by Sigrid Nunez
He cocks his head to the other side then and says, “Why did you run away from me?” And before I can speak he answers for me. “You were afraid. I know it. But why?” More than a hint of umbrage now. “I am not a bad person. You had to know I would never hurt you. I was always very careful with you.”
Often when he came to see me, as soon as he stepped through the door he would kiss me, and as he was kissing me he would reach down and gather me up into his arms. He would hold me for a long time, hugging me to his chest, kissing me, and then start walking with me into the apartment, to the bedroom, to the bed.
“My friends are waiting,” I say. “I have to go.”
Of course he will not let me pay him. Does he still cheat his passengers? I wonder, as I get out of the cab.
“May I call you, my dear?” His tone is affectionate, insinuating, full of humor. Twisting his mouth to blow smoke out of the corner. My skin remembers him.
“No,” I say, and at this Vadim looks many things at once: a little wounded, a little bemused, a little mocking, and, as always, a little sorry for me.
“In that case, okay, goodbye again.” Not a man to ask twice. Lots of fish in the sea. He drives off, calling, “Take it easy, my dear!”
Did I mention the weather? Cold rain and a spiteful wind that first helps me get my umbrella up, then tries to tear it away from me.
My friends are waiting. They are waiting inside the bar right there on the corner, but I hesitate, as if I didn’t know which way to go. Or I made it all up: There was no one waiting for me, and now I would catch another cab and go home.
Of course he was bad. He was very bad. A brute. A pimp. A menace to women. I know why he pitied me.
And it isn’t true that I never saw him angry. He became angry with me when he saw that I was afraid, especially if there were other people around. For example, one night, walking in the park, the way I kept looking over my shoulder made him very angry. He took hold of my wrists and he shook me. “I told you: You don’t have to be afraid when you are with me. If I have to fight for you, I fight. If I have to die for you, I die. I cannot do differently. Differently, I am not man.”
I think he was a good father to his daughter.
At different times in my life I have made up my mind to try therapy. It seemed an obvious thing to do. Everyone else was doing it. Women, especially, swore by it. Perhaps I was just wildly unlucky, but the male doctors turned out to be easy to seduce, and I didn’t fare much better with the women. The last one I tried had told me at the end of our first session, “A background like that, no wonder you’re here. You don’t know who you are!” Then she added, more to herself than to me: “Still, there must have been something good back there: It must have come from the father.”
I thought she should not have said that.
I even took someone’s advice and sought out that rarity, a Chinese-American therapist, who kept exhorting me to summon more rage to our sessions, as if rage were a dog I could whistle into the room. Here, Rage! (But my mother, seen as the root of so much trouble, lived in a state of constant rage, and what good had come of that? A question for which Dr. Wu had no answer.)
When I was in college, I had a friend who insisted on going home with me one holiday. This was a woman from an ethereally privileged world who prided herself on her lack of prejudice. The idea of visiting a housing project excited her. I suppose it seemed romantic and daring. Throughout her visit she was very polite, but I could tell that she was nervous. Later, I heard from others the report she gave of her visit, as if it had been to a sideshow: how scary it was and how weird she found my family; how she couldn’t sleep at night on the cheap cot that had been pulled out for her. I remained friends with her (some sort of twisted pride, I think), but I never forgave her. Some time after the visit she said to me, “And how are your little parents?” It was the closest I ever came to punching anyone. Now, that was rage.
It would not have occurred to me to introduce Vadim to my friends. Although they wanted to hear all about him and to see the photographs, they would not have liked to meet him; it didn’t matter how much Pushkin he could recite. Some saw the whole affair as a kind of backsliding on my part. (“You can take the girl out of the projects, but …”)
There are people who will tell you that, no matter what you achieve in life or what opportunities come your way, you must stick with your own class. To try to rise above your class is to betray it and to risk losing your soul.
After my father died I had a nervous breakdown. It may have been the illness, or it may have been the medication used to treat the illness, but I lost what had been a very good memory. Before the breakdown I could, if I wished, turn to some scene from the past and run it like a movie in my head. I could bring it all back: where the scene had taken place, what kind of day it was, what clothes people were wearing, the expressions on their faces, entire conversations word for word. It may have been the price of cure, but it was a hard adjustment for me, becoming a person with ordinary powers of memory.
It was only recently, when I read somewhere that there are seven million Changs in the world, that I remembered this: I had a classmate named Joey Chang, one of the very few Asians in our grade school. I must have told him about my father, and he must have told his parents, who called immediately to invite our family to a barbecue. This invitation caused some consternation in our household. Remember: We were not used to going out. And we had no car, so we would have to take the bus. But there’d be no leaving my father home this time.
Joey Chang had two little siblings, a girl and a boy. As we sat eating spareribs, these two were all over my father, climbing into his lap, swinging from his arms, until finally he gave up trying to eat and let them drag him off. For the rest of the afternoon he played with them nearby on the lawn.
We did not return the Changs’ invitation, and they did not invite us to their house again. I could imagine Joey’s parents saying to him after we left: “They aren’t really Chinese!”
Back home from the barbecue, my sisters and I were downcast. “He never played like that with us.” A revelation and a shock, that brief glimpse of a happy, active father. Our mother didn’t see anything shocking about it. “Ach, such adorable little Chinese kids—what do you expect? You have to forgive him. I would probably be the same with little German children.”
Some things it would be death to forgive.
“Why did you want to hurt yourself?” asked the doctor who admitted me into the hospital.
“Why did you go with this man? What did you want?” The doctor sitting across from me now is a woman. A stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished.
Additional Acclaim for Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God
“An intelligent and poignant examination of social and erotic displacement, and written with such extraordinary and seemingly unstudied conviction that one accepts every word of it as truth.”
—The Atlantic Monthly
“A Feather on the Breath of God brilliantly succeeds in describing a life on the fringe, outside the conventional categories of cultural and personal identity … . A remarkable book, full of strange brilliance, trembling with fury and tenderness.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Nunez nearly transforms literature into ballet.”
—The Washington Post
“Wise and beautiful. This novel is now on my favorite-books list.”
—Carolyn Chute, author of Snow Man
“An exquisite novel that saves us from our primal fears of loss by reaffirming our belief in the immortality of love. The book is complex and beautifully felt, and I was haunted by it. Sigrid Nunez is a radiant and tenacious writer.”
—Fae Myenne Ng, author of Bone
Also by Sigrid Nunez
The Last of Her Kind
For Rouenna
Mitz:
The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
Naked Sleeper
Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels For Rouenna and The Last of Her Kind. She has received several awards, including a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
The author wishes to thank the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for their generous support.
A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD. Copyright © 1995 by Sigrid Nunez. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Parts of this book were originally published, in slightly different form, in the Threepenny Review and the Lowa Review.
First published in the United States by HarperCollinsPublishers
Designed by C. Linda Dingler
eISBN 9781429944946
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nunez, Sigrid.
A feather on the breath of God: a novel / Sigrid Nunez.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-42273-3
EAN 978-0-312-42273-8
I. Young women—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. Chinese Americans—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. German Americans—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Ballet dancers—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Family—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3564.U475F4 1995
94-22766