“But you must be able to undo this,” my mother said. “Release his spirit, send him away.”
“I cannot,” the old woman answered. “This is not our work, and it is not ours to undo. You would need to find the Kabbalist who conjured him. That of course is impossible now. Millions of the Yevrei are dead, and those that are not have escaped to other lands. He is condemned to live here forever, alone.”
After a long silence, her eyes cast downward, my mother spoke. “I will pack our things,” she said. “We will leave with you.”
“I must tell you,” the old woman sighed, “that the creature wants to see your boy. He will not be harmed. It should only take a moment.” She looked at me, reached out to take my hand.
“Have you gone mad?” my mother exclaimed. “Leave that monster alone with my child?”
“It is a monster with the soul of a man. Or, if you prefer, a man with the capabilities of a monster. Either way: It is a request that you cannot deny.”
I took the old woman’s hand and went with her down the stairs, slowly and carefully, to face the creature in the wall.
The bricks had now all fallen away, and I could see him fully from head to toe. He was terrifying in his stature, yet imbued with a strange beauty and created with obvious care. The old woman led me to stand at his feet, and he trembled all over. I was afraid he might shake himself apart. His tears had dug deep grooves from the corners of his eyes down his cheeks to his jaw.
“You were a good man,” I told him, as if speaking to my own father. “You must forgive yourself.”
The old woman reached across to him, pulled a piece of clay from the tip of the smallest finger on his left hand. She formed it into a ball, and handed it to me.
“This clay will always be alive,” she said. “It will never dry or crack. And its spirit will always be with you. Take this, and always remember.”
It has been many years. My mother is long dead. I have married, as has my sister. She has two daughters, and I have a son. We live in different cities now, all of us. I still have the ball of clay. It has neither dried nor cracked, and when I hold it, I still feel the life inside.
Lena
Alice once asked: “If you were a monster, what kind would you be?” This was on our first real date, not just a coffee or a walk through a park. We had gone out for a big sushi dinner served in one of those wooden “love boats” and then had walked back through the narrow streets, shimmering and slippery with fresh icy rain. It was supposed to be funny but something about the question, the tone, made me uneasy. I wasn’t sure how I should answer. She put her arm around me, pulled me closer. “You know,” she added. “A vampire, a werewolf, a mummy.” I knew. Believe me, I knew.
“A sea monster, I think,” I replied. “I love the water, I love to swim. I’d be happy in a black lagoon.”
Many times my aunt Maryan told me a story from the old country about a young girl whose sailor brother was taken by a sea witch and hidden in a twisting winding tangle of caves under an island of barren rock. Unlike the slender pale lake spirits in her other tales from the first land, the sea witch was a voluptuous woman with the lush full tentacles of a giant squid, and she would search the ocean for shipwrecked sailors to take back to her lair, where she would mate with them—somehow—and then eat them alive. The witch was beautiful and regal and solitary and voracious. I had always wanted to be her. I considered telling Alice this, but from what little I knew of dating, it didn’t seem like ideal conversation.
I turned and looked at her, pulled a long lock of hair away from her forehead. “What about you, what kind would you be?”
“What makes you think I’m not one already?” Then she widened her mouth, baring her teeth, as she made a dark gurgling sound, and lunged for my neck, laughing and laughing until we both nearly fell into the street.
I knew very little about dating before I met Alice, only what I’d read in books or seen at the movies. It was odd, one minute I was alone in my library carrel, the next she was hovering over me, introducing herself and asking what I was reading (Jane Eyre), what I was wearing (a simple summer dress that had been my mother’s), and if I would like to join her in the cafe downstairs for some tea. Tea on Tuesday led to more tea and a walk in the park on Friday, and then the sushi dinner that Sunday.
One thing I didn’t know about dating was that you had to answer so many questions about yourself, some of them very personal. Was I in school? (No, I was schooled at home by my aunt.) Where did I work? (I didn’t, and probably wouldn’t, I had what I guessed was called a fixed income.) Where did my money come from? (An inheritance from my aunt’s family, we received a payment every month.) What did I do with my days? (I went to the library, or to the cinema, or I walked or swam.) Alice answered my questions easily, and I realized she had probably dated a few people before me, so she was already prepared. For me, it was like the game shows on TV, where if you said the right words in the right order at the right time, you would win a prize.
It was on our way back to Alice’s home from the park, we were walking along the edge of the market talking about favourite toys we’d had as children (I had a stuffed clown with a rubber face that played a lullaby when you wound its red plastic nose) when something sprayed onto a wall caught my eye: a blast of pinkish purple, a stencil or some kind of graffiti with some garbled lettering above it. A wiry guy with a ponytail was standing next to it, postering for a band night at a bar up the street.
“What’s that?” I said to her as we reached the corner—then I felt something, a twitch and a tickle, low on my back, as if someone had just put their hand there. Little Sprout was awake. That was a bad sign. Had it smelled something, brushed against something? I glanced behind, looked around—nothing—then Alice piped up from my right, “What’s what?”
“That over there,” I said, gesturing towards the wall across the street, but whatever I’d seen was gone. Long-haired guy was slapping wheat paste over where the spray had been, or where I thought it had been, and then smoothed another swath of posters down on top of it.
“I guess it’s under there now, it was . . . odd.” I hadn’t seen it clearly, I couldn’t have described it. An ad of some kind? Or some kind of art? Or maybe a warning, like those interlocked circles on drums of hazardous waste. I looked from wall to wall to doorway to fence to see if I could find another, but there was nothing similar in sight. The twitch at the small of my back had subsided, replaced with a low dull throb. Little Sprout, I whispered in my head, go back to sleep.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem a bit shaky.”
“I should head home,” I said. “My aunt will be wondering where I am.” The image had been right over there—but what had it been? I barely saw it, it shouldn’t have mattered, but somehow it did and I didn’t know why. As if I alone was meant to see it and, for a moment, I had. I walked Alice to the door of her building, gave her a light goodnight kiss on the lips—a first for me—and watched as she unlocked the front door and made her way up the stairs.
By the time I got home, Maryan was already in bed. She was quite old now, and almost always asleep by nine. My back was sore but not painful, and the twitching had stopped completely. I would have to be careful sleeping, though, and then be sure to have her take a look in the morning. I felt like something had happened, not just there but inside me as well, something had tugged loose and was trying to free itself. Little Sprout. Maryan would know what to do. I gently closed her bedroom door, then walked quietly through the kitchen and down the stairs, past the laundry room and into my apartment.
Maryan was my late mother’s half-sister, and it was in her house that I lived. I had a small flat in the basement with my own kitchen and bathroom as well as a separate entrance, up a small flight of cement steps and out into the backyard, which allowed me to come and go without too much disruption. It had been difficult moving even this far from her, though we both knew it was a necessity. She had raised me almost from birth, alone, and was unable
to see me as anything other than the little girl she taught to read and write and sing.
My restlessness throughout my teenage years had troubled her greatly: my disappearance for hours at a time; my constant travels through the city, by bus and train and bike and on foot; my late-night swims from the docks to the scattering of islands in the centre of the lake; my pre-dawn stumblings through the house and my long early-morning showers scrubbing and scrubbing at myself with undisguised self-hatred. Like many mothers and daughters, she and I would fight our way around the real problems between us. She had raised me to become the person I was meant to be, and now that person confused and angered her, and sometimes frightened her.
A girl went missing last year—fourteen and drunk, she had fallen from one of the party boats in the heat of the summer and her body just vanished. She had been alone on the deck, she had gone up looking for something or someone. It was all the city could talk about, divers searched for her for days while Maryan scowled at me, unable to say anything, unable to ask.
Finally, a week later, the girl’s body washed up three miles away, once pretty, now blue and bloated, shrouded in weeds and wreathed with snails. Full fathom five, thy father lies; of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes. Her eyes were gone—alas, no pearls—and part of her face scraped down to the bone, to the teeth. And, most vividly, her left leg, gone. Gnawed and slashed and torn away, perhaps by a propeller blade, or caught between rocks, still somewhere amid the filth and debris lining the harbour bed.
Suddenly, just as I had pulled my pyjama top over my head and was reaching to switch off the light, I heard a shuffle, a stumble, from the floor above me. “Maryan?” I called. Something fell to the floor with a thunk. I hurried back up the stairs, threw open the basement door. Apart from a few small smudges, the floor was clean and unmarked—but in the middle of the grey speckled linoleum stood Maryan’s large heavy chef’s knife, wobbling slightly, its point plunged down into the floor. I felt a cool breeze against my ankle and saw that the back door that I had locked was now open, creaking softly, spilling golden streetlight into the room. I knew I should be frightened, but instead I was intrigued. Maryan had often warned of men who might come in the night and try to hurt me. Was that what this had been? I pulled the knife from the floor with a yank, held it out in front of me as I made my way to the back door, peering around and above me and then outside, then shut the door with a shove once again. Maryan always locked all three deadbolts. I only ever bothered with the middle one, the oldest and probably the easiest to defeat. This time I turned them all with a defiant click-click-click.
“Lena?” Maryan called sleepily.
“Yes, Maryan, sorry,” I answered. “Go back to sleep.”
I put the knife in the sink, turned and looked down at where it had stabbed the floor. Knelt down, smoothed the scar with my fingers. Trouble, I whispered. Whenever a knife is dropped, trouble comes from wherever it points. And if the knife had been pointing down to the basement, that meant the trouble was coming from me, or to me, or from somewhere below me.
The next morning I came up the stairs into the kitchen to find Maryan sitting at the table, a mug of salted kelp tea already waiting for me. I sat down carefully, brought the steaming cup to my lips, took a still-too-hot sip. She saw the way I was holding myself and frowned. “Let me look.”
I moved my chair to the centre of the room, stripped to my waist, crossed my arms on my chest and leaned forward, resting my chest against my thighs.
“Well now,” Maryan said as she pulled another chair closer. “One of your sutures is loose.” I could feel her as she ran her fingers along my spine, pressing and pushing my skin the way one would nudge and knead sweet yeast dough. “When did this happen? Do you remember?”
“Yesterday,” I said, looking at her bare feet on the floor. Tiny toes, nails painted ruby red. “I was in the market, shopping. With a friend.” I thought of the face sprayed on the wall, the postering guy, the hand at the small of my back. “I might have been carrying too much.”
“You must be careful,” she replied, getting up. She pulled one wooden drawer open, slid it shut, pulled open another, rummaged around with a clatter. Then came back to her chair, unzipped a small cloth case. I felt the sharp sting of alcohol as she swabbed the area above my buttocks. “Hold still,” she warned—then began, so softly, to sing the song I’d known from childhood: the song that was sung not to me, but to that which lay coiled within me.
Malen’kiy sprut, malen’kiy sprut, ya tvoy drug . . . Malen’kiy sprut, malen’kiy sprut, ya pomogu. . . .
I turned my head and watched as she pulled a semi-circular needle out of the bag, then felt first one stitch come free, then another. I heard the snick of a small pair of scissors as she trimmed the end of the thread, then felt the curve of the needle as it pulled through one of the now-empty holes in my skin. I made a noise as she pulled it snug and then tied it to the stitch below. “There, that should hold,” she said, sounding quite pleased. She pulled another length of waxed thread from the spool, snipped it, slipped it onto the needle and drew it back and forth through the remaining holes, criss-crossing the slit down my back like a shoelace.
“I do not think of you as having friends. How long have you known this friend?”
“Not long,” I said, wincing.
As she began to tighten the thread, she gave a sudden gasp—and a droplet of blood splashed to the floor between our feet.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. Little teeth.” I turned my head to see her sucking her finger.
“Is it back inside?”
“Yes,” she answered, examining her finger, then wrapping it in a bit of tissue. “I startled it, I think. We are both very lucky.” She took the two ends of the thread, gave a good tug, then tied them off. Both of us sighed, at that moment realizing we had scarcely dared to breathe. Two more snips to cut down the ends, a long strip of gauze secured with medical tape, and then she placed her hand on the nape of my neck.
“You can sit up now. Put on your blouse, and finish your tea.” I fastened the buttons, knotted the silver-blue scarf I had worn, smoothed out my skirt. I drank down the tea, which by now had cooled, its saltiness more pronounced. She placed the scissors, thread and alcohol wipes back in the little cloth pouch, zipped it shut.
Later, I wondered if Maryan had been the intruder—if she had crept out of her bedroom while I was downstairs, had unlocked the back door, had dropped the knife and then hurried back to her bed.
Later still, I wondered if, instead, Alice had followed me home. If you were a monster, what kind would you be?
Saturday and Sunday were very long days at the library, and long evenings thinking about Alice and her many questions. As I got close to the restaurant I wondered if she would stand me up. I had overheard two girls talking in the cafe about boys who had stood them up. One of them seemed intense and difficult and I decided that she and I were very alike. Of the many people I saw each day, very few of them noticed me, and those that did looked startled, even afraid of me.
So I came to the conclusion that Alice would stand me up, that I would wait patiently drinking green tea until it was clear to the server, the sushi master, the other patrons, that the person I was waiting for was never going to show. But when I swung open the restaurant door, Alice was already there and seated at a corner table. She stood and smiled and gave me a hug. I almost started to cry, I was so happy. And Little Sprout was still and silent.
“You have a secret,” she said, in between bites of unagi roll. “I mean, we all have secrets, but you carry yourself in a particular way. Like there’s something you don’t want people to see about you.”
I looked down at my plate, at the shrimp on its hard-packed bed of rice, shelled and flayed with just its pinkish tail remaining. “I have a kind of deformity, on my spine, a growth. Like a tumour. It’s not painful, not usually, but it spasms from time to time and that’s how I know I need t
o go home and rest. Bad things happen if I don’t.”
She looked shocked, as if she had imagined an entirely different secret and now wasn’t sure what to say.
“Like a tumour. Is it a tumour? Like cancer?”
“No,” I replied, “not exactly. But it is wrapped around my spine, and it can’t be removed. Not without killing me. That’s what they say.” I shrugged.
“Who are ‘they’?” she asked. These were not the questions she was used to asking. These were uncomfortable questions, and she was uncomfortable asking them.
“The doctors. My aunt. Some specialists I used to go to. We don’t talk about it much anymore.” The trick to telling lies, I knew, was to make everything half-true. I picked up the shrimp roll with my chopsticks, dipped it in wasabi soy and then popped it in my mouth, pausing mid-chew to pull out the tail.
“Have you seen it? The growth?” I shook my head. “Not even in x-rays?”
“No,” I answered. “I don’t need to see it. I know it’s there. I—talk to it, sometimes.”
“Does it ever answer?” She ventured a smile.
I smiled back. “Not yet.”
Alice nodded solemnly and then, all out of questions, she finished her unagi roll and poured out the last of the tea.
Dinner was largely silent after that. When we finished, I walked her back to her building. I was certain that this would be the end, the point where she would say, “Well, it was nice knowing you,” and pull my head down to give me a peck on the forehead. But instead, she wordlessly led me along her street, up to her building, into her lobby—Wait, what was that handbill? Back there, on the fence—Was that a face?—into her apartment and into her bedroom, then began to take off her clothes.
“I can’t,” I said quietly.
“You don’t have to,” she replied.
We lay down together on the bed, kissed and touched each other, her reaching into my blouse, into my pants. It all started out awkwardly, tinged with sadness, but then something between us turned and she rolled me on my back and straddled me, placed my fingers on her and inside her, and rode them until we both were wet and gasping. Another first. She collapsed on top of me, sweaty and giggly and swoony, then rolled off and landed beside me.
The Bone Mother Page 12
