, and it belongs, in its entirety, to her.
When she alights at Tempelhof she shakes her wrists loose as she hurries out into the airport as though she knows where she is going—and in a way, she does: tomorrow she will take the train to Moscow, and in Moscow she’ll become a whole new person—luminous, herself.
She finds the baggage claim and claims her luggage—an old off-white suitcase of her grandma’s, from before suitcases had wheels—and navigates the throng of those awaiting the arrivals of their relatives and friends. Her terror she will hear her name’s in vain: in leaving Oklahoma, Amy has freed herself of nearly everything and everyone she’s ever known.
Soon the room gets lighter, and she begins to hear the street. From inside the inside pocket of her jacket she extracts the grayscale map she printed in her grandpa’s den. She holds it high, up to the light from outside like it’s amber—and sure enough, the city glows, most around the page’s perforated edges, the current limits of her expertise.
Yet just beyond her grasp, she sees trees quivering in gleaming sheets of glass, and closer, as she lets the map drop, people flicker past, their certain steps seeming to keep the flecked and polished floor in place; these gliding silhouettes all intermingle like the languages she hasn’t learned or hasn’t learned completely yet, which rise and fall in flurries.
In all of this activity, in all this mystery, in all these intersections, Amy can sense the nearness of the world’s quickening pulse, and she can feel her own rising to meet it.
An hour from now she’ll struggle with her grandma’s suitcase until finally the clasp gives and slices right into her knee. At the abrupt unplanned eruption of her blood, Amy will faint, and when she comes to, she will find that the shards from her one picture frame have pierced all her packets of cheese and peanut butter crackers, and that all her cans of Dr Pepper have exploded in the air, staining her clothing—though she won’t mind, starting from scratch, with just another little scar.
Tomorrow, without the right visa, she’ll get kicked off her train to Moscow in the middle of the night in Minsk, and in Warsaw, have her head shaved by mistake—though she won’t mind: she’s always wondered what it would be like, or what it was like for her sister.
Between now and when she starts to write the letter to her sister, Amy will turn disasters into pictures, taking portrait after portrait of all the times she winds up lost and finds out something new about the world. In country after country she will calculate exchange rates and learn words, lie when she’s missing the words for the truth and be lighter in translation because all words without memories are beautiful and hollow like the eggs Amy and Zoe used to dye each Easter that Zoe always tried so hard to keep from breaking.
Amy won’t get homesick. She’ll buy hats and a backpack and think about her sister as her hair grows back. At the grocery store in Warsaw, as she checks out, she will get yelled at for putting her fruit and yogurt in a plastic bag. In advance of the impending cold, she’ll try to buy new clothes but get shooed out of the changing room for reasons she can’t understand.
She’ll study Polish. She’ll get a Polish cell phone. Her Polish cell phone will get stolen one afternoon from the table where she’s sitting having fuchsia soup. She’ll get another Polish cell phone.
The brown-black walls of her apartment will seem to hold the cold, and the quiet will be so intense sometimes she won’t know how to think when she wakes up. One day she won’t remember the Polish symbols for men and women and will accidentally see a man standing over a urinal with his penis in his hand. One day she’ll forget to pick up a basket when she walks into the grocery store, although all she will have wanted was some gum.
One April day it will get so slippery along the sidewalks that Amy will stop to break her walk up. She’ll duck inside a coffee shop, where she will see a sunflower head the size of a wall clock flat atop a table by a window. A girl will hover over i
t, effaced by a burst of curls. As Amy stands dripping in the doorway, the girl will snatch seed after seed out, devouring them one by one.
Amy will travel to Wrocław and Dresden and Prague. She’ll sit at stations for hours on end on purpose, never uttering a word. Enchanted by the whoosh and bustle all around, electrified by all the destinations that come up on the boards beneath the big clocks all the stations seem to have. In motion, time will defer to space; it will be the only time when everything is out of Amy’s hands. There will be nothing that she has to do and nothing that she even can. It will be a carelessness that isn’t careless, merely the absence of concerns. And for more than a decade, it will be the only way for Amy to be perfectly at peace.
Come summer she’ll get thrown off her bus to the Baltic for not having a ticket for her backpack, propped up in the seat next to hers like a person. She’ll pay her first real bribe.
The bus will still drive off without her. And as it drifts off the horizon, Amy will close her eyes and wish that she could have her sister back, nearby, but when she opens up her eyes again, Zoe won’t be anywhere in sight.
So she’ll take a picture of the serpentine slope of an overpass that won’t capture the sounds of the cicadas or the bitter fragrance of the rapeseed fields, or the eddies of dust at her ankles or the sun that looses rivulets of sweat that pool around her throat.
Until Amy finally writes to Zoe, she’ll tuck the old manila envelope that holds their shared history under her pillow every night. Pictures of a snail’s shell; a felled spruce; a spiral staircase; padlocks on the Pont des Arts.
Speckled with Dr Pepper and peanut butter grease, punctured here and there by broken glass, Amy and Zoe at the playground, Zoe on her shoulders, her smile more like a scowl.
In the back of the ambulance, the whites of Zoe’s empty eyes.
The envelope will bulge, and crumble at the corners, but Amy won’t stop adding images to her collection as she moves from Poland to France to Germany to Argentina and falls in love again and wants to tell her sister but doesn’t know how and travels and makes her way home again to the home she has made with her boyfriend in Buenos Aires—until one day, on a translation residency just outside of Kraków, she realizes she now has everything she ever wanted, and that it’s not enough.
So she’ll go back. Not to what could never be her home again, in Oklahoma, but rather to the runways where her world began.
Amy will imagine all the photographs there are and all the photographs there aren’t of Tempelhof, no longer an airport now—some from before it was a refugee camp, before it was a park, before it had a concentration camp, before it ever even saw an airplane, when it held Prussian parades and, earlier, Knights Templar, when it must have been replete with bison, spruce bark beetles, hedgehogs, storks. Storms that split the sky with light and tiny yellow flowers that popped up from softened soil.
But right now, on June 1, 2000, she just folds her map up, tucks it back inside her pocket. She glances down at her grandmother’s suitcase, glimpses a trickle of dark liquid emerging from its closest corner; hastily, carefully, she lifts it, then sets off.
Remember when you said that Sasha’d be a swordfish or a meerkat or a lightning bug or a dog, and I said he’d be a bluebird?
You were right, of course.
The thing is we were both right.
One day Amy wakes up wanting
It is June 1, 2018. She has just won the world’s largest translation prize in London. The good thing is her dad is still around to be proud of her, although he’s had leukemia for twenty years; with her mother and her sister she is barely in touch. Following the ceremony, Javi went to Paris, to teach a few classes, and Amy came here, near Kraków, to translate something new.
Outside the sun is shining; the snails are slinking down the sidewalks in their mobile homes. For the first time Amy comprehends the pleasure of pure want—what Zoe must have felt as she made lists for Santa—and she showers quickly and is dressed.
Many of the snails get crushed along the sidewalks; as she walks a little stooped from the weight of her backpack she bends down further to inspect their shells. Often they’re in shards or finely ground now, the animals inside them just some sludge the shade of leaves left over from last fall. Amy shuttles the intact ones over to the other side, placing them in tiny clearings.
On the train hushed seas of green flash by with bales of hay like buoys, blanched cropped wheat.
All of us are anything, everything, brimming with secrets.
The breeze at Tempelhof is gentle
Now the runways have been overtaken by bicycles with brimming baskets, the asphalt itself burst through by stalks and blossoms, the once-white lines that guided planes now green, glittering when struck by sunshine.
Amy settles in a patch of cut grass, extracts the envelope. Slowly she unspools the red thread of its clasp.
A little yellow butterfly flits overhead.
From above, what the pictures most resemble is their mother’s mother’s quilt, made half of scraps and half of Amy’s grandfather’s blue uniform, ragged in the middle of one square from the night that he got shot and killed. Amy wonders how to tell this story to her boyfriend, how to explain that it’s that very gash that makes it sacred, but then she wonders if they even have such things as quilts in Argentina—or if they have them here in Berlin.
Although it’s easier to tell the stories of her childhood in any other language, Amy does encounter frequent obstacles like these.
As she searches her vocabulary, Amy’s eyes move back and forth across the images, verifying their positions. It occurs to her that laid out step by step like this, more or less in order, the pictures also form a kind of path. This path strikes her as urgent, as though it’s made of bread crumbs and can only be traveled down right now.
The breeze picks up. Quickly Amy gathers up her pictures, making a stack, more or less in order. Then she flips the first one over and embarks upon her letter. Pen trembling at first.
Above all we are the shelter we seek out in others and the safe havens we become for those we choose to love.
There is a picture of an insect in the yellow fronds at the center of a big white flower; in the background a dozen giant wet green leaves, flat and sometimes ragged at the edges
There is a picture of a single white azalea, half in shadow; in the background the red splotches of some other plant. There are pictures of pansies, and goldenrods, and Queen Anne’s lace. Of hyacinths Amy can smell when she sees again, Indian paintbrush, and violets, and irises, and yarrow, tiger lilies and lilacs and phlox. A spikelet of wheat inclined towards the camera. A bird’s nest, scraggly in the crook of a dogwood branch.
A picture of Zoe meeting her own gaze in the mirror. Over her shoulder stands Amy, the camera obscuring her face.
There is a picture of the plumes on the body of a flamingo that faces away. There are pictures of roadrunners, egrets, woodpeckers, buntings, owls. Killdeer, herons, swans. Cranes, turkeys, peacocks, ducks, geese, blackbirds, blue jays, crows, nuthatches, finches, martins, siskins, vultures, hummingbirds, hawks. The state bird of Oklahoma, the scissor-tailed flycatcher. A feather from a cedar waxwing between the pages of a book like a pressed flower; Amy recognizes the book, its squat Cyrillic letters, as the copy of Doctor Zhivago her father found her—not knowing what it was, perhaps just recognizing Amy’s favorite letter, the butterfly, ж—when she was thirteen.
There is a portrait of a goat glancing up at the camera. Dozens of pictures from when the monarchs came to Minnesota in the summer after Amy’s sophomore year: monarchs aloft, monarchs alit on fuzzy light purple-pink thistle buds. Their wings are tissue paper and stained glass, prominent white dots like glints of sun on water. There is a picture of a pelican looking into a lake sprinkled with raindrops, a picture of Zoe blowing a kiss from the couch in the living room, a silver ring on one slim finger. A picture of Zoe sitting beside a rosebush, gazing down at a rose whose perfect outline falls in shadow along the und
erside of her bare right arm.
There is a picture of Zoe leaping around above a sidewalk; a picture of Zoe shielding her eyes from the sun; a picture of Zoe sleeping on her stomach with her face pressed into the pale blue sheets; a portrait of a bumblebee in a geranium; a portrait of a black-and-blue moth on gray wood siding; a picture of a rabbit in a sea of bright green grass; a picture of three fat ostrich eggs at two sharp-taloned feet, the underside of a beak swooping in from the side; a portrait of a doe with her ears pricked up; a picture of a rusty Coke can on the riverbank, faded from red to pink; a portrait of a zebra on a carousel; a portrait of Zoe in a field of black-eyed Susans from the far side of the meadow at camp; a portrait of an ugly baby bird in brown leaves with a single green shoot of something standing straight up in the middle; a portrait of Zoe with her leg up on the bench before her like she’s just hurt it, looking like she might cry, labeled in the perfect round letters of Amy’s girlhood: Waluhili, June, 1995.
Once she’s made three neat shining rows of images she takes a big step back. And now, as she surveys her pictures—each so balanced and so beautifully framed—it dawns on her, first, that every picture she has ever taken has been a portrait, and, second, that every portrait is a portrait of Zoe.
Every picture is a portrait of Zoe because Amy’s intentions as a photographer have never wavered, although she herself had never known of them till now
What she wants—what she’s always wanted—is to capture and to fix forever the presence of her sister, to contain her, to never let her go, or break, or even change. Whatever animal or bird, whatever butterfly or flower, whatever street, whatever car, whatever house has captured her eye, it has only done so insofar as it has featured some component of Zoe—some mood, some shape, some angle, some quality of glance. There were never really any action shots. And that seamless series of gestures that Amy performs, cradling the camera in her left hand, is always that same gesture: an attempt at a hermetic, time-repellent embrace.
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