Women Talking

by Miriam Toews

  She looks as if she would say more, but now Agata Friesen, sensing Salome’s impatience and impending rage, briskly asks if we might put aside the animal/non-animal and forgiveness/non-forgiveness and inspirational/non-inspirational and soft tissue/hard tissue/new skin/old skin debates to concentrate on the matter at hand, which is whether to stay and fight or leave.

  The women agree that we should move on.

  Meanwhile, Salome has flung her milk pail to the side; it’s wobbly and bothering her. Ona gets up, gives Salome her own pail to sit on, and retrieves Salome’s wobbly pail for herself.

  Once she is sitting again, Ona Friesen continues to consider something said earlier. She mentions that Mariche’s use of the word “counselling” has brought to her mind another issue. She requests permission to make one more statement regarding forgiveness.

  The women agree. (Although Neitje Friesen’s eyes roll in their sockets as her head snaps back and her jaw drops open. Amusing.)

  Ona speaks: If it has been decided by the elders and the bishop of Molotschna that we women don’t require counselling following these attacks because we weren’t conscious when they happened, then what are we obliged, or even able, to forgive? Something that didn’t happen? Something that we are unable to understand? And what does that mean more broadly? If we don’t know “the world,” we won’t be corrupted by it? If we don’t know that we are imprisoned then we are free?

  The teenagers Neitje Friesen and Autje Loewen are now engaged in a contest using body language, attempting to outdo each other to convey their boredom and discomfort. Autje has pretended, for example, to have shot herself in the head by inserting a rifle into her mouth, then slumping over on her milk pail. Neitje has asked plaintively: But are we staying or going? She is resting her head on her arm. Her voice is muffled. Her palm is open and facing upwards as though she is waiting for an answer, or for a cyanide capsule to be placed inside that palm. She has removed her kerchief and I can see one long, thin, very white line running down the centre of her scalp. It is naked skin—called a “parting” by the women.

  Greta Loewen sighs heavily. She says that although we may not be animals we have been treated worse than animals, and that in fact Molotschna animals are safer than Molotschna women, and better cared for.

  Agata Friesen reminds Greta that, due to issues of time, we have agreed to abandon the question of whether the women are animals or not.

  Greta waves aside Agata’s reprimand and closes her eyes. She is tapping her false teeth on the plywood.

  Mariche interjects: I believe the only solution is to flee.

  Oh, but the idea of fleeing has created an uproar amongst the women!

  They are talking at once. Still talking at once. Still talking at once.

  Ona looks at me. I look at the minutes. From nervousness, because of Ona’s glance, I clear my throat—which the women take to be a gesture of impatience on my part, an interruption. They stop talking.

  Mariche glares at me.

  I stroke my throat as though it’s ticklish, the beginning of an illness, perhaps strep like young Aaron’s. I haven’t meant to interrupt. I am an obstacle to Mariche, and possibly to Salome, who is impatient for other reasons, like a sudden flood, like a chipped hoof. (These are her words, muttered, but they don’t translate well.)

  Now Salome Friesen asks, aggressively, Is this how we want to teach our daughters to defend themselves—by fleeing?

  Mejal Loewen interjects: Not fleeing, but leaving. We’re talking about leaving.

  Salome Friesen acts as though she hasn’t heard Mejal: Fleeing! I’d rather stand my ground and shoot each man in the heart and bury them in a pit than flee, and I’ll deal with God’s wrath if I have to!

  Salome, Ona says gently, please be calm. The Loewens are talking about leaving not fleeing. The word “fleeing” was improperly used. Set it aside.

  Mariche shakes her head at this, indignant. She apologizes sarcastically for using the incorrect word, a sin so outrageous that Salome with her Olympian airs and almighty mind must take it upon herself to rectify for the sake of all humanity.

  Salome strongly objects. She counter-accuses Mariche of being reckless with words. “Leaving” and “fleeing” are two vastly different words, she says, with different meanings and with specific implications.

  Autje and Neitje have now begun to take some interest in the proceedings, both stifling giggles. Meanwhile, Greta and Agata wear stern but resigned expressions that speak to years of experience with this type of opprua (uproar) from their daughters. Agata’s hands are clasped and she is spinning her thumbs around each other. Greta is patting her own head.

  Ona Friesen is staring wistfully out of the north-facing window, towards Rembrandt’s canola field, towards the hills, and towards the border and a vision of her own making, perhaps.

  Mejal Loewen has surreptitiously begun to roll herself a smoke. (Left over from the last one, which she had extinguished, stylishly, by pinching it with her finger and thumb.)

  Well, August? says Agata. She is sitting next to me. She has put her arm around my shoulder! What do you make of all this? Do you have an opinion too?

  What comes into my head is the story of the Korean poet Ko Un. So I tell the women how he had tried to commit suicide four times, once by pouring poison into one of his ears. He survived but destroyed his eardrum. The other eardrum had been damaged when he was a political prisoner and was tortured. During the Korean War he was forced to carry dead bodies on his back. Then he became a monk for ten years.

  The women have stopped arguing and are listening to my story about the poet. I stop speaking.

  Agata asks, Then what?

  Well, later he became an alcoholic, which saved his life when again he wanted to kill himself, this time with a large stone and a rope in the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Jeju Island.

  Where is that? asks Autje, but she is shushed by her mother.

  It doesn’t matter, says Mejal.

  Well, says Salome, it matters, but let August finish his story first.

  Agata nods at me to continue.

  On the boat, I say, they sold alcoholic drinks. Ko Un thought: Why not have one before dying? He had one drink, then a second and a third … he got drunk and fell asleep. When he woke up, he was at the pier. He had missed his opportunity to kill himself, and the others were waiting for him because they had heard that the legendary monk and poet Ko Un was coming to their island. They hoped that he would stay there. So he did. And he was very happy there for some years.

  After a pause, Mejal asks me if I’m finished and I tell her that I am.

  The women do not speak but shuffle on their pails, clearing their throats. I mutter that Agata had asked me if I had an opinion on the debate over leaving versus fleeing. I had meant only to articulate my feelings about the meaning of meaning: How it is possible to leave something or someone in one frame of mind and arrive elsewhere, in another entirely unexpected frame of mind.

  I am already aware of that, says Mejal. Aren’t we all?

  We are aware of many things, instinctively, says Ona quietly, but to have them articulated in a certain narrative way is pleasing and fun.

  Salome Friesen tells the women she has no time for pleasing and fun. May I be excused, she asks sarcastically, since it is lunchtime and my turn to bring food to a few of the elders of the colony as well as administer my youngest daughter’s antibiotics?

  Salome’s youngest daughter, Miep, was violated by the men on two or possibly three different occasions, but Peters denied medical treatment for Miep, who is three years of age, on the grounds that the doctor would gossip about the colony and that people would become aware of the attacks and the whole incident would be blown out of proportion. Salome walked twelve miles to the next colony to procure antibiotics for Miep from the Mobile Klinic that she knew was stationed there, temporarily, for repairs. (And to pick up moonshine for herself, according to Mariche, who on several occasions when Salome is raging has indi
cated, by miming the act of bringing a bottle to her mouth, that Salome secretly drinks.)

  I have to hide the antibiotics in Miep’s strained beets or she won’t swallow them, says Salome.

  The women nod and tell her to go, go.

  As she leaves, Salome suggests that if Mejal goes to get the soup from the summer kitchen then Salome could bring the spelt bread she baked this morning. We will all have this food for lunch, Salome says, and continue with our meeting as we eat. We will have instant coffee.

  Mejal shrugs, languidly—she hates to be told what to do by Salome—but rises from her chair.

  Agata, meanwhile, remains perfectly still, mouthing the words to a prayer or a verse, perhaps one from Psalms. Miep is her granddaughter, named after her. (“Miep” is a nickname.) Agata is a strong woman but whenever she hears the specific details of the attack on her tiny granddaughter she becomes very still, predatory.

  (When Salome discovered that Miep had been attacked not once but two or three times, she went to the shed where the men were being kept and attempted to kill them all with a scythe, as I mentioned earlier. This was the incident that convinced Peters to call the police and have the men arrested and brought to the city where they would be safe. Salome claims she did ask to be forgiven for that outburst, and that the men forgave her, but nobody, including Peters, witnessed this. Perhaps these last facts are not germane to the minutes of the meetings but I believe they’re significant enough to include in the footnotes because without the perpetrators having been taken to the city, and the other men of the colony following them to post bail in order to have them returned to the colony, where they could be forgiven by the victims and in turn have the victims forgiven by God, these meetings would not be happening.)

  The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, rich in loving kindness and forgiving, says Agata.

  She repeats this, and Greta takes Agata’s hand and joins her in the recitation.

  Mejal Loewen has left the room, I presume to smoke, even though she has declared that she is going to get the soup from the summer kitchen. She ordered Autje, her niece, not to follow her, and Autje made a face as if to say, Why would I bother? And also a face to the others, as if to apologize for her strange aunt, the smoker with the secret life.

  Miep and the other little children from the colony are being looked after by several young women at the home of Nettie Gerbrandt, whose husband is away in the city with the others. Nettie Gerbrandt’s twin brother, Johan, is one of the eight on trial. Miep herself is unaware of why she experiences pain in certain parts of her small body, or that she has a sexually transmitted illness. Nettie Gerbrandt, too, was attacked, possibly by her brother, and gave birth prematurely to a baby boy so tiny he fit into her shoe. He died hours after being born and Nettie smeared her bedroom walls with blood. She has stopped talking, except to the children of the colony, which is why she has been put in charge of their care while the others work.

  Mariche Loewen believes that Nettie may have changed her name to Melvin. She believes Nettie has done this because she no longer wants to be a woman. Agata and Greta refuse to believe this.

  I ask for a quick breather.

  Ona Friesen once again glances at me inquisitively—or perhaps she is curious at the notion of a “breather” (which, likely, is not a word she has ever heard before, even in translation), or at the notion of the sustained breath, the exquisite agony of the unexpressed thought, the narrative of life, the thread that binds, that knots, that holds. A breather, breath, sustained. The narrative.

  The women give me their consent.

  I have returned to the meeting. I am alone, waiting for the women.

  When I was out, I heard music coming from a truck. It was the song “California Dreamin’,” sung by the Mamas and the Papas on a radio turned to an oldies station. I stood a hundred metres from the truck, which was on the main road that runs along the perimeter of the colony. Autje and Neitje were standing beside it, listening. There were few sounds other than the voices of the Mamas and the Papas, in such sweet harmony, singing about the safety and warmth of Los Angeles, the dream of it. The girls didn’t see me, I’m quite sure. They stood perfectly still beside the driver’s side of the truck, their necks bent, heads down, as though they were forensic detectives listening for clues, or solemn mourners at a gravesite.

  Before the song had played, the driver of the truck made a public announcement on his loudspeaker, which he had attached to the cab. He was an official census-taker and he insisted that all colonists must come out of their homes to be counted. He made this announcement several times but of course there are only women, mostly, now in the colony and they don’t understand his language, and even if they did, they would not leave their homes, the barn, the summer kitchen, the yearling pen, the chicken coops, the laundry building … to be accounted for by a man driving a truck with a radio tuned to a pop station. Except for Autje and Neitje, of course, who were drawn to the truck like lost sailors to sirens.

  Now, as I wait for the women to return to the meeting, I have the song “California Dreamin’” in my head, an earworm. I imagine teaching the women the lyrics to the song, having them harmonize like the Mamas and the Papas, repeating the lyrics, a call and response. I think they would enjoy it. All the leaves are brown … I gaze around the empty space, hearing their voices.

  These meetings are taking place in the hayloft belonging to Earnest Thiessen, one of the elderly and infirm men who has not travelled to the city. Earnest is oblivious to most things, including the fact that the women are using his hayloft for their meetings. He can’t remember how many children he’s had or if his siblings are alive or dead, but one thing he has never forgotten is that Peters stole his clock. Earnest’s father had left Earnest the family’s cherished clock when he died, knowing that Earnest, of all of his sons and daughters, was most bound by and fascinated by the nature of time. Peters insisted that Earnest hand over the clock, telling him that time in Molotschna was eternal, that life on earth naturally flowed into life in heaven if one was pure in God’s eyes, and therefore that time, and clocks, was irrelevant. It was discovered, months later, that Peters had installed the clock in his study, the room in his house where he planned his sermons and conducted colony business. Earnest, although senile, has never forgotten his stolen clock, as though this one injustice has expanded to take up all of his mind, as though he has been appointed as the keeper of this one injustice to the exclusion of all else, and when he sees Peters he always asks him when, at what time, will he return the clock.

  The women prefer to meet in this hayloft rather than at one of their kitchen tables because in the kitchens there are children everywhere and always underfoot. It’s not unusual for a family to have fifteen children. Or twenty-five children. (A few months ago, I gave myself a challenge: that I would walk down the main path that encircles Molotschna, through the cornfields and the sorghum, a distance of several miles, and only take a breath when I saw a child. My breathing never once faltered.)

  Our table consists of hay bales with a piece of plywood laid across them, and our chairs are milking buckets. Autje and Neitje occasionally take turns sitting on the window ledge with their legs up and bent at the knees, or in saddles that they’ve removed from Earnest Thiessen’s tack room and set up on a mouldy beam here in the loft.

  Ona Friesen keeps an empty feed pail beside her because she is pregnant and is experiencing nausea. Several of the women in the colony attempted, hurriedly, when it was clear that Ona was expecting, to marry Ona to Julius Penner, the simple son of Ondrej Penner. But Ona insisted that Julius deserved better than a woman afflicted with Narfa and that he would be tainted with sin for marrying a woman who was not a virgin. The elders of the colony have concluded that Ona is beyond redemption, that her Narfa has rendered her incapable of reasoning. I feel obliged to point out that this criticism (being incapable of reasoning) from the elders is saturated in irony, and that Ona will be exempt from eternal damnation because
she has not willfully sinned. Her unborn child, a product of the unwelcome visitors, as the rapists are euphemistically referred to by the elders, will be given to another colony family to raise as their own, perhaps even to the family of the unwelcome visitor.

  Now the women are returning, with the exception of Autje and Neitje.

  Mariche Loewen explains that the young women are at the end of Earnest Thiessen’s driveway visiting with the Koop brothers from Chortiza, the neighbouring colony. (I know that isn’t quite true, but suspect Mariche understands the blowback the girls would receive from Salome if Salome were to learn that they had been listening to the census-taker’s radio. Mariche is protecting them, and saving time. Salome is such a puzzling contradiction, defiant yet traditional, combative and rebellious yet eager to enforce the rules when it comes to others.)

  The other women frown, but concur that we must begin without them.

  Salome asks Mejal if she was smoking, and Mejal asks Salome if that is any of her business. The two of them have brought the bread and soup, and instant coffee, from the summer kitchen and are serving portions of it for the women, and for me.

  Greta and Agata begin the meeting by stating that it is imperative that we make a decision this afternoon about staying or leaving.

  But as they finish speaking, Autje and Neitje return to the hayloft, and now they are entertaining us with an amusing stunt. Before joining us in the loft they secretly positioned a flatbed wagon carrying stacks of bales underneath the window. Autje climbs the ladder first, moaning hysterically about not being able to live a second longer, about life being too cruel. She sways and moans, then runs to the window and flings herself out of it, headfirst.

  The women scream, and we all sprint and hobble to the window, to find Autje sitting placidly atop the stack of bales. Ona laughs hard in appreciation while the others shake their heads and strive to contain any sign of approval.

  The women resume their seats at the table. Neitje mentions that the Koop brothers told her and Autje—(now I realize that the young women did visit with the Koop boys, in addition to the census-taker)—that the brothers’ father had been in the city selling cheese and had bumped into Ingersoll (Mariche’s brother-in-law and husband of one of the Do Nothing women). Ingersoll was in the city with the other men from Molotschna and had stepped outside the courtroom to check on his team. He had told their father, who had mentioned it to their other brother, who then mentioned it to the Koop boys, that two of the Molotschna men were planning to return early to get extra livestock, and possibly horses, to auction in the city for more bail money.