by Miriam Toews
I once made the mistake of asking my father if it didn’t make sense that in all those years from then to now some Mennonite girl would fall for a Mexican boy and want to marry him. It’s called integration, Dad, it’s not a big deal. I mean if you accept their cheap offer of land … But he had stopped listening to me ages ago. The last real thing we talked about was the absurdity of life on earth. He was thinking about something he’d read in an old newspaper that had somehow managed to float into our field from El Paso or somewhere. We were in the truck on our way to Cuauhtémoc and he asked me how I thought it was possible that a crowd of people could stand on the street in front of a tall office building and cheer a suicidal man on to his death by encouraging him to jump. I was surprised by the question and said I didn’t know. What does that say about us? said my dad. That we’re cruel, I said. Then my dad said no, he didn’t think so, he thought it meant that we feel mocked, that we feel and appear stupid and cowardly in the presence of this suicidal man who has wisely concluded that life on earth is ridiculous. And we want him to die immediately so that the pain of being confronted with our own fear and ignorance will also, mercifully, end. Would you agree with that? my dad asked. What? I said. I didn’t know what he was asking me. It’s a sin to commit suicide, I thought. I said no, I still think it means we’re cruel. My dad said no, it doesn’t mean we’re cruel. He got a little mad at me and stopped talking to me for a while and then as time passed never got back into the habit.
My father had lost his family when he was a little kid, when they’d been driven off their farm near the Black Sea. His parents and his sisters had been slaughtered by soldiers on a road somewhere in Russia, beside trees, and buried quickly in the ditch. My father survived by singing some songs, German hymns I think, for the soldiers, who thought it was cute, this little blond boy, but eventually the novelty of that wore off and they foisted him onto some other fleeing Mennonite family who adopted him and brought him to Canada to help with the animals and baling. He hated his adopted family and ran away when he was twelve to work on some other farm where he met my mother and eventually married her. That’s all I know about that because by the time it occurred to me to ask him questions about it he had stopped talking to me. I tried to get more details from my mother but she said she didn’t know any more than that either.
We’d had fun, me and him, you know, typical farm fun, when I was young. He made me a swing that I could jump from into hay and he understood my grief when my favourite chicken died. He even brought me to the fabric store to buy some flannel to make a burial suit of little trousers and a vest and hat for my chicken and he let me bury it outside my bedroom window rather than tossing it into the rubble fire like the other dead ones. But it was colossal and swift like the sinking of the Titanic the way all that disappeared when he moved us overnight to Mexico.
Two weeks after we moved here my mother took me to the doctor for the first time in Cuauhtémoc and told him that I thought I was dead and nothing she or my father said could convince me of the truth. I was thirteen years old, the same age that Aggie is now. My father stayed outside in the truck. The doctor spoke to me in Spanish and I didn’t understand him very well. His office was in a big barn and the nurse was his wife. He had a small revolver in his pocket but before he examined me he took it out and laid it on his desk. He asked me what my life was like when I was alive.
I don’t know, I said.
Is this your life after death? he asked me.
Yes, I said. I think so.
How did you die? he asked.
I don’t know, I said.
Food poisoning? he asked.
Maybe, I said. I don’t know.
Snake bite? he said.
No, I said.
Heart attack?
I’m not sure.
Do you feel that you were born and lived and then you died or that you have never lived at all? he asked.
I was born and lived and then died, I said.
So, he said, do you think that you’re in heaven?
I don’t know, I said.
What makes you feel like you’re dead? he said. Are you numb in some parts of your body?
No, I said. I don’t know.
Did you see yourself die? he asked.
Yes, I said.
How did you die? he asked.
I’m not sure, I said.
But you saw yourself die? he said.
Yes, I said.
In a dream? he said.
I don’t know, I said.
If you still feel that you are dead in six weeks will you please come back to see me? he said.
I looked at my mother and she nodded. She didn’t like his question about food poisoning. The doctor thanked her for bringing me to see him and patted her arm. He put his pistol back into his pocket. My father was still sitting in the truck, waiting for us. He asked my mother if I still thought I was dead.
I don’t know, she said.
Why is it so important to you whether I’m alive or not? I asked them.
It’s not whether you’re alive or not, said my father. Clearly you’re alive. It’s what you believe. He pinched my arm. Do you feel that?
I nodded.
You need to stop playing games, Irma Voth, he said.
Someday you’ll be a wife and mother, Irma, said my own mother. Will you come alive for that? I didn’t know what to tell her. How was I supposed to know? On the way home I put my head in her lap and she undid my braids and combed my hair with her fingers. I like to remember how that felt. She was so gentle. I still don’t understand how she managed to take out my tight braids without any tugging or pain. Irma, she whispered to me, just begin. I didn’t know what she meant. When we got back she stayed with me in my bed even though I was thirteen and rubbed circles on my back slowly.
Aggie and I sat on the fence and talked. We were surrounded by nothing but three farmhouses in a neat row, sky and corn. How are the boys? I asked.
Annoying, she said. We had two little brothers, Doft and Jacobo, who liked to connect everything with rope.
Are they still tying shit together? I asked.
Yeah, and hiding shoes, she said. She told me that already my father was fighting with the director of the movie.
He’s here now? I said.
He came early, said Aggie. Mom and I listened to him talking with Dad in the kitchen. Dad said he’d shoot his dog if it attacks the cows or even if he sees him in the cornfields. He’s a fighting pit bull from Mexico City, Irma, and the director said he’s got a haunted soul and a natural sweetness, and he’ll play in the movie as a dog of the family. Dad told him that no family here has a fighting dog from Mexico City and especially not one with a soul and that’s the first sign the director doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Aggie told me the director said he had invested almost all of his own money into his art, into making this film about beautiful people in a beautiful part of the world, and that he has nothing but respect and admiration for the Mennonites. My father asked the director if the dog was really there purely for protection. He accused the director of lying to him. That the dog was there to protect his expensive camera equipment. The director denied that and said no, the dog would be an integral part of the film. Aggie said that our father told the director that films were like beautiful cakes, filled with shit.
How can he say that when he’s never seen them? I asked her.
He says art is a lie, said Aggie.
We sat on the fence and stared at things. Artless things. Things that were true. Things that belonged to ourselves and to each other. The clouds, our clothing, my hands. A bird flying over us had two long twigs in its mouth and he dropped one so that it landed directly at our feet like it was a gift. Here you go, Mennonite girls, prepare a nest. Or maybe it was an attack.
Dad says you believe in God but not an afterlife, said Aggie. He says that’s impossible.
That’s not remotely accurate, I told her. I never said that.
Frieda’s
dad drove his truck the wrong way down the highway to Cuauhtémoc, said Aggie.
What a moron, I said.
No, she said, he killed himself.
On purpose? I said.
I don’t know, said Aggie. Didn’t he drive there all the time? Did they secretly reverse the directions?
What are they gonna do? I said.
Who knows, said Aggie. Get a new truck? Katharina at school said he owed money to narcos.
Aggie, I said.
Well, how should I know? she said. Oh, I have this for you. She pulled a tiny infant’s undershirt out of her pocket. There was a small faded flower on the collar. You wore it in Canada if you were a baby, she said. Mom told me to give it to you.
Thanks, I said. When I was a baby.
When you were a baby? said Aggie. English is such a prick.
You’re pretty good at it, I said.
Oh, and this is from her too, she said, and kissed me on the cheek.
Get lost, I said.
Can I come live with you, Irma? said Aggie.
Well, I said, are you looking for a quick and easy way to complicate your life forever?
Maybe I could live with you secretly, she said.
We sat quietly. We heard cows practising their English, trying with no luck to form words.
What’s he trying to say? said Aggie.
Help, I said. Our own stupid joke.
I told her to go before it got so dark she’d fall into the ditch on her way home but she didn’t move. Aggie ignores all my advice, as though she were determined to live successfully, and we sat on the fence for a long time. Then we started to get stiff from sitting and began to kick each other lightly in the dark.
When are they moving in? I asked Aggie.
I don’t know, she said. Tonight.
My power was still off and I couldn’t find the flashlight that Jorge had given me. I thought about bringing a cow into the house for company, just one. A small one. Or I could sleep in the barn like Jesus but without the entourage or the pressure to perform. I lay in my bed thinking of ways I could make Jorge happy if he ever came home again. One was: wash my feet before going to bed and dry them completely. The other one was: be hotter. It was true, what Jorge had said, that we weren’t kids anymore. I loved chasing him around fields and having dried turd fights and hiding in the corn while he looked for me and planning our future together in the Yucatán in a lighthouse with round rooms and a pole in the middle that we would use to slide down from the top floor directly into a boat that with one shove would put us out to sea. I told him we could call the boat Katie but he said he’d have to name it after his mother and even that was okay with me, I didn’t argue. I knew I would be alone for the rest of my life if Jorge didn’t come back to me. No boy from any of the Mennonite colonies would want a woman who’d been married and abandoned and especially one who’d been married to a Mexican.
I decided to go out and spy on my family from the roof of their grain shed. I could see directly into their large room. I thought about throwing myself off the roof of the grain shed and onto the roof of the outdoor kitchen which they’re not using now and lying there, dead, for months, invisible but toxic.
I wondered how long it would take them to find me. Then I remembered that they wouldn’t be looking. Well, maybe Aggie would be looking, but that’s the thing that stopped me from doing it. I had one question of myself: how do I preserve my dignity when nobody else is watching? By believing in a happy ending, I told myself. I had to get out of the house.
I stood in my yard and noticed the lights on at my cousins’ old place. The filmmakers had arrived. And then I heard voices and music and laughter and I had never felt more alone and strange in my life, which is something. I went back into my house and lay in my bed some more and tried to pray. God, I said, help me to live. Help me to live, please. Please God, help me to live. God, I need your help. I need to live. Please? I need help living. God. Help. I had never learned how to pray properly. It didn’t make sense that God would require me to articulate my pain in order for him to feel it and respond. I wanted to negotiate a deal. I knew I wasn’t supposed to talk to the filmmakers but wondered if it would be acceptable to observe them from a distance. I punched myself on the side of my head. What difference did it make what my father had said? I posed another question to myself. How do I behave in this world without following the directions of my father, my husband or God? Does it all end with me sleeping in a barn with cows and creeping around the campo spying on people from the roofs of empty grain sheds?
I got up again and went outside and crept along in the darkness towards the filmmakers’ house. I leaned against the water pump in the side yard and watched while several guys unloaded a million black boxes from a truck and a car and a van and carried them into the house. All the lights were on and the filmmakers were laughing and talking loudly and music was playing from somewhere inside. A dog was barking. In fact, a dog was barking and running at me in the dark and it looked like his eyes were on fire and I could see sparks flying out of them. I thought, well, I should run now, but I couldn’t move, I was galvanized to the pump, and then I heard a man yell, Oveja, Oveja!
Which is how I met Diego, the director of the film.
Vive aquí? he said. He was kneeling, looking up at me, and holding on to Oveja’s collar.
No, I said. Well, yes. Over there. I pointed. I tried to smile. I shook with fear. I may have bitten off a piece of my own tongue.
Me llamo Diego, said Diego.
Irma, I said.
Mucho gusto, Irma.
Mucho gusto.
Diego released Oveja and the dog wandered back to the house and Diego and I stood in the dark by the pump. He spoke quickly and precisely but his voice was soft, as though he were helping me through an emergency. He told me that Oveja, the pit bull, used to be a champion fighter in Guadalajara. He told me that Oveja, like every living thing, needs to love and be loved. And that his eyes tell a story of pain and suffering, and that he is haunted by his criminal past, a life he would never have chosen for himself.
Oveja and I are blood brothers, Diego said. We were soldiers and now we are artists. He explained that before he became a filmmaker he was involved in armed conflict, though on the legal end of things.
Oveja will eventually play the part of the family dog in my movie, said Diego.
I know, I said.
Ah, you do? he asked.
He suggested that we move closer to the yard light so that we could see each other’s faces. He smiled and I looked at him closely. He wore a thin thread around his neck and attached to the thread was a small piece of paper the size of a postage stamp. It had writing on it but I couldn’t read it. He had a red dot in the white part of his left eye, like a tiny pilot light.
Which languages do you speak, Irma? he asked me.
German, Spanish and English, I said.
Do you want a job? he asked me.
I don’t know, I said. I think I have one.
What is it? he said.
The farm, I said. I glanced over at the barn behind my house. And … wife.
How old are you, Irma?
I’m nineteen years old, I said.
And you’re married? he said.
Yes, I said, for one year already.
Have you been here all your life?
I was born in Canada, I said.
Where is your husband? he said.
He’s in the city.
Which city?
Chihuahua. Or Juárez.
For how long?
I don’t know.
Would you like to make some extra money as a translator? he said.
Diego said he’d explain to me in Spanish or English what he wanted his German actress to say and do and I’d tell her, in German, what it was. He told me that it didn’t really matter what the actors were saying because nobody watching the film would understand the language anyway. It wasn’t really German that they’d be speaking, it was Low German, wh
ich is the unwritten language of the Mennonite people and hardly used in the world anymore. And besides, he said, there will be subtitles.
My actors could be saying I have worms, you have worms, we all have worms, he said, and nobody would know the difference. Do you understand, Irma?
I do, I said.
But I want them to know what they’re saying, he said. So that they’ll feel the words and produce the appropriate emotional response.
He told me that Miguel, a sixteen-year-old production assistant, will pick Marijke the German actress up at the airport in Chihuahua city tomorrow and bring her here to Campo 6.5 and we’ll begin to shoot the movie the next day after she’s had some time to rest.
I’m looking for internal energy and presence, Diego told me. I travelled around the world searching for the woman who would play this role. I want her to be beautiful, but not beautiful.
I understand, I told him.
I want her face to feel at home on an ancient coin, he said. I want her eyes to harm me. I want her, I mean her, to be too big for her body, a living secret, so that she is squeezed out through here, he said. He touched my forehead.