Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  “Back then,” I said, “she must have been so angry. After the rape, I can imagine that she may not have wanted to survive. Perhaps she was hoping to die in the forests, fighting. She was young, sixteen or seventeen when they were taken. So by this point she must have been—what? Eighteen?”

  “She was fourteen when they were taken. Wait, what rape?” Herkus asked.

  “Oh,” I said. I explained about the guard at Stutthof, surprised Justine hadn’t already done so. She kept giving me warning glances as I told the story of the SS officer raping her and setting her free, but I wasn’t sure why. I was still reeling from the idea that Grandma Sylvia was only fourteen. I had never pictured her as being fourteen at Stutthof. The way my mother told the story, she had seemed older, in control, the protagonist of the story. It had been because of her great beauty that the guard was overcome. Now it seemed that she was just a child having horrible things done to her. I thought of Chloe, then pushed the memory out of my mind. I thought of Justine’s objection: That Grandma Sylvia could not have been beautiful. That it was something stranger or more sinister than desire that had moved the guard.

  “So probably timing-wise,” Herkus said, “the baby was from the forest husband, not the officer.” I understood now what Herkus was trying to piece together, why Justine had been shooting me warning glances. Herkus’s mother could have been the child of that SS officer. Which would mean that sweet, goofy, beautiful Herkus had a Nazi for a grandfather. A rapist Nazi even.

  “I am sure,” Justine said, “that your mother was the daughter of the forest husband.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, because it was the thing to do, the thing to reassure Herkus. But I imagined that if the baby were the Nazi officer’s child, Grandma Sylvia would have had even more reason to leave the baby with her brother and not stay, even more reason to turn her back and return to the darkness of the forest. There was a compelling psychology to this explanation that I couldn’t entirely let go. And maybe it was just because I was so woozily drunk, but when I looked into Herkus’s face, his eyes seemed uncannily blue, merciless. It seemed like a foregone conclusion, almost, that he was the progeny of that SS officer. It was, I felt, a terrible tragedy, but also an unavoidable one, like the ending of Romeo and Juliet.

  It was closing time at the bar and suddenly we were on our feet and being herded to the door. I realized as we were almost outside that I hadn’t paid for any of my drinks.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Herkus said, patting me on the back. “They are my friends here. On the house.”

  “No,” I said, “but I didn’t just have this one beer—I had—I need to pay.”

  “Next time you treat me!” Herkus said. Herkus had put on a brown leather jacket that was cool and buttery soft when I hugged him. It was raining very lightly outside, but it was still warm.

  “Will I see you again?” I asked, confused, misty-eyed, as though Herkus and Justine were angels who had visited me and might not come again.

  “Of course! Of course!” they said.

  “I will call you,” Justine said.

  And then I was walking down a street by myself. The rain was pleasant. I wandered for what seemed like a long time. When I came to the River Vilnia, I realized I was lost and I should not cross it. I knew for certain that I didn’t live on the other side of the river, so I doubled back the way I had come. I thought of Grandma Sylvia in the forest, killing Nazis. She killed four Nazis. That had always been the story I was told. One of them she stabbed in the neck with a knife while he was taking a shit in the forest.

  At one point, I realized I was outside of Susan’s hotel. I stood in the gutter, swaying, looking up at the darkened windows. I didn’t even know which room was hers. I wished desperately that I could go to her, that I could tell her everything I had learned from Herkus and Justine, that I could put my head on her lap and she would stroke my hair and possibly give me a glass of water and some Advil.

  “Inadvisable,” I said to myself, still swaying, looking up at the dark windows.

  But I realized I now knew where I was and I could find our apartment.

  Once my key was in the lock of our front door, I understood that I had been terrified for hours, unsure if I would ever be able to find my way home. My mind had not registered the fear, but my body was full of it, and I was shaking and unable to breathe normally.

  Inside, I sat on my bed in the dark and looked out at the moon as I listened to my heart pounding like a lonely drum in my ears.

  Chapter 9

  “Off the Record”

  Word doc

  Created by User on 7/17

  I have been thinking more about the possibility of there being no self at all. My mind goes in two directions. One is that if my perception of my self is determined by my brain chemistry, which seems like a duh since the invention of SSRIs and antidepressants, then I am really just a pot of bubbling chemical soup and my consciousness is just a by-product of my being. Which means that consciousness isn’t some magic pebble that only human beings, made in God’s image, possess. Probably all biological beings have varying levels of consciousness and self-consciousness: there is something it is like to be a dolphin or a pig or a dog or even a clam or a bug. The complexity of the self-perceived self is probably just a reflection of the overall complexity of the organism. In other words, maybe even rocks have really simple primitive rock-consciousnesses.

  It is five in the morning. I have not slept and I don’t think I am going to. It is bright as day outside. My father is snoring in the next room and it is so loud it is impossible to believe he is actually making that sound with his body.

  The other direction I head in, is what if we are not single people but, like, genetic collages, so that part of my grandmother goes on in me, or part of my great-great-great-uncle. I mean, genetically that is EXACTLY what happens, but I am just saying: We have this illusion that we are somehow separate from our ancestors as though our stories have nothing to do with their stories and maybe that is an incredibly stupid thing to think. Maybe people who remember “past lives” are actually remembering their ancestors. What is ancestor worship all about? I know it is a thing, but I don’t know much about it.

  After my fight with Judith, I couldn’t sleep and my dad was still out, so I decided to maybe go find him, only I ran into Daniel at a café, so I sat down with him. He had been out running, I guess, because he was wearing a T-shirt and running shorts instead of his usual pirate outfit. He was drinking a vanilla milk shake. I knew as soon as I laid eyes on him, “Oh, this is the night I have sex with you. I was wondering how this all was going to happen, but this is the way it transpires.” Sometimes I know things like that, and everything feels gentle and predestined, and all I have to do is let it happen.

  A lot about Daniel is confusing. For instance, going on a run and then stopping for a vanilla milk shake on your way home. That’s a weird thing to do at ten at night. Also, he is incredibly physically attractive: tan skin, dark hair, a robust, almost phallic-looking nose, and a really wonderful body. And yet he wears the pirate shirts and those khaki Dockers that come all the way up to your belly button. I think the shirts are cut the way they are because currently he is living in Saudi Arabia, or at least that’s what he told me the night we went to the jazz club. So I guess it isn’t his fault, but still. It is even weird that he is living in Saudi Arabia.

  “What do you think about what’s going on in Ukraine?” Daniel asked me. The lights of the café where we sat were bright-hot neon and it reminded me of a carnival against the swimming darkness outside. I sighed. So he was going to make me work for it. I would have to be intelligent in order for him to have sex with me. He knew about my Russianness and now I would have to perform for him. I resented it, even as I knew I would oblige.

  “I think Putin is winging it,” I said, quoting almost exactly from a Times article I had read and just praying like hell he hadn’t read the same one. “Everyone keeps analyzing what he’s doing, but I don’t think an
alysis will help. There has to be an underlying pattern in order for you to analyze something. But Putin is just winging it and when he gets scared he tends to double down.”

  “The CIA released something where they had some analysis of him done in secret and they think he has autism,” Daniel said.

  I shrugged. I didn’t care if Putin had autism. The man was cracked. Maybe autism was part of it, but it barely seemed like useful information to me.

  “Maybe the CIA leaked that because they knew it would irritate Putin to hear they thought he was autistic.”

  Daniel took a sip of his milk shake, raised his eyebrows, nodding, but then when he swallowed, he didn’t say anything. We sat there for a while. It seemed like maybe I was wrong. Maybe he wasn’t even interested in me and he was thinking about how he wanted to get home and go to bed and digest his vanilla milk shake in private. But then he said, “Would you like to come to my place and get a massage? I studied Zhi Ya massage when I lived in China and I haven’t gotten to practice in a little while.”

  Granted, it was an incredibly weird come-on line, combining the oldest and most blatant sexual overture with a weird professional explanation, but at least I felt like I knew what was going on. Sure, I said. Let’s go to your place and you can practice your acupressure thing on me. All the way there he kept chattering on and on about the principles of Zhi Ya and his time spent in China. He had made a vow, a personal commitment, he explained, to live in seven countries and learn seven languages before he turned forty. He had already lived in Chile, China, and now Saudi Arabia, and he claimed he was fluent in Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic as well as English.

  Like my dad and me, he was living in a little rented apartment instead of a regular hotel room, though his was just a studio with a tiny kitchenette in Užupis. He didn’t have a washing machine, he explained, and he was going to have to figure out where a Laundromat was soon. It was clean enough in there, though it smelled like boy. I wondered how old he was. I was thinking that since he had already lived in three countries and learned three languages, he was probably close to thirty, but he didn’t have any wrinkles. He had me lay down on the bed, and I went to take off my shirt, but he said no, he could do it through my clothes. I was almost offended. Who stops a girl from taking her top off? But this was his weird-ass rodeo and I figured he was in charge of making up the rules.

  I was wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts and flip-flops. I kicked off my shoes and lay facedown on his bed, which smelled even more like boy. He climbed on top of me and straddled my hips. “You have really nice calves,” he said. “You can tell a lot about how a woman is going to look naked from her calves.”

  I just made a noise into the covers in order not to have to answer. He was rubbing me now, and it was clear he wasn’t lying about having been professionally trained. He definitely had a system and within ten minutes I was no longer having conscious thoughts and he was making things hurt and things feel good I didn’t even know were there. He spent a long time pinching around in my armpits and then he made a noise like he was really satisfied with himself. “That was a good release,” he told me, as though I had done something.

  When and in what way this was going to turn sexual was entirely a mystery. I could feel he had a hard-on through the thin, almost crunchy fabric of his running shorts. It was rubbing all over my back when he moved to work on my shoulders. “Maybe I should take my top off,” I suggested again.

  There was a silence. He was breathing kind of heavily. “If you want to,” he said. So I reached down and tugged my T-shirt up and over my head, still lying on my tummy, but I left my bra on. “Do you have any lotion?” I asked.

  He scrambled off me and went to scope out the bathroom. I could hear him opening cabinets and then opening his mini-fridge. “I have butter,” he said.

  “Like cocoa butter?”

  “No, like dairy butter.”

  Whatever, it didn’t matter. I didn’t say anything, just shrugged, and he clambered back on top of me and began to rub the cold stick of butter into my skin. It felt good actually. I was sure that now that I was half naked and covered in butter, things would begin to speed up, but they didn’t. He just kept rubbing me for maybe an hour, and then he announced he was done.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “You’re really strange,” I said, directly into his mattress.

  “What?” he said. My voice had been muffled by the covers.

  “I said you are really very strange.”

  He laughed and climbed off me. “How so?”

  “You live in all these countries. You speak all these languages. You are clearly ambitious, but not about anything normal like money or a career. For fun, you go on history tours with a lot of old people by yourself. You give out massages that should turn into sex, but they never do, and then you climb off and you say, ‘How do you feel?’ I’m just saying, you’re strange.” I had rolled onto my side, and he could see my breasts spilling a bit out of the cups of my bra. It was a good bra.

  He laughed again, sitting on the bed beside me, his massive hard-on clearly visible in his running shorts. I felt almost resentful of the size of the hard-on since it seemed increasingly that I wasn’t going to have the chance to actually see it. I had only ever seen three penises before, and none of them had been as big as his looked to be. I was just curious. He rubbed his forehead with his hand for a minute, and then looked up at me, his face suddenly candid. “I guess,” he said, “I’m just a little worried about how old you are. I’ve been avoiding asking.”

  “That’s a good instinct,” I said. “You should keep doing that.”

  He let out a sigh, shaking his head like he’d lost a big bet. “So does that mean you aren’t twenty-one?”

  “I am not twenty-one,” I agreed.

  “But you are eighteen?” he said.

  “Like I said, you are better off not asking,” I said.

  “Oh fucking crap.”

  I nodded in what I hoped was a knowing way. I had gotten the impression that most men wanted to have sex with “barely legal” girls, so I was really hoping this wasn’t a deal breaker. I had never read Lolita, I had never even seen the movie, but I did have a vintage movie poster of it in my room and I got the gist. Lollipops and everything. “I’ll be eighteen in a few months,” I said, in as husky and sexy a voice as I could manage.

  He hid his face in his hands for a minute and I knew he was deciding, and I was positive, absolutely positive he was going to decide in my favor, but when he looked up, I knew. There was pity on his face. And I hated him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re beautiful, but you’re just a baby. You’re a baby!” He held out his hands, gesturing at my body like it was beautiful but also like it made him sad. I was like cake he couldn’t eat. That was what his look said.

  I was so angry it made me start trembling. I grabbed my T-shirt from the floor by his bed and whipped it on.

  “Don’t be mad,” he said.

  “I’m not mad,” I said. “Thank you very much for the massage. You’re talented.” I wanted desperately to get the power back, but I wasn’t sure how. What was just revealed was that I was willing to have sex with him but he wasn’t willing to have sex with me, and it was humiliating. I hadn’t really wanted to have sex with him in the first place! I just wanted to get back at Fang and forget about Judith and have an adventure and see a new penis. But he was weird. What a baby, to order a vanilla milk shake.

  “I’m sorry, Vera,” he said.

  I didn’t want him apologizing to me. “For what?” I asked.

  “For leading you on, I guess.” He shrugged. He no longer had an erection, I noted. I was standing now, in the middle of his room, and he hadn’t stood up with me. Evidently I was supposed to find the door on my own, which was fine, it was just right there, but it was still awful, like I was a servant being dismissed.

  “You didn’t lead me on,” I said. In order to keep my voice level and unemotional, I pictured a
steaming pile of dog shit. It was a trick I had learned in therapy. I could talk about anything in a level voice by now. Really, I wanted to punch him in the face. It suddenly seemed stupid to me that he had such a cartoonishly huge dick. It was probably what made him feel so entitled.

  “All right,” he said, shrugging. “I’m sorry all the same. Can we be friends?”

  “Of course,” I said, because there was no other option. If I told him no, he would have the impression this had been upsetting for me, and I would lose even more power.

  “Good,” he said. “Are you safe getting home?”

  He wasn’t even going to walk me home, I realized. I mean, I hadn’t expected him to, it actually hadn’t occurred to me that he would. But now he wanted verbal acknowledgment that he didn’t need to, when he knew perfectly well that I was seventeen and wandering around in a foreign city at what was now midnight. “Of course,” I said. “I’m perfectly safe.”

  I didn’t even know how to get home because his apartment was in Užupis and I got totally confused. I wandered around for fucking forever. At one point I saw a bar and there were lots of young Russian guys in it and I thought about going in there and fucking one of them, but I was feeling too scared and upset about how lost I was. Finally, I found myself on Žydų gatvė, but I only knew it because I saw the kindergarten where the Great Synagogue used to be.

  I sat down in the grass in the middle of the playground. It was a little muddy from the rain earlier, and I knew my shorts were getting wet, but I didn’t care. I just sat there and let my mind unclench, and it felt like knowledge was being poured into me. It was just this feeling of transmission, of images or facts, flickering by so fast I didn’t know what they were. I felt that God was there with me on that playground. The universe was being explained. I plucked at a lock of my hair that had gotten stuck in my mouth as I was walking. The moon was small and high above me. I wish I could describe it without using language. If anything, what I was receiving were images, thousands upon thousands of images, flickering through me, and each one was a code for some tremendous truth.