I loved my little girl, loved her dearly. She had a way of laughing that was glorious and unconcerned and though she didn’t speak for her first three years, she could say such things with her eyes that the two of us understood each other perfectly.
By her fifth year our fears were proven to be unfounded. She’d mastered Russian and German. When I wrote to my sister in Canada—that distant country!—to tell her of my daughter’s aptitude, she sent back children’s books in French. “Mama, je t’aime,” Desi would say, preferring the smoothness of that other language with its twists and complications, its puzzle-words that could only be memorized.
Kiril insisted that we’d send her to the Language School when she came of age. It occurred to us that she might be able to work as a diplomat and so have the opportunity to see the countries currently denied to us. It would be a good profession.
We had a little hope of succeeding. I worked during this time in the government offices and there was the possibility of advancement. If I did well then Desi’s chances might be greater when the time came. And I had a serious job. It was my duty to analyze pamphlets for coded messages. This was difficult work. The office was unheated and often our fingers and toes would grow numb from the cold. At first I didn’t believe I would ever find any messages. After all, these weren’t dissident pamphlets. They were produced in a warehouse in the adjoining building by another government agency where I assumed another group of girls must be struggling over the pamphlets we ourselves produced. It was a case of the left hand watching the right. Who would dare put forward their subversion this way?
But then I learned that one of the girls I worked with, Nevena, had failed to report a series of discrepancies in documents planted amongst her daily batch. She didn’t appear in the office the next day and none of us ever knew what happened to her.
All this made me more serious in my efforts. Luckily I had a good memory. I could hold the image of the master pamphlet in my mind very well. This allowed me to spot errors. They were small things usually, a misspelled word, a letter placed upside down. The pamphlets were produced by hand as we were never given the faster Linotype machines we heard they had elsewhere. As such it was easy for mistakes to occur. I believed what I saw were these things.
But the other girls in the office were not as good as me. It wasn’t uncommon for our department to seed false flags in our batches. More girls disappeared but I was promoted. At last one of the other girls came to me, Rosita, who had a child the same age as Desi. “You’re so clever,” she said, “how do you do it?”
I tried to explain. I held the image in my mind, made it as strong and bright as possible, until I could see nothing else. Then I would hold another page before my eyes and the two would somehow join together. At that point it was obvious what was different.
She tried to adopt the same technique but she couldn’t get the knack of it. We developed exercises to strengthen her memory but they didn’t work. It was only when we explained to Elitsa what we were doing that she was able to devise a solution. It turned out Elitsa’s husband was an optician. She understood the workings of the eye better than either of us. She said when we looked at a thing our two eyes took in two images, which the brain bound together. I’d learned to use my mind’s eye to do the work because I was clever but it must be possible to do the same thing using only the body’s eyes.
She instructed us to bring in our husbands’ shaving mirrors. We were all nervous for we hadn’t seen mirrors in the Universal Goods store for many months. If our experiments went wrong then they mightn’t be replaced and we’d need to bring the razor to our husbands’ chins ourselves lest they grow uncitizenly beards.
But again I shouldn’t have worried. Elitsa measured out the distances herself and she placed the standing mirrors in such a way that two pamphlets could be laid out side by side. When Rosita sat down to study them then the mirrors controlled the route of her gaze: one eye saw the left pamphlet, the other the right. The first time she tried it she screwed up her face in consternation and then let out a shriek of delight. “I can see it,” she told us all excitedly, “look, there, the space between those words is wrong. It’s like magic!” She let me try for myself and it was just as she said. The wrong words seemed to shimmer and glow.
After that we encouraged the other girls to bring in their husbands’ mirrors and we set up many more of these contraptions. Soon we joked that the whole lot of us would be known as the Bear Wives for the hairiness of our men. Never mind, we thought. At least we would be safe.
* * *
A month later Elitsa didn’t come into the office. A month can be a long time and by then some of my fear of the vanishments had dulled. I thought she might be sick. But the next day her space was empty and the third as well.
“They don’t like us so smart,” Rosita said darkly and after that we gave our mirrors back to our husbands. We set about doing things the old way and even I, who had never needed the mirror to begin with, made sure to be a little less diligent. I worried Rosita was right and at the same time I feared she was wrong, that perhaps there had never been a reason for the disappearances. Perhaps we were grasping at straws.
Then spring came and so did the rains.
We learned about them first from the pamphlets. Words like contamination and half-life began to appear with regularity. I learned to avoid anything grown in the fields and so Kiril and I did what we could to trade for powdered milk and cans of tasteless beans. But we couldn’t avoid it entirely. It was necessary for us to attend the Victory Parades despite the grim fug of the clouds. The rainfall was light and we brought umbrellas. After we released I made sure to scrub us all—Desi, in particular. I remember how she grinned her little monkey-grin at me as I soaped her arms and shoulders.
“Pourquoi as-tu si peur, Maman?” she asked. I told her I wasn’t afraid, only that we had to be clean. I scrubbed until her skin was raw and she began to weep.
* * *
She grew sick. She died.
In another country she might’ve lived. It wasn’t that our doctors didn’t care for her but their equipment was outdated. They had many patients. I don’t blame them. Only they didn’t let me hold her in the end. They told me they’d cremate her, as they did for all the others who grew sick in the rains.
The next day I couldn’t go to work. I thought I was dying too, that’s how bad I felt. Kiril begged me to, he warned me if I didn’t then they might come for me. Rosita stopped by as well and she brought with her biscuits which she insisted on crushing so we might eat them with rosehip jam. She told me three days of absence could be forgiven but no more than that. They understood I was grieving but there was work to be done. I was one of the best, even now.
I didn’t care. When Kiril wouldn’t leave me be I locked myself in our bedroom. My grief was a terrible thing. I had only a school photo of Desi from when she had won a prize the previous year and I stared at it for hours. What was I doing? In my mind I could see my daughter’s body. Her face was pale and bloodless but her shoulders were streaked with red. She looked as if she’d been mauled by a bear. I lay the mind-image of her corpse over the photograph and my vision began to dance. I saw her alive and smiling. I saw her dead. For a whole day I did this until I dreamt the image had been fixed. My mind had made her whole again: a bright, shimmering creature who hovered at the edge of my vision.
I tried to call out to her but there was a pounding at the bedroom door, which was flung open. Someone shouted, “You must stop this!” It was Elitsa.
She looked different now. Her long hair was glossy and smoothly cut and her skin seemed to glow with good health. She wore a Party uniform that was crisp and clean.
“Leave it be,” she said, “let her go. She doesn’t want this.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you. But I promise, you must do as I say.” Then she lowered her eyes and whispered to me: “L’enfant est vivant!”
A gripping cold seized hold of my lungs. I couldn’t br
eathe. She poured me vodka from her own flask and only when the fire of it bit into the ice was I able to look at her.
“You’ve prospered,” I said bitterly.
“Someone must.”
“Is that how it is then?”
She nodded and took my hand. Then she told me what would happen. I had a sister, didn’t I? In Canada? It was a good country. I would be allowed to go to her. The passports had been arranged and we would be given money, as much as we needed. Only I must never speak of what I’d seen, of what I’d read in the pamphlets. I was an intelligent woman, she would be sure there was a position for me at the university.
* * *
Elitsa was as good as her word.
It was snowing when we arrived at our new home and I’d never felt such cold before in my life. I had to buy a pair of boots with thick fur on the inside to keep my feet warm. Kiril took me to the shopping centre, which seemed to me to be like a palace. Everything glittered, there was so much light. I said to Kiril, “We must buy more of these. We will send them back for the others. No one has boots like these back home. No one knows boots such as this exist!”
He held my hand as we made our way along the treacherous sidewalk, the two of us moving slowly as if we were learning to walk for the first time. The boots felt so good. The wind didn’t touch us. We were both crying as we walked and the tears froze to our face so that the streets seemed to spark with reflected light.
We weren’t alone on the street. We passed a group of schoolchildren in thick winter coats who were gazing at the sky. They looked like angels with their pale faces, their unfamiliar greetings. Eagerly they cast their mouths open as the snow drifted downward and like sugar dissolved on their tongues.
III
When I was fourteen I was disappeared.
It’s a strange thing: to be disappeared. I had a bad fever at the time—a nightmare of chemical horror—and so my memories are distorted in any case. I was in a crowded hospital room with many others. There weren’t enough beds so some were lying on the floor on rush mats. My burning bones whispered beneath my flesh. I imagined an old woman counting them, putting them in order so she might know my future. This was my doctor, I think, though I can’t be sure. It might have been my mother.
The State took me in. My mind during this period, which lasted close to six months I was told, became like molten silver so they set it to congeal in its new shape before it might be tampered with. There was a school I went to which was very like the school I had attended before. Continuity, eh? Except I didn’t go home. We all slept at the school, we ate at the school, we completed the tasks we were given, suffered our punishments and endured the sparing praise that was sometimes heaped on a rival. It was much the same as it had been except my mother and Kiril weren’t there. But I was told they had died and that I was an orphan and all this was for my own good. They didn’t indulge my grief. We were all grief-stricken. At night we were a small nation of howlers.
* * *
So. What did we learn then?
We learned to love one another. This was the first thing though it wasn’t what they intended to teach us. But it was necessary. We were well fed in the school, better than we had ever been, and as we progressed we were each given private rooms so we could study better and learn. But for us there was no outside world, no adults beyond our teachers and supervisors. We were a communal species, denied community, and so we made it for ourselves. We loved one another. We had too much but we shared it anyhow. If one of us was praised then we would take it upon ourselves to be sure each other girl was praised equally by one of us. We didn’t want them to divide us. We called each other “little sister.”
But that’s not what you meant. Well then.
The other things flow from that first commandment we gave ourselves: to love one another. We were asked to stare for long hours at walls until pictures came into our minds. We were told these were the mind-shapes of our fellows and that we must study them carefully and report back.
Many didn’t believe this was possible, but I did. I sent darling Liliya, the youngest of us, a mind-shape of the Eiffel Tower. I’d seen it in the books my aunt sent me and I remembered it very well. It didn’t look like any other building I had seen before. A standing skeleton, I thought, all dressed up in little fairy lights. She saw it, I know she did. She drew it for them but they weren’t happy. It looked too pretty in her drawings and they were afraid if we saw such images we might become attracted to the West.
* * *
There’s another thing I learned at the school and it is this: fear is a fixer. Those mind-shapes burnished by terror had an added brightness to them. They lingered far longer. When our teachers learned this they began to incorporate it into our training. We would choose an image—say, of the oak tree in the centre of the yard, whose crown had died off, leaving only the bleached staghead—and if it wasn’t clear enough we would be encouraged to fix it with our fears. For example, I might add to the mind-image the shape of Liliya’s thirteen-year-old body, hanging from one of the low branches. We were encouraged to use all our friends in this way, rather than choose a particular little sister, lest any one of us become too familiar with the thought. It would diminish the effect. So we became used to sending to each other—this is what we called it—and incorporating such grotesques as we could think of: our fellows mutilated, burnt alive, hacked to pieces, raped, their blood weltering hot and vivid. Those who weren’t good at imagining such things were given pictures and told to use them as models.
* * *
What was the purpose of this? It wasn’t clear to us at the time. The mind-images we sent each other were not particularly special and we all thought it would’ve been much more effective simply to speak to one another. But our teachers didn’t agree. They tested new forms of communication. For two months I was sent to a small village in the mountains. There were only a few shepherds there and they mostly spoke Turkish, which I didn’t understand. They brought me food: mushrooms and cured sausages and thick yoghurt and watermelon.
I’d never seen such a beautiful part of the country. The mountains formed a long black spine that ran the length of the horizon, cradling forests of oriental beech trees and lush purple-pink rhododendrons. Some areas were so thickly grown that, seen from a distance, they resembled an alien landscape of the kind a child might draw when she’s very young, using the wrong colors: green skies and purple hills and her parents nothing more than two blinking box-heads sat atop a tower of twigs.
I was allowed to roam freely and I did, but never into the forest where, I knew from stories, there were bears and rebels and border-crossers. All manner of enemies of the State. Escape never crossed my mind, in part because I didn’t know what I’d be escaping from or escaping to. Things simply were and mostly I was content.
It was my job to act as a receiver. The others were senders. I took in whatever messages I could. We were practicing writing now, which was hardest because we had to do it in English and because there was so little room to incorporate our fixers. We took to sketching increasingly elaborate death-scenes in the margins. I found these amusing, the things my friends could think up to scare themselves! But I had never needed this particular trick. So in return—although it was against the rules—along with the letters in reply I sent out mind-shapes of my own: the crystal waters of the coast, the little reflecting pool I’d found at the end of the footpath, a bulbous yellow-green gourd shaped like a deformed member. But the mountains most of all, which I loved more than anything else. It was these images which I held in my mind when I returned home, so that I might return there when I slept, having stripped off my newgrown womanly skin.
* * *
In 1990 the school was closed. I was fifteen. There were many changes that year and for us this was the worst. We all felt as if we’d been nearing something crucial in our training, a sense that the politics of the world outside had interfered in our growth.
Three army jeeps came to take us away. We were to b
e returned to our parents.
Most of us were confused by this news as we’d lived in the belief that our parents were dead. We’d been shown images of their bodies by the doctors as part of their grief counseling. It was these images, of course, that we’d used as a basis for our earliest sendings.
Twenty-eight were taken away in that first convoy. Three of us remained: myself, Liliya, and Ivet who was a year older than both of us and on friendly terms with one of the teachers. She had a graceful, thick-limbed body and Titian-brown hair. She’d first begun the fashion of sending mind-images of deformed members, which we’d all done at various times to amuse ourselves, and it was she who explained to us what they were for and how it hurt so we all might learn from her mistakes.
“Our parents really are dead,” she confided as we watched the jeeps vanishing through the compound gates.
“What will they do with us?” Liliya asked.
Ivet shrugged. “We must decide for ourselves.”
* * *
That night I slept fitfully. I tried to summon the face of my mother and Kiril to my mind but it was difficult. They came from the time before and much of that was lost to me. But had I really ever believed they were dead? No, I don’t think so. Another part of me—the part, I believe, that knew you—also seemed to know the story of their life but it was as if I’d hidden this knowledge deep inside myself. Or perhaps my teachers had.
I’m sorry to say so but of far greater concern to me now was the loss of my sisters. Would they really be returned to their parents? What would I do without them for company? I’d become so used to the gentle murmur of their voices in my mind, the press of their good regard and fellow feeling, but now that seemed to be stripped away from me. I felt desperately lonely.
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