Silent Girl

by Tricia Dower

  The yurt begins to feel small. The shirdaks on the walls press in on Kyal, their lurid colours screaming: Run! The scarf is a jooluk, a wedding scarf. She rips it off and throws it to the ground. Who are these women who conspire against one of their own? She stares at them and they stare back.

  “She doesn’t want to stay,” says one. “She would rather be cursed.”

  “She will stay,” Batigul says. “She knows it’s an honour for a woman to be chosen this way. It’s just that she is a virtuous girl whose duty it is to resist. Let us give her some time alone with her grandmother.”

  “My father will not permit this,” Kyal says when all but Dimira have left. Her heart pounds and her stomach churns as though she were in the final stretch of a race. She steadies herself with deep breaths. She will talk her way out of this.

  “He is not here,” Dimira says. “The decision is mine.”

  “I won’t stay.”

  “I’ll tell you a story,” Dimira says. She lowers herself onto a cushion and gestures for Kyal to join her. Kyal remains standing. Dimira sighs heavily and begins:

  Once upon a time, not too many years before you were born, a girl of indescribable beauty was betrothed to a handsome young man.

  Ideas scratch around in Kyal’s mind like burrowing shrews. Dimira is in the path to the door, but she presents no challenge if Kyal chooses the right moment. By the time her grandmother struggles up from the floor, Kyal will be gone.

  The young man worked long hours each day on a collective, saving for the girl’s bride price, because she longed for a traditional, fairytale wedding. Not for her a Communist Youth Wedding! While he worked, he lost himself in reveries about the day his countrymen would be free to own horses again.

  Lost in her own reverie, Dimira closes her eyes. Does she assume Kyal will stand still as a stick? An aluminum can sits by the stove – a large one likely holding milk or cooking oil. Kyal sidles over and nudges it with her toe. Full. She’s lifted cans that weight before. She’ll use it as a battering ram against anyone who tries to stop her.

  The girl was assigned to a different collective. One day a hooligan she worked with kidnapped her, took her to his family’s house and consummated a marriage with her by force. Later, when his parents relaxed their guard over her, she escaped, running for hours in bare feet to her home. Her parents refused to let her in.

  ‘You have dishonoured tradition,’ they said. ‘Go back to your husband’s home.’ The girl was a woman now, spoiled, but she said she’d rather die. The young man who loved her took pity and married her. But it was too late for them. The women in the hooligan’s family had cursed her when she ran away.

  Kyal glances at Dimira, listens more carefully.

  She gave birth to two sons who never drew a breath. Then a daughter arrived and lived. The couple thought the curse had lost its power. But when she delivered the next daughter, the beautiful young mother died.

  Tears gather in great knots of pain in Kyal’s throat. Two sons. Two brothers. Never a word about them, yet it is their absence as much as her mother’s that hovers over her family like a thundercloud aching to break. It comes to her like a blow to the chest. She and Aigul were never enough.

  The man blamed himself. If he had kidnapped her instead of indulging her foolish wedding dream, she would be alive today. He would have sons to help with his herds, to sit with him on the honoured side of the table.

  Dimira opens her eyes and gets to her feet with a grunt. “You have been claimed by a good man, Kyal. His name means gladness. Don’t try to change your fate. You’ve crossed the threshold and worn the scarf. You are married to Jyrgal.”

  “You stupid old woman,” Kyal says, not caring how much it will hurt. Forgetting the makeshift battering ram, she runs to the door where a wall of women blocks the exit. “Jyrgal!” she shouts at their backs. “Where are you, you coward?”

  “Here,” he says, as though dropped from a cloud. He bursts through the women, piercing the yurt, palms flat on his chest in apology. Dimira bows to him and leaves.

  “Who sends a grandmother to steal a bride?” Kyal says. “Who have you recruited to rape me in your place?”

  “No one will rape you. I won’t force you to stay. This was Emil’s plan. He was afraid to wait for you to fall in love with me. Desperate for you to take pity on Aigul once you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  He shifts his shoulders inside a jacket that looks a size too big. “Your grandmother was to have told you. Aigul is pregnant.”

  Kyal flushes with humiliation. She couldn’t be trusted with the truth as Jyrgal was. She had to be tricked. Her stupid, careless sister! The tears she’s been holding back escape. “Does my father know?” She picks up the wedding scarf from the floor and wipes her eyes.

  “Aigul respects your father too much to tell him. If she marries now, they can say the baby came early.”

  Jyrgal takes the scarf from her. Has she offended him? She hopes so. She wants him to feel disgraced, too. “It’s more likely fear, not respect, my sister feels. It’s easy to confuse the two. Go take another woman.”

  “I don’t relate to most women. You say what you think.”

  “Not a good trait in a wife.”

  “I think it is.” He turns the scarf over in his hands. “Your eyes are so black, I wondered if your tears would be.” He folds the scarf and places it on the platform where Aigul was sitting when Kyal first entered the yurt. He moves so close to Kyal she can see the sweat lining his upper lip. She steps back.

  He places his palms on his chest again. “Sometimes I don’t like what it means to be a man.”

  The bewilderment in his voice catches her off-guard. She touches his arm, hard beneath the soft, fine wool. “In Bishkek,” she says, “I rent a room from a married couple. He drinks too much. She says there’s nothing they don’t know about each other, nothing new they can expect or hope.”

  “I know nothing about you,” Jyrgal says, “except that you ride with wings.”

  “Your wings are bigger. You overtook me easily.”

  “I cheated.”

  So! Still never beaten. She’s too pleased to be outraged. “What, Jyrgal the noble? Jyrgal the good?”

  He gives her a grateful smile. “My horse is tethered behind the yurt. You’ll handle him fine if you remember to still him with quiet halts.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It will take me a few minutes to saddle another horse. When I come back, I’ll say I couldn’t find you.”

  Where would she go? Into the mountains? The desert? Neither village nor city offers refuge. Someone else would kidnap her. Someone without such an earnest face. She’d never see her family again. She drops to the floor, her shoulders and legs aching from vigilance. She wonders if a single fly has ever made it out of a spider’s web. “You know the proverb,” she says. “The earth is a small place for a fugitive.”

  “So, you believe in curses.”

  “No, but my family does. They would live their lives as if they were cursed.”

  Jyrgal walks to a trunk covered in brightly-collared tinplate. Such an unhurried walk. It must be how he keeps his horse calm. He pulls out a blanket embroidered in bold shades of green and gold. “My mother has been making quilts for years,” he says, “to keep my future children warm. It’s taken so long she’s made enough for Emil’s children, too.”

  Kyal will be expected to spew out a litter of sunburned faces and shaved heads, she supposes, each one taking her farther away from who she was born to be. “Your mother has an ugly mole on her chin,” she says.

  Jyrgal laughs from a depth that makes Kyal ache for all that has passed. For her mother who is now beyond all expectation. For the realization that when she left home this morning, it was already determined she’d never return.

  �
��Can I really take your horse?”

  “Yes.”

  “If not today, another day?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not easy to live with,” she says. “I’m not a good sport.”

  “I will try not to underestimate you.”

  “I believe in bathing often.”

  “Then, so do I.” He steps toward her.

  She puts up a hand to stop him. “We need to discuss the bride price.”

  His smile gives way. “Your grandmother and my parents already agreed to it. What are we to discuss?”

  She tells him of her plan to become an ambassador. He listens seriously, nodding his head in a way she finds surprisingly endearing. You’ve been claimed by a good man.

  “I can promise only that I will speak to my father on your behalf. If he agrees, my mother will follow. What about your grandmother?”

  “That will be my test,” Kyal says, “my first diplomatic assignment.”

  That night, the universe passes over the smoke hole in the yurt Kyal agrees to share with Jyrgal for a while, only a while. The moon, silent and lonely, peeps in through the hole. Kyal cannot see the Girl in the Moon, the orphan that the sun and moon rescued from a life of bondage. She feels the ground throb beneath her, feels part of an eternal flow of events. How many others in the world peer at the same moon? Unable to sleep, she watches the Great Bear slowly revolve around Polaris. Simply because it has chosen that path doesn’t mean it’s unable to choose a different one.

  I see a woman may be made a fool / If she had not the spirit to resist.

  —Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew

  Deep Dark Waves

  I, that please some, try all.

  —Time as Chorus in The Winter’s Tale

  SHE TOOK THE HAND HE EXTENDED AND STEPPED OUT OF THE CAR. When she reached for the baby, he said, “I’ll do that. We need to get you in first.” Had the muscles in her back and legs not ached from pushing Nicole out, had her anus not been on fire from who the hell knew what the doctor had done when she was spread open and helpless, she might have caught the treachery in his voice. She held onto his arm. Let him put one hand on her waist and guide her inside. As she hobbled into the washroom to change the soaked pad between her legs, he said he’d be right back. She didn’t see him when she came out. The baby wasn’t in the bassinet beside their bed. She shuffled to the garage. The car was gone.

  8:30. Nearly sixteen years later, in a room with chandeliers and champagne-coloured walls, Sona prepares to speak of that day. The occasion is a breakfast to raise funds for several women’s shelters in Toronto. As hotel staff clear plates and refill coffee cups, she stands in a shadowy corner, recalling how her lungs seized up in the forsaken garage, the simultaneous heating and cooling of her skin, the rage that lived in her throat for weeks, the months it took to resign herself to his having trumped her.

  For shelters and community centres she dresses simply: flat shoes, a long skinny skirt, and a pastel sweater to set off her blue-grey eyes. Today it’s a teal suit meant to say to the businesswomen she’s facing: I’m one of you. Let me in. No matter how many times she gives this presentation, a gnawing at the base of her gut impels her to involve the audience in her grief.

  Hearing her name, she sucks in her stomach and adjusts her skirt. As she approaches the podium, the room hushes. The women will be assessing her, looking for flaws. She carries no script. Leaning into the microphone, she begins.

  “November 16, 1990, Wellesley Hospital. Nicole is born, arms and legs folded into each other. My Pretzel Baby. Nothing permanent, they assure me; for some reason she couldn’t stretch out in my womb. Over the next thirty-six hours, I massage her limbs until they straighten ever so slightly and study the paper-thin nails curled into her tiny fists, unaware those are the only hours I’ll ever have with her.”

  As Sona reveals the moment she realized Brian had taken Nicole and disappeared, a woman in the first row of round tables reaches under her chair and brings up a purse, pulls out a tissue.

  Sona’s amplified voice has a little girl quality she imagines coming across as both fragile and brave. In rooms with no microphone, she strains to be heard, especially in shelters where children keep interrupting their mothers. It makes her sound shrill.

  “The police said unless Brian and I had filed for divorce or legal separation, he had the right to take his daughter anywhere he wanted. Being missing wasn’t a crime. They said that in my own living room, as leaks spread like an ink blot test on both sides of my navy blue blouse.” She sweeps her gaze across the upturned faces, smiles. “Always wear white when you’re lactating – I’ll wait a moment while you write that down.” She pauses for the laughter, is relieved when the woman with the tissue smiles and settles back in her chair.

  “So I said, ‘Is he going to nurse her?’ They asked if Brian had a history of mental illness, if everything was okay in our marriage. I said, ‘What difference does it make if you don’t find my baby?’ They said I could go after him for theft if the car was in my name. It wasn’t.

  “My breasts were like granite. I pumped them to relieve the pain but also to keep my supply up. I was convinced he’d be back with her. It was unthinkable otherwise, unconscionable.” A few women nod. They’re hooked.

  “After two weeks, I stopped. If Nicole was still alive, I reasoned, somebody would have put her on formula. Any of you gone through the agony of waiting for your milk to dry up? You could fly to the moon and back in the time it takes, right? I stuffed cabbage leaves in my bra – don’t laugh; it works. I put bags of frozen peas on my chest, too, cursing my body for continuing to make milk for a lost baby.”

  Affection warms the cavernous room. Sona relaxes her spine. As head of consumer research for a marketing firm, she speaks with easy confidence to shareholders and clients on the proclivities of various demographic groups. Exposing her own life is different. She wants these women to care more about her than what she says.

  “Just over a month later, on Christmas morning, I wake to new snow and a small white envelope delivered during the night through the mail slot in the front door. I stand on the chilly floor in bare feet and stare at it for a minute before stooping to pick it up. No postmark. A single white sheet inside. No greeting, no signature, eleven words typewritten on the middle of the page: Nicole is safe. Adopted by good people. Private transaction. No records.

  “The police agreed he didn’t have the right to do that. They alerted doctors to be on the lookout for Nicole and held a press conference in the frigid air outside police headquarters so, in a shivery voice, I could beg the ‘good people’ to give her up. My parents hired a private detective. Brian’s dad offered a reward. You probably know all this. How many of you googled me? The whole ugly story orbits endlessly in cyberspace. Come on, don’t be embarrassed. I would have.” After nervous laughter, a number of hands snake up.

  Sona googles Brian Patrick Warnock on Saturday nights when the stillness gets to her. She pours a glass of wine and sets up her laptop on the dining room table. In her profession, the prevailing assumption is, “If I know you, I can find you,” but not so with Brian. In sixteen years, he hasn’t used his credit card or passport, renewed his driver’s license or the plates on the car. Searches for Nicole are equally fruitless. She’d have a new name, of course. Brian, too. Sona hounds the police whenever new fingerprint or DNA technology comes along, but they ignore her. In the early days when the story was fresh, she would get calls and letters: I know where they are. Sadists and nut cases. She followed up on them all.

  Nicole is safe. From whom? How dare he.

  Sona still lives in the two-bedroom brick bungalow they bought shortly before Nicole arrived, east of Toronto in what was then a neighbourhood of young families and retired couples. Her mother doesn’t understand why she hasn’t had Brian declared dead and sold the house, wh
y she doesn’t buy a condo downtown, something more befitting an executive. “Papa and I would feel like visiting, then.”

  Brian planted a row of cedars along the back. What a show he’d made of pulling gumboots over sweats and digging the holes, of ritualizing their new beginning. The cedars are twice Sona’s height, now. Most of the older folks sold out to immigrants who’ve erected shrine-like multiple-storey homes. Something Sona would never have done back then. It was essential all rooms be on one floor. The new neighbours leave her alone. What song would you take to a deserted island if you could choose only one? My Sharona, Brian always said when they played that game, except he called it My So-oh-na.

  A photo enlargement of day-old Nicole resides in the second bedroom along with framed letters, sympathy cards, and a montage of newspaper clippings showing Sona’s young, anguished face. Nicole will need to know her history. Sona hung onto the crib and change table for two years before buying the twin bed and dresser – blond maple, European looking, not too little-girlish, even for a sixteen-year-old. She dusts the furniture every other week, changes the sheets once a month. The routine comforts her. Aspiring to move on is both hypocritical and futile, she tells anyone who brings it up. The best you can do is to layer one reality over the other.

  Brian’s clothes are on his side of the closet in their room just as he left them, shirts together and separate from the dress pants and sports jackets he wore to house showings, everything in descending order according to length. She wasn’t surprised he didn’t take the acid-washed jeans and Hawaiian shirts she’d talked him into. That he abandoned the rest kept her listening for his return past the point of self-respect. When dust settled on the clothes, she encased them in garment bags. Wrapped his shoes in tissue. Resentment still curdles in her stomach when she considers what he must have spent to re-outfit himself. He cleared out the bank account the day he left. She had to go begging to her parents.

  At night, as the occasional light from a passing car streaks across the wall opposite her bed, she wonders if someone needing your forgiveness suffers more than you. She could pardon what Brian did to her but not what he did to Nicole. Or to their son. What restitution could he possibly offer that she would accept? She went a bit wild for a while, picking up men and bringing them home, convinced he was nearby, watching her. Thought she could flush him out. She rarely dates anymore. The nice ones don’t move her. The others want to get rough too soon.