The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  “So you mean she was grossed out?”

  “No, no, no. That was the only obvious thing. You should have seen her face when the baby kicked. Your mom was the thing that brought her back into the room, onto this continent.”

  “So then why did she go?”

  “I’ll have to keep telling you the story.” Mrs. Bird stops there, and pours us each another cup of tea. When she puts the pot down she runs her hands back and forth across her thighs as if they have gotten cold. “It was late fall and we had a freak blizzard, you know the ones that sometimes come in November. I was there with Jack, and he got so cold, there was barely any life left in him by then. I covered his wheelchair with blankets and still he shivered like an old man. His face was so thin. Sometimes it seemed like it had always been this way, that he had never been red-cheeked and cheeky and stamping through the snow in his woolens. Anyway, I had my eye on Anna too. She helped me make some food for tea; the power was out and we were using the kerosene lamps so we could see to cut up the little sandwiches. She kept stopping, right in the middle of handing me a piece of bread, or spreading a cut of meat. She was so still—I would say ‘Anna, what is it?’ And she wouldn’t answer, just look at the floor, then a minute later shoo me with her hand and go back to whatever she’d been doing.

  “Then, once we had served the snacks and wheeled Jack in, she suddenly stood up, bent over me, and grabbed my arm so roughly—I had a bruise there, I checked later—she dragged me out into the hallway, and said, ‘The baby is here.’

  “And that was the end of it. Of whatever had made her keep her labor a secret, the shame or pride. There was no trip to the hospital. No doctors or spinal blocks or any of the things that are supposed to civilize a birth. I tried to walk her to the bedroom but she wouldn’t listen to anything—and there were plenty of commands. I was one of them—‘Get up! Let’s get to the bed! Here, let me hold your hand! Louis, get some sheets! Call the doctor!’

  “Anna made it to the bedroom herself and then squatted down on the floor, right there, with her arms back against the bedframe, and began to scream. She gave birth like that—like all the things your Grand-mère defended herself against.

  “Your Grand-mère thought Anna was giving birth like a Gypsy. But she wasn’t, Madeline. She was giving birth outside of culture. She took no help. No nurse wiped off her sweat. Her husband didn’t help or hinder. There was no midwife, no herbs, no prayers, nothing but her and that baby. Her sweet little maternity dress went to shreds. She clawed at her skin. She ripped a hole all the way into the mattress stuffing.”

  “Didn’t you help?”

  “Do you understand? She was wild, Madeline. I couldn’t get near her. That’s why no one caught your mother. She just slid out onto the carpet. And the whole roomful, me, your Aunt Eva, your Grand-mère—we all just stared at her. I don’t think we could quite believe it. It was she who picked up your mother. I can still see the blood smeared over her skin. Anna held your mom until she gasped and turned pink and cried. And then Anna cried too.

  “That was the thing—the crying—that released us from our freeze frame. We ran around like little squirrels then, gathering warm soapy water and towels and blankets and soothing words. Anna was docile and calm then. Except for holding your mom so tight it was hard to clean the blood in between them.

  “She would not let go of that baby. She began to breastfeed. There was a crib, a layette, you know, the whole French way of bringing a baby home. The doctor came and cut the cord. We cleaned up the placenta. But no one could get her to let go.”

  Mrs. Bird stops talking and looks at me.

  I laugh, a shrill laugh. “She left. That’s the truth. You say no one could get her to let go.”

  “This is the hard part,” she says.

  A memory comes. I’m in New York, small enough to see a scene of overcoat pockets around me, dull fabric and the cold air in between. A woman appears in front of us out of the swirl of wools. I’m holding Kris’s hand and he holds Mom’s. Dad is somewhere at the edge of consciousness, barely more than another winter coat. We stop, expecting the stranger to excuse herself and move on. But she stands there, her brown face and her big brown eyes still, unreadable. I look up at Mom. Her mouth is slightly open but she has almost the same blankness. I tug on Kris’s hand, he tugs on Mom’s sleeve, and we begin to sidle around the strange woman. As I pass by her she reaches out a hand and lays it flat against my cheek. I look up. I don’t understand what I see there: the closest thing it resembles is how Mom looks at Kris. It comes to me now, twenty-something years later, in front of my third cup of tea. The woman looked at me with love.

  Mrs. Bird begins again. “I’ll never forget the look on her face the morning she came to me. She had the baby with her. Your mother, I mean. Your Grand-mère had presented her with an impossible proposition. Really, for a new mother I can’t think of what could be harder. Your Grand-mère said the child could have a lucky life, a safe privileged life here. She didn’t have to be caught between worlds. She didn’t have to be a daughter of war. All Anna had to do was disappear. It might even be selfish to stay. Who would her staying benefit?”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes, I mean that.” She pauses, then says, “Your Grand-mère wasn’t evil, Madeline. She didn’t know Anna’s story like I do. She didn’t let herself know her new daughter. She and your grandma were a perfect storm that way. I guess neither one could stand the fact that Anna was the one who walked out of that war alive.”

  “Mom said—”

  “It’s all a cover job. Your mom doesn’t know anything. Your papa didn’t even know the truth.”

  I shake my head.

  “I tried to tell Anna that your mother needed her. But what did I know? I was just a stupid, unmarried twenty-year-old. I think she turned against herself, Madeline. Not against you, or your mother. Only herself, the things that mother-love knows, the instinct that has the answer, even to an impossible question.”

  I stay quiet. Nothing is as it was.

  “The story that went around at the time was that your great-grandmother paid her off. It’s half true. She gave your grandmother a large sum of money, and your grandmother accepted.”

  “She shouldn’t have. She should have spit in Grand-mère’s face.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. What I do know with certainty is that the money is not why she left.”

  January 20, 2004

  The Iraq Bug Book

  Silverfish

  Termite

  Bookworm

  Bacon Beetle

  Cockroach

  Mole Cricket

  Toe Biter

  Unidentified

  January 21

  The bomb scene has no sense of privacy, no decency, no boundaries. It has no sense of day or night. Am I in this bed under these sheets? The man is dying. Again. Falling toward me. Sometimes when I sleep he’s coming at me, shot but not falling. I don’t know what else to do, so I shoot him again.

  Awake.

  Notes on sanity:

  1. Fill the bullet hole with anger

  2. Hate person you shot

  3. Having an enemy=inner peace

  4. Believe in your brothas

  5. In your orders

  6. In your mission

  7. In your country

  How many strikes does that give me? I don’t even know why they let me keep batting

  The army knows better. They knew:

  that I was going to Iraq anyway

  that I would kill someone

  that without the mind they tried to shape, I would be nothing but shit.

  I can’t hate them!!!!!! I LOVE THEM I LOVE THEM I LOVE THEM I LOVE THEM I love their goddamn long outfits I love his eyes the way he fell the blood that got on my uniform and won’t come out I love the girl I didn’t see. So much I would take her home.

  So I have nothing to say to anyone. Not even Benja.

  January 23

  Date palms, dusty trees behind fences, dir
ty sidewalk. I’ve seen this house before. Nice painted cinder block from the street but now I could see it had been hit by a bomb. When you walk through the courtyard past the dusty flowers you can see the tarps along the left-hand side. Inside, the cement is painted yellow. Brown curtains and behind the curtain clear plastic and duct tape.

  A girl lives here. She sustained a minor head injury, probably from getting thrown against the ground. She happens to be the same age as the girl whose father I shot. Connor happens to have sent me here. The TV was on, someone was dancing on the screen to music I don’t know. The red rug was too beautiful to walk on in boots. They had a teapot boiling. A middle-aged man in a collar shirt and slacks offered us tea. I could hear his voice shaking in his throat.

  We sat on the floor. The younger man of the two, with direct eyes and a blue and white shirt that said POLO across the front, spoke for the first time, in English. “I have hoped to go to America someday.”

  I said, “You speak good English.”

  He looked down. “I was in the university before the war.”

  Then silence and we sipped our tea. Me, Benja, and the interpreter. Kareem stood watch by the door. It must be unnerving to have tea with people wearing machine guns. I don’t know. Maybe if you live in Baghdad, you get used to it. Like people talking on their cell phones while they pee in public bathrooms.

  Finally Benja said, “I have a daughter too. She’s two.”

  Both men jerked their heads a little like they’d heard a funny noise.

  I said, “We brought a box. Some food and clothes.”

  Benja asked, “How is the girl?”

  The men looked at each other. “Recovering,” the younger one said.

  “May we give it to her?”

  The men looked at each other again. The older man called out toward the back.

  And then the curtain parted, the rough brown curtain, a way to hold kitchen smells inside, but also the door between here and there—out of the door they came.

  The girl. Light on her from the side, dust like a fine coat of brown sugar on her hair. Face wiped clean. A calico dress with a collar. Her face was so serious I couldn’t imagine making her laugh. How can you be two and already forget how to laugh?

  The woman in a long dress with blue and white flowers, a black shawl over her head. She looked at me and right away turned her head. Maybe she saw the guilt smeared across my face.

  “Isra,” I said, which was the girl’s name, and she suddenly began to cry, and turned, and buried her face in the woman’s flowered skirt. The woman said something in a clipped voice. I asked what she had said.

  The college student looked away, and said quietly, “Now that she is an orphan, she cries all the time, for nothing.”

  “She is not the mother?”

  “No, how do you call it, the aunt. The mother …”He let his shoulders drop. “She is gone too.”

  I said, “So she is crying for something, all the time.”

  The aunt looked up at me when the terp translated.

  I looked straight back at her. I said, “What do you need?”

  She spoke, no longer shy, and the anger so clear in her I could feel the wave coming across the room. Translation: “Electricity. Water. Safety. We need law, we need someone to protect us.”

  The college student looked down. “It is hard to find fruit.”

  An invitation to return.

  Of course I’ll return.

  I have no choice.

  Mom is singing again. Down at the bottom of the steep winding stairs, in front of the plastic utility sink with the drainpipe for the washer hung over the edge of it, dotted with stains of yellow paint and unknown other substances. She stands by the metal tap, pulling wet nylons out of the white basin and stringing them over the drying rack. The smell of detergent, bleach, and mold emanates from the walls when I step off the last stair.

  I used to find space rocks down here, porous grey rocks of varying sizes, some splattered with whitewash, and I’d pile them in rows shaped into secret codes for communicating with my home planet. Mom the alien would be out in the next room. I could hear her footsteps on the cement, and when she would mutter to herself, I would imagine it was in some secret language.

  The dirt floor where I arranged the rocks was dank, full of old mouse feces and maybe toxic dust. Mom would appear silhouetted in the doorway while I shrank deeper into the room, trying to remain invisible. She was just using the utility sink to wash her hands and I could see her without having to put on my good girl face or feign indifference—her smooth, slightly olive skin, velvety under the bare bulb, her hair swept back, arranged for doing laundry, and her thin arms peeking out from her shirtsleeves. From this distance I could let myself want her, to want to climb in her lap and have her stroke my hair as she did some nights when she was in a good mood. Alien as I was, I could ache to be like Kris, her baby, not the one who hid in the dirt or performed like a wind-up toy. I wanted her badly enough to betray my presence, to clink one rock against the other, which in the language of my planet means please love me, but she would have been mad because I was dirty again and not practicing for my recital. And so I stayed as I was until she retreated into the other room, and I could return to my game.

  Today, in the same basement, the light is on her. She sings off-key and shrill, like a cat. She does it without holding back. It’s horrible and lovely at the same time. I have always loved to listen to her sing.

  I slip all the way into the room and stand behind her, listening like a shadow. I’m not a long afternoon shadow, languishing, but an early one, just after midday, slight and tucked close against the sun-warmed figure.

  She turns now, with that thought, and stops singing. I don’t even know what the song was, so I don’t know if it is finished or just stopped.

  “I was thinking about pasta,” I say. “With feta and tomatoes.”

  “You’re still too skinny,” she answers.

  I hurl something back at her. A food fight. “I think your mom loved you.”

  Mom’s hands are quiet on the little ball of nylons left in the sink. “What do you know about that?”

  “I talked to Mrs. Bird. Did you know she was there when you were born?”

  “Mrs. Bird has never been particularly lucid.” Even from the side I can see Mom’s face shutting off, the way an old TV picture disappears into itself when you push the off button.

  “Mrs. Bird is strange, but I wouldn’t say she’s murky.” I would say we are murky, here at the edge of this conversation. I want to push her, tease her out of her withdrawal. “I think she knows things that we don’t. Do you really think we know ourselves best?”

  Mom turns from her nylons, walks past me, and begins to head up the stairs toward the kitchen. The wood creaks and we both duck instinctively when we get to the part where the upstairs staircase cuts into the ceiling. I pull myself along the banister after her, like a cat stalking a bird. Unconvinced of my potential success, but driven by instinct. Sometimes you catch them unawares. “I want to know what Grand-mère really told you. About why your mom left.”

  “She told me the truth.”

  “What is the truth, Mom?”

  She seems to catch the rhetorical nature of my question. “The truth is what you believe to be right, and you stick to it.”

  “Because if you question it, things might break apart.”

  “Why have you always wanted to shatter what is comfortable?”

  “I guess my definition of comfortable is different than yours.” Give the baby away. Is throwing out your heart comfortable?

  We’re at the top of the stairs now, and enter the kitchen single file. “Grand-mère had no reason to lie,” she says.

  She had the usual reason: protecting herself from her own shame. As I emerge behind the wooden table I say, “Grand-mère wanted the best for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that doesn’t mean she acted flawlessly in your interest.”

  “What are
you driving at?” On the other side of the table, she pulls a large black pot out of the cupboard and fills it with water.

  I’m criticizing the queen. Spraying graffiti on a statue. Yes. But I go on. “Grand-mère loved you, but maybe your mom did too.” Maybe you love me. And maybe we’ve gotten it all wrong.

  Mom starts to boil the water, and she pulls the tomatoes out of the fridge. I realize she’s going to make dinner: she always does that when she’s mad. When I offer to help, she will say it’s all taken care of.

  How could a noodle taste bitter? This is how I managed the impossible—how I starved like my grandma, in a house full of food.

  A HOT blade of summer light comes in the window from the garden, across the empty space between the cream-colored ceiling and the floor, across the burgundy couch and the pillow Mrs. Bird got for me.

  I begin to talk. I’m thinking about what I’ve lost. Considering all I’ve destroyed. “When I play the harp,” I say, “it’s like another story I tell myself. Everything is what I make it. Do you know what I mean? I change my angle a little, just pluck one string from the side, and the tones all fall differently.”

  “That’s real power.” I open my eyes and see Mrs. Bird smiling. “A lot of things are stronger than our will. They don’t last. The gift or the loss. Nothing lasts.” She gives me her curious look, I guess to see if I understand.

  I shrug. They last long enough to hurt, some for a lifetime.

  “We spend our lives like children with blocks, building a little world. And then—I can tell you, you get old. People die even though you don’t want them to, even though it wasn’t in the road map you thought God handed out. We get mad at God, but all along it was we who were mistaken.”

  I say, “Ever since Kris died, I get this feeling sometimes—like nothing is real. I’m just floating. I thought if I could find the thing he left me—I don’t know, it sounds stupid—that my life would go back to what it was before. More straightforward.”

  “Things are real, Madeline. Completely real. They just aren’t permanent.”

  “I’m not sure I can embrace impermanence and stay sane at the same time. I mean, how can you?”