Burning Girls and Other Stories

by Veronica Schanoes

  True. Goldman knew it was true. Berkman preferred younger lovers and had ever since emerging from prison. “That old lobster,” Goldman muttered, and slashed angrily at the air with the cleaver. It whistled. “Every day one sees decrepit old men of more than fifty-two with girls of twenty. And yet my own longings are met with disapproval, disdain, even disgust among those who claim to be my comrades.”

  “You see, then,” said the Baba Yaga. “There is no true equality. The revolution will never truly come.”

  “If only I had my old faith,” Goldman said, her voice growing stronger with each sentence. “But what is left? I have no faith left in the people. People are venal fools. I have no faith left in the revolution. Look what it has come to! I have no faith left in our own beautiful ideal, even—so much hot air and baseless hopes! What is the point of any of this?!”

  “You might as well strike off my head,” murmured the Baba Yaga, who seemed fascinated by Goldman’s sudden fury.

  “I might as well!” shouted Goldman, gesturing with the cleaver. “I might as well! For what have I done with life? Speeches and lovers! One pointless blow against Frick that failed utterly! For all those things avail me now, I might as well strike off your head and take your teeth and live alone in the woods, calling down curses on Lenin’s head! I might as well! I will! I will! But—” She broke off suddenly.

  “Yes?” breathed the Baba Yaga.

  “Is it all truly destroyed? Is there nothing left? Is my beautiful ideal really nothing but a mirage? Will I never see it made flesh? You are to become an oracle, so answer me now. If the answer is no, I will strike off your head and take your teeth and live in your cottage and eat the foolish peasants who catch my eye and send poisoned, sorcerous arrows at Lenin’s heart! Is there really nothing left?”

  “Nothing,” pronounced the Baba Yaga, perhaps too firmly. “There is nothing. In the shadow of the war to come, the flowering of anarchism shall be crushed beneath the heel of fascism. You may scramble and speechify all you like, but they will be lost. You will lose. Spain will lose.”

  “The … flowering?” asked Goldman quietly.

  There was a pregnant pause as the Baba Yaga realized her misstep.

  “Spain will lose what?” Goldman continued.

  “Spain will be under fascist rule for decades! Perpetrators of atrocities will go unpunished!”

  “Spain will lose what?” Goldman repeated.

  The Baba Yaga sighed and shrugged. “Agricultural collectives, self-managed factories, schools and hospitals run by and for working people—all crushed. Betrayed! Lost!”

  “Lost?” said Goldman. “To be lost, they must first be had.”

  “For moments only!” cried the Baba Yaga. “And then—into oblivion.”

  “Moments,” said Goldman, “are all any one of us ever has. This moment, and the next, and the next. Perhaps that’s all there ever is at all.”

  The Baba Yaga felt Goldman slipping from her. “But what comes after, eh? Fascism!”

  “These moments, they are anarchist moments! And if one moment, why not another?”

  “They will be lost!” wailed the Baba Yaga.

  “Everything is, eventually,” agreed Goldman. “Do you know, once Sasha’s cousin told me it was undignified, unbecoming, frivolous, even, for a serious revolutionary, knowing of the misery in the world, to dance with such abandon, even for only a few moments? He couldn’t see that those moments are what make it possible to continue the work of revolution. Because the revolution, it must not be heartless and joyless and bloodthirsty, even in pursuit of the highest good, because, Baba Yaga, there is no highest good. The means will always become the ends. And though I can no longer dance all night, you tell me there are some beautiful moments left to me? Ahead of me, even?”

  “You’re not going to strike off my head, are you?”

  Goldman shook her head briskly. “Not when there is an anarchist flowering waiting for me—oh, Baba Yaga, save your enchantments, for those are the words to conjure with! I have writing I must do. I must warn these Spanish comrades not to be taken in by the Bolsheviks, for one thing.”

  The Baba Yaga shook her head. “There is loneliness ahead of you,” she warned. “And defeat.”

  “I’m lonely now,” said Goldman. “And defeat is not destruction. I will take my leave. Thank you for the tea, Baba Yaga. Good-bye. I hope you do find someone to take your place soon, as you wish it so.”

  The Baba Yaga snorted. “When you left Petrograd as a girl, you left Russia, and haven’t you been unable to return, though you stood on Russian ground? How do you propose to find the forest again?”

  Goldman met the Baba Yaga’s eyes. “Through the door.”

  “What door?”

  Indeed, when Goldman looked around, there was only a wall with a dusty shelf affixed to it. But she stayed on her feet and regarded the witch stonily. “The door I entered through.”

  The house began to turn, steadily, slowly, but Goldman stayed on her feet, and her gaze did not waver. The cleaver glinted in the meager light, and the glint was not just reflection. Light arced from the hearth to the cleaver and thence into Goldman’s chest as the house continued to spin. She opened her mouth to speak and light crackled through her teeth and tongue. The orator breathed fire. “Little house, little house,” she called. “Turn and place your back to the woods, and set me free.” She slammed the cleaver down into the table.

  The house settled with a jolt. A door appeared in the wall. Goldman opened it. As she lifted her foot to cross the threshold, the Baba Yaga called out to her: “Emma!”

  Goldman looked back, still holding the door.

  “Only a true daughter of the Baba Yaga could command my home against my will. The house knows its mistress.”

  Goldman shrugged. “I’m not beholden to your chicken-legged house, no matter what it thinks.”

  “Then take an affectionate warning, daughter. Get out of Russia while you can.”

  Goldman nodded, and then she stepped through the doorway, and was gone.

  3. THE END, JUSTIFYING THE MEANS

  I was raised by Marxists, and in the 1980s, that was not so common, not even in New York City. I remember when I proudly told my classmates that my parents were communists (they were never CP, of course; they were 1960s New Left and knew better than that) in fifth or sixth grade—whenever it was that we studied the virtues of capitalism and the unworkable evil of communism. They all seemed shocked and asked what it was like at my house. “You’ve been to my house,” I said. “It’s just like yours!”

  I wasn’t sure what kind of answer they were looking for—a big portrait of Papa Karl on the wall, maybe? A dinnertime request to pass the potatoes met with the stern reminder that these potatoes were dug by the workers?

  (To be honest, I’m told that my parents did have a big poster of Marx up when I was a baby, but I have no memory of it. Apparently I liked it a lot as a newborn, which my father made much of, but my mother figured it was because it was a stark black-and-white image of a human face.)

  My mother repudiated communism when the Soviet government turned the Red Army on the Russian people in August 1991. It’s an odd marker, because, as I said, neither of my parents had ever been CP or supported the Soviet Union, but there it is. Life doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to happen. That is why art is superior to life. It is why fairy tales can contain as much truth as facts.

  When doing the research for this story, I approached my mother with my—as Goldman put it—disillusionment with the revolution. I had always been taught that it had a glorious beginning and that Stalin had betrayed revolutionary principles in order to seize and keep power. But Lenin and his comrades formed a government rotten from the get-go, and Goldman was writing about it from the left in the 1920s, so why were my parents still buying this crap in the 1960s, I asked my mother.

  “We all should have known after Kronstadt,” she said.

  The Kronstadt Rebellion was a rising of sailors, s
oldiers, and ordinary people on Kotlin Island, in the Gulf of Finland, in March 1921. It made fifteen demands of the Bolshevik government. They included demands for free, fair elections conducted by secret ballot; freedom of speech and the press; freedom of assembly and to form trade unions; the right for peasants to own cattle; the right for workers to engage in handicraft production; the liberation of all political prisoners belonging to socialist, workers’, or peasants’ organizations.

  It was brutally suppressed, with thousands killed, executed, and/or imprisoned.

  The Kronstadt Rebellion took place in 1921, thirty years before my mother was born. The Red Army had been turned on the Russian people at the very beginning.

  * * *

  Marx said that capitalism must end in either socialism or barbarism. He did not, I suppose, know about the third option, fascism. Or maybe he included it under barbarism. In any case, it is to fascism that we have tumbled: concentration camps in which children are separated from their parents and brutalized, in which they suffer and die from neglect and worse; a crude, know-nothing leader who sailed to power on cheap racism, backed by elites who believed they could control him; cops who beat and gun down black people more or less at will; our own uteruses being turned into traps as reproductive rights are ripped away across the country.

  The administration is empowering a denaturalization task force housed in the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. This task force is charged with examining “bad naturalizations,” revoking the citizenship of the people in question, and deporting them.

  I am a Jew and a leftist and, I like to think, a decent human being with more than a shred of conscience, so I fear and abhor fascism, and I am horrified by what the United States is doing and what it has always done. But Marx also said that being determines consciousness, which is to say that my class matters far more than any good intentions or left politics I have. He was probably right, and I am pretty sure that in the event of revolution, I’ll end up against the wall as the decadent, white, bourgeois parasite that I am. Razstrellyat.

  I know one song, a hopeful song, and I’ve known it for a long time, that says we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. But I know another song, too, and I’ve known it for longer, and that song says ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

  The revolution will not be kind. Revolutions rarely are. But the present regime is nothing if not cruel.

  Where do those who walk away from Omelas go? There’s nowhere to go, nowhere moral, nowhere safe, nowhere that does not depend on the suffering of some child. That means you have to stay and fight, and make the revolution as kind as possible.

  In the final analysis, I probably am not an anarchist. I think one must have far more faith in people than I possess to be an anarchist. But I believe in this: you do not achieve freedom by abridging people’s rights; you do not create joy by enforcing misery. The means do become the ends, because there is no end. There are just ongoing moments.

  In 1936, some months after Alexander Berkman’s suicide, Emma Goldman visited Barcelona, then controlled by the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, the anarchist union. The CNT collectivized farms, factories, even hotels and restaurants—all these places run by the people laboring in them. Goldman said that being in Barcelona felt like finally, finally coming home.

  Stalin’s line was that the abolition of capitalism should be addressed only after the civil war was over, and the more the anarchists resisted that line, the less Soviet aid they got. Barcelona fell to Franco’s fascists on January 26, 1939.

  Oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home.

  RATS

  What I am about to tell you is a fairy tale and so it is constantly repeating. Little Red Riding Hood is always setting off through the forest to visit her granny. Cinderella is always trying on a glass slipper. Just so, this story is constantly reenacting itself. Otherwise, Cinderella becomes just another tired old queen with a palace full of pretty dresses, abusing the servants when the fireplaces haven’t been properly cleaned, embroiled in a love-hate relationship with the paparazzi. Beauty and Beast become yet another wealthy, good-looking couple. They are only themselves in the story and so they only exist in the story. We know Little Red Riding Hood only as the girl in the red cloak carrying her basket through the forest. Who is she during the dog days of summer? How can we pick her out of the mob of little girls in bathing suits and jellies running through the sprinkler in Tompkins Square Park? Is she the one who has cut her foot open on the broken beer bottle? Or is she the one with the translucent green water gun?

  Just so, you will know these characters by their story. As with all fairy tales, even new ones, you may well recognize the story. The shape of it will feel right. This feeling is a lie. All stories are lies, because stories have beginnings, middles, and endings, narrative arcs in which the end is the fitting and only mate for the beginning—yes, that’s right, we think upon closing the book. Yes, that’s the way. Yes, it had to happen like that. Yes.

  But life is not like that—there is no narrative causality, there is no foreshadowing, no narrative tone or subtly tuned metaphor to warn us about what is coming. And when somebody dies it is not tragic, not inevitably brought on as fitting end, not a fabulous disaster. It is stupid. And it hurts. It’s not all right, Mommy! sobbed a little girl in the playground who had skinned her knee, whose mother was patting her and lying to her, telling her that it was all right. It’s not all right, it hurts! she said. I was there. I heard her say it. She was right.

  But this is a fairy tale and so it is a lie, perhaps one that makes the stupidity hurt a little less, or perhaps a little more. You must not expect it to be realistic. Now read on.…

  Once upon a time.

  Once upon a time, there was a man and a woman, young and very much in love, living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Now, they very much enjoyed living in the suburbs and unlike me and perhaps you as well they did not at all regret their distance from the graffiti and traffic, the pulsing hot energy, the concrete harmonic wave reaction of the city. But happy as they were with each other and their home, there was one source of pain and emptiness that seemed to grow every time they looked into each other’s eyes, and that was because they were childless. The house was quiet and always remained neat as a shot of bourbon. Neither husband nor wife ever had to stay at home nursing a child through a flu—neither of them ever knew what the current bug going around was. They never stayed up having serious discussions about orthodontia or the rising cost of college tuition, and because of this, their hearts ached.

  “Oh,” said the woman. “If only we had a child to love, who would kiss us and smile, and burn with youth as we fade into old age.”

  “Oh,” the man would reply. “If only we had a child to love, who would laugh and dance, and remember our stories and family long after we can no longer.”

  And so they passed their days. Together they knelt as they visited the oracles of doctors’ offices; together they left sacrifices and offerings at the altars of fertility clinics. And still from sunup to sundown, they saw only their faces reflected in the mirrors of their quiet house, and those faces were growing older and sadder with each glance.

  One day, though, as the woman was driving back from the supermarket in the station wagon, bought when they were first married and filled with dewy hope for a family, the trunk laden with unnaturally bright, unhealthily glossy fruits, vegetables, and even meat, she felt a certain quickening in her womb as she drove over a pothole, and she knew by the bruised strawberries she unpacked from the car that at last their prayers were answered and she was pregnant. When she told her husband he was as delighted as she and they went to great lengths to ensure the health and future happiness of their baby.

  But even as the woman visited doctors, she and her husband knew the four shadows were lurking behind, waiting, and would come whether invited or not, so finally they invited the four to visit them. It was a lovely Saturday morning and the woman served homemade ruge
lach while the four shadows bestowed gifts on the child growing in her mother’s womb.

  “She will have an ear for music,” said the first, putting two raspberry rugelach into its mouth at once.

  “She will be brave and adventurous,” said the second, stuffing three or four chocolate rugelach into its pockets to eat later.

  But the third was not so kindly inclined—if you know this story, you know that there is always one. But contrary to what you may have heard, it was invited just as much as the others were, because while pain and evil cannot be kept out, they cannot come in without consent. In any case, there is always one. This is the way the story goes.

  “She shall be beautiful and bold—adventurous and have a passion for music and all that,” said the third. “But my gift to your child is pain. This child shall suffer and she will not understand why; she will be in pain and there will be no rest for her; she will suffer and suffer and she will always be alone in her suffering, world without end.” The third scowled and threw a piece of raisin rugelach across the room. Some people are like that. Shadows, too. The rugelach fell into a potted plant.

  Sometimes cruelty cannot help itself, even when it has been placated with an invitation and excellent homemade pastry, and then what can you do?

  You can do this: you can turn for help to the fourth shadow, who is not strong enough to break the evil spell—it never is, you know; if it were, there would be no story—but it can, perhaps, amend it.

  So as the man and woman sat in shock, but perhaps not as much shock as they might have been had they never heard the story themselves, the fourth approached the woman, who had crossed her hands protectively over her womb.

  “Now, my dear,” it began, spraying crumbs from the six apricot rugelach it was eating. “Uncross your hands—it looks ill-bred and it does no good, you know. What’s done is done, and I cannot undo it: you must bite the bullet and play the cards you’re dealt. My gift is this: your daughter, on her seventeenth birthday, will prick herself on a needle and find a—a respite, you might say—and after she has done that, she will be able to rest, and eventually she will be wakened by a kiss, a lover’s kiss, and she will never be lonely again.”