The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Listen.” Scott glanced at his wife then slowly shook his head. “I don’t know who you are or what the hell you’re doing, hauling this … this obscenity over here –”

  Lenore gripped her husband’s arm. “No, honey, he was –”

  Robert saw the confusion on her face. He thought, What have I done? She turned away from the stark metal breasts. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Inside, the boys screamed for Quarter-Pounders. Scott said, “You keep your sicko stuff away from my kids, hear me? I don’t want them seeing crap like this.”

  Robert tried again to apologize to Lenore but she wouldn’t look at him and he didn’t know what to say.

  In the shed he stripped once more and cursed his mother’s face. If she hadn’t been such a princess, so enamored of her suffering, if she’d humored Frederick, followed him to the City of Art – how different Robert’s life would have been! He’d have seen the shapes his father saw, learned the joys of women.

  As it was, he couldn’t do a decent picture of his wife or even talk to the lady next door.

  He threw the empty Anacin bottle at Ruth.

  The goddamn collage! Perfect in conception and design, filled with slippery puns: Duchamp. His famous chess match with a nude young woman.

  Robert was the rook, torturing himself with the work. He’d call Hope tomorrow and have it carted out of here.

  Big Sid rumbled all around him, floor tom to cymbal to snare, a fanfare fit for paradise. Monet’s Eden was free of people – an ideal condition, Robert thought. “Leave me alone!” he shouted at his walls. He tore an old sketch of Ruth into shreds. Her eyes, her lips, her teeth fluttered to the floor. He slammed his hand on his desk. A sharp lance split his palm; he pulled away. A wasp had flown through his window and landed where he hit. The pain made his hand cramp again. He thought of his mother’s sewing needle, the voices of his parents when they were both alive to soothe him.

  ______

  The warm J & B seared his throat. Only a damn monster could drink this stuff.

  He’d never painted drunk. Frederick used to say whiskey slapped him awake. Robert decided to try it – nothing else had pricked his imagination – though he didn’t know if his swollen hand could hold a brush.

  His mind crackled with fever and aspirin and booze.

  On his knees he picked up his mother’s parts. Her chalky skin smeared his palms. He clapped to clean them, wincing from the burn of the sting, and continued to clap, sitting by the Rook. The grand Becker. Bravo.

  Woozy, he crawled toward the woman. She stood before him like a dare. He licked her steel-plated thigh.

  He whispered his mother’s name, then his wife’s, over and over like a poem. Solid, familiar sounds. Sounds of comfort.

  He reached for the metal shirt. His father’s last trace. Where had the material come from? Part of a car door, an oven, a corrugated roof?

  For a moment his anguish changed to wonder at his father’s gift, as it did so often when he was a kid in New York. Frederick had taken what the world didn’t want, a tossed-off scrap, and fashioned this image, nearly human.

  An act of salvation, which moved Robert deeply. Rescue, redemption. A confession, Hope had called it. The piece seemed to touch him now with a quiet, abiding grace.

  In the low evening glow, the woman was whole again, strong and assured. The shirt looked beaten and flat. Poor bastard, happy only as long as the light lasts.

  Let him reach, Robert thought. Let him believe in possibilities.

  He got to his feet near his easel, skin against paint, and ran his fingers over his portrait. “Come home,” he whispered. The woman had no face. “Please come home.”

  Overwhelmed by his fever and the heat, he tumbled onto his cot. The scents from his garden, musky and sweet, reminded him of Frederick’s R & B women, their rose perfume, their smoky mysteries like the textures of dreams. He didn’t move all night (except once, when he thought he felt a warm, steel finger touch his face), and was awakened by Sarah’s call.

  Three

  AKHMATOVA’S NOTEBOOK: 1940

  Adrayman in an oak wagon offers me a ride to the square. On cloudy days, not much light, I still look young.

  “Where are you going?” he says.

  “To the prison.”

  “What for?”

  “My son,” I explain.

  “Arrested?”

  “For the second time.”

  “What’s he done?”

  I’ve made him nervous. “His mother’s a poet.”

  “Is that so?” He flicks the reins; his horses shiver. “Maybe I know you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, really, what’s your name?”

  “Akhmatova.”

  He looks at me. “Anna Akhmatova?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your husband, Miss.”

  “Thank you. This will be fine.”

  Outside the prison, women in black shawls stand one behind the other.

  “Come to the tavern with me,” says the drayman, trying to be cheerful. He pats the wagon’s seat. “You can sit here under the feather blanket while I buy you a beer.”

  I thank him for the ride.

  “I’d like to hear a poem.”

  I smile, shake my head, then take my place in line. The walls are scratched and gouged. The woman in front of me turns and asks, “Can you put this into words?”

  I tell her, “I can.”

  ______

  Women whisper that they bleed beneath their skirts. In Petersburg the men, in a hurry, won’t listen. Instead they hear a clamor of crows, the bell of the gray cathedral. Irritable, quiet, I pass through their rooms, dreams replacing dreams all night.

  Lena, I ask you again: Who can refuse to live her own life?

  Lately I’ve dreamed of you as a child in your long white dress, trampling the wild-onion dirt in the hills above town. “He looked at me funny, Anya.” “Well, his brother touched my hand.” “Does Father pull your drawers down when he hits?”

  When we were small I refused to wear white dresses so that people could tell us apart.

  In one of my dreams Mother’s talking again about the city of Kitezh, saved from the Tartars by prayer. “It was lifted straight into Heaven, just beyond those hills,” she says. “On days when the fish are still and all the mud has settled to the bottom you can see its reflection in the lake. Each man had a wagon. Their wives raised many, many children.”

  You follow her pointing finger to the tip of one bald peak. Softly, to me: “She’s telling it wrong.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “It wasn’t saved. It was just a city of brides. Their husbands had gone to war.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Tartars raped and murdered all the women. Left only bones.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Riga” – a girl in our school – “told me.”

  Mother buttons her sweater. “It’s getting colder. Let’s go home now.” She takes my hand.

  Rubbing your arms in the mist you warn me, “One day, Anya, we’ll live in Kitezh.”

  ______

  Dry snow, candlelight mirrored in a stranger’s dining room window. First course (served in silver dishes by a dour maid): roast duck with apricots, cranberries, a light Gewürtztraminer. Next, mushrooms in lobster sauce, cream gravy, Jarlsberg cheese. Coffee and chocolate for dessert.

  Afterwards we sit by the fire. The rug is soft and warm.

  “I could treat you to meals like this every night,” says my host. He ships vegetables and fruits around the world, acres and acres of foodstuffs.

  “And what would I have to do to earn them?”

  He laughs. “Nothing. Enjoy yourself.”

  I shake my head. “I did enjoy this evening. I’m glad you invited me.”

  I’d seen him at the market earlier this week, supervising a dozen crates of Jonathan apples unloaded from a Dutch steamer.

 
“I’m not the first to ask you,” he says.

  “I’m comfortable living by myself. Choosing my friends.”

  “And your lovers? There must be several men.”

  I smile.

  “Poor bastards.”

  “I don’t lie to them.”

  “Food’s going to be scarce in the coming months-the army will need it. I can help …” he says.

  “Thank you, no.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “What?”

  “How do men kiss you?” He lifts my chin. “Tell me how you kiss.”

  ______

  Lev is thin. Black bread and sugarless tea. I appeal to the authorities on behalf of my son, but my voice, in chorus with dozens of other women, is indecipherable. Day and night in the dank pine waiting room, the smell of mercurochrome, swabbed across the corns on our feet.

  I’ve been a bad mother. When Nikolay first proposed marriage (he was cocky as a prince), I told him I hadn’t the patience for courtship; I wanted to sit by the Neva, reading Hamlet.

  “So you want to be a poet,” he said. “What are you going to write?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever interests me.”

  “Pretty odes on wind chimes or cats?”

  “Of course not. Why are you being so hateful?” I turned toward the river and opened my book.

  He shook my shoulder. “Have you ever heard rifle fire? A young soldier moaning and clutching his guts in a field? My God, Anna, what do you know of the world?”

  “Enough to tell you no,” I said. “Leave me alone. Go be a man.”

  The following day he took a holiday train to France with six other young army recruits. Three weeks later I heard he’d swallowed a vial of strychnine. For nearly a day he lay unconscious in the Bois de Bologne before a young couple stumbled upon him. Three times he threatened suicide, twice I refused to marry him. But it turned out he was right.

  A witness to one’s time, Lena. What else is a poet but that?

  When Lev was born (October, mild and warm) I discovered how little I possessed of the simple love by which people live day to day. Working for each other, eating together under the same roof. Nikolay spent half the year hunting in Abyssinia. I read my poems, shouting over drunks, in bars.

  Our son grew up in his grandmother’s house, eighty kilometers east of here. I didn’t even visit.

  ______

  “I want to see Kitezh.”

  “Don’t.” I pleaded with you to put your skirt back on, and to come away from the lake.

  “Mother’s wrong.”

  “Please, Lena.”

  “Someday …” You gazed at the waves.

  “We can make our own city,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the sky. Or under water.”

  “With nasty boys?”

  “And rich, spiced food.”

  You smiled, pulling on your socks. “All right, Anya, you start.”

  ______

  A priest stops me outside the prison. “Good woman, come pray with me.”

  “I’m not a good woman,” I tell him. “Besides, there’s no one to hear.”

  Five or six rabbis also wait outside the gates.

  “Of course there is. We each have an angel –”

  I laugh. “I’m a descendant of Eve, Father. Read your Bible.” I lace my boots up tight.

  “No forgiveness for those who won’t seek it!” he calls after me.

  ______

  In the bars, men sat at my table and swore they loved me. We discussed art about women, women as artists. One night Mikhail, a painter friend of mine, said, “Feminine beauty is an imperative.” He couldn’t afford oils; I often gave him lipstick to mark his large canvases. “It tugs at my hand when I pick up the brush.”

  “Romantic nonsense.”

  “No no,” said another. “It’s the serenity I’m interested –”

  I slapped the table, spilling beer. “Listen to you. All of you. Have you ever really seen a woman?”

  “We’ve offended poor Anna.”

  “Here, have another glass,” the men said.

  “You don’t even begin to know –” I pulled a cigarette from a pack and leaned toward a white candle stuck in a bottle’s mouth.

  “A toast to Anna,” Mikhail teased. “A magnificent, fearsome woman.”

  “Listen to me –” I said.

  “To Beauty.”

  “To Art.”

  “And to bed.”

  ______

  For many years after you’d gone (ripples flattening out; gas pockets in the mud, the sulfurous steam; bats whirring in the bushes) I resented you. And Nikolay, volunteering for the front, leaving me alone here in Petersburg. Even when the Bolsheviks murdered him I felt nothing but rage for my husband. Lev had just turned ten. I was drunk and loud each night in the Wandering Dog.

  ______

  “The wasteland grows.” For a time, early in our marriage, Nikolay liked to puff himself up and quote European philosophers, to impress me.

  “What do you do on these hunting trips when you’re not hunting?” I asked him once. “Play cards? Go to brothels? What do men do on their own?”

  “Why?” he said.

  “I want to know, that’s all.”

  “We drink. We laugh. We talk.”

  “What about?”

  “Money. Philosophy. Your friends at the Dog aren’t the only ones with thoughts in their heads.”

  “What kind of philosophy?” I asked.

  “The future, the world, that sort of thing.” He pulled off his boots. I massaged his feet. “The other night at dinner, Peter was telling us that Nietzsche – Peter’s favorite – has a wonderful definition of mass violence – or, as he calls it, the True Twentieth Century.”

  “What does he say?” I asked.

  “‘The wasteland grows.’”

  “That’s it? ‘The wasteland grows’?”

  “He wrote it in 1880 – or ’90, something like that. Before the war. Before Verdun, the Somme … he was a prophet.”

  Nikolay never noticed the paradox until I pointed it out. “Waste makes barren, limits, opposes growth,” I said. “How can a wasteland grow?”

  He stared at me.

  Years later, cleaning out his things, I understood the answer. The wasteland grows, spreads like a swamp, if we forget to remember.

  ______

  When the Wandering Dog burned down, the poets and writers of Petersburg scattered, each like Lear without his kingdom.

  Cigarettes, candles, amorous dancing – an accident, said the police. “Wild bohemian artists,” they called us. “Pimps and whores.”

  Most of my friends stayed silent or quietly left. Now I sit by the Neva and wonder what they’d say about our city? Flat, white buildings, haphazard construction, the squalor of the market. Increasing numbers of soldiers on the streets. All this talk, from travelers, about the Reich’s frightening power in Germany.

  The wasteland grows.

  ______

  “She’s famous. Why doesn’t she say something on our behalf?” “It’s because of her fame that her son is in jail.” “She’s no better than the rest of us.”

  The women’s hushed voices echo beneath the pine wood ceiling. Lev lies, in a half-stupor, on the cold cell floor. I cup my palms beneath the spigot in the courtyard, run quickly back into the prison, but by the time my hands reach his lips there’s nothing left to drink. “Lev, Lev …”

  Fame is so much water.

  Today I can’t afford both dinner and a beer. I buy a squash, hurry home and toss it in a pot on the stove. Start some tea.

  Early in the morning the men arrived …

  They came at dawn.

  At dawn they came …

  While the kettle whistles I write this sentence, tear it apart, make it again, slightly new.

  ______

  Polonius, to Hamlet: “What do you read, my lord?”

  “Words words words.”

  ______


  A visitor from the West.

  “I’m afraid I have only boiled potatoes to offer you,” I tell him.

  “No no, nothing for me, thank you.” He settles uncomfortably into my armchair. Pillows stretch across the floor. Your picture, Lena, in a silver frame on my desk.

  My guest’s card (he helps me with the English) reads: Mr. Alfred Weller, First Secretary in the British Embassy in Moscow. He has requested this meeting with me out of admiration for my work.

  “You’ve just returned from Paris?” I say.

  “Yes. I have news of some of your friends.” His Russian is awkward; I stop him and ask him to repeat. “Aleksander Halpern, Pasternak, Shileyko – they’re all doing well. Modigliani has become quite famous since he died.”

  “Really! When I knew him he’d dig and dig in his pockets and never make the price of a drink.” We laugh. Mr. Weller watches me closely. His eyes are small; he hasn’t much hair.

  “They’re very concerned about you, your friends. Every day we hear more rumors out of Germany. War seems inevitable.”

  The tenant below noisily unlocks his door. We glance at the walls.

  “Would I be any safer in Paris?”

  “At least you’d be among friends. You could publish.” He stares appreciatively at my ankles.

  “I couldn’t leave Petersburg now. Old habits and all. I can hardly bring myself to say its new name. Leningrad. Cold and official.”

  “Do you have any recent work I can take to your colleagues in Europe?” asks Mr. Weller. “They’re eager to see what you’re doing.”

  I turn on my desk lamp. “As a matter of fact, I’ve just started a long poem – the first in nearly a year. It’s dedicated to the women who wait with me outside the prison.”

  “Yes, I heard about your son. I’m sorry.”

  I glance at the page. It isn’t about my son. Truthfully, I haven’t thought of Lev in days. “Do you find me attractive, Mr. Weller?”

  He fidgets with his coat. “Of course,” he says softly.

  “Don’t.” I read him the first lines of the poem:

  At dawn they came to take you away.

  You were my dead, I walked behind.

  In the dark room the children cried,

  the holy candle gasped for air.

  I ask him, “Can you follow the meaning?”

  “Yes,” he says.