“I don’t have a rifle! I’m . . . this is just a campout, a party,” Hannah ventured. “This isn’t a war. Get that rifle away from me! Who are you shooting at?”
“Kaiser men,” whispered Maria. Her neck bulged with veins as she strained to listen, her head cocked to one side. But around that neck was a cord entwining religious medals and a tiny gray fabric bag. So, it’s true, Hannah marveled, having read that all of the women enlisted in Bochkareva’s Battalion of Death carried suicide poison in a pouch close to their throats. Rather than be captured alive and endure the dishonor of rape, they would defy their assailants and choose the very hour of their deaths, exiting unviolated. That poison capsule must have nestled uneasily against the sacred cross on the same necklace: suicide, a mortal sin. The Mother Church was supposed to decide who and when to martyr, female agency in such matters rarely recognized. Yet Bochkareva had been addressed as “Mister Commander”; had written, of her own battle experience, “We were eager to get into the fray to show the Germans what we, the boys of the Fifth Regiment, could do. Were we nervous? Undoubtedly. But it was not the nervousness of cowardice. . . . our hands were steady.” Although she had been ready to kill, the Russian woman’s own memoir had emphasized the saving of lives.
It gave me immense joy to sustain life in benumbed human bodies. As I was kneeling over one such wounded, who had suffered a great loss of blood, and was about to lift him, a sniper’s bullet hit me between the thumb and forefinger and passed on and through the flesh of my left forearm. . . . I continued my work all night, and was recommended “for bravery in defensive and offensive fighting and for rendering, while wounded, first aid on the field of battle,” to receive the Cross of St. George. But I never received it. Instead, I was awarded a medal of the 4th degree and was informed that a woman could not obtain the Cross of St. George. . . . I protested to the Commander.
Now the great Bochkareva pulled Hannah up and hustled both of them further into the woods. Twigs snapped and cracked below Hannah’s throbbing heel, forcing her to give up thoughts about Russian sexism and move as directed by the powerful figure. In another moment, both of them spotted the looming shape of Janey and Amy’s tree fort.
It had, indeed, become a fort. The gauzy print blankets and pillows Janey and Amy had set up just that morning, for the comfort of potential midnight couples seeking a love nest, were nowhere to be seen. Crouched on the deck, clad in parachute harness with only a missing tooth to mar her beauty, was the Nazi fighter Hannah had been named for, the Hungarian Jewish martyr Hannah Senesh.
“Got good one for you. You train her!” Maria called up. “Only tiny wound. In heel, like Achilles. Make her tough, my sister! I go.” With a rough pat on Hannah’s back, she turned and disappeared into the woods. And the 22-year-old warrior standing ready in the tree fort gazed down at her namesake and growled, “Get up here before they see you, girlchik.”
No. No.
Not this. Not Nazi Germany.
No way.
I’ve got to get out of this one. I can’t do this one. I don’t want to know.
I’ll die if I go up into that tree with her. They’re coming for her. They tortured her. They killed her!
“Yes, I know. You lecture on war from the safety of a classroom,” Senesh taunted, peeling off her parachute and laying it aside. “You want some women’s history? ‘Life hangs over me like a question mark. I could have been twenty-three next July; I gambled on what mattered most. The dice were cast. I lost.’ Can you be brave, Hannah? They quote my poetry, so often, but that is not all I wrote. I once wrote, on Christmas night of 1943 while I trained as a partisan, ‘I respect the people who believe in something, respect their idealistic struggle with the daily realities. I respect those who don’t live just for the moment, or for money. . . . We have need of one thing: people who are brave and without prejudices—who want to think for themselves and not accept outmoded ideas.’ ” She smiled fiercely. “You think I don’t know that it takes guts to be a lesbian scholar, to get up every day and face the students and be out? They would have killed you, here. So, run. Run. Don’t let your tender heel slow you down; don’t pause before doing the right thing. Stay brave in your war.” And she ducked, as booted footsteps crashed toward them, too close, and coming nearer.
Hannah stumbled, gasping, back toward the campfire, the party. Would anyone have noticed her absence? What time was it? What season? Bochkareva had vanished. The frost that had appeared on mulch underfoot was now giving way to tender green shoots. Hannah looked back over her shoulder and saw, deep within the woods, a plume of smoke rising, dissipating instantly as it touched sky.
As she emerged from the woods, it was once again warm spring; but now it was Saturday morning, not the previous evening, and Shoni and Meg were at the entrance to the sweat lodge, calling to her. “Hurry up. Where have you been? The stones are hot. It’s time.”
If I can just sit down, thought Hannah, and think. If I can just take some time to sit, to sit here in community, maybe I’ll sort it out. I have my own past. I don’t know why I’m being placed in everyone else’s story. Maybe I’m supposed to meditate on bravery. What am I being prepared for? Are these women telling me to get ready to be a warrior? I don’t know if that’s what I am supposed to do. But she entered the lodge.
Silent heat. Burning stones.
In the sweat lodge, reduced to naked vulnerability, Hannah and her friends opened to the messages of their very different ancestors. Traditions met, melted, and pooled around their feet. Their hot bodies steamed as Shoni led them through the ritual of greeting their many martyred peoples, their spiritual leaders. As each woman welcomed in her own past, it seemed they could feel the presence of those watchful visitors. Much later in the day, when it was all over, Hannah would overhear Shoni say to Isabel, “That was one crowded lodge.”
As her increasingly drenched body shifted and turned on one dark patch of earth, Hannah’s mind turned over that question of bravery, of survival in wartime. Who had been brave? Her immigrant foremothers, crossing the Atlantic, destitute, driven, fleeing pogroms. Because they left Europe when they had, few in her own family had faced Hitler. She knew there had been hardship, arrests, the long voyage in a ship. Were they warriors? Victims? Survivors? Or all of that and colonizers, too, moving with their fragile menorah candelabras into tenements built on Mohawk lands?
It was too hot. There wasn’t enough air. She was holding earth in her fists but around her was the angry ocean, America so far away it was just an idea. She sensed the other women around her locked in their own visions of ancestors, who had come unwillingly in slave ships or as indentured servants or sex trafficked as whores. All of them except Shoni and Meg had lineage that came from somewhere else. All of them, including Shoni and Meg, descended from those who had suffered far more in wartime, slavery, genocide, the Trail of Tears, internment camps, mental institutions for the queers.
Their sweat was gone. Their skins were baking. Meg, knowing the uninitiated were struggling in the intense dry heat, abruptly dashed ladles of water across their bodies. And in an instant Hannah was standing at the rails of an immigrant ship. The slap of water was refreshing, but was salt: a wave of dense seawater, drowning her. It drenched her scarf. Her head was covered, modestly. She held a baby. Both of them cried out.
Now she couldn’t breathe. The air felt both absent and too close. Her head was pounding, her body shaking. Around her she sensed her other friends, too, were wrestling with visions and visitations not altogether easy to contain in their damp bodies. For the moment, though, there was only her own need to escape, to get out. She couldn’t stop to take in Gloria’s moaning or Nan’s repeated mumbling of “I see you; I know you; I can hear you.” They were all packed together. Too many of them.
They were all packed together because they were on their way to Auschwitz.
The sweat lodge was a boxcar.
I bear the burden of my own genetic code.
The train would carry her into he
r ancestry, but she might never come back. Why was she so unable to face that fear? How could she be her own ancestors’ spiritual descendent if she lacked bravery?
Open the door. Raise the sides. Make a window. More and more ancestors are flying in. There’s no more room. Their haunting can’t protect me. We need to get out of here. “I need to get out of here,” Hannah hissed. Meg, calm and concerned simultaneously, ladled water onto Hannah’s head, but the images hovered nonetheless. The wrapped walls still held the shape and splintered finality of a boxcar. Then Shoni called out “Ho!” and opened the draped entrance to the lodge. There was a collective exaltation of anguish and relief. Several women dropped their heads to their dirt-caked knees and wept, but Hannah rose from the soft dirt floor and lurched on wobbly legs through the entrance, which was finally an exit from the lodge as well.
Immediately, she could breathe again, although cold sweat began to mat her already wet hair. The day was beautiful. There wasn’t a hint of disturbance in the circle of trees around the quiet lodge, and women’s laughter poured out of the house where everyone else was gathering to make lunch. Isabel. She had to talk to Isabel. With more purpose in her stride than she had ever summoned before, Hannah burst into the house, dripping, muddied, naked but for her pine needle-plastered underpants, shouting “Isabel! Isabel!”
Her friend, their bartender, was in the kitchen mixing fresh lemonade with spring flowers, using a pair of silver tongs. She looked up, surprised. And then, grabbing a dishtowel, wrapped it around Hannah’s shoulders and pulled her into the cabin’s rustic bathroom, calling “Just give us a moment” over one shoulder to the other gaping party guests. Isabel latched the bathroom door and poured water from the faucet into a plastic Wonder Woman cup left on the sink. Patting Hannah’s arm, she ordered, “Drink this, but swallow slowly.”
Hannah ignored the directive and gulped. Then retched. “This is just water, right?” she demanded angrily. “It’s not one of your drinks?” Isabel shook her head, watchful and silent now.
They sat together on the curved rim of Janey and Amy’s old-fashioned bathtub, which was fortunately broad enough and stable underneath them. Hannah waited until her heartbeat had slowed down to something approximating normal, and finally faced her friend. “Listen, Isabel.” She spoke with all the authority, all the practiced firmness of her most empowered classroom voice, the one she used to warn her students that plagiarism and cheating could not be tolerated. “I don’t know what’s happening to me lately. I don’t know how much you have to do with it, or even if it’s you. And I don’t know if these little encounters are something you think I asked for or that I need. Because I never see them coming, and mostly they’re okay. But don’t send me into the Holocaust. Are we clear on that point? Don’t send me there. I can’t learn anything new there. I’m busy living for all of them; I’m not supposed to endure what they did all over again.” She blew her nose on a wad of toilet paper and was startled to see blood. “I’m not brave like Hannah Senesh. I’m not ready to be a martyr, even in a vision.” She gasped as she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror: for a moment, it appeared that all the hair had been shorn from her head. She grabbed at Isabel, and they toppled over into the bathtub.
“Don’t make me feel pain,” Hannah begged. Then she noticed the candle. There was a candle burning in a dish on the bathroom windowsill, a beeswax memorial candle in a protective glass jar.
“I put that there for Memorial Day,” said Isabel, and as she pushed up the window to let in more air, the breeze of spring blew out the candle flame. “For your warrior ancestor Hannah Senesh. Let’s quote her, and then you’ll feel better, all right. ‘Blessed is the match, consumed in kindling flame,’” recited Isabel; abruptly, Hannah went limp.
When she woke up, one hour later, Hannah found she had been washed clean and dressed in a white bathrobe. Her hair, now drying, fell fully from her cooled brow. She was in the cabin’s spacious and beautifully sunlit living room, with the other members of the campout who had participated in the sweat lodge, all in terrycloth robes, some also with awed looks or tears drying on their faces. Ritually prepared foods were passed around, and Hannah accepted a bowl of potatoes. They ate in silence. Then Moira said, “There was a time for my people when one-quarter of one potato meant the difference between living and dying.”
“And mine,” said Hannah.
“And mine,” said Letty. And as Hannah waited to see who might speak next, her eyes fell on the chess table in the corner, and for an instant she saw Rose Valland, the librarian, playing with Jeanette Rankin, the Congresswoman, each attempting to win a game of strategy without enacting violence. “Well, it’s your move,” Rankin was saying.
“Check,” answered Valland, with a barely discernable smirk. Then no one was there. The chairs were empty. And while the rest of that weekend held its usual pleasures, from skinny-dipping in the creek to late-night marshmallow roasts, Hannah turned her head and carefully looked away from the rising campfire smoke, which bent eastward; and Isabel put away the game of chess some guests had started and abandoned. An unseen hand had knocked the queen far over, on her edge.
Chapter Six
Pride Week
“What was your first Pride Parade like?”
Awkwardly bent over the front bumper of her students’ LGBT Association parade float, Hannah was so surprised by the question that she dropped her wrench. It made a loud clang on the garage floor of the campus physical plant shed, and the other students all looked up, startled. Rainbow-themed crepe paper and a half-inked banner declaring Intersectionality Is Our Strength trailed from their stained hands.
There was nothing more stupefying than being reminded that she, their professor of LGBT history, was some kind of historical artifact herself.
“Well.” Hannah sat down on the hood of the Chevette and tried to remember. “I was like you, or some of you, just finishing up my first year of college. Newly out, terrified, broke. I didn’t really hang out in bars, so a Pride parade was something free and open that I could watch without much investment, and of course there were women to check out . . .” She caught herself, wondering how much to reveal to rising sophomores.
They could have cared less about student-teacher boundaries; school was out for summer. “I bet you were a stone fox,” breathed Emma, who had spent all spring angling to be teacher’s pet.
“I was not a stone butch, that’s for sure,” Hannah laughed. “You can draw the picture yourself, can’t you? What do you think I looked like at Pride ’79?”
“Overalls, Birkenstocks, plaid flannel shirt,” they shouted in chorus.
“Yes, and the requisite purple bandanna. I did have punk friends, but piercings and tattoos became more of a common look later on.”
“Do you have a tattoo now?” Emma wanted to know. “Where is it?” Her eyes darted across Hannah’s body, and Hannah silently thanked the Goddess for the over-21 rule at Sappho’s Bar and Grill, where she’d be partying with her own peers after tomorrow’s parade.
“Yes, Emma, I have a tattoo,” she heard herself sharing, and rolled up her pants leg to reveal the rippling Greek letters along her right calf muscle. The students examined her body art, puzzled. “That looks like an Alpha and a Phi. You were in a sorority?” asked Caitlin, confused. “You don’t seem the type.”
“Moron! It’s the name of Sappho,” Emma shot back.
“Back to my first Pride parade, if you please. Well, I was living at home that June, and it was Father’s Day weekend, you know, as Pride so often falls on, and I was supposed to do something nice with my dad. We were quite close. He promised to teach me to ride a motorcycle that day, and oh, how I looked forward to that, but at the same time I was itching to sneak away to the parade I knew was being held downtown. Somehow, I worked up the nerve to come out to him while we were riding around the countryside. He said he didn’t mind having a daughter who was a Dyke on a Bike as long as I always wore a helmet. Then he actually dropped me off at the head of t
he parade as if I were going to be the lead bike. I was mortified, but what a cool spirit he was! And I spent the rest of that afternoon watching women, but shaking with adrenaline that I had just come out to my father, and he didn’t mind. In fact, he was proud of me . . .”
Dad. Dad. Dad.
She went home pleased with her students’ parade float, but missing her father. Too many of those students had shared the pain of being rejected by their families. Coming out in a homophobic home had meant, for some of them, a father’s contempt expressed in blows and curses. But Hannah, twice their age, had been blessed with loving parents, light years ahead on the tolerance curve. Her father had been that rare guy who wrote out Christmas checks for lesbian separatist organizations and partied with dyke celebrities, rolling them joints. Though Hannah had spent decades chanting death to the patriarchy, her arms linked with separatist pals, she owed her chops in activism and service to her dad, and she still followed many progressive causes he embraced in the 1960s. His devoted stewardship for Mother Earth practically guaranteed that she would end up spending her adult summers living in an owl-haunted pup tent backstage at women’s music festivals, doing recycling. During his stint as a stay-at-home father while finishing his own graduate thesis, he had written feisty letters to Hannah’s third-grade teacher, defending her right to wear pants to school instead of a dress. He had not really intended to raise a little lesbian, but once Hannah came out as a gay eighteen-year-old, he stepped up to the plate with harsh words for parents who dissed or abandoned their gay children. That, to him, was heresy. And now he was gone.
Sappho's Bar and Grill Page 7