But then the private wandered off and did not return. They waited until evening to search for him, the moon above casting a phantom glow over the trees. Each cracking branch beneath their feet was a premonition. Father held his breath like a glass he feared breaking.
They found the private on the outskirts of the forest, spread eagle and face down. His hair was matted. When Father touched the back of the private’s neck, his fingers came away freckled with blood. The bullet, wherever it had come from, had killed him instantly. The lieutenant, when he saw the carnage, turned away and heaved up air. Father steeled his own stomach and rolled the private over. His face was unmarked; in the light his features had a guileless calm. “What have you done?” the leaves murmured. But what had they done? Who was this man, now dead twice over? They agreed to return for him the next morning, but when they came back the body was gone.
Three weeks before her twenty-fourth birthday Maemi married her last sweetheart. He was a stern but thoughtful man, an accomplished physics professor who spent hours locked up in his office, parsing through the riddles of the universe. She had loved men with their heads in the sky before, but never one with a purpose for being there. He was a man unlike any she had ever known, which allowed her to believe he could be like her father. He had recently been declared an official casualty of the old war.
They settled in Kawagoe, not far from her husband’s school in Tokyo. He did not like her to work, so she had given up on her research, remaining at home to cook meals and otherwise wait out the day. Sometimes she went to Kitain Temple and walked among the hundreds of Gohyaku Rakan, the tiny statues of Buddhist disciples packed together like stone sardines, their faces sanded down from years of exposure so they all seemed to be sleeping. Sometimes she bent down to whisper secrets in their ears. She would be dutiful, she told them, and that would bring her closer to love.
Her husband handled her body like it was an equation, delicate and decipherable. Sometimes late in the night, after they had made love and her husband had gone to sleep, Maemi would lie awake and imagine the molecules of the world pinging around her, cells binding up and breaking apart, the living and the dead existing beside one another if only for a short while.
By the twenty-ninth year in the jungle Father was the only one who remained at the post. Not long after the death of the private, the lieutenant abandoned camp during the night. But Father’s existence continued as it had before: scavenging for food, sleeping out beneath the stars, and awaiting word from the emperor. He did not consider himself lonely. It had been long enough for the isolation to simply become a life.
He allowed himself to dream again. He saw himself out one morning on the perimeter of the fields, performing his routine surveillance, when a figure approached him. It was a young man, shaggy haired and dressed in strange loose clothing, not more than thirty years old. He held his hands up, a reporter’s camera strapped over his chest, and asked for his name. When Father gave it, the young man smiled and said, “I’ve been looking for you.” He told him that the war had ended long ago. He pleaded with him to come home. But Father refused. “I am awaiting orders,” he said.
The young man kept returning to him night after night, always saying the same thing. The war is over. We did not win. Finally he came with a delegate from the emperor’s service. After Father was relieved of his duty and pardoned for any crimes committed while believing himself at war, he presented the delegate with his rifle. Then he dropped to his knees and wept until his body gave out beneath him. It was a dream so real and yet so curious, so filled with a foreign longing, it was as if someone else had given it to him.
Maemi did not remember her old childhood love right away when she answered the door. They had both grown older, of course, but it was more than that. His body was long and knobby as a green bean. His curiosity had hardened into philosophy. The child at her hip squirmed so at first Maemi did not hear what he was saying. Something about an island. Her father living there. He would be returning home soon. There would be a parade.
An island. Her father. Living. A shudder ran through her and though her body heaved with tears she did not shed them, not until later while her daughter was out playing in the backyard and she wept over the stove, salting the soup with her tears. That night, as her husband slept beside her, Maemi drifted off with a single image forming in her mind, the dream that all her other dreams had been guiding her toward: Father in an open-top car, sitting in the back with a representative of the emperor. He’d been given sunglasses and a new suit to wear, which itched at his elbows and knees. His hair had been cut back to the military cropping of his youth. Bits of gray peppered his chin hairs.
As they began the long drive down the avenue and the crowds of cheering people came into view on either side, he turned his head upward to the silver cyclopean buildings he still had not gotten used to living beneath. It was a strange world now, far stranger than the one he had left, and frightening too. So much noisier and faster and careless. And yet Father would face it all for what was waiting for him at the end of this journey: his daughter and grandchild. He would know them in an instant. He would take them both in his arms and tell them he was sorry that he had missed so much. He would kiss the tops of their foreheads, run his fingers through the soft strands of their hair. The approach was slow but it did not matter. For now he was content with the knowing that comes before being known.
Laika
Babette came to the home the same year we got a television. They arrived three days apart, both dropped unceremoniously at the front door. Madame Durance never bothered much with new girls but was very put out by the lack of paperwork for the strange machine. “We need to keep track of these things,” she said, nudging the box with her sensible shoe. “What if it makes us all sick?” Hollis, the orderly, had it hooked up within an hour. It was 1957, the year Khrushchev looked up to a star-drunk sky and found a new world to conquer. We were all hankering for the unknown, though we knew that could be harder to find in Nebraska.
Babette, however, was left to dawdle in the hall, regarding her new surroundings with a ginger eye. She had a stooped posture that made her appear smaller than she was; the sack dress she wore was so thin it seemed in danger of dissolving with each new breath. Her hair fell in Grimm-like golden ringlets down her back, anointing her in a light that seemed both suspect and enviable. She could as easily have come from Hollywood as Omaha.
“Babette,” Madame Durance repeated when she asked who she was. I could see her mulling it over, the name that sounded at once Biblical and lewd. “You’ll bunk with her,” she said, nodding toward me. All the new ones did.
It was an unspoken rule that the girls were not to ask each other what brought them to Durance Home. It was simple enough to guess some of their troubles, at least the ones with the bellies already in orbit, dropped off by the family priest. They’d grow big, disappear for a day or two, then return with bodies pressed flat like they’d been through a juicer. Nothing left but tears. The rest were dragged in by their mothers. I was brought by my brother, the only family I had; my slippery fingers had found their way into one pocket too many. He bought me a chocolate malt on the drive there—the last ice cream I would taste until adulthood. The woods around the home were filled with brocade trees. Deer flashed past like hoaxes. When we pulled up to the gate with its jack-o’-lantern teeth, it was blocked by ogling boys that Madame Durance shooed away. Like pigeons. When he left, my brother kissed my cheek, his whiskers leaving little cat scratches on my skin. That was 1954. I was ten. He died eleven years later in Vietnam; I remember the look on Madame’s face when she told me, more clearly than anything about him. But Babette, far as anyone could tell, arrived alone.
Televisions were made of tubes in those days. There was enough time between turning the knob and the light snaking through its electric guts to wonder what exactly you were going to see. After Hollis finished plugging everything in, we all stood around the squat brown cube, observing its bulging poker face and in
sectile antenna. Nobody wanted to be the first to touch it. We had heard of them, certainly, but if anyone had been in the presence of one before, she didn’t say so. “Step back,” Madame Durance shouted, “I’m not paying for your medical bills if you all get cancer.”
Then she leaned over and switched on the knob. The screen flickered, fuzzed, a low hum agitating the air. We waited silent, fingers in mouths, breath held. Madame Durance thwacked the side once and then the image caught, stilled. An old man, caterpillar-lipped, hair combed in white peaks, was seated at a desk, looking straight at us while he spoke. We all flinched in one great wave and then we started to listen. Someone named John Glenn had set a new transcontinental speed record, flying a supersonic jet from California to New York in three hours twenty-three minutes eight seconds. We all looked up as if he were still above us, as if we could see something other than the ceiling.
“Only one hour a day,” Madame Durance said, fixing small padlocks over the knobs. But we could still be carried into sleep on visions of staticky life.
Later that year the Soviets launched two Sputniks into space. The first was just a satellite, a shiny metal sphere elbowing its way through the constellations. The second had a dog in it. Laika. Russian for “barker,” the old man in the television said. A stray from the streets of Moscow. A blurry image of her in her flight harness was shown. The tips of her ears flopped down. The fur of her face was dark, kissed with ashes, except for one line of white that ran from her forehead down the length of her snout. Before she was shuffled into her own metal sphere, she turned back to the cameras and smiled like a starlet.
At night in our house on that little hill, when there were no lights for miles and the only sound was the breath in Babette’s nose like the cooing of a dove, I would dream about Laika and what she saw up there. That sky so big it could swallow you. Keep you safe and warm.
Though Madame Durance did not pay much mind to how the girls arrived, she carried a different tune when it came to how they left. We were not prisoners, serving out a stay, but we were not quite wards either, kept confined until our eighteenth birthdays, when we were left to the whims of the world. We were there for our betterment, a betterment that was decided upon by Madame, and once betterment was reached, a mysterious transaction was performed and a parent or guardian showed up to take us home. This was a process we accepted rather than observed. One day a bed was empty, a girl was gone, and we were left believing that she had learned something but not knowing what it was.
By the time Babette arrived I had been in the home for three years and was losing interest in bolstering the sort of behaviors that would get me out. I was not, as my brother routinely reminded me, a pretty girl. My hair was the same color whether dirty or clean. I was solid as a tree trunk with the complexion of curdled milk. I wasn’t made for much more than scrubbing floors, which was also my daily task at the home, lacking the parents to pay my keep. Still, Madame saw something in me. To this day I cannot name it. But a trust of sorts had formed between us. During my first few weeks at the home she would leave things out for me: a pencil case, a snow globe, a silvery thimble. A test to see if I would steal them away. Sometimes I did. But I grew to anticipate the tilted smile she gave me when I left something untouched. I began to recognize the glory in giving things away and became her confidante.
Most of the other girls were incessant talkers and boasters, having just recently recognized they were interesting, if only to one another, though they quickly learned to hold their tongues around me. Once they realized how their secrets reached the ears of Madame Durance, I was promptly snubbed. A room change was requested; another newcomer was installed. But I couldn’t help myself. The rest of them chattered away to anyone within earshot, but Madame truly listened. It seemed the source of her power. I knew what to tell her, which seemed the source of mine.
Babette was a quiet girl and thus a figure of great curiosity for everyone else. She was peppered daily with questions, getting well-seasoned in a week.
“How did you get here?” they would ask. “By car?” “On foot?” “In a plane?”
She would dip her chin and smile in a way that suggested her pleasure couldn’t be shared. “I was led here by the Lord,” she’d say.
Every night before bed Babette knelt at the window and prayed. When I wanted to know why, she said it was because she was closer to God that way. “Does that mean your prayers get to him quicker?” I asked.
She laughed, a bright, trickling sound. It startled me in a way I never quite recovered from. “Come,” she said, patting a spot on the floor beside her. “We’ll see who He answers first.”
I sat down, mimicking her pressed-hand pose, bending my forehead to my fingertips. But I had never asked God for anything but forgiveness, forced into the darkness of the confessional to recite my litany of petty crimes to a man I couldn’t see. “You lie” was the only thing I had ever heard in return.
“I don’t know what to do,” I mumbled into the hollow between my thumbs.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Babette whispered. “Just let your thoughts wander where they need to go. He’ll follow you.”
I thought about Laika, looked up at the sky above us and the impossible cradle that carried her. I imagined her passing through the stars and being accepted as one of their own, each small bright ball leading her gently along her path. I thought of her smile flashing across the television screen, all the hope she held in her, and I wished her safely home.
The mystery of Babette’s troubles revealed itself soon enough. About six weeks after she arrived, she started getting sick.
“Is she sitting too close to the television?” Madame Durance asked. But we all knew what it was.
Another week later Babette and I were called into her office. Madame Durance sat behind her desk, hands knitted in a neat fist. Her hair mirrored her hands: a high, tight bun coiled so close to her head it surely required pins to hold it, though I never saw any. She had the same stern look of that man on the television but she wanted to know the news rather than give it. “You’ve been here a month and a half,” she began. “Do you want to tell me how long you’ve known?”
I watched Babette in the baldly nosy way that children are allowed to look at one another. She had a curious calm about her face that I’d never seen in the presence of Madame before. Most girls cowered, confessed before they were accused or fought back viciously. Babette simply sat there with the same serene, bemused expression of someone taking in an unusual entertainment. “I need to know when it happened, Babette.”
She shook her head but the gesture was so small that it seemed she was neither refusing nor denying.
“I need to know if it happened here.” Still, Babette remained silent.
Madame Durance turned to me. “Have you noticed anything . . . unusual happening recently? Somewhere on the grounds? Perhaps even in your room?”
I shook my head, knowing full well the long withering look that would follow. But what else could I do? It was the truth.
“Babette,” she said, “who have you been having . . . intercourse with?”
“Nobody,” she replied. Her voice was gentle but firm, the way a mother might cut off an argument with a troublesome child.
“I beg your pardon?” Madame’s tone was cold enough to skate across.
“Any baby in me,” she said, “was gifted by the Lord. Like Mary.” Now it was Madame’s turn for private amusement.
We were both dismissed, but Madame found me later in the third floor latrine, up to my elbows in soapsuds. “There’s something off about that girl,” she said. “I don’t trust her. It happened here, I just know it. She needs looking after. And I need you to do it.”
It was a test of a different sort, the first order Madame had ever given me and one that in the days after the revelation I found difficult to follow. There was no reason to believe Babette, of course, except that all of us did. “What’s it feel like?” “What did you see?” “Did He speak to you?
” One girl, Cordelia, affluent of breast and impoverished in brain, even asked for a lock of Babette’s hair, as if holiness was something you carried on you, not in you.
Madame’s skepticism seemed ugly in comparison, or at least unfair. She fired Hollis. She had to, she explained, to set an example for the other girls. It was a mistake to hire a man in the first place. Through it all Babette remained peaceful as a river, suggesting wild and wonderful things at work just underneath.
Every girl of that lost age has something she never quite got over. For some it was the first time they heard Bob Dylan. For others it was the sight of Paul Newman striding onscreen in Hud. For me it was Laika. Though there was little available at the time, in the years since I’ve been able to learn much about her. The Russians only had four weeks to build the spacecraft for her flight, for instance, but they made many provisions for her. There was an oxygen generator and a device to absorb carbon monoxide. An automatic fan was installed to keep the interior cool. Enough food was stored for a seven-day flight, and Laika was fitted with a bag to collect her waste. Monitors of all sorts kept track of her movements, her heart. She was estimated to be about three years old. Vladimir Yazdovsky called her “quiet and charming.”
She was trained with two others, Albina and Mushka. To adapt the dogs to the confines of the craft’s tiny cabin, they were kept in progressively smaller cages for periods of up to twenty days. Such captivity caused them to stop urinating or defecating, made them twitchy and weak. The trainers tried giving them laxatives. But only by prolonging the internment could anything come of it. Later they were placed in centrifuges that simulated the movement and noises of the spacecraft during launch. Their pulses doubled; their blood pressure increased. They came out with the addled velocity of the elderly.
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