My eyes claw at the walls. Torn, aware in the stillness. But everywhere there are obstacles, the reluctance of my limbs, my mind.
Your baby died during the birth, a nurse comes in and tells me, though I’m not sure about when she comes, how many days later.
It is for the best, she says, then lowers her voice and adds, considering your situation. With no sense of the incomprehensible fact she has just delivered. She leaves me a tray of food that contains sausages and beans. As if this offering were perfectly normal following this news. The sausages are a whitish pink and shrunken in their casings. It reminds me of all the lost fingers, the men who have cut one off. A precaution, Lev told me, against conscription.
I hear a woman singing in a soft voice to a baby in the corridor and feel my own heart recoil. There is no lullaby capable of singing a baby who dies to rest. My body begins to shake. Each lurching sob sending a ripple of pain. Then the metal tray on the floor with a clatter. A child created and cancelled as though for my punishment alone.
There are sounds. There is a flurry of clicks on the tiles. My fists against the nurse. Another nurse. There is an injection and then a warm, slow seeping euphoria before the subterranean dark.
When I wake up I remember the dread each time, though each dread is nothing compared to the newest. I try to find the attending doctor. No one knows. No one seems to know. I am told nothing. I have moments of clear thinking and then others where I remember nothing. They have stopped the bleeding. The numbers have balanced and stabilized. I am made to sign a release form and then sent outside in a wheelchair that stops at the door, as though once this line is crossed you are fine.
And when I walk out, carefully moving into the cold morning, my body moves through the grey. Only now in the outside world, back in season, back in time, do I realize that life is not the same. As though a part of me was lowered in the grave with the baby. Though there is no baby. There is no grave.
—
So it will be born in February, an Aquarian. The stars hold something, Tacita does a chart. Birthflower: violets, she reads aloud. Birthstone— A graven-faced silence.
What, Tas?
Nothing. She says it in a way that I know it’s not.
Tacita, what aren’t you telling me? I ask laughing, reaching for the book. And then I see it. It says, amethyst.
—
The air is cold, and the instant it hits my skin I know that I must get out of here. I am told that my own tragedies are small against the greater tragedies that exist right now in the world. But tragedy doesn’t calibrate that way, I want to say to the nurse. It isn’t dwarfed by the whole. Tragedy is not general. How do we possibly compare tragedies? Instead, I am silent. I speak to no one.
I wish I lived in a different place. A place of opposites. Where it is night instead of day. This place is too old. Too complicated. A ruined holy city. I want green and plain. The outside air burns into my eyes. Everything spiritless. The entire city is a soft corpse, slack-necked, head lolling, open misaligned eyes. The streets, graves. The unnatural silence. The boarded-up shops. The blackened buildings. The dark uptwisting trees. The empty wet chairs in the Tuileries. The icy wind. I stand awkwardly. The pain in my body is present but fading, though I want it to stay. I want it to match what remains unbearable.
I am lost. Useless. The cobblestones grow slick with wet. The white snow turning to ash as soon as it touches the pavement. Throat twisted, I see black footprints behind, through the colourless slush. Proof I am still here. Three uniformed men observe me from a balcony. I smell concrete, its deep mildewed earth dragonish through all the holes. I walk blankly, fixedly. Though Tacita wears a bright red coat, ample and stylish, I do not see her, standing below.
HERON
Sheets of feathers, crackling of reeds, waist-deep, dagger beak jacked to kill.
EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED in the way it happens in fairy tales when the whole kingdom falls asleep except for one person, the one cursed to remain awake. It makes me want to exist under another constellation, wake up in another time. I lie sluggish in bed for days. When I go out, for the first time I see the danger everywhere. It is busy, confusing. The sound of metal, the men in dark uniforms, the pained expressions, everyone fleeing. The deafening silence of Lev. That people can disappear. Whole populations can disappear. They can slide off the edge into nothingness.
He could be banished to Siberia, a woman in line at the post office says uninvited, scanning my envelopes, the thin pleas that go unanswered. Not as far north if accompanied by their wives, she adds, as though they are all polygamists.
It is a coarse wind slanting from the east. I walk to Tacita and Istvan’s. Inside the apartment, the tinkling glass sound of Russian Orthodox church bells, and then a Stravinsky waltz. Russia engraves everything, even this Hungarian-occupied apartment in Paris.
Istvan is consumed with the idea of freedom. He works tirelessly, helping artists escape. There is an heiress with a house in the south. Special routes. Ways to get papers. Tacita and I have been helping too.
It would be so easy now to do nothing, Tacita says, squeezing my hand. But don’t.
I look at her as though I cannot hear, concentrating on the human lips moving, the even tones, a look she possibly interprets as reassurance.
I think I need to get out of here. I look up at her, into the dark pools, her sloe eyes.
Yes. You must go, I, she says, looking over at Istvan. But he will not leave his work here yet. We will eventually book passage and set sail from Portugal too. We must get you a ride to the coast, I. You cannot stay here. You can sail to New York.
She looks at me and smiles. Then we will see each other on the other side.
I nod.
A flicker of possibility that, despite all the things I cannot change, there could be a way out of this. This rolling anguish that pulls me into its ripeness where extinguishing life seems perfect and near.
At the call of the whistle, Tacita picks up the kettle and pours into a mint green teapot. Steam rises. She puts her spoon in the jar of contraband honey, takes it out and carefully licks it.
When we meet again in New York, she says, we will have our exhibition based on the disappearing animals.
I begin making elaborate black line drawings, hunched in my coat. Fingerless gloves. Eating little. I am waiting to be taken to Marseille, and from there I will go to Lisbon and join others, waiting like orphans, for escape. But something new is in me, something dark and not-mine. I notice that murder is everywhere. On these men’s faces, their tight-lipped mouth holes. A fox that hangs around a woman’s neck, the small claws dangling somewhere between her clavicle and her shoulder blade. All the skins furled like unopened lily-of-the-valley leaves pinholed with air in Mme. Tissaud’s atelier. Pigs, calves, cows, dotted whorls of ostrich necks, goat stomachs. Though there are so few now, almost no leather anywhere. I begin to see things that make me unsure. I start to say things out loud as a test, to see what others will say.
Do the cries of animals make you uneasy? I say to Mme. Tissaud, motioning to the skins.
I hate nature, she laughs. It’s so—vegetal. I find it vast, tedious. I am comforted by electric lights and music and the rose windows of Notre Dame. I would rather look at a Delacroix than a forest. I have no romantic attachment to nature, she says, lining up text blocks. It was severed when I was a child. I remember watching a mother duck gliding, trailed by three yellow ducklings on a summer day. A majestic heron flew over them for a moment and then disappeared. I watched the mother and her ducklings smoothly moving on the lake’s surface and thought how serene they were. And then a flash of feathers. The heron landed and skewered them. One. Two. Three. It ate all three of the ducklings, gulping them down in front of the mother who swam around frantically, crazed, wings flapping in water.
I think I have been too close to the earth, she says and twirl-locks the cutter in place. Tilling soil, walking through wet fields, fingers rubbed raw from picking crops. We had livestock, and k
illed the animals we ate. We witnessed the savagery without spell. Animal skins are no different to me than cloth, other than how they perform in binding.
This clarifies nothing, I decide.
She wipes her hands on her coarse apron and I follow her back to the kitchen. She takes out a bag of dried bracts that sprout from the linden leaves and begins to pound them into paste, letting them rest in a sieve. She will use it to bake biscuits, flour now being scarce.
Ivory, Jean-Yves, my oldest son, is coming to take me to the Dordogne. You could come with me. After everything—
Everything?
You need to be careful, she says, mixing, crumbling more leaves in her fingers. It’s not safe here.
Safe?
I am capable only of repeating what she says.
There are so many more of them here. And more people have been taken away. Just the other day I saw them drag a teenage boy to Gare d’Austerlitz and board him on one of those trains without a destination. His eye had been punched into a shiny purple circle. She stops. I can see her eyes filling up with emotion. She brushes off her fingers and puts them on my shoulders, looking directly at me. I can tell my eyes startle her. Their dullness, their remoteness. She says, Against change of fortune set a brave heart. Though for the first time her voice sounds scared, making it unclear whom she says this for.
And Lev. Silence, a new language that trickles between us like blood.
No one mentions his name. But, Tacita says, slowly parsing the words, don’t underestimate him.
Tacita, I cannot talk about it. Though nothing I say matches the desolation within. I feel like something has been switched off.
I eat carefully, potatoes only, while incomprehensible events unfold in the outside world. All of it interests me very little. It increases, this encircling darkness, though nothing threatens me from outside. Strangely, I feel as though I am not destined to die. Living with this deep-hulled absence seems like a sentence, one that I will have to endure. Wondering whether or not it is a gift to survive. With only Tacita noticing that there are things not normal in me.
I sit down at my easel because it is what I know, but it is more a relic from a former self. I find narrative pointless. Why a story? Why now? But I squeeze the ends of tubes and mix colours, silverblue and icy grey with russet undertones. A vivid centre of colour, a mantle of fur depicted out-of-doors in a wintery landscape. There is a small bird offset in the left corner. The bird is slowly disappearing and can barely see its own reflection in the mirror that juts out from the snow. The figure in the mantle has a half-smile as though he carries a secret. The moon sits, immovable.
I hear a quiet knock on the door.
Come in.
Tacita’s shoes tick across the floor. Oh, you’re working, I. I can come back.
No, I say, not looking up. Stay.
She squints and comes close to the painting and then stands back. It seems to be a discovery, she says, no imperatives in her voice.
I keep painting while she walks and then sits on the bed. There is a long silence.
Ivory?
Hmm.
I’m scared.
I stop and put down my brush, walk over to her and sit beside her on the bed. She is shaking. What is it, Tas?
God, I wouldn’t know, there are so many things, she says, fighting back the emotion.
Tell me.
I spend so much time standing in line for hours to collect some rotten scraps of food like a rat. All that time waiting gives my mind too much room. I am not thinking of the divine. I keep thinking, When there is no beauty, what exactly have we got? Have we got truth? And then my thoughts fill with all the things that are tightening, making me feel I cannot breathe. Everyone I see with plundered faces, yellow stars pinned to their coats. How quiet the streets are. So quiet you can forget your own life. I am a chiffonier, like the rag-pickers from the Belle Époque combing the streets for broken glass and dead animals to skin. There is nothing here. And I know that Istvan’s work is essential, but it scares me. All the artists and writers he is getting to the house in the south. Then everywhere I look I see the soldiers, and am sure that they know. The awful prying eyes as I walk by our captors who live and multiply among us. I think I might be paranoid, but then something real happens, like coming home and the bath is drawn. Water right to the top. They are trying to tell us that we are being watched. And then I think, Where is Lev? She starts to cry. And where are you, I? Where are you?
I put my arm around her shoulder. Tas, I am here. It’s—the world that has changed its shape.
Well that is why we must go, she says, wiping her cheek.
Tas—
Yes?
Tell me. Honestly. Do you think I might be a bit—mad?
She pauses for a long time. I think you are really, extraordinarily, awake.
But do you think by leaving we are fleeing the failure of civilization?
She takes in air. I think that we are not yet eaten away by our own cynicism. We have faith. She pauses again. Your making that painting proves it.
It does? I feel like everything is untrustworthy. This painting seems so absurd. Even language. J’ai peur. What does it even really convey of this experience? We are bound together in this, but we aren’t. Not really. We have to go it alone. We have to live with ourselves. I feel like I’m drifting, Tas. My mind keeps playing tricks. I look at basic things, and I find I can’t tell what they are anymore. At least not their purpose. We make sense of things by always relating them back to ourselves. I wonder what they’ve done to Lev. And it makes me want to—
She looks at me. Her eyes look worried.
Exist in something truthful, I say. Something full of grace.
Tacita lights a cigarette. You will, I. You are about to return to the larger-than-life forests, like you had in childhood. The wilderness that you love. I can see a thought flicker across, and then she smiles. You know it might be Mother Nature who is actually your real mother. Her eyes go to my laddered stockings. It’s funny because childhood is so brief, but then you end up missing it for all the rest of the years.
You don’t miss yours.
Some things.
I’ve spent my life running away from things.
You’ve spent your life running toward things. This is no different.
But I’m different, Tas.
I keep having dreams where I can taste dirt in my mouth. That I’m dead and that I have to negotiate my own body somehow, I say in a quiet voice.
Well, thank god, she says, uncrossing her legs, we don’t have to undertake our own burials. She looks up and walks to the window; she still has her coat on. Everyone now lives with their coats on. The winter has been shatteringly cold. There is no coal. The electricity has been shut off. We shove newsprint between our sweaters and coats. People stay in bed for days just to keep warm. Outside the cold rain falls.
I can hear the wet slap of the tree branches against the side of the roof in the wind.
You know what scares me, Tas?
What?
That I’m getting used to it.
To what?
To everything.
People can get used to anything, she says and then adds, but that isn’t always bad.
I don’t know. I’m not sure what will survive. I can already feel the hardening of collective hearts. Of my heart.
Tacita is so serious when she turns on her heel and looks at me, though her eyes look large and tired. Ivory, don’t you see? What lives on is this. She sweeps her hand across the air. Our day-to-day lives.
I look at her blankly.
Everything. This dust on the floorboards. Those dried silver teabags on your saucer. That plant with the browning leaves. Your tubes of paint dried at the openings. The bubbles in the glass of that window. The leafless branches of that tree that will blossom and leaf and scatter, over and over again. The matches that will be used to light those cigarettes. The stacks of books that you may or may not have read yet. All the stamps on
all the unopened letters you have sent. Mme. Tissaud humming downstairs. This beautiful, unfinished painting. We have to hang on to it. All of it, because when we are gone, everything slips away and our time, these things—all these things will be gone.
Then we will hold on, I say.
What I don’t tell her: I dream that I jump out my window in my sleep and wake on the way down.
And while we hug goodbye, outside, the rain falls.
MOTH
Lunification.
THE THING IS—the clock moves an inch—there is something else.
What do you mean? Another tick.
There was a child born in Paris.
There is no child, I say flatly. The baby died.
Skeet looks into my eyes. A whole lifetime passes back and forth.
It didn’t. I mean, she didn’t. I have the hospital records the museum sent, he says, gesturing to his bag. This is what they would tell unmarried women, he says carefully, when in fact the child had been adopted. That the mother was often heavily drugged for days at a time. That there were always many families that wanted a baby. This child, this girl, was adopted by a childless couple who fled to the south and later settled back in Paris.
A daughter, I say, attempting to move past this word functionally, but agony grips my chest and forces it out, stilted. The horrible sound stuck in the walls.
But, before anything else, I have to tell you. He drops his head. She’s gone now.
When I say nothing, he says, They called her Jeanne.
My heart heavy as water. I swallow several times to regain control of my voice. Oh god, Skeet. I have to just—
I’m sorry Frame. I’m so sorry. I just wanted—
I should be crying, soaking his shirtsleeve. But I am stunned. I had known, somewhere, that this is what the letter meant, but would not, for a moment, let myself think it. The pain I had kept tightly in the heart of my heart, stopped it filling my entire chest. All these years as though a sound, muffled offtime, stayed with me. Another heartbeat faintly beating behind my own. In order to forget one life, you need to live at least one other life. The young can withstand the shock of love because another life is still possible. It is only the old who die of heartbreak.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 24