Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  Those stories of Grandma Sylvia were the stories my mother told again and again, a prideful insistence in her voice, almost as though the stories, terrifying as they were, could be made tame by being told often enough. They were shadowy things that my mother was forcefully bringing into the light. Grandma Sylvia would never have told me such stories, and in fact any discussion of the past seemed to be weirdly off-limits in her presence, as though none of it had ever happened. My mother only knew the stories because when she was a girl, Grandma Sylvia drank, and she would get sometimes mean, sometimes sad, and whisper horrible, wet secrets as my mother rubbed her back in her dark bedroom. The stories morphed and changed, depending on Sylvia’s mood. The versions my mother told to me had been patched together through inference, guessing which of her mother’s confessions were true and which were designed to mislead.

  There were many stories. There was: The Time Grandma Sylvia Escaped the Gas Chamber. The Time Grandma Sylvia Stabbed a Nazi in the Neck. The Time Grandma Sylvia Had to Kill Her Own Baby in the Woods So the Nazis Wouldn’t Hear It and Find Them. Not all of the stories were so dramatic, of course. There was also: The Time Grandma Sylvia Saved the Family by Clipping So Many Coupons the Grocer Gave Her Everything for Free. Or: The Time Grandma Sylvia Tried to Buy Rabbit Per Pound at the Pet Store.

  These stories were impressed upon the soft clay of my developing mind, and they took up rather more room than my memories of the actual Grandma Sylvia. I could remember Grandma Sylvia, but only hazily. I was nine when she died, and so most of my memories of her were nothing but physical details: the ugly orange roses on her teapot; her low laugh, like gravel being shaken in a box; the pale green packets of her cigarettes, Benson & Hedges Menthol Lights; her thin wrists and papery skin that was always cut up from working in the garden; the huge sapphire ring that hung off her hand like a spider’s swollen egg sack.

  There was one Grandma Sylvia story that dwarfed all of the others. It was also the only story she told openly and forthrightly, though I suspect she did it out of perversity because the story bothered her entire family.

  The story was a kind of birthright, or else it was a riddle, or perhaps a curse. My mother told it to me many times over the years. In fact, there was a period when I was ten or so, just after Grandma Sylvia died, when I would request the story over and over again, and my mother always told it in the same thrilling, ritualistic way, making sure to hit on all the beloved details. The whiteness of the field of snow. The red flannel of the shirt. The bitterness of wild onions and how their leaves stuck up through the snow like scraggly hairs. The details were what made it possible to believe the story was real.

  Sylvia and her sister were both in the Stutthof camp in the former territory of the Free City of Danzig. They were together, having been separated from their mother and brother before being interned. Grandma Sylvia was, my mother said, the most beautiful girl in all the world, and her sister, well, her sister was not.

  On the morning Sylvia and her sister (who was always nameless, my mother claimed not to know her name) were led to the gas chamber, they knew what was coming. They weren’t confused or taken by surprise. They had known for months that the camp had been converted into a death camp; they had watched the small gas chamber being built. It was amazing how tedious and bureaucratic the process of death was. They had to wait in line to hand over their clothes to an officer, and as Sylvia handed over her clothes, the officer looked up at her like he had been stung. Such a beautiful girl! Handing over her clothes! About to die!

  Sylvia and her sister held hands in the gas chamber, shivering and naked, waiting for death to begin, when suddenly the door swung open. All the naked girls looked up at the officer in astonishment. “You!” he said, and he took Sylvia. He led her naked down the hallway, took her out a back door, raped her in the snow, and then left her there. Before, in the small, crowded gas chamber, holding her sister’s hand, Sylvia had been prepared to die, had welcomed death even, but now she was already planning how to live. She sat up, naked in the snow. She thought about what she should do, scrambling up out of the snow, crouching and trying to brush it off the burning skin of her thighs. She would have simply run toward the forest, but she needed clothes and the only source of clothes was the camp. She stood frozen, undecided.

  The guard returned, startling her. He threw her some good, heavy workman’s pants, men’s boots, a red flannel shirt, a jacket, and a fistful of money. “Go,” he said, gesturing at the tree line. “Run!”

  She took off running across the field. She thought she’d never get across it. When she finally made it to the woods, she survived by eating wild onions she found under the snow.

  “And so your grandmother always celebrated that day,” my mother would say, “as her second birthday, her rape birthday.”

  The term “rape birthday” made me cringe, especially as I got older.

  “Why cringe?” my mother said. “He saved her life. Rape happens. Rape is a fact of life. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not ashamed of it,” I would say, but I was lying. I thought that rape was something shameful and terrible that a woman would not want to ever talk about. But I could still remember the cheap supermarket cakes my grandmother would buy for herself on her rape birthday, the blue flowers of lard frosting she would lick off the knife.

  “Maybe,” my mother suggested, “compared to everything else, the rape was the least bad of the things that happened to her. Maybe when your entire world has been transformed and you have lost everything, your whole family, maybe then rape is just…” She trailed off.

  “But why did he save her? Just because she was beautiful?” I often asked. It was a point that bothered me. What was the significance of beauty? Was Grandma Sylvia worthy of being saved just because she was beautiful? Was her sister less worthy for being ugly? I didn’t like the whole thing.

  “I don’t know,” my mother would say, because she was a naturally speculative creature, too. “Maybe she became human to him. Maybe this is something the guards did occasionally. Maybe he raped her in order to have a chance to set her free outside. Who knows?”

  —

  So I took Vera to Vilnius.

  And before we even got there, while we were still on the flight to Helsinki, we got into a terrible argument, the kind that is baffling and confusing and where one of you falls through a trapdoor you had no idea was there.

  “When I was little,” she had said, deep into the blurry hours of our transatlantic flight, “I pictured tiny men inside me, using levers and pulleys to work my muscles and joints. And I pictured whole cities inside my stomach where they would take the pieces of food and mash them and work them like clay and re-form them into perfect spheres or cubes or pyramids, which they would then set, like little boats, into my bloodstream.”

  “That’s a wonderful image,” I said. I had given in and ordered myself a Scotch and I was beginning to feel sleepy.

  “But what if that’s true,” Vera said. “What if we’re a collective and not a single thing? What if the idea of being a person is a mistake?”

  “You mean, what if there is no ‘I’?”

  She nodded. She had bought a Toblerone bar at the airport and now was gobbling the dark triangles of chocolate and her breath smelled sweet in the dim cabin.

  “But there is an ‘I,’ ” I said. “I mean, that’s the reason we think there is an ‘I’—because we think there is. Cogito, ergo sum.”

  “What is that?” Vera asked. “Latin?”

  I tried to explain about Descartes and his meditations. Descartes was a figure I found touching. He had been very sickly and spent many hours in bed. They say that was how he invented the Cartesian graph—he was watching a fly on the ceiling from his sickbed and wishing he had a way of charting its coordinates. On the other hand, he vivisected dogs.

  “What is vivisection?” Vera asked.

  “Like dissection only the thing you are dissecting is still alive,” I said.

  �
��What a freak! Who could do that to a poor little doggy?” There was chocolate all over her teeth.

  I laughed. “A lot of scientists were…like that,” I said. “Anyway, cogito, ergo sum means ‘I think, therefore I am.’ ”

  “I’ve heard of that,” Vera said, nodding, “but it doesn’t sound very convincing. Maybe the mind works that way, but what about the body? Did you know that there are one hundred trillion bacteria in the human body? What if they are part of us? I mean—they are. They are part of us. So why doesn’t that seem to matter to anyone? I mean, maybe I would be a different person if I had your bacteria instead of my own. Maybe I would seem like a different ‘I’ to myself.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t understand how the mechanism would work. Are you suggesting they would change your biochemistry?”

  “Or whatever,” she said. “I mean, we’re altering my brain chemistry with medication in order to make me seem like a different ‘I’ to myself, aren’t we?”

  That was an uncomfortable question. “Yes, but—”

  “And we’re doing it against my will. It’s a kind of biochemical rape,” she said. The word rape stopped me, as it always did.

  “Is it really against your will?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I don’t think I’m crazy.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I must have waited too long.

  “But you do,” she said. “You think I’m crazy.”

  “No,” I began. I was thinking of the video Fang had shown me, her dark eyes, her outstretched wrist: I am the immortal light.

  “Please don’t patronize me,” she said. “It was stupid of me to think you would understand. You make a show of wanting to be friends, so it gets confusing. I hope you understand that.”

  “I do want to be friends,” I said, though really I suspected that was my whole problem, the trap of modern parenting: trying to befriend your children. But then, I didn’t know how to be a father. What did I have to offer besides friendship?

  “I’m going to try to get some sleep,” she said, her voice shaky and cold. She took her neck pillow from under her seat, leaned it up against the window of the plane, turned her face into it and closed her eyes.

  “Vera,” I said.

  She said nothing.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She said nothing.

  “Please don’t be mad at me. I don’t know what I think. Honestly, I don’t know.”

  “Could you please turn off the light?” she asked, not opening her eyes.

  “Sure,” I said, and I tapped the button above us to turn off the little reading light, and then there was nothing but dim darkness and my daughter who was angry at me and Mario Batali on the tiny television in front of me demonstrating how to fillet a fish.

  —

  When we landed in Helsinki, it was like none of it had ever happened. Like the whole conversation had been erased. We walked shakily through the airport and boarded our flight to Vilnius, but I knew it wasn’t all right. There had been a test and I had failed it. And we hadn’t even gotten there yet.

  I hadn’t told Vera the story of Grandma Sylvia’s rape birthday, in part because Katya had asked me not to. But even as we got off the plane in Vilnius and wandered the sparkling, efficient little airport, where the air smelled sharp and clean, and where all of the people were dressed so beautifully and formally (I had somehow managed to spill wine/grease/dark stuff all over the front of my polo shirt), I still thought maybe Vilnius had the magic that Vera needed, the magic that was so painfully absent in Dr. Carmichael’s office, the magic that I myself lacked and was unable to give her. In a way, Vilnius seemed like my last chance.

  But a chance at what? To save Vera? To wake her up from an enchanted slumber? It was absurd. Possibly my motivations were more selfish. Vera identified as Russian because her mother was Russian, and she had grown up speaking Russian at home. She identified as Jewish because her mother was Jewish, and she had been raised going to temple, had gotten bat mitzvahed and everything. She did not identify as Polish or Lithuanian, nor did she have any interest in my family’s faded, sentimental Catholic memories. Then again, why should she? I myself hardly identified as Polish or Lithuanian. Even my mother didn’t speak a word of Polish, though her mother had been fluent. We didn’t have a culture to offer her so much as the ghost of a culture. And maybe the Grandma Sylvia story had something to do with that. I worried that at bottom, I just wanted Vera to be interested in me, in my family, to ask me questions and hear my stories and make me feel like not the worst father in the world.

  Still, as we waited for our bags in the Vilnius airport and looked around hopefully for the person from the program who was supposed to meet us, part of me thought that if Vera could find in herself that hardness, that ability to lick the frosting off the knife, maybe she would be better able to play the hand that life had dealt her.

  Vera redid her messy, rat’s-nest bun, and said, “Hot Jewish Johnny Depp at two o’clock.”

  “What?” I asked. I had just spotted her Hello Kitty suitcase tumbling down the chute and onto the baggage carousel.

  “I said the hottest guy I’ve ever seen is walking over here right now. Don’t tell him you’re my father.”

  “Are you Vera and Lucas?” asked Johnny Depp, his voice stunningly American and reassuring in the midst of so much susurrus murmuring. He was wearing a fedora and flashed glaringly white teeth. There was an air of fate about his swagger, as though we had stepped into an absurdist film. I could already feel reality shifting.

  “Yes,” I said, touching Vera’s shoulder. “I’m Lucas. And this is my daughter, Vera.”

  Chapter 2

  Date: 7/7/2014 11:43 PM

  From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

  To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

  Subject: Fairytale on Jew Street

  Dear Fang,

  Already my neurons are like tragic little fireflies trying to find a mate before they die, that is how fucking tired I am, and the apartment I am in is weird and smells like tea bags and plastic that has been microwaved, and I am a pathetic, puffy, bloated creature who has not pooped in, I swear, like three days, and who got rained on, and then went to a weird concert, and then got a little tipsy off free chardonnay in plastic cups, and then had a heart-to-heart with a really old lady who wanted to buy pot, and OH MY GOD FANG it is weird here, it is so so so weird, and yet it is kind of wonderful. I thought this whole trip to Lithuania was going to be a drag because, well, reasons, but I have this feeling in my guts like when a plane takes off or when you have just shoplifted something, only I can’t figure out what I have stolen or what part of me is about to be launched into the air.

  1. The buildings here all look like wedding cakes and the streets look like alleys. The street our apartment is on is called Žydų gatvė, which means “Jew Street,” or, I guess, “Jewish Street.” Because the people of Vilnius are mad straightforward like that. I don’t know how to describe what is both creepy and beautiful about this town, Fang. It’s surrounded by forests and swamps, and in the middle of, like, WILDERNESS there is suddenly this little medieval town with all these quaint buildings. Only it doesn’t feel old and ramshackle but instead very modern and European and civilized, except that amid bicycles and taxicabs there will suddenly be a babushka selling mushrooms out of a red handkerchief. I would not be surprised to meet a Nobel Prize–winning scientist in a café, nor would I be surprised to encounter a gnome. It is just that kind of place.

  2. I’ve decided that the problem with my dad is that he is trying to be likable all the time. Inside his head there is some sinister laugh track going on that either guffaws or boos, and no one can hear it but him and he lets it rule everything he does. God forbid someone not like him. That’s the tragedy he is constantly trying to avoid. I’m going to try an experiment of just being excessively nice to him and praising him for everything he does and see what happens.

  3. The concert we went to was possibl
y the most insane event I have ever attended, and yet it was totally normal. Here is what happened: We had to walk there, getting totally lost, through the rain, without umbrellas. By the time we got to the concert hall, we were soaked and then it was really air-conditioned in there, so sitting through the music was kind of like a specialized torture technique. The music itself was just a pianist and a singer, and the singer was an incredibly short fat little man who was shaped just like a teapot, only he was wearing a tuxedo. He must have had it specially tailored. He was really the most oddly shaped man I have ever seen, and he wore shoes polished to a mirror shine. But Fang, his voice. It was like bronze and chocolate melted together and flung through the air in spangles. It was like something stretched impossibly taut, a piece of silk against the sky, and then something that sags, soft and dead, the belly of a shot fox, the clicking jaw of a dying mink.

  He was singing in Yiddish, but it didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand because I was still almost crying through every single song. So was my dad. It was the first time I have ever seen him cry. He does not cry gracefully. He looked like he had an eye infection. Anyway, the teapot man kept singing song after song and, keep in mind, we had just flown for like twenty hours, I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours or so, we were freezing cold and shivering and wet and this tiny little teapot man is FLAYING us alive. Anyway, during the last song this old man next to me completely loses it and begins sobbing and then he says sorry to me and asks if I can understand the words, and I whisper no, so then he kind of translated for me, just the chorus really, but it was a lullaby about a mother and child whose house has just burned down and the mother is telling her child that they must walk into the fields, but the fields are dark, are an abyss. God, like a horrible interstellar wind, is pulling them into that darkness, intent on erasing them and the whole world. All that is civilization is ash. She is telling her child to be brave. They have no choice but to walk on into nothingness. She says not to worry. She says little birds are singing, attending them as they walk toward death.