“Your wife will need to know these things,” she said to me, turning her face away from my father. The discussion was apparently over.
A few months later as fall was edging into winter and snow was lightly dusting the fields and roads and trees and houses and outbuildings, I was playing at being a soldier hiding from the enemy in the stand of pines at the border of our property. My parents talked of war when they thought I was asleep—when was it coming, from where, who would fight, who would die. I imagined an enemy squad inching towards our house and how I would have to pick them off one by one with just my pistol—when suddenly I heard a high, sharp sound, a yelping or mewling, and footsteps thudding, closer and closer. I knelt down behind the tallest and heaviest of the pines and I waited and watched.
This land, on the other side of the pines, was part of the Woytowich farm. Their family was not part of our villages, not even by marriage. They had come to the area from outside Kyiv, had been assigned land by the government, and were told which crops to raise—sugar beets, I believe, which were unsuited to the climate and the soil. They knew they could not seek help from us, so they kept to themselves. I saw their son Adel playing in the fields from time to time, he was close to my age and height, and I saw him now—but he was different, like a stick drawing of a boy, no shoes, shirt open, his skin as white as the fabric that billowed around him. He had a smear of blood on the side of his head, shocking in its brightness. It was he who was making the yelping mewling sounds, running in circles, great clouds of breath bursting out of his mouth, eyes wide, and then I saw that his father was chasing him, holding a large, rough rock. I crouched farther down and waited even as my breath fogged the frozen air around me.
Mr. Woytowich was dressed more warmly than his son, in a grey woollen jacket and boots. The boy was weak and shivering and panicked, unsure of how to escape. He turned towards the pines, towards me, but Mr. Woytowich quickly rushed in to block him. The boy backed away, terrified, falling over his own feet.
Just then, a higher, softer voice called his name—“Adel! Adel!”—and his mother appeared over the rise, her head and shoulders cloaked in a faded floral shawl. He started to run to her, then stopped as he saw she was holding a long sharp knife. “Adel, Adel,” she beckoned as a loving mother would, but she held the knife out between them, point aimed forward towards the boy, as ready to gut and slice and carve as she was to embrace and console.
He seemed transfixed by her as she moved forward, almost forgetting his father shifting and moving behind him. Suddenly Mr. Woytowich lunged forward, grabbing the boy by the shirt, and just as quickly the boy tore away, rushing first towards his mother and then off to one side as she slashed at the air in front of him. All three were within an arm’s length of each other, moving warily. Then wordlessly, Mr. and Mrs. Woytowich began advancing on Adel a step at a time, forcing him to step backward each time they did so. Three steps, four, and then his heel broke through a crust of ice. His ankle turned, his leg crumpled, he fell backward, screaming, and his parents lunged onto him, Mr. Woytowich bringing down the large rough rock, smashing and smashing, and Mrs. Woytowich stabbing with the knife, blood spraying the fine white snow all around them. I watched breathless as they tore at him, pulled his flesh from his bones and gorged on the fresh raw meat, gnashing and chewing and licking and swallowing—then abruptly stopped, hushed themselves, looked from side to side and all around, fearfully, in every direction—then picked up what was left of the boy and hurried back over the rise towards their farmhouse.
I waited and waited until I was sure they were gone, and then I ran home. I sped first past the barn, then around the sheds, I saw my father smoking out back near the clothesline, he saw me and stubbed out his cigarette, I could scarcely speak. “Papa,” I rasped, “come quickly, we can’t tell Mama.”
“She’s just putting supper on the table,” he said. “I can go with you later.” He reached for me and I pulled away.
“No, we have to go now, someone’s been killed. You have to come with me.”
I didn’t need to tell him twice—we ran back up the way I’d come, my mother calling out behind us but we didn’t stop, we ran to the stand of pines where I showed him the welter of blood congealing and freezing into the snow, the trails of footprints weaving around and through each other, and I told him what I saw, I told him everything.
At the end he paused in thought and said, “You are certain it wasn’t an animal? You are certain that it was the boy?”
And I answered, “Papa, there are no animals.” And it was true: outside our own lands, we hadn’t seen boars or rabbits or foxes or deer, or even dogs or cats, not for many days. He nodded, then told me to run home, run without stopping, and stay with my mother inside the house. I was to say there had been an accident, and that we should start supper without him. He would be back as soon as he could. And then he sent me off while he started towards the village.
As my mother and I finished our meal, we could faintly smell something burning. We stepped outside, looked out beyond our fields and saw a thick black ribbon of smoke unfurling from what would have been the Woytowich house. My mother let out a sharp sigh, took my hand and led me back inside. An hour later, my father returned and sent me to bed, then told my mother the whole story as I lay wide awake listening. He had brought a half-dozen men to the Woytowich house. They had found the husband and wife, they had found what was left of their son. They beat the couple until they were close to death and then set them afire, and then stood outside and watched as their house burned to the ground.
That night I had a terrible dream, which I knew in my heart to be true, and in that dream I was back among the pines, huddled close to the ground, watching Adel as he was chased by his father and then by his mother—and in the moment before he fell backward, his eyes turned to the pines and he saw me, and I saw him, and his eyes locked with mine and said, “Help me.” I could have done something, I could have shouted, I could have thrown a handful of stones, I could have rushed in and grabbed at the knife. I could have been a soldier. I woke up bathed in sweat, my parents hovering over me. I said I remembered nothing.
My mother’s sister Mimi came to visit a few days later, unannounced, she had been born in the village but now lived in Kyiv. She never watched what she said around me, she said the city stank of death and that she had sold everything and spent everything to make her way back to us. So of course we took her in. She held me tight against her and told my mother that in Kyiv there were handbills pasted to the sides of buildings: «Їсти власних дітей – це варварство » they read. “Eating your children – it is barbarism.”
I asked Aunt Mimi what barbarism was, but my mother answered instead. “It is worse than what animals do, that is what it is.” And she gave us both sharp looks. Still, we ate our stew that night, food from the trucks, and I thought as we ate that it was exactly like what animals did, it was only worse because it was us.
And I can tell you one more thing. The boy Adel was three months younger than me, nine years and four months when he was killed—and the time in our villages when so few were born, the time we callMovchanya, it lasted just over nine years. It might be a coincidence. Or I might be misremembering. All this, as I said, was many years ago. And cannibalism is everywhere now, everywhere you look, you can scarcely walk a block. Decent people, out in the open. I fear for what will come next.
Dacian
Years later, as I was driving through the streets of Warsaw, slick with freezing rain, I heard one of the old songs on the radio, one that we had danced to in the church hall the night we met. Two roses, faded, in a crystal vase. I pulled my car over to the side of the road and listened, and as I did so I felt the lightest brush of her fingertips on the back of my neck. I gasped and jumped away, my flesh crawling at the thought. I spun around, my eyes searching the back seat, searching everywhere. I was alone. I turned back to see the rain had turned to heavy wet snow. I switched off the radio, put the car into gear,
then turned the rearview mirror away from me, afraid of what I might see. Slowly, fearfully, I drove back towards my home, which had been our home. I thought I smelled lilacs but that was impossible—the first blooms were still weeks away.
She had been born in a small farming town where Ukraine borders Romania. Both her parents were dead. This was as much as I knew of her past, or at least it is what she had claimed. Her childhood, her family, her friends, her journey that brought her to Poland, every question I asked was met with icy silence. But in every other way she was open and joyful, bright eyes and full mouth, flaxen hair and satin skin. Everywhere we went, the colours seemed to shimmer and dance like music for the eyes, the sounds of the city sparkled in our ears, and we were bundled together in a love that wrapped us and warmed us against a world growing colder. It was as if the whole city was under her spell, and we were all seeing the world and each other with new eyes.
I do not know why I killed her. One moment she was alive in my arms, laughing, my hand on the back of her neck, laughing, my other on her throat, laughing louder, and then I was squeezing, tighter and tighter, and her laughter rang out all around us even after she was dead on the floor. Her eyes wide and empty. Her darling mouth twisted into a rictus. Had she been laughing, or crying? Or screaming? Where had we been—at dinner, a nightclub, out on the street? It was as if everything before this moment had been a dream, and now, for the first time in years, with her crumpled body before me, now I was fully awake.
“Do it,” I remember her saying as she laughed in my face. “You’ll never be rid of me. Do it and I’ll be yours forever.” I could see her daring me, mocking me—but I could also see her pleading with me. Do it, she gasped, tears streaming down her cheeks. Which was real? Which was the dream? It mattered little. I was a murderer now, a monster, and I had to conceal my crime. I waited till well after midnight, then bundled her in blankets and carried her to the car, laying her gently across the back seat. I drove north along the river until it was nearly light, and then I placed her at the water’s edge, face down, so that she was just barely submerged. It felt like a thousand eyes were trained on me, that at any moment someone would come and stop me, but no one saw me and no one came. And no one ever found her.
This was the odd thing. No one ever found her. Every day and night I waited for the knock at the door, the hand on my shoulder. Come with us please, we have some very sad news. But no such news came. A week later, I broke down, did the foolish thing, the stupid thing, I drove back up the river to where I had left her, and of course she was gone, not a trace. So someone had found her, or she had washed away. She couldn’t just get up and leave.
That first night when we met and danced, she pulled herself close and whispered, “You will soon love me,” and her words came true—as the hours passed and sunrise grew near, I knew I would never leave her. The first time we made love, my hands slid down her back, my fingers moved along her spine and found a series of indentations, on either side, like tiny mouths. My finger slipped into one, and something uncoiled inside. “Careful,” she murmured and kissed my forehead, and the memory slipped away. A week later, I think, I came home from work early to find her in the kitchen on the floor eating a child, just four or five years old, gutting it, devouring it, the still-breathing body twitching and shuddering. Did this happen? I don’t know. What do I remember? So many fragments jagged and broken—as if a beautifully painted glass had smashed and, when the pieces had fallen away, a vile and monstrous image was revealed.
As I drove in the rain, the mirror facing away from me, one image after another sprang from the depths of my mind to confront me. What day was it when she tore at herself, screaming “Why am I alive?” and pushed me away when I tried to hold her? What night was it when I woke to find her curled up in the corner staring blankly, blood caked down the front of her face? When was it that we came home from a night out to find the windows smashed and the floors all covered with dead birds, bloodied, their necks all broken? Were these even my memories? Or was the dream of our life together now turning, curdling in my guilt-wracked brain?
Suddenly I felt smooth soft hands slide over mine to grab the wheel, felt a lithe and dainty foot press onto mine to push the accelerator, watched helplessly as we approached the chiming train crossing, saw the crossing gate start its downward swing, rushed towards the tracks to meet the charging engine, her warmth so close, her voice so close, Do it, almost a kiss, a precious kiss, the whistle screech, the blinding lights, Do it do it and you’ll be mine, you’ll be mine forever.
Mihaela
Knitting is a good way to pass the time when you’re waiting for something to die.
I learned to knit from Mrs. Yelchin, who would sit with me while my mother went shopping or visiting, often on Saturday afternoons. Over the many weeks of visits, I learned to make stockings, hats, mittens and gloves, lace shawls and scarves. Mrs. Yelchin was already very old and, while she never said so, I can now look back and see that she wanted company as her final days crept closer. One morning when I was twelve, a few months before we left the village for Bucharest, my mother heard that Mrs. Yelchin had taken ill suddenly and had died in the night. At my mother’s urging, I finished the Russian lace shawl that I had been working on and sent it to her daughter with my condolences. I later learned that the daughter had been ill as well, and died just a few weeks after. I was told she was buried wearing the shawl, but I cannot be certain.
Once we arrived in Bucharest, a strange fear came over me that grew stronger and sharper every day: I became convinced that I had stopped growing. Other girls my age were now taller, rounder, becoming young women. I was not. I ate, I slept, my heart pumped, my lungs drew air, but I was somehow frozen in time. Even my hair, my fingernails. Of course I didn’t tell anyone—my parents, my friends, my teacher. What could I say? But as the season changed from summer to autumn and my mother brought out my warmer clothes, she looked and saw that I could still fit into everything, that none of my dresses or blouses or skirts needed to be let down or let out.
“Who has been cutting your hair, Mihaela—have you been using my good scissors?” No, I replied, no one’s cut my hair. “Well, that’s impossible,” she said, looking at it left and right—then oddly, defiantly, picked up the scissors, pinched a length of my hair between her fingers and snipped it. Still holding my hair, she set the scissors down, looked back and gasped. The hair was restored, as if it had never been touched. Yet there were the cuttings, in her lap, blonde and gleaming. Startled, she brushed them off of her dress and onto the floor as if they were the legs of spiders.
By winter it was obvious that something was wrong, and my mother pulled me from school. From then until I was twenty, I rarely left the house and only when accompanied. My father was unconcerned at first, but came to realize the implications and made arrangements for me to see a doctor. My mother quickly persuaded him to cancel, fearing that I would be subjected to tests and experiments, diagnosed as a freak or in some way abnormal, and then seized and shut away in a hospital or sanitarium. Articles in the newspapers spoke of the quest for genetic purity, the forced sterilization of the mentally and physically unfit. And so I went unexamined, and my mother taught me at home.
And then my father was killed—run down by a drunken soldier in a military vehicle. There was no restitution, barely even an admission that the accident had occurred. My mother and I would soon be penniless. He had been a violinist in a chamber orchestra, supported by a selection of wealthy older patrons. My mother knew some of them, and they in turn knew others. And so I was introduced to a series of men with specialized tastes who would pay my mother for the pleasure of my uniquely diminutive company.
For even as my twenty-first birthday approached, I remained ageless, never physically developing and in some ways never emotionally maturing. Over the next two decades, I spent nights or weekends with dozens of men, some of whom wanted to use me cruelly, to live out unspeakable fantasies, and others who just wanted to talk or play. At fi
rst it was troubling, but I came to feel that I was in some way helping to prevent the mistreatment of actual children by simulating one for these men. I later feared that I was doing the opposite—fuelling appetites rather than sating them, creating victims instead of sparing them.
In the end, it came down to this: we needed the money. My mother was elderly, and dying, and in a private hospital. The war was raging around us. The chief physician, Leo, who had been one of my earliest patrons, now played at being my uncle and lover and thankfully was all but impotent. I would spend mornings in my mother’s one-room flat, preparing and packing a lunch, then afternoons at her bedside, feeding her and then knitting a feathery shawl for her shoulders and arms as she often complained of draughts. In the evenings I would dine with Leo and spend a few hours in his home, watching him drink and smoke and mutter about his deceitful colleagues until he collapsed into a heap on one piece of furniture or another. I would then let myself out and ask his driver to return me to my residence. Then, one afternoon, as I approached the shawl’s last rows, my mother died beside me with barely a sound. I looked up at her slack face, her clouding eyes, and I knew. I promptly stood up, touched her cheek lightly, then went down to the driver and requested a ride back to Leo’s apartments.
Once there, I asked the driver to come up for a moment and help me with my bags. He was surprised to see them already packed and waiting. I gave him one hundred rubles from my mother’s purse and told him to drive me to a small church on the eastern edge of the city—and to say nothing to Leo of my whereabouts. At the church was another old patron of mine who, after a substantial donation, was kind enough to send me to a convent in Valea Vinului, where I have been ever since.
The Bone Mother Page 10
