The Woman in Oil Fields

by Tracy Daugherty

  “These words, these little scribbles, Mr. Weller, are all that matter to me. More than your admiration. More than the prison. Or my son.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  I sit. “Sometimes … sometimes after working I feel that way.”

  “Then by all means come to Paris – where your poems can be seen.”

  “I don’t approve of emigration.”

  He makes a little gesture with his hand. “If you’ll forgive me, Miss Akhmatova, I think your stubbornness is misplaced. It’s all very well to die for one’s country –”

  “Dying.for one’s country is easy,” I tell him. “Dying with it is another matter entirely.”

  ______

  “We have to make it easy for people to walk,” you said.

  “Light and shade. Cool spaces for babies.”

  “I’m not going to have any babies.”

  “Oh, Lena, of course you will.”

  “If it’s a boy he’ll grow up and leave you. Girls you never get rid of.”

  “I’m not going to live with Mama all my life.”

  “She’s a stupid woman,” you said.

  “No she’s not.”

  “Wrong about everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Everything.”

  “See, you can’t say.”

  “She shouldn’t let Father hit her. And the lake. She’s wrong about the lake.”

  “Riga’s the one who doesn’t know anything.”

  “The streets have to be wide enough for horses and carts. No automobiles. Absolutely no automobiles.”

  “Maybe one or two?” I said.

  ______

  I walk in a field of factory ash with only my shawl and a hairful of snow. My books have been burned in the square.

  This morning Lev’s face is bruised, his lips are chapped and torn.

  “What did they do to you?”

  A dry cough. “Stop it, Mother.”

  “Don’t strain. Quietly.”

  He lifts his face toward mine. “They put a bag on my head. A bag of water. When they kicked me, my nose and throat filled till I thought I would drown. I couldn’t stop choking.”

  I stroke his sweating back.

  “Who was it?” he says.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In your apartment.”

  “When?”

  “‘As long as she entertains men in her apartment,’ they said …”

  He closes his eyes. His long black hair comes off in patches on my hands.

  ______

  Not, not mine: it’s somebody else’s wound.

  I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground.

  Whisk the lamps away …

  ______

  “Bowls,” Mikhail said in the bar one night. “Jars. Glazed china plates.”

  “Even the word ‘containers’ is a conceptual burden placed on women,” I said.

  “You take yourself too seriously, Anna.”

  “I object to not being seen.”

  “Men create these images in order to praise women, don’t you see that? Angels. Swans. Damp, dripping caves –”

  “You might as well be papering a wall, to hide what’s underneath.” I snuffed the candle to punctuate the point.

  “Delilah with her scissors …”

  ______

  Just after we married, Nikolay and I traveled to Paris. I remember thinking, “These streets have leaped from my mind,” I felt so at home. I imagined the city of Kitezh looked something like this: women walking freely, laughing, in their light skirts and stockings.

  In his quiet room Modigliani sketched me in pencil, the slender lines of my neck shading off into plumes.

  One afternoon on my own (Nikolay and I had already grown restless in each other’s company) I walked through a refurbished neighborhood on the Ile de la Cite. The sky had been dark all day; as I passed a laborer setting buckets of brown paint in the window of an unfinished apartment, hail began to patter the awnings. The laborer invited me inside. The apartment, he said, had once housed happy men, but they had all gone.

  “Where did they go?” I said.

  He seemed not to hear. “Where are you from? You don’t look French.”

  “Petersburg.”

  “Ah, the noble peasant. High plains? Sheaves of wheat?”

  “Well …”

  He laughed, and tapped my finger. “A very pretty ring. Do you have any children?”

  “No,” I said.

  He was quiet for a moment, busying himself with his rags.

  “My wife is in the clinic, expecting our first child,” he said finally. “Twenty years old, my wife. I’m quite a bit older, as you can see.”

  As he spoke he cleaned his brushes in a little can of turpentine marked “Flammable.” His hands were long and explosive.

  “I haven’t gone to visit her.”

  A piece of hail, like a heavy crystal wine glass tossed at the sill, tipped a half-empty bucket onto the waxed wooden floor. The man didn’t move. Brown paint seeped into the cracks beneath the carpet; his child waited in a place without color.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All these years. I didn’t know a woman’s body could be so huge.”

  ______

  “Hippogriff, mermaid, manticore,” Mikhail said. “Siren, sister, witch.” Words words words. Crumbling wall, paper (a floral design) sagging to the floor, stretched across the rug like a dress dropped in haste. The naked animal herself out the window, on the canvas, trembling at the edge of the page. To a nunnery, in a winery, passed out on the dirt. Container and contained. In Pushkin’s land.

  ______

  Mr. Weller requests another chat. On the phone I tell him no. “The Party’s asked me to write a poem praising Stalin.”

  According to all reports, he says, the Germans are murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews.

  “Why the Jews?” I ask.

  He doesn’t know.

  My days are a series of nonmeetings. Admissions of nothing. The roomer below is afraid to meet me on the stairs.

  ______

  “Brick towers.”

  “No no, Lena, wood.” I laughed and pulled your hair.

  “Brick is solid, Anya. We want our city to be solid.”

  “Well, my city’s going to be pretty and smooth. Lots of wood. And copper.”

  “I’d rather be safe.”

  “Wood’s safe.”

  “Not from fire.”

  “There won’t be any fires in our city. We’ll run them out of town.”

  “We’ll have the best firehouse in the world.”

  “With six gray horses.”

  “And three fat men.”

  ______

  The bats we discovered as children still squeal inside the cypress trunks. Remember how they frightened our aunts?

  The day you finally went looking for the city of Kitezh, Mother and her sisters sang hymns from the Bible. As minnows rose in the shallows near the trees they praised God’s love to me. “You have the gift of words, Anya,” Mother said. “Use it for His glory.”

  Father and Uncle Svetan basted the calfs hind legs: shallots, crackling butter. “Are the children hungry?” Uncle Svetan asked.

  “Where’s Lena?” said one of the aunts.

  “I thought she was with you.”

  “No, she – Oh my Lord.”

  They gathered at the water’s edge, in knee-deep mud (gas pockets popping all around them), trying to call you back. The meat began to burn.

  This evening I can’t see the lake: no moon. But I know where it is. I can hear it. The news from Paris is bad. Men say, Lena, that all of Europe may fall to the German attack. Russia, too, perhaps. My friends urge me to join them – next month they’re sailing to America – but “someone,” I write Shileyko, “has to be a witness.”

  Bats echo in the hills. I walk back
to town. Two soldiers with rifles on their shoulders leave a house by a darkened side door. Someone’s crying in the kitchen; I duck down the street. A young woman carrying a child in a burlap sack sniffs around the empty market stall where I’m hidden. Rotten peach halves. Scattered apples. She scrubs the dirt, hands a grapefruit rind to her baby.

  “No,” the child protests.

  “Eat, eat.”

  Fresh graves and bread crusts end another day of commerce.

  ______

  Lev will be released in ten days. The prison official smiles at me. “No more guests?”

  “No,” I say.

  “The Party, I understand, was quite pleased with your tribute.”

  A young wife, waiting for news of her own, squeezes my hand. Across the room, other women – tired mothers – glare at me.

  I stop by the market. Cabbage is all I can afford and still have the price of a drink. Tucking the small head under my arm I treat myself to a beer in a tavern not far from where the Wandering Dog once stood.

  In the apartment, still holding the cabbage, I fluff my pillows, straighten the Modigliani in its cracked brown frame. My eyes have faded a bit. With a towel I dust the table before setting the cabbage down.

  From my window I see draymen returning from the fields, milk cans clattering, empty, in their wagons. Children menace each other with sticks. A couple of soldiers pass in the street. “Keep me company tonight?” one yells up at me. His friend laughs and bumps into two old women, knocking the frailer one to the ground. She spits. The soldier scolds: “Watch where you’re going. Crazy old bitch.”

  The world will never want us. I know this. I’m going to tell everyone.

  ______

  “Did you love my father?” Lev slouches over cabbage and boiled potatoes. His second day home – too weak, until this evening, to speak.

  “I felt sorry for him. Would you like another potato?”

  “Yes. Why? What made him so pathetic?”

  “He wasn’t pathetic. I never thought that. It’s just that he wanted – what? To be a great man, I suppose. First as a philosopher, then as a husband, a hunter, a soldier. He used to tell me, ‘I was born for these things.’”

  “Was he really a traitor?”

  I stack our plates on the counter. “He was killed because of his poetry.”

  “That must have increased its value.”

  “His spare style, the Bolsheviks said, ‘betrayed our rich Russian culture.’”

  “And you?” The color has returned to Lev’s cheeks; his back still aches. “Don’t you want to be great? A great writer?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I should feel sorry for you?”

  “The way I see it, people’s judgments are beyond my control. Your father couldn’t accept that.”

  “I suppose I’ve helped your career.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jail. Your loneliness. Your terrible suffering – all that.”

  “Hush.”

  “I’m sure you’ve written about it.”

  “No.”

  “Then you will. It’s too good to pass up, eh? And who knows – a poem here, a poem there, perhaps I’ll wind up in prison again.”

  I dry my hands. “I’m sorry, Lev. I never intended my work to affect your life this way.”

  “But it has, hasn’t it? Maybe I should get myself killed. Then you’d surely be great. The Great Akhmatova.” He stands, painfully. “Where was she until I wound up in jail?”

  “You knew where I was. You could have come to me.”

  He tosses his cup onto the pile of dirty plates. The cathedral bell rings once, twice, twice again.

  ______

  A small steamer’s anchored in the river. On board, dozens of young soldiers, crisp in their belts and boots; crates of fruit. Women clutch rosaries near the now-empty market, whisper prayers, wave at the boys as they pull away in the boat.

  “I hear that your son is home again.”

  I nod to the woman beside me.

  “Thank God. You’re very fortunate.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I am.”

  ______

  Such grief might make the mountains stoop,

  reverse the waters where they flow,

  but cannot burst these ponderous bolts

  that block us from the prison cells …

  ______

  This evening it’s clear to me, Lena: Mother was wrong. What we see in the lake is not a reflection of Kitezh, but the city itself. Marble columns, cobbled streets, fish rounding corners, quick as light.

  The True Twentieth Century: I’ve finally lived to see it. I drop my shawl on the bank, remove my shoes and skirt. The water is cold. Pinnacles, vaulting, an Ogee arch. Stained glass, crockets engraved with ball flower designs. Rotting wood. Straight ahead, a white gate: is this the way in? You can tell me.

  Yes, I hear you whisper. Or maybe it’s the water swishing. Louder now, yes: Closer, come a little closer …

  Here I am. My lungs begin to ache. No, I think. Closer, Anya, come this way …

  No. My place is with the dying, not the dead.

  I surface, catch my breath. My skirt, a purple patch, waves to me from the shore.

  ______

  In town, merchants fold their awnings. I shiver, shake back my short wet hair. A light goes out in a window. This is how the world ends: acquiescent, Lena. Peaceful. No help needed from us. I sit by the Neva and laugh. My pretty fool, my lovely foolish home … I’ve forgiven everyone. You’ll be my angel now.

  THE OBSERVATORY

  September 1, 1987: Claire’s latest letter, postmarked Jerusalem, begins: “We’ve learned a new trick, a process known as oral rehydration. Last night Azziz and I, with the help of some UNICEF folks, administered salt-and-sugar packets to several pairs of parents, for their kids. My pet projects – birth control, literacy – have sprouted wings. Still, the Mighty Penis rules our group and I’ve said so. A few of the men, including Azziz, are beginning to listen. In the meantime I’m amazed at the resiliency and resolve of the women over here. They have a real country-toughness, though windstorms and war have forced most of the rural communities to fold up their tents.

  “So now we depend on city-dwellers for support. They clothe us, offer us food and shelter. Of course we’re in constant need of cash. A steady supply comes from sympathizers in the States, but the mails are slow. We’re on the move a lot.

  “You know what I miss? Woody Allen movies. Has he stopped being funny? Do you get into Houston or Galveston much, or are you too busy wishing on stars? Silly William. Have you found a job?

  “You wouldn’t know me. I’m whippet-thin, strong (though I’m smoking again). The old devils have started to stir – a couple of girls in our outfit have traded ‘meaningful’ looks with me, but so far I’ve kept my hands to myself You’re the last one to’ve pushed my button.

  “Be careful, Will. You may be asked about me.”

  ______

  My clearest memories are of intimate moments, such as seeing Claire naked for the very first time: the delight that she was so feminine (I’d had no doubts, yet the sight of her unwrapped brought relief as well as happiness: A woman’s body, I said to myself, something with which I’m familiar, and even to some degree practiced). The susceptibility of her skin; the offer; the vulnerability; the variations (breast size, wrist size) from the standard American beauty; the discovery, by watching her gestures and learning their urgency, of what she most (inexhaustibly!) welcomed –

  Crazy, recalling all this now – she won’t be back. Remember, instead, that blue double star in Lyra earlier tonight: an elongated object to the unaided eye, but when magnified, the pair – both blue – stood at least twelve degrees apart. The loveliest things I’ve seen since Claire, and of sufficient visual interest to record in my log.

  ______

  11/23/87. I try to concentrate on the sky but I’m still thinking of C. For five months now, ever since she left, I’ve collected her letters
here in this binder, next to my sketches of Jupiter’s gray and yellow bands, Saturn’s rings.

  Her remarks of October 2 share a page with the Martian polar caps as they appeared in my ‘scope last night. What is she becoming? By her third strident paragraph I no longer recognize the person I knew:

  “… more and more women are cutting loose, placing themselves in adversarial roles to their own societies. In the States, it was all I could do not to be enraged every day. The stares of young boys. The sexual compromises. I resent the fact that I was made to feel I had a crisis on my hands if I lost an earring or discovered a run in my hose ….”

  In this same notebook I scribble replies, only some of which I mail. I’m surprised at my own anger. Often I find myself writing about her as though she had died. Sometimes I forget that she’s not here.

  ______

  She’d lost patience with forecasts, proofs and signs. Tossed my atlas aside. “I’m thirty-eight years old, William. Thirty-eight years old,” she said.

  I continued reading as I’d always done (philosophy, gardening, the lore of star names), hoping to impress on her a sense of continuity, but nothing mattered to Claire after she’d lost the baby.

  “There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there also is the truth,” says Kierkegaard. “There is another view which conceives that wherever there is a voting, noisy, audible crowd, untruth would at once be in evidence.” I followed the latter principle, gathered my instruments and built my base out of town.

  ______

  Watermelons, beets, basil and chives, squash, cauliflower, radishes. A deep, sweet water well (the water is heavily fluoridated, comes out of the ground that way, good for the teeth though it stains). I’m self-contained out here, northwest of the city, but discouraging activity surrounds me on all sides. Last month a mobile home park opened up down the road, with huge mercury vapor lights diminishing visibility in the southeastern sky. Crowds in the evenings, curious about my buildings. A mile to the west, bulldozers clearing six acres for a car dealership.

  The owners of the mobile home park want more space. They’ve offered to buy the surrounding lots, but so far the local landowners – including my father, who maintains the three or four acres I occupy – refuse to sell. Meanwhile, migrant families from the east, from the industrial midwest, keep arriving, jobless and violent. Tread worn thin beneath their trailers, cotton towels waving off sun and dust in the windows of their trucks …