Women Talking

by Miriam Toews

  It’s funny now—or was then, too, but I didn’t see it—to think of how I recited (Oh, why do I use the word “recited,” so top-heavy, so comical), how I repeated those words to my cellmates, the words of Flaubert, wrapped in the memory of my mother, of love and death, the death of a dream, or perhaps not death. A part of my scalp was removed, brutally, when I finished, the part that I scratch at wildly, as though I’m searching for the source of something, something I’ve lost, a frenzy of pain. Why does the mention of love, the memory of love, the memory of love lost, the promise of love, the end of love, the absence of love, the burning, burning need for love, need to love, result in so much violence?

  Molotschna.

  Ona held my hand to her belly until I felt the life inside her and I smiled. Why has Peters allowed me back into the colony? Why did the librarian suggest that I return to Molotschna? The women in the loft have taught me that consciousness is resistance, that faith is action, that time is running out. But can faith also be to return, to stay, to serve?

  Much service, too, does he who turns his plough, and again breaks crosswise through the ridges he raised.

  Is there a small but vital, burning piece of Peters that is seeking to make peace? And mustn’t I acknowledge that? Or even if it isn’t a vital, burning piece of Peters but a barely glowing ember, mustn’t I hope that it will grow? In which case, mustn’t I be here, in Molotschna, as a physical reminder not of evil, but of God’s grace?

  I don’t know. I only know one fact: that I’m of more use being alive and teaching basic reading, writing and math, and organizing games of Flying Dutchmen, than lying dead in a field with a bullet in my brain. Ona knew that all along. She told me she had a favour to ask of me, that she needed me to take the minutes for the women’s meetings. I hesitated at first, but what excuse could I make? What could I tell her? That unfortunately I wouldn’t be available to take the minutes because I’d be fatally wounded from a self-inflicted gunshot to my head?

  I understand now that I had told her exactly this, with my eyes, with my silence, with the gun. (Especially with the gun.)

  I asked her what good the minutes would do her and the other women if they were unable to read them? (But she may well have asked me instead, What good is it to be alive if you are not in the world?)

  And that’s when she told me the story of the squirrel and the rabbit and of their secret playing, and said that perhaps she hadn’t been meant to see them playing—yet she had seen them. Maybe there was no reason for the women to have minutes they couldn’t read. The purpose, all along, was for me to take them.

  The purpose was for me to take them, the minutes. Life.

  I smile. I see the world turning in on itself, like waves, but without a sea or shore to contain them. There was no point to the minutes. I have to laugh.

  I stand at the window and sniff the air for any sign of smoke, but there is none, or if there is, I can’t detect it.

  Are the women rushing headlong into a raging fire?

  I look at the boys, asleep, unconscious to be exact, and plead silently with them to tell me the truth.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My gratitude belongs to three women without whom these pages would be blank: my editor, Lynn Henry; my agent, Sarah Chalfant; and my mother, Elvira Toews.

  I wish, also, to acknowledge the girls and women living in patriarchal, authoritarian (Mennonite and non-Mennonite) communities across the globe. Love and solidarity.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Miriam Toews is the author of six bestselling novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth and All My Puny Sorrows, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Marian Engel / Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Summer of My Amazing Luck

  A Boy of Good Breeding

  Swing Low: A Life

  A Complicated Kindness

  The Flying Troutmans

  Irma Voth

  All My Puny Sorrows

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in the UK in 2018

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  First published in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto

  This ebook edition first published in 2018

  All rights reserved

  © Miriam Toews, 2018

  Cover design by Faber

  Interior illustrations by Willow Dawson

  The right of Miriam Toews to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–34034–7