by E. L. Carter
I crouched on the bed like a lion. That was what I had become, a lioness. They told me to lie down. I roared. They told me again, and then they were quiet. Things were falling out of my body, gobs of pink mucous substance, bright blood, and feces. The baby inched along. I pushed. And then a contraction, and the urge to push again.
“The baby’s crowning!” someone said. I reached down with my hand and felt the little head, the tickle of wet hair on my fingertips.
The doctor pushed my hand away. She put hers there instead.
Another contraction, and the head began to protrude into the space between my crouched legs. I reached down and felt. The doctor pushed my hands away.
At least for this moment, the story hadn’t yet been told. The future could be anything. My baby was mine, exactly as she should be, held safe within the taut skin, safe from my foolish pain, from the pain of the world, of being born into a world full of loss—a life that for her would begin in loss. I would have stayed that way if my body would have let me, exactly in the center between one moment and the next. But the push came down my vaginal wall, a tsunami force that I had to heed, and her head came out, and her little body slipped past me, past my grasping fingers, into the doctor’s gloved hands.
I fell back onto the soiled paper of the delivery table. The baby turned pink in the doctor’s hands and began to cry. When they cut the cord, she twisted and opened her mouth, searching for me. I clutched the streak of her blood on my fingertips into my folded hands.
She wailed. I cried out. The nurses toweled her off and wrapped her in a little flannel blanket and put a hat on her head. They weighed her. I sobbed and no one said a word.
The placenta slipped out. And then the nurse walked away with my baby in a bassinet on wheels. She didn’t look back when I threw the water cup at her.
I’m crying now, my shoulders bobbing on the wave of feeling. “All I wanted was her. I didn’t care about the harp anymore. But it was too late then. I brushed against her head with my fingers, Mrs. Bird. That was the only right thing I’ve ever done.”
“You loved her.”
“No.”
“Do you think I’ve never hurt someone I love? Do you think being ignorant or scared or dumb makes love less real?”
“I don’t know.” When I can speak again, I whisper, and it comes out like a croak. “I don’t deserve anything.”
“Oh, Madeline. You did what you did because that’s what you believed. You left your baby because you believed someone else deserved her more. And now, ever since, you have punished yourself. Madeline, the gift is right in front of you. Are you going to deny yourself again? Or the dusty girl?”
I sit there for a long moment.
I say, “You’ve had to do this too, haven’t you? Face something you don’t want to, for love.”
“Of course. It’s called accepting your life.”
“I thought life was about being happy.”
“Yes. It is.”
She’s being too opaque. “No. That’s a contradiction.”
“Is it?” She smiles.
“You can’t—” I can hear the echo of what I’m about to say. You can’t accept your life and be happy at the same time. I stop myself. Instead, I say, “Oh.”
“I think—” Mrs. Bird says slowly. “I think you are ready to claim your grandmother’s story.”
FRANCE—SPRING 1944
Brother is tending the horses near the woods where we will camp for the day. Deeper in the trees, away from camp, I lean over a stream at the place where the current pushes through the ice. A small veneer has begun to form, moving in from the frozen edges, like the seal a snail pulls over itself in winter. I push my hand against it and it shatters, disappearing into the stinging cold.
We have been hiding. Woods to woods, traveling at night, and by day no laughter, only the sound of everyone’s breath trapped inside the wagon, pushing against the walls and begging for a breeze. Father says there is a man to the south of us who can help us get over the mountains to Switzerland. Stories have come in from the other kumpanias: men with guns, hunting us down like deer, dragging away every man, woman, and child to be crowded into trains and then never heard from again.
I push my hands into the stream and hold them there; the water washes over them, almost burning, as if the ice were a fire that burns out the worry. Above me the trees creak, stiff with cold sap. The sky is blue now above the trees, but the forest is still dark. I don’t want to go back inside the caravan and sit all day in the terrible air and the fear.
A hand on my shoulder from behind. I spin around: Brother. Tall above me, all legs and arms, his eyes that have been so dark and sullen are now lit up by something I can’t read. He puts a hand over my mouth, and with the other he pulls me up from the stream and into the half-light of the woods. He grips my wrist so hard it hurts and drags me, fast as I can run, away from camp. I don’t know what he is doing, I don’t know anything anymore except that I trust my brother. And then I hear the horses scream. A piercing sound, nothing like a whinny or even the sound they make when they fight. It cuts through the silent trees, through the thick, cold air, through my skin. I stop. Brother almost pulls me over, he yanks at my wrist again and we run. Now the scream of a woman comes through the trees, followed by a chorus, a wave of sound—and then the gunfire begins. It goes on and on. We run. It seems like the sound will never stop.
Somewhere between a moment and a year and no time at all since it started, the gunfire falls quiet. The sound of our feet on the fallen leaves and pine needles, the rasping in and out of our breath in the cold air become amplified in the vacuum of sound. We run. Far up the mountain, away from any trail or kumpania or person we know. We run until our legs begin to buckle under us, until we clutch at each other and fall into the leaves and stay, arms around each other. The early spring sun shines above us and illuminates the bare branches, a sort of peace that I cling to, watching as our breaths subside to normal.
We stay where we fell. I watch the sun brighten the branches, close my eyes as it comes straight down through the trees and pierces me with light, and then watch again as it shines on the other sides of the branches. Finally it disappears. In the dark, we dig ourselves into the fallen leaves and push them over us to stay warm. It’s too dangerous to cry. We hold each other and shake, let the fear and the pain work their way out of us in shivers.
The next day in the early half-light we move up the mountain farther, and then find a small thicket to hide in. Some kind of dense prickly plant. The ground beneath us is layered with rabbit droppings. At night, a blanket of dead leaves again.
How long can a person live without water? The question begins to muscle its way into my mind in the middle of the shivering night, and by morning I can’t seem to care about anything else, not even about the guns. I hold my hand to Brother’s ear and whisper—water. He nods. We don’t know what to do except go down again, retracing our steps toward the stream. For two more days we travel at dawn and dusk only. At the bottom the stream gurgles, a happy splash against the retreating ice. The jug I had brought there to fetch water lies where I dropped it. For a moment it seems like nothing at all has happened, that I will fill the jug, walk back to camp, that the wheels will creak, and we will sit inside the wagon waiting out another day. I blink. For the first time tears blur my vision. I lean down and drink.
When I finally raise my head from the stream, Brother is on his haunches, his arms hanging over his knees, staring at me. He whispers, “We won’t live unless we go back to camp.”
I blink again. Put one finger on each eye and press. From behind my fingers, I say, “I won’t live if I see what they did.”
No reply. I open my eyes. I am alone.
I pull my legs up against my chest and wrap my dress over them, holding myself like I hold the baby when it cries, rocking, and inside my mind I begin to sing a little lullaby. The only sound is the stream. It gurgles like the baby did when it was soothed again, and so I keep singing. The
wind begins to blow, brushing against the tops of the trees. Shhhh. Shhhhh. I sing until Brother appears again through the darkening trees.
His arms are full. Lard. A cook pot. The gold coins Father had hidden in the mattress. Flint and steel. Two satchels and a blanket. His trap. He won’t look at me. I ask, “Were they taken away?”
He says, “No.” His face twists up and he closes his eyes. When he opens them he stares down at the stream.
I say, “What should we do?”
He says, “Nothing. We have to leave them. We can’t make smoke.”
We load up the satchels with the supplies, fill the water jug, and head back up the mountain, following the stream this time as best we can. We hike all night, then bury ourselves under leaves and our blanket all through the next day. That night Brother sets his trap and gets a squirrel. We cook it in the dawn light over a small fire, then move away from where the smoke would have drifted above the trees along with the mist.
It goes on like this for days and more days—nothing changes, not the meager food or the clench of fear at night when the wind makes the branches creak, or the constant movement, a zigzag across the mountain, never too far from the stream. What finally changes is the taste of the air and the length of day, the buds appearing on the trees, and the dandelions, sweet and bitter food. Nettles. Fiddleheads. Fish in the stream. Birds mate and nest, lay little eggs, a shot of delicious unfirmness. People say it will make you weak, but I feel strong when I eat them. Caterpillars appear on the fresh growth, and snails on rotten leaves in the moist morning air. I don’t care anymore what is clean or dirty, what is appropriate, what will make me sick. I eat whatever I can.
Brother won’t eat caterpillars. He points when he sees a butterfly hover by the stream and land on a sun-brightened rock, its wings slowly pumping. “Look,” he whispers, “one that escaped, like us.”
I want to see the beauty he sees. I want to believe in it enough to hold myself back. But I don’t. I devour any grub I see.
BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005
Out of the glare of the sun, out of the heat washing like ocean waves across the street, out of the concrete crumbled from bomb blasts and the burned-out edges of buildings, from a family she’s lost and then lost again, through the frame of the door that is so much bigger than she, the door I have been watching for an hour or more—and into the room with the folding chair and the saggy couch and someone else’s track in the carpet—here is Isra.
Isra has long dark hair pulled back and braided, but tangled inside the braid. Her dress is too small for her. It has small purple flowers, the kind you might find on the sale rack at Target. Her skin is innocent—soft, little-girl smooth like the skin of a girl raised on a wide lawn and a porch with iced tea and mint. But her eyes—Kris called it a shadow. I see something you could fall into forever. Can you travel that far inside a shadow? A shadow over a canyon, maybe, or the edge of a mountain when the sun goes behind the precipice. It’s more than the absence of fear or the memory of a mother or enough to eat or dental care. She is a beggar, and the bottomless, empty bowl she holds out is her childhood.
I turn on the old man, Abdul Adl. I want to snap at him, to chastise him, simply because I need someone to be mad at right now and he looks so tired. His cheekbones protrude under his skin, stretching it taut, and his beard has a brittle quality, like the hairs would break if you bent them. He greets me politely. “Asalaamu alaikum.”
“Wa alaikum salam,” I reply, the fight gone out of me.
We all sit: me on the folding chair, Abdul Adl and Raed on the couch, and Isra on the easy chair. She had to climb up, and now sits with her arms on the great pillowy sides and her feet dangling down, a torn green throne.
Abdul Adl says, “Your brother, may he rest in peace, promised to take care of the girl. You know this?”
I say, “Yes, I do.”
He goes on. “There is no one left but me to care for her. I am an old man. Things are not done this way—a man caring for his granddaughter. This is shameful for both of us.”
“I understand.”
“Your brother was a good man. He meant well. You are keeping his word, so I believe you are honorable also.”
I nod my head again.
“Isra has an aunt in Amman—my daughter—she could care for the girl. Will you take her there? She needs to be raised by her family in the Islamic way, do you understand?”
I don’t know if I’m relieved or hurt. I turn to Raed. “Do you know? Can we do that?”
He asks Abdul Adl a question in Arabic. They discuss for a few moments, while I sit fidgeting in my chair and Isra slowly scans the room. I watch her eyes touch on the landscape on the wall above the couch, the lamp, Abdul Adl, Raed. She doesn’t look at me.
Raed turns back to me. “It’s possible. She has a passport.”
“Um,” I say. “Okay.” I think I’m sad. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to drive to Jordan. I remember a trip to Petra a few years ago, the staggering red colonnades carved into the canyon, Bedouins with a young camel on a rope. Maybe I should go to Petra again. A song pops into my head, a chant like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan would do. The harp, glissando, behind it. I yank myself back into the room, a rope in my nose like the camel’s. Should I spit like the camel did? Here I am inside the moment, the very moment I have waited and wondered about since the moment I read Kris’s note on a flowered couch in New Jersey in early spring. My brother’s gift sits quiet as death in a chair four feet from me, waiting for me to save her. And all I can think of is how to escape.
I turn to Isra. “What do you want?” Raed glances at me partway from the side, hesitates, but translates.
She looks at me with her brown wooden begging-bowl eyes, and holds me with them for a long moment. Then she says something. I can see Raed flinch. He looks down as he repeats, “Are you going to be my mother now?”
Her practicality stuns us into silence. Abdul Adl starts to cry. He says some things to Isra in Arabic that Raed doesn’t translate. She sits still in the chair and looks at him. Then she shrugs and gazes again toward the lamp with the tassels on the shade.
I stumble in. “I’d like to be your mother. I’d like to—but the best thing is to let your auntie take you, and I will help however I can.”
When Raed translates she keeps her eyes on the lamp, studying it as if it’s the focus of the conversation, the most interesting thing in the room. I want to tell her I’ll be her mother because if I do, she’ll look at me again. Since I can’t do what I want, I turn on Raed. “How will we find them again? Is it going to take another two weeks?”
Raed frowns.
I say, “She’ll be safer in the hotel with me than in Dora with her grandpa. Right?”
He takes a breath of air. “I’m not sure he’s ready to leave her.”
“Well, ask him.”
Raed gives me the look I’ve been waiting for since I met him, the hard stare of a man who hates. When he speaks to Abdul Adl the old man immediately begins to cry again. I want to grab my words out of the air, stuff them back inside the dark folds of my abaya. I look at Isra instead, and this time she looks back, something new in her eyes now, maybe a little bit curious about the drama unfolding and the strange woman who commands these men.
Raed tells me, “Now that it’s time, I’m not sure I can do this. That is what he says.”
He wants me to be a decent human being and give the old man some time—and I am decent, but also desperate. I hesitate. I guess I’m more decent than desperate. I say, “How can he get her to me when he decides?”
Raed sighs again. “I’ll take care of it.” A much more decent human than I.
They talk for a few moments and it is decided. Abdul Adl will take the time he needs to say good-bye to Isra, then Raed will fetch her in Dora in a few days. Everyone stands.
Isra laughs unexpectedly. “See you later,” she says in thickly accented English.
I smile back. “See you later.”
It’s only a
fter they walk out that I see the butterfly sitting on the table next to the lamp, its sequins catching the light. When I see it I scream so loud Raed comes running from the door.
“I’m just so mad,” I say. The things we forget with the best of intentions. My whole preconception—a gift—everything disappears into the swirling sad dust.
“He’s going to let her go,” Raed says.
“I know.” I pick the butterfly up off the table, then drop it again with a small plunk. “I just don’t know if I deserve her.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Of course you do. We can be as good as we want to be.”
Next time, I’ll give her everything.
A month ago, back in New Jersey, I looked out the window of a train at the houses blurring past, the stream of green leaves washed together by speed. Not a runaway this time. Nor a lover, almost blind to the beauty of the swirled-together landscape. In Hoboken, I marched straight through the turnstiles and back out the other side at Penn Station, with hardly a glance up at the majestic marble colonnades. As I walked up Fifth Avenue in the bright evening light, I was an island among islands, each of us an island in the ocean of tapping shoes.
At Times Square, not even a cursory nod to acknowledge the neon.
I want to say I was on my way to MOMA.
I should have been looking for my grandmother.
Or at least be trying out for an orchestra.
It would have been easier if I had been having an affair.
A vacation.
But I wasn’t.
Despite all the stories I could or should have been living, despite the urgency with which Grandma hissed in my ear, I followed some other pressure, one I could hardly identify. I bought a ticket, and it was ripped, and then I stood on the other side of the threshold of Avi’s moment.