Burning Girls and Other Stories

by Veronica Schanoes

  She sighs and puts her goggles back on. The red smears of blood are still damp. The dodo looks a bit anxious—perhaps it is reconsidering the wisdom of nestling into a serpentine egg-eater—so as a gesture of friendship Charlotte gives the bird a second pair of goggles from her basket for protection. She tightens the strap around the bird’s head and it squawks in appreciation. Then she takes a small bottle of seltzer and a piece of cake out of her basket. She and the dodo share breakfast? lunch? dinner? Neither one of them knows, and neither do we.

  After eating, Charlotte examines the bottom of her left shoe and pulls out several straight pins that had stuck in the rubber. While she is doing this, she is oblivious to the dodo’s embarrassment at having nothing to give her in return for the goggles and food. Luckily, the awkward bird spots something glinting in the corner of the abandoned station. It is Charlotte’s own thimble, which has rolled out of her pocket while she was sleeping. The dodo, ignorant creature, has no way of knowing the shiny thing’s provenance. It picks up the thimble in its beak and solemnly presents it to Charlotte. Charlotte accepts it graciously even though she recognizes it and has no intention of using it. Snakes, remember, don’t sew. She slips it in her pocket.

  Charlotte stands up. As she pulls away from the wall she feels her jacket sticking, but she cannot see why. The graffiti that she was leaning against, old and chipped as it was, has imprinted itself on her jacket like wet paint in a silent movie or a Sesame Street sketch. The mirror ghost prints of half a dozen punk slogans crisscross her back.

  Together Charlotte and the dodo climb the stairs, and armed with the pins from her boot she begins to pick the padlock keeping the gate closed. It’s a fruitless exercise—Charlotte wouldn’t know how to pick a lock even if she had a cat burglar’s do-it-yourself kit, and these straight pins are causing nothing but pricked fingertips and a steady subway rumble of foul language from Charlotte.

  Finally she gives it up and throws the pins away. Sitting back down on the ground, she opens her basket and takes out a large solid key with four different ridged edges that match the + at the bottom of the padlock. She unlocks the padlock, puts the key back into her basket, slides the lock off of the gate, and locks it around a belt loop on her jacket. Then she pushes the gate open. She and the dodo step through together.

  They climb up another set of steps. When they come up from underground they are at the very edge of a forest. Looking back Charlotte can see the glint of the sun reflecting off two paths winding through the trees, both of which trail off a few feet away from the entrance to the subway station. Looking the other way she can see her grandmother’s cottage two, maybe three blocks away. She checks to make sure she still has everything she needs: goggles, jacket, basket. The dodo watches her uncertainly. It shuffles its feet and clears its throat. Charlotte picks the bird up and hurls it as hard as she can up in the air. The dodo spreads its stubby prickly wings and flaps ferociously, twisting its barrel-like body back and forth as it rises. It hangs suspended for a few seconds, contemplating Charlotte. From this height she looks like a red blur, a bloodstained egg, and compared to the dodo, she is barely more than an egg. The dodo wishes her luck, blows her a kiss, and then continues its ascent.

  Charlotte has already turned away and is walking to her grandmother’s cottage. There is nothing left in her way, just smooth sidewalks unrolling under her feet. When she gets to the cottage, she knocks gently on the door, and when there is no response she uses her school ID to jimmy open the lock. She walks in.

  Grandmother is not bedridden, and her eyes, ears, and teeth are just the right size. She is wearing a green dress and kneeling in front of the crackling, sparking fire in the fireplace. She is crying softly and inconsolably. She does not even turn her head to look when Charlotte comes into the room.

  Charlotte kneels down next to her grandmother and takes her hand. “It’s okay,” she says.

  Her grandmother continues to weep over the long tube of patterned snakeskin. “It’s dead,” she whispers. “It’s dead.”

  “No, Grandma,” says Charlotte. “It’s not dead.”

  But her grandmother continues to weep gently, bent gracefully over the shed skin like a delicately branching willow. Charlotte sets her basket down and takes from it a loaf of fresh bread, a quart of homemade chicken soup, and a bottle of red wine. “These are for you,” she tells her grandmother, who makes no response. Charlotte takes a red apple from her basket and places it in her grandmother’s hand, closing the older woman’s fingers around it, but still her grandmother does not turn her head.

  Charlotte stands behind her grandmother and begins to undress. She takes off her motorcycle jacket, folds it lovingly, and lays it on the floor. She unties her bloodstained apron, takes it off, and lays it on top of the jacket. Her sky blue dress follows, as do her black cotton underpants and bra as well as her hair ribbon, leaving her standing in only her purple Doc Martens and her goggles.

  “It’s okay, Grandma,” she repeats. “It’s not dead. Look.”

  And as her grandmother turns to look, Charlotte—slowly, slowly—begins to shed her skin.

  EMMA GOLDMAN TAKES TEA WITH THE BABA YAGA

  1. HISTORY IS A FAIRY TALE

  Once upon a time, there was a girl, the third and youngest daughter of a merchant, whose charms lay not in her looks but in her brains and voice. But those brains lay fallow, as her father was one of those who did not believe that knowledge was of any use to a girl. So she set out on a journey and she traveled far from home, over land and over sea, until she came to a strange land.

  Or perhaps you would prefer this?

  Emma Goldman came to Rochester, New York, from St. Petersburg in 1885. She was sixteen, and she was very, very smart. Despite her intelligence, her misogynist father denied her an education, and had even thrown her study books into the fire.

  Truth can be told in any number of ways. It’s all a matter of emphasis. Of voice. I have not lied about anything yet.

  And in this strange land, she met a young man, a young man who beguiled her with his ability in dancing, and won her heart with his love of reading. But his promises of love and ecstasy were empty, and the girl continued her travels. So she set her sights on a larger city in this strange land, a city booming with glory and misery, and set off once again. She left behind the young man, bitter at the failure of his overtures, and her eldest sister, who felt for her a mother’s love.

  Here are the same events, told a different way:

  After a little over a year in Rochester, she was divorced from an impotent husband and barred from her family’s home (her parents had followed her to Rochester soon after her arrival) for “loose behavior.” Only her older sister Helena, who had long stood in place of a mother to Emma, supported her. So she packed a bag and headed to New York City. Well, where else?

  The fairy tale sounds better, I think, or at least different. It makes Emma’s life romantic and mysterious, her emigration a grand adventure rather than an escape from the very real menace of rising antisemitism. As soon as I ground this girl as Emma Goldman, she is no longer on a quest; she’s only waiting to become the fire-breathing anarchist.

  But the matter-of-fact history is much more succinct. A bit juicier in some ways, too. Good for Goldman, refusing to settle for a lifetime of sexual frustration. What a waste that would’ve been. Good for Helena, too, the older sister who had supplanted Goldman’s harsh, unhappy mother, the sister who loved her and consoled her and brought her up, and stood by her steadfastly even as Goldman became a lightning rod for scandal and political persecution.

  Emma Goldman had long been interested in leftist politics, and in New York City, she found anarchism. She had a vision of a humanity unfettered by the coercive violence of the state, cooperative societies without hierarchy. In some ways, collectivist anarchism is what Karl Marx envisioned as communism’s ultimate goal, but anarchists know that the state will never wither away of its own accord. It must be abolished at once. In her youth, she belie
ved in what was called “propaganda of the deed” fervently enough to, with her lover Alexander (Sasha) Berkman, plan and execute—well, fumble—an attempt on the life of Henry Clay Frick. Frick was an anti-union Carnegie steel factory manager responsible for the murders of nine striking workers. Berkman was to kill Frick and then himself, and Goldman to explain his deeds and their motives afterward. Their hope was that Frick’s murder would inspire a working-class revolution that would overthrow capitalism.

  Needless to say, that is not what happened. Berkman got two shots from a pistol off at Frick, missed, and was then tackled by a security guard. He nonetheless managed to stab Frick three times with a dagger before being clubbed on the head by a nearby carpenter. He attempted suicide but was restrained and taken into custody. Berkman ended up serving thirteen years in prison and one in a workhouse. He insisted he had acted alone, and Goldman avoided prison in that instance.

  But with her fervent belief, her brilliant orations, and her personal bravery and defiance, she rocketed to radical celebrity in the United States and Europe, speaking on anarchism, sexuality, and art. She read, she wrote, she spoke, she published, she agitated. She ran afoul of the law more than once. She was no longer a girl. She grew stout. She grew white hairs. She still believed in free love and longed to practice it, but found few lovers. She continued traveling, speaking, and loving as best she could. Even after the United States did its worst and deported her to Russia in the midst of its civil war, she continued.

  Emma Goldman found anarchism, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  It’s all history now. Goldman has been dead and buried for almost eighty years, and Red Emma, the most dangerous woman in America, is safe for leftist Jewish feminists such as myself to lionize. She can’t open her mouth to reject her elevation to sainthood. The greatest orator in America no longer speaks. She has become more icon than iconoclast. She is history.

  * * *

  Emma Goldman and Berkman were imprisoned for using her writing and speech to “induce persons not to register” for the draft, illegal under the Espionage Act of 1917. They were released in 1919, and the United States government was out to get them. J. Edgar Hoover at the tender age of twenty-four was already head of the Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division, which was charged with disrupting leftist American activities. He decided to use the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, a piece of legislation designed to keep anarchist immigrants, along with “epileptics, beggars, and importers of prostitutes,” out of the country.

  Goldman stood upon her citizenship. She was not an alien, but a United States citizen, entitled to freedoms of speech and the press, and she therefore would not answer any questions about her anarchism.

  The Department of Labor stripped her of her citizenship.

  Remember the impotent husband?

  Apparently he had been convicted of some crime or other in 1908 and had his citizenship revoked. Hoover pressured the courts to find that this meant that Goldman, too, was no longer a citizen.

  Never mind that they had been divorced for more than twenty years by 1908, and that this was unmitigated patriarchal bullshit of the highest order.

  It was easier with Berkman—he had never applied for citizenship to begin with. Ultimately, Goldman withdrew her appeal so that they would not be separated. For they loved each other, even if they had not been lovers for many decades, and whither thou goest, I will follow. And Goldman, now a woman and not a young one at that, prepared herself for a homecoming to Mother Russia.

  * * *

  Homecoming is such an important moment in fairy tales, is it not? You can set forth to seek your fortune, to find a bride, to carry a basket of food to Grandmother’s house, and at the end of the tale, you must come home again and show your mother what you have achieved, whom you love, the empty basket.

  And while you are on your journey, you trust that home will still stand and Mother will be much the same as she always was, because if mothers start running around changing and having adventures, what is there to define yourself against? How can you know you are the foreground if Mother refuses to continue being the background?

  But we do change, nonetheless.

  * * *

  Goldman and Berkman and 247 others were put aboard the USAT Buford on December 21, 1919, and the ship docked in Finland on January 16, 1920. The following day, the prisoners were put in unheated boxcars and taken as close as possible to the border Finland shares with Russia.

  They were then marched through a snowstorm and handed over to the Bolsheviks. Goldman and Berkman saw the other 247 prisoners safely across before crossing over the frozen Systerbak River themselves, where they all received heroes’ welcomes and were put on a train to Petrograd.

  Goldman had not seen Petrograd in more than thirty years.

  She was a celebrity. And she had hopes for the Russian Revolution, for the freedoms and reliefs it might bring the people of Russia. Anarchists had fought alongside Bolsheviks, taking on some of the most dangerous missions of the October Revolution. It was Russian anarchists who evicted the Whites from the Kremlin, for example. Anarchists dreamt of a new age in Russia, an age in which anarchists and communists could work together for the common good.

  That was not what the Bolsheviks had in mind, though, and in 1918 the Cheka, precursor to the KGB, raided more than twenty-five anarchist centers in Moscow. During these raids, forty anarchists were murdered and five hundred taken into custody.

  Outside of the USSR, though, Goldman and Berkman still had hope. How could they know what information they were receiving was genuine and what was right-wing propaganda, put about to discredit the revolution that threatened capitalist hegemony?

  But that revolution was rotting from the inside. It rejected human rights as bourgeois sentimentality. Lenin personally assured Goldman that freedom of speech was “impossible” during a revolutionary period.

  Once in Russia, Goldman learned of fellow anarchists tortured in Bolshevik prisons, of all anarchist activity suppressed. Favoritism and graft made a few schools glorious while most “common schools” were dirty and verminous and unheated, serving children miserable food and punishing them with beatings. Health services, too: doctors and nurses forced to spend their time waiting for a few minutes with the commissar instead of tending to the sick. Goldman visited a special hospital for Communist Party members, with every advanced piece of equipment, every amenity, and she found others without the barest necessities.

  There were even plans for a prison especially for “morally defective children.”

  Only those who have thrown away the last vestige of their humanity put children in cages.

  The Party abolished capital punishment, true, with an order that took effect the morning after five hundred “counter-revolutionist” prisoners were executed in Petrograd.

  Goldman was horrified. “Five hundred lives snuffed out!” she cried.

  “As if a few dead plotters mattered in the scales of a revolution,” said John Reed, the radical U.S. journalist, one of only three Americans buried in the Kremlin Necropolis. “Razstrellyat!” The word is Russian; according to Goldman, it means “execute by shooting,” but that sounds a little formal to me. I suspect the flavor of what Reed was saying was more akin to a line my mother used to quote from David Peel and the Lower East Side, or perhaps Amiri Baraka, or even Patty Hearst: “Up against the wall, motherfuckers!”

  Goldman made excuse after excuse to herself.

  Berkman gave the Bolsheviks the benefit of the doubt longer than Goldman did. “You can’t measure gigantic upheaval by a few specks of dust,” he told her. Doesn’t the end justify the means?

  Lenin dismissed Goldman’s concerns as more bourgeois sentimentality.

  But Peter Kropotkin shared her horror, and abhorred the government “that in the name of socialism had abrogated every revolutionary and ethical value.”

  And then, even Berkman began having trouble justifying the Bolsheviks’ actions.

&
nbsp; He remarked to a Soviet comrade while walking together in Moscow on the number of children begging in the streets.

  “No more than there are in London,” the apparatchik replied defensively. (And indeed, when I told this story to my mother, she interrupted to say the same thing.)

  Berkman shook his head. “But comrade,” he said. “In Moscow, the revolution has already come.” (My mother had no answer for that.)

  When Berkman tried to implement a plan to renovate the Soviet soup kitchens, to make them pleasant and efficient and their food nourishing, he was told that “It was naïve of Berkman to claim that feeding the masses was the first concern of the Revolution, [and that] the care of the people, their contentment and joy, [was] its main hope and safety, and indeed its only raison d’être and moral meaning. Such sentimentality was the purest bourgeois ideology.”

  One starts to find bourgeois ideology quite appealing.

  * * *

  The revolution had come and gone, and Goldman, always an endless fountain of ideas, nerve, courage, esprit de corps; a fighter who didn’t know when to give in; a perpetual motion machine flying the black flag, her heart beating to the rhythm of a printing press and marching feet, was still. The locomotive lay idle, its black flag hanging straight down, with no breath of wind to stir it.

  And then she received another blow. She had been visiting Moscow for a while, and had had no word from America. In fact, a letter for her from her niece had arrived in Petrograd, where it sat for a month awaiting her return. It had never been forwarded because, Goldman was told, “How could anything from America be so important and interesting as what you were seeing in Moscow?”

  How, indeed?

  Goldman’s beloved older sister Helena had died, her death sped by the blow of Emma’s deportation.

  “Not ‘so important,’” Goldman wrote in her memoir, “only news of the death of my beloved Helena. What could personal sorrow mean to people who had become cogs in the wheel that was crushing so many at every turn? I myself seemed to have turned into one of the cogs. I could find no tears for the loss of my darling sister, no tears or regrets. Only paralyzing numbness and a larger void.”