by Rufi Thorpe
Daniel didn’t matter. Judith didn’t matter. My father didn’t matter. Fang didn’t matter.
Your mother birthed you through her hips, a voice said in my mind. I pictured myself sliding out of Mama, and her sliding out of her mama, and her sliding out of her mama, all the way back. We were like matryoshka nesting dolls. We were thousands of years old.
It was funny, I thought, the way women let men think they ruled the world. That was the bargain they made: You take the world, and we’ll take life and death. Sure, fight wars. Make up countries. Call them whatever you want. Make up laws. It all sounds good.
But that was only to distract them so that they wouldn’t try to participate in the women’s work, which was the pulling of souls out from the darkness and the projection of light into the future. Women were making time, they were weaving it in their wombs by building consciousnesses to experience it. Let the men have their tanks. Let them have their statues. Let Putin ride his horse shirtless.
We would be here all along, quietly guiding the light out of the dark.
IT TOOK SEVERAL CUPS OF COFFEE and four Tylenol before I could even be convinced to shower and get ready for our trip to the castle at Trakai. It was a long bus ride out to the castle and Judith was there, but both Susan and Daniel were conspicuously absent. Vera was humming with energy. She was chattering about the forest and what a magical place it seemed like. Primordial was the word she used. It was true; the country cottages, dachas, were like something from a fairy tale, and as we passed open meadows there would often be a fat old woman wearing a head scarf stooping to pick mushrooms or flowers. I was close enough to Vera that I noticed her teeth were yellow and visibly coated in plaque.
“Jesus, Vera! When was the last time you brushed your teeth?” I said. The rest of her was perfectly coiffed, her makeup precision perfect. It was unsettling.
“God,” she said, elbowing me. “Nosy!”
“Seriously,” I said. “Buy some gum or something just to get the top layer off.”
The castle was not nearly as impressive as a castle ought to be. The grounds were beautiful, though, a large lake with swans. An inordinate number of weddings seemed to be taking place. Brides were posing for photos everywhere you looked. Darius took us around the castle, pointing out what was of interest, explaining that this was wedding season and that many couples had been waiting for summer so that they could get married at Trakai. The castle itself was stone to about the first story and then brick going all the way up after that. It made the building look like one of those flip-books where you can put the legs of an elephant on the body of a deer.
“The castle needed renovations,” Darius explained, “and of course the Soviets would never have allowed us to build a fortress, a castle, thinking it would be part of a rebellion. Well! So the Lithuanian officials came up with a scheme to rebuild the castle anyway, and they told the Soviets they needed building materials to build new schools and then they used the bricks that were sent to rebuild the castle. Too bad for the schoolchildren, but oh well!”
Vera was in such high spirits that she kept turning cartwheels as we wandered along the green lawn. I noticed that Kenneth was watching her, sneering, as though her cartwheels were a direct rebuke or rejection of him. After Darius released us to explore, I just wanted to get away from the group. I wasn’t interested in the castle. I was getting bored of history, to be honest. “Let’s go get some coffee or something,” I said, and steered us to a small café on the lake.
We ordered coffee and fried dough. Dragonflies buzzed along the edge of the water and something about the expansiveness of the space or the properties of the lake muted all sound. Even though there were many other people around, we could only hear their conversations or laughter as a hush. I thought about Herkus. I was going to have to tell Vera about what had really happened to Grandma Sylvia. I had decided that much already.
“Vera,” I asked, “did you write a paper about rape for English class?”
She closed her eyes for a long slow blink, then opened them, said, “I had forgotten I did. It feels like that was so long ago. It was in another life.”
“Well. At the time, you were upset about it. And your mother told me about it.”
“God, Mama, way to be a busybody,” she said.
“And she asked me not to tell you something, a thing that I think is important, and that I feel like you have a right to know because it’s part of your lineage.” I was the only one eating the fried dough, and I tried to lick the powdered sugar off my fingers before telling her the story, the real story, of how Grandma Sylvia escaped.
Vera listened with a stagy but quiet stoicism. Her manner was affected in a way that reminded me of my mother, as though she were playacting hearing the story.
“This doesn’t surprise me,” she said, when I was done. “How else is a woman supposed to escape with her life?”
I thought this was an odd reaction.
“I mean, really,” Vera said. “The story before didn’t make any sense. He just set her free because she was pretty? Like freeing a butterfly out of doors that has accidentally gotten in your house? It didn’t add up.”
I nodded. It was true that the edited story I had told her was psychologically problematic, presenting the SS officer as some motive-less do-gooder, but I thought the issue of combining rape and freedom was just as hard to fathom.
“Oh, I don’t think so at all!” Vera said. “Rape is really like the perfect act to encapsulate what he wanted to say to her: Fuck you for being so beautiful and forcing me to want you. Fuck you for not being something I can just kill. Fuck you for making me look, for making me see.”
It was an interesting point. I didn’t want to bring up the other hypothesis, the one that Justine had introduced into my mind, that the guard had been moved not by Grandma Sylvia’s beauty but by pity. There was something terrible about pity, something dirty and terrifying about it, that I did not want to discuss or bring to Vera’s attention. Instead, I asked a question.
“Why did you write that term paper, Vera?” I asked her. “Why were you even thinking about rape? I mean, what was the assignment?”
“Oh, rape wasn’t the assignment,” Vera said. “That was part of why she failed me. I have no idea what the assignment was supposed to be, but I figured, like, ugh, it’s just a hoop to jump through, you know? They want you to do a certain amount of work and show you know how to format a bibliography, but then she got almost like personally offended that I hadn’t done the assignment.”
I nodded. Sometimes when I tried to picture Vera interacting with the world, the real, official, boring world, I got a nervous, almost giggly feeling and it made me want to cover my eyes with my hands. God only knew what that teacher made of her.
“But I guess it was just a way for me to think through what happened to me at the mental hospital.”
I reached across the table for her hand. “What happened at the mental hospital?”
“Oh, chill—no!” she said. “I wasn’t raped. I mean, like, sexually. But there are things you can do in this world that make other people decide you don’t have a right to your will anymore. I didn’t have a right to choose when I wanted to eat, when I wanted to sleep. I didn’t have a right to think my thoughts. I didn’t have a right to feel my emotions. It was the most complete form of rape imaginable. I didn’t want to take that medication, but they would make me. If I tried to resist, they would hold me down and inject it into me with needles.”
“So talking about rape was your way of talking about all that?”
Vera nodded. “But I mean, I don’t really believe that—that there is no such thing as consent. Obviously there is. It’s just in a different class of being, than, like, trees and rocks and stuff. I mean, consent is, like, fairly imaginary.”
“What?”
“Consent is just a nice idea. Like freedom or liberty. Or justice. It has reality and importance as an idea. And we should strive to make our real lives mirror those invisible
ideals. But at the same time, you know, it’s not real like gravity. If consent were real the same way gravity is real, it wouldn’t be possible to rape anybody. Or maybe you could, but it would be much harder, I think.”
While what she was saying was uncomfortable, and could possibly be construed as wildly offensive, it was still intriguing. That was the thing about Vera. She was always coming at things from an unexpected angle. “Listen,” I said, “I just can’t shake this feeling that Herkus’s mother was the product of that rape. With the SS officer.” I told Vera what I had pieced together with Herkus and Justine the night before.
“But you don’t know for sure,” she pointed out. “And what does it matter anyway? Might as well let him believe his mother was the child of the forest husband.”
“But it just makes too much psychological sense of why she would leave the baby, why she wouldn’t want to raise it herself.” I was also aware that I was upset about something I would never have said to Vera, which was that I was upset that the Nazi had been evolutionarily rewarded for raping Grandma Sylvia. He had snuck his way into our chain of being. His genes were threatening sweet Herkus from the inside. It was an insane idea, I knew this.
“Maybe, and maybe that’s why she left the baby,” Vera said, “but there’s no way of knowing for sure.”
Still, it occurred to me that there was a way of knowing for sure. I knew the date of Grandma Sylvia’s rape birthday, had known it my whole life, had eaten cake with her on that day when I was a child. All I would need to piece it together was some idea of when Herkus’s mother had been taken to the farm, what her birth date might be. If they were nine months apart, then I would know.
“Yeah,” I said, “but doesn’t that just seem like too much of a coincidence? She gets raped, has a baby, but the rapist isn’t the father?”
Vera shrugged. “It’s not as easy to get pregnant as all that. You’re only fertile, like, three days a month.”
But it was as easy as all that. I thought of my own mother and father, who’d had sex only the one time. I thought of myself and Katya. Sometimes it was incredibly easy to get pregnant. Sometimes the stars aligned just so. Still, statistically speaking, Vera had a point.
“Did you know that chimpanzee males rape females all the time?” she said.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Fang and I watched a documentary. I put it in my English paper. And the male chimps kill the babies of their rivals so that the females will be fertile again quicker. So to deal with that, the female chimps mate with as many males as they can so that there will be confusion over who the father is.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
She shrugged. “They commit genocide, too. Just like us.”
She looked so grown up these days, with her clear skin and new clothes. But I was worried about her. I was worried about what being in the mental hospital had done to her. What it had cost her when none of us believed her.
“You know, Vera,” I said, “all your, you know, ‘delusions’ were really just metaphors taken a little too far, but they were good metaphors. The blue light on Fang, the rotting cheerleaders—all of that was insightful. There is way more to life than being cool in Rancho Cucamonga. And we really are all going to die someday. But if you focus on that, it will make you go crazy.”
“So you’re saying don’t think about it?” Her disdain was quick and cutting.
“No,” I said, “I’m saying—I don’t know what I’m saying. Just: It’s part of our obligation to go on living and wanting and becoming. I used to not understand this—how could Grandma Sylvia, after all that, how could she move to goddamn California and become a housewife, of all things! How could she possibly do it? But that’s what you do. That’s the heroic thing to do: To choose to be happy. To take your kids to Disneyland. To drive your station wagon through the orange groves and let the past go.”
“I’m sorry, Papa,” Vera said, “but I just think that is really very stupid.”
I thought maybe she was right. Maybe it was stupid. But possibly because I had eaten so much fried dough or else because there was a sleepy magic to Trakai, I didn’t worry too much about whether I was right or wrong. There was no way, sitting there at that lake, looking at my daughter, to second-guess myself. I could only think the things I thought, just as the dragonflies could only be dragonflies buzzing. I shrugged. “I’m just saying, Vera, now that you’re not insane, what are you gonna do with your life? Are you gonna go to college?”
“Don’t even talk to me about college,” she said, her voice bitter like the words tasted of pennies. “Nowhere good will take me now.”
It was true that the public universities of California had become almost impossible to get into in the last decade. In order to be accepted as a freshman you had to have perfect grades, extracurriculars, the whole nine yards. Even B students had to spend a few years at a junior college before transferring in. And her grades this past year—they would be a lot to explain. “You could look at private schools,” I said. “Or go out of state.”
“With what money?”
“I could help with money. I’m sure my mother would help. We could take out loans. We’d patch it together.”
Vera just stared at me. I stared back at her.
“You would do that?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, amazed she didn’t already know.
—
I snuck out that afternoon to buy Vera an amber necklace. I wanted nothing more than to take a nap, but we only had four days of the trip left, and I was worried I wouldn’t have another chance. I told Vera and Judith I was picking up some groceries, and I went out to find the jewelry store Vera had described on Gedimino prospektas, a long, broad street where vendors laid out wares on tables or on blankets on the ground: a multitude of amber baubles, tiny lacquered wooden boxes, hand-carved wooden kitchen implements, fur hats, Soviet trinkets, old war medals, painted canvases hawked by middle-aged artists absolutely reeking of alcohol and cigarettes. Not the fresh smell of alcohol spilled but the citrusy, rotting smell of alcohol that cannot be processed by the liver, now seeping out of the pores as some new poison. Ink, I thought, and wondered if I smelled like that too. I needed to get the drinking under control. I was always intending to get the drinking under control, but I never actually did. It was another thing that made me feel helpless, the lack of progress I made on my various schemes to better myself. My body was just one more dissertation I wasn’t going to finish.
I couldn’t find the shop Vera mentioned, but I found a shop, and I was assured by the high prices that the amber was real. I was not normally very good at picking out jewelry. It wasn’t that I didn’t like jewelry or couldn’t tell when it was pretty, but I knew there was a whole other fashion part of it that I didn’t have a handle on. But with the amber, I was less nervous. It was just like trying to pick a pretty shell at the seashore or a pretty rock at the lake.
I didn’t like the pendants, just one big gob of amber on a chain, and I finally settled on what I thought was the prettiest thing in the store: a necklace of perfectly polished, large, round amber beads that ranged from the lightest, palest honey all the way to the darkest, pitchy red-black, perfectly arranged like a rainbow. I could picture it on Vera’s neck. I knew it was the right one, and I bought it, practically in a haze of exhaustion. I am sure the woman who ran the shop thought I was completely insane; I was barely able to count my money to pay for the thing. Sadly, I needed a beer. I knew having a beer would cure me, but I was unwilling to have one and admit what was wrong with me.
When I got back to the apartment, having bought a useless hodgepodge of groceries as cover, there was a note on the table in Judith’s spidery hand:
Your daughter is acting as my chaperone on a night out. I am unable to work the locking mechanism on my door and so I need her in order to enter and exit my apartment. She has an excellent sense of direction! Don’t wait up.
XOXO, Judith
PS: I am ki
dding, we will be home early. I am an old woman.
I didn’t even need to think about it. I opened the freezer, poured a shot of vodka, chased it with a pickle, brushed my teeth, put on fresh clothes, and set out for Susan’s hotel.
—
It was luck that she was there. I brought her a bag of little black plums I had bought as part of my cover-story groceries. My mother had always said never to show up to a woman’s house without bringing a gift. I held out the plums, not knowing what to say, just standing there at her door. I wanted her so badly I didn’t even know how to flirt or coerce or beg. I could only hold out the plums and hope she knew what I meant, why I was there, what I needed. It wasn’t just sex I needed, either. It was something I didn’t have a name for.
She was wearing an oversize man’s shirt and pajama pants. “I was writing,” she said. “Sorry I skipped out on Trakai without telling you.” Her hair was wet from the shower. I wanted to lick her ears. I wanted to bite her hair. She took the plums and motioned me inside. “Sit,” she said, and gestured at the bed.
I sat. It was late afternoon, almost evening, but the sun was still bright outside and her curtains were pulled against it so that her room was dim in that very particular way that a sickroom is dim. She sat beside me and reached into the bag of plums, plucked one for herself, then offered the bag to me. I reached inside, my hand awkward and trembly in the plastic, and took one of the little fruits. When I bit into it, juice ran down my chin. The skin was puckeringly sour and the flesh disgustingly sweet. I almost choked on my own saliva. Susan made no game of eating her plum suggestively, but she didn’t have to. It was a frankly, undeniably erotic activity, eating those plums on her bed.