“Okay, it’s enough,” Magdalena would say, but Barry was just getting started.
“Did you ever go hunting for bones in the forest? You ever go off to take a piss in the forest and poke your cunny on a Jew bone sticking out of the ground?”
“No, I never did this.”
And it would go on like that until Barry got tired and said, “But cheer up kiddo. Nobody knew a thing about anything, did they?”
But the truth was, she did know some things about those places in the forest.
Sometimes after school Lina and Magdalena would take the bus to Lina’s grandmother’s house. Magdalena didn’t have any grandmothers, and knowing this, and because she was grateful to Magdalena’s mother for taking Lina to live with them, Lina’s grandmother let Magdalena call her Baba like Lina did, and she stitched both of them tiny dolls that she turned inside out to hide the seams.
Lina’s grandmother lived just outside the city in an old wooden house painted blue. She didn’t like to go out because she was Polish and she didn’t want people to hear her accent, so Lina and Magdalena did her shopping, going to the butcher’s and the vegetable market and the pharmacy all by themselves, almost too shy to say what they wanted and then running home with their bags of cabbages and bread and medicines as if they’d stolen them.
Lina always took care of the money, because she was older and it was her grandmother, but Magdalena held on to the list that Baba had written out for them in her old-fashioned handwriting with the spelling all wrong, because Magdalena was the better reader. And when they came home, poppy seed cakes would be warm on the oven and Baba would be stitching yarn onto the heads of the dolls, yellow for Lina and brown for Magdalena.
Baba’s skin hung like tissue paper over her bones, and if it hadn’t been for her white gold hair anchoring it to her skull it would have slipped off a long time ago. There were hollows under her ears and in her collarbones and her hair was so thin she could hold it all in a child’s barrette. From time to time Baba patted her hair and brushed the fine bits back behind her ears in a way that showed that Baba had once been so beautiful that Lina’s grandfather had taken a great risk during the war and married her, to save her from being sent away.
But Baba’s hands were like the hands of another person. The older and tinier Baba got, the bigger her hands became. They looked to Magdalena like pieces of driftwood that had been soaked and rounded and sanded and smoothed by the sea for hundreds of years.
Baba had been a seamstress, and though her hands looked like blocks of wood they could do anything. If Lina or Magdalena had brought a bit of shiny cloth or a piece of lace with them, Baba would turn it into a dress or a long winter coat for their dolls, with cuffs that turned up on the ends of the sleeves and bits of thread knotted to look like buttons.
Magdalena liked to watch Lina’s grandmother work, because when she used the old sewing machine she pushed up her sleeves and Magdalena would get to see the paintings on her skin. Baba had letters on her face and hands and in the gap between her stockings and her skirt like other people, but on her arms the words were written in another kind of alphabet, with letters that looked like tiny paintings, each one shaped almost like so many things but not exactly like anything, and Magdalena would lean in close, pretending she was watching Baba as she finished off a tiny hem, trying to understand what they said.
Baba’s skin was so thin and she was so covered in writing that from far away she looked blue. Most of the words on her face and neck must have been Polish because they were much harder to stack one sound on top of another than the words they learned in school, or the words on Magdalena’s teacher’s face or Lina’s or anyone else’s. Sometimes Baba would catch Magdalena looking at her, trying to make sense of the line of letters that started at her ear and ran all the way down to the collar of her dress.
“Don’t move your lips like this,” Baba would say, and Magdalena would try as hard as she could to keep all the sounds in her head without saying anything. But she always lost the first part by the time she got to the end, and without meaning to she’d be back to shaping the letters with her lips. “Stop this,” Baba would say again, more sharply. “Someone will see.”
One day when they went to visit Lina’s grandmother, Ruta was there. Baba stood in front of the door and said to them, “Please, you must not come in today,” but they could see Ruta behind her wrapped in a blanket. Ruta started calling for Lina, and Lina ducked under her grandmother’s arms. But Ruta was sick and her hands weren’t steady. Baba tried to get Ruta to sit down, but she didn’t want to. Ruta ripped Baba’s dress at the shoulder and Magdalena saw that all across Baba’s body there were words, some of them in the language of paintings, written over and across each other as if they were meant for a person with twice as much skin. Ruta’s face had changed, there was something slack in her mouth and as soon as Lina saw it she pulled away. Ruta tried to make Lina come back to her, but Lina didn’t want to. There were two red points at the tops of Ruta’s cheeks. When Baba tried again to make her sit down, Ruta slapped her. Suddenly Lina was crying, and it was as if her crying had no beginning, she started right in the middle with big sobs. Ruta yelled at her to stop it, but Lina only cried louder. It was a screaming, hysterical cry like Magdalena had never heard, and Ruta put her hands over her ears and ran toward the door. She stumbled and got up again, only taking her hands off her ears to take Baba’s purse off of the hook by the door, and then she left.
As soon as Ruta was gone Lina stopped screaming. She stood for a moment, then she ran after her mother. Baba called to her, but Lina was already halfway down the street, running after Ruta who was just then disappearing around the corner with Baba’s purse dangling from its broken strap.
Baba started down the steps after them, but she nearly lost her balance, and it was only Magdalena being there that kept her from falling. Baba wanted to stay right there on the steps, but Magdalena led her back inside to the sofa. Baba’s big hands were tented over her face as if she were reading them, and she sat there shaking her head slowly, not saying anything.
So Magdalena did what she thought her mother would have done. She shut the door. She pulled the torn sleeve back over Baba’s shoulder as best she could. She patted Baba’s hair and brought a wet rag from the kitchen for the place on her cheek where Ruta had hit her. Then, because she didn’t know what else to do, she started singing to Baba as if she were a little child, and by the time she ran out of words to the songs she knew it was getting dark. Baba was still looking at the palms of her hands, and so in the last light Magdalena read to her what was written there, spreading Baba’s hand on top of her own and tracing the letters like a gypsy telling the future, except that when she put the sounds together, what came out was all in the past, and she sang it to Baba like the continuation of a lullaby.
In the forest past the station Paneriai they stop the train. First Lidya Kamiemiecki, Jakob and Jacha Gornowski, Solomon Marmorsztejn and his mother Gita, Lejba Byk and Ester Kowarska. Malka who never waited. Smuel, Boris and Ilja. Varvaza brought the children with her. Anna Litvinova and the baby Misha. Irina Kac and the man on the train. Josef Lewin’s fiancée Rivka. Mira and Luba Erlich. Jakub, Mama and Anucia at once. Professor Ginzbergas who wore his shirts one for each day. Chana Bir, then Mr. Izakov, the man who sells buttons . . .
“Where is Anucia?” Baba asked, and Magdalena showed her. “And Misha?” There on her thumb. “Jakub and my mother?” There and there.
Then Baba said, “You have to pretend you don’t see such things. If you tell like this again they will take me away.”
Right before Baba died she lost her caution and asked Ruta to bury her in the old Jewish cemetery, where the gravestones were covered with the same kinds of letters that Baba was. Ruta didn’t have the heart to tell her that the cemetery had been dug up years ago when the Russians built the Sports Palace. Magdalena didn’t know about any of it at the time, because Lina and Ruta had moved away to Kaunas and it was while they were living
there that Baba died. It was only when they came back to Vilnius that Magdalena heard, and only then because Ruta came to their door drunk one night and told Magdalena’s mother everything, how Baba’s whole family had been killed in a pit in the forest, and how Baba would have been killed too if it hadn’t been for an old man, a sage of the community who had always frightened the children by reading from books that weren’t there. He looked to where Baba stood with the others beside the train tracks and told her she would run, and she did. She ran through the forest until she was found by Ruta’s father, who it seemed very likely had been doing some of the killing. He was a peasant man who lived nearby and he saved her because of her beautiful blonde hair. He hid her for a time in his chicken coop and then when the war was nearly over he married her.
Magdalena’s mother had been the one to tell Ruta the night that Lina died. “If I had known,” Ruta kept saying over and over on the phone, never finishing the sentence. Magdalena’s mother didn’t understand what she meant, but Magdalena did. How could Lina’s mother have looked at her daughter each day, fed her and taken her to school and sometimes slapped her and left for days without saying why, bought her dresses and held her hand across streets, if she had known that Lina would be gone at twenty-one?
With Dov Kitrosser it was the same. He’d pressed his wet face into Magdalena’s shoulder and said, “I never would have left her alone if I had known.” And when the policewoman called to explain the results of the inquest, she’d said, “We believe Ms. Valentukaitė ingested the seeds without knowing their toxicity.”
But Magdalena had known. If she’d locked Lina in the bathroom the moment she shaved away the last bits of her hair and saw the words cause of death underneath, if she’d made up some lie to keep her there long enough to look up ingesting and acute, to make sure respiratory failure meant what she thought it did and then—with Lina probably threatening to pour her lotions down the drain if Magdalena didn’t unlock the door—if she’d flipped back to the A’s in her high school English dictionary and seen that apricots were a fruit and that was Dov’s specialty—well, everything might have been different. Lina and Dov might at that moment be together sampling a shipment of pineapples grown without any skins. Or things with Dov might have ended as they usually did and Lina would be back in their flat in London, sitting in front of the open fridge, cooling her feet in the vegetable bin.
It had been a mistake not to believe what it said on Lina’s skin, and she didn’t want to make that mistake again. So for a little while after Neil called to tell her about the camera and Magdalena realized why Barry happened to bang open the bathroom door just when he did, she thought about taking Neil’s advice and reporting Barry to the police. Not for what he’d put in the cabinet—somehow that didn’t seem right. After she cut the lock on the medicine cabinet with Barry’s hedge clippers she pulled the camera out of the wall and held it up in front of Barry, dangling wires. But Barry just laughed and wagged the finger that was still wrapped in cotton from where he’d cut himself trying to grab the razor from Magdalena, saying, “Guess you’re not in much of a position to complain.” And it was true. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she was glad Barry had come in when he did.
It was the other things she wondered about. Barry had guilt written all over him, and it seemed that someone ought to know. He’d been a young man when he did what he did, and, like the Lithuanian peasants drunk on country brandy and the unfamiliar power to remove whole families from the history of the world, he may have believed that what he did was necessary or found a way to close his mind to the worst of it. But if he had an explanation, it wasn’t written down. All that Magdalena saw on Barry’s skin were facts and dates.
Still, for a while after the day Magdalena told Barry about the words, she was careful not to say anything more. When Barry yelled to her from the living room one afternoon because somebody had spilled something on his keyboard, calling her Two Hundred Twenty Thousand instead of by name, Magdalena answered. But when he made her take the book with the sticky notes off the shelf and told her to start reading the chapter on Lithuania, marked Magdalena, she told him, “You are some sick fuck, you know that, Barry?”
“Read,” he said.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“It’s for your own good. You should know these things.”
“No,” Magdalena said.
“Then get out. Pack your bags,” Barry said.
Magdalena put on her glasses and then, instead of looking down at the book, she looked at him, pretending to stumble a bit over the names, so he would know she was reading.
“Mount Darwin, 2 September 1975. Chained the feet of Erasmus Chiutsi made it look like he hung himself,” she said.
“What?” Barry said.
“Burned and beat his brother Amos,” she said. “Number 5 Rest Camp, Chilimanzi, 25 September 1975. Beat Mariya Mandiuraya with a stick, set dogs at her breasts. Covered Grace Mandirova’s head with a white cloth poured water on her face six times gave her tablets and cotton wool.”
“Get out,” Barry said. “What the fuck is this? Get out.”
He knocked her glasses off, but Magdalena picked them up again and held them to her face—not because she needed them; she’d known it all by heart for months.
“Pokwe Rest Camp, 28 September 1975. Told Mushandi Kurwara the children he has will be the last ones. A bag with wires coming out. Three shocks. Chiweshe Protected Village No. 12, 2 August 1975—”
“I’m going to kill you,” Barry said.
After that there was a lot of shouting. Barry chased her out of the house and threw her things after her. The new girl started screaming; there was the sound of police sirens and Lina’s camera crashing onto the pavement. Barry ran out after Magdalena with a piece of pipe from the basement, and to stop him from using it Magdalena told him what he’d wanted to know, which was his future. Little words, written small across his eyelids: blood cancer, metastatic. He set the pipe down on the pavement, where it rolled a little until Magdalena stopped it with her foot. When she looked at him again Barry had slumped like an old man down onto the curb. She put the pipe in the bushes where the police wouldn’t see it, and told the new girl to be quiet. Beginning with the things that Barry had thrown out onto the street, Magdalena started packing her bag.
“ ‘Saves the life of Magdalena Bikauskaitė in the bathtub,’ you have this written too,” she told Barry as she left. But it was a lie, it didn’t say that on him anywhere, and Barry just sat, not looking up.
She’d been walking for a long time. The sidewalks in Paris were uneven; her arms felt like they were tearing out of her shoulders from the effort of pulling the suitcase while trying to keep it balanced on its one wheel, and she still hadn’t found the street that would take her to the Montparnasse station. Two women passed by, their faces lined with French words that might have meant anything. A man in a doorway smoked a pipe with his sleeves rolled up; she could see columns of text running down his arms.
Magdalena was beginning to have serious doubts about what she was doing, and she was starting to think she was really crazy for not getting on the bus to Vilnius. The street she was on wasn’t on the map she’d gotten at the station and she was trying to read the name on the street sign at the next corner and at the same time thinking that maybe she ought to go back to the station and ask please if it were possible to buy back her canceled ticket—when she nearly bumped into a man who was standing still in the middle of the sidewalk.
He was bending down to look in the window of a shop. Magdalena stepped off the curb to go around him and lost her grip on the handle of Lina’s suitcase, which rolled over into the street. The man turned to help her and Magdalena hurried to take off her glasses, because it seemed that out of all the millions of people in Paris, this man was also Lithuanian; the meaning of a string of words in her own language jumped from the man’s face into Magdalena’s head before she even knew she was reading them.
She had gotten out of t
he habit a long time ago of reading out loud the words she saw, but the particular phrase on the man’s skin was so familiar that she heard her own voice saying it before she could help herself. “Akys nemato, širdies nesopa.” It was something Magdalena’s mother said all the time. If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t hurt. Something like that. It was one of Magdalena’s mother’s favorite expressions. She said it when she bought a bottle of high-quality shampoo, taking it off the shelf with a laugh, not looking at the price. She said it, quietly, to Magdalena when they passed a young woman swaying over a bottle on an empty street, and if a friend’s thieving ex-husband drove past in a new car, Magdalena’s mother would narrow her eyes and say it as loudly as she liked. It was an old-fashioned saying, so well used it hardly meant anything, and the man on the street looked at Magdalena strangely. She was about to hurry past before he could ask her why she’d said something like that out of nowhere in a language she couldn’t possibly have known he’d understand, but as it turned out she didn’t have to explain, because it seemed he hadn’t understood her after all.
“I’m sorry,” the man said in English, “I don’t speak—”
Magdalena put her glasses back on, just for a moment, and she saw that the man couldn’t be from Lithuania; all the other words on him were English. She scanned his face quickly. There were details of his retirement accounts and a life insurance policy: She could see its payout date printed below his ear. At the corner of the man’s eye were descriptions of things from his childhood: a matchstick castle, a secret, a time the gate of the chicken coop was not shut tight. On his jaw a marriage, mentioned briefly. Magdalena didn’t want to be caught looking too closely, so she took her glasses off.
The man was bending over her suitcase. “I’m afraid you’ve lost a wheel,” he said. He lifted it back onto the sidewalk, and she had to explain that it wasn’t his fault, the wheel had been lost a long time ago and that suitcase was always flipping over.
Indelible Page 17