Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  Sasha has no idea how many people live out here; the permanent residents of the ashram seem to have little to do with the Seekers passing through. But exploring the forest, each day she finds little enclaves where someone has built a life for themselves in the middle of the jungle.

  One path takes her to a clearing where a three-bedroom house has been built into the creeping branches of a mighty banyan tree. Another path ends at a sprawling organic farm, where an ancient, creaking farmer is guiding a buffalo that is pulling a yoke across a field. He looks up and waves, ‘Bonjour!’

  Down another, she finds an old stone temple and, inside, bathed in incense and lamplight, a woman, very old, very naked, lying on the floor on a sheepskin rug, being massaged by an Ayurvedic healer in a prim white sarong. Sasha is startled, stammers an apology, and begins a retreat while the healer gazes at her serenely, rubbing oils into his hands without a word until she is back outside.

  Every day walking the jungle brings something new, and Sasha starts to feel that anything is possible, that she could take a new path one day and end up in an entirely new world, like walking from one movie set into another.

  One journey through the jungle takes her down an otherwise non-descript road ending in a razor-wire fence that has lost its battle with nature and has been wrestled to the ground by vines. She steps gingerly over the wreckage of the fence and then out past the tree line, and she is looking at the sea.

  There is a little strip of sand, a secluded cove that stretches from one bank of dunes to another, forming a natural, private enclave. She sinks gratefully into the side of a dune to catch her breath, flumps down into the sand, and realises that the only sound she can hear is the waves breaking against the shore, the soft crash and the hissing retreat of the water. The chance for a swim, any break from this heat, is irresistible. Without further thought she is stripping off her outfit, kicking her sneakers away, shedding her undergarments, leaving a trail of discarded clothes down to the waterline, where she plunges in and startles at the urgency of the undertow.

  She swims out only a little way, rolling in the shallows, before finding her feet again and standing up to walk back to land – when she freezes.

  A figure is standing on the ridge where the dunes crest. The sun is right behind it, and she sees only the silhouette, but it’s enough to chill her blood; the shame of it, the sharp edge of incipient fear.

  The figure starts to descend the dune. As it comes into focus, Sasha realises it isn’t one of her fellow Seekers but a little girl, no more than ten. Tall but rake-thin, a too-large cotton shirt baggy on her, she lugs a plastic sack, dragging it behind her as she skitters down the dune. She grabs an empty bottle that has washed up on the shore, puts it in her bag, and abruptly she is gone, back up the dune and over.

  ‘Hey!’ Sasha calls out. ‘Hey wait, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to . . .’

  The girl looks back over the crest – Sasha sees the flash of her eyes. Even from this distance she can see the whites all the way around, the fear there, and realises that her nakedness is immaterial. The girl did not look up from her feet the entire time it took her to clean the litter.

  Just that flash and then she is gone for good, leaving Sasha alone on the beach, ankles freezing in the surf, her skin already dry in the heat.

  ‘Hey!’ Sasha calls, feels her voice snatched by the wind. ‘Wait!’

  She’s thrilled, by the appearance of the girl, by the jolt of adrenaline at seeing her on the ridge. And she is embarrassed to have spooked her. Before she thinks through what she’s doing she’s climbing into her clothes and running barefoot after her.

  The girl’s tiny footprints in the sand lead back up the beach and down the path towards the forest, where Sasha finds the girl’s sack, abandoned by the side of the road. A little later she catches sight of her, struggling to free her foot from the tangle of razor wire and vines.

  Sasha cries out for her to stop – a strange, dismayed noise from the back of her throat – but the little girl is free, limping away down the path, a trickle of blood darkening the ground behind her.

  Stricken, it takes Sasha a minute to negotiate the snarls of the ruined fence. She’s sprinting down the narrow forest path when a mess of barking and screaming reaches her ears, seconds before she rounds a bend in the path and surprises one of the house dogs crouched over the child, one meaty paw pinning her to the earth.

  The dog stands in the middle of the path, hackles raised, its head low, teeth bare. A tendril of drool dangles from a fang – it catches the light in exactly the way the dog’s damp, shining eyes do as they snap up and fix on Sasha as she nears. There’s foam on its mouth, blood in the foam.

  Sasha knows better than to yell, to succumb to panic, but she cannot help herself. She recoils, the memory of an old bite suddenly fresh on her skin, the sick, puckering feeling of the rapier shots; long needles in her stomach, one after another after another. She felt them for days afterwards, for years, whenever she thought about it – she feels it now, as she cries out, and the dog shifts its attention away from the child and on to her.

  It is the worst possible reaction. The dog, enraged by her terror, leaps at her, barking and growling, while she scrambles away. She’s crawling backwards across the ground, fingers sinking uselessly into the soil, when they close around something solid – a rock, a broken chunk of sandstone, hefty enough that when she hurls it, catching the dog with a glancing blow along its snout, it is startled. It lets out an aggrieved whimper, skulks back a step or two, and then skitters into the woods as Sasha hefts another rock to her shoulder.

  Sasha reaches the little girl, kneels by her side, finds her wide-eyed with shock. She is bleeding from three deep bite marks, one on her throat and two more in the meat of her arm, bleeding badly.

  ‘Oh,’ Sasha says. ‘Oh thank God.’ She clamps her hand onto the deepest wound.

  On an otherwise unremarkable winter morning in the early nineties, Sasha’s father rose early, fixed himself a cup of tea, strong, with lemon and honey, took it up to the roof of their Brooklyn walk-up, and threw himself off.

  Nobody who knew him was surprised. Not that he’d done it, nor by the method he’d chosen. But then, there were so few left.

  Ivan had never been happy in America; he’d worked harder than he had even back in the Soviet Union, but now in a country he loathed more every day, and which loathed him in return. The miracles of American life other refugees from behind the wall had embraced – cheeseburgers, Levis, Hollywood – had left him cold. It gave him no joy to sit in a darkened theatre, watching Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot rocket launchers at sleazy, cockeyed villains who spoke with unfair exaggerations of his own accent. It took him years of working construction, shimmying up girders, before he finally gave in and surrendered to the sweet siren song of the ground calling him – splat – to his rest.

  He had been thrifty: gone over the edge in his worst clothes, a tracksuit too grease-stained and moth-eaten to go to goodwill. He had, however, gone to the closet, removed his good suit and set it out with instructions for them to bury him in it – which was optimistic given the mess he’d made hitting the pavement and the calibre of mortuary services they were able to afford with the little money he left behind.

  Next to the suit he’d laid his wallet, filled with all the cash in the world he’d managed to accrue, and his watch, improbably an antique Japanese Seiko, a diver’s watch, with all the bells and whistles and spinning gauges. It was a mystery where he had procured this watch, amidst the rolling deprivations of his life behind the iron curtain.

  When Sasha’s mama saw the watch lying unattended on the bed, she understood right away what he had done. He loved that watch, was inordinately proud of it. He never took it off, would reluctantly remove it and carefully rest it on its band only to bathe, to make love and to sleep.

  When the police knocked on the door of their little railroad apartment, hats respectfully removed and held in front of them, just like in the movies, she was f
urious. She launched herself, fists first, at the police, and after they had made their tactical retreat, at her daughter. Finally, when that avenue of release was exhausted, she turned on herself, gouging at her face with her nails, pulling her hair out in great chunks that blew across the apartment like tumbleweeds for days afterwards.

  For a week Mama did nothing but weep, wreathed in an enormous black shawl, only gathering herself in the evenings to heat a can of soup for Sasha’s dinner. Then, one morning, she stood, announced she was done crying, and set about erasing her husband from history.

  She gathered his possessions into garbage bags; clothes, books, records, his razor and toothbrush. After that, she cleaned the pantry of his favourite foods, tipped them into the trash and, for good measure, also dumped in every photo of him in the house. Only his watch, rescued by Sasha and hidden under her bed, survived the purge.

  Once every trace of her husband was safely contained in trash bags, Mama threw them unceremoniously off the fire escape to nestle in the evergreen pile of garbage that built up between the buildings. She went out for a couple of hours and returned with groceries and a large oaken crucifix, which she affixed to the bright patch on the wall where, until that day, a family portrait had hung. Then she made a meal of pickle soup and sat Sasha down to inform her how things would now be. Her father would not be coming home anymore, because she had no father. As far as Sasha was to be concerned, she’d never had one.

  ‘What are we going to do? The only thing we can do. We have to smile at it.’

  That morning she had woken up Sasha Ivanova, Russian–American, brown-haired and buck-toothed daughter of Ivan. No longer. Tonight she would go to bed Polish.

  ‘We will use my father’s name,’ explained Mama, matter-of-factly.

  ‘What’s wrong with my name?’

  ‘We need a good Catholic name,’ she said in Polish. ‘We belong to God now, not to anyone else.’

  Mama found work in a Polish deli in Greenpoint, and while the pay wasn’t great, each night she brought home paper bags full of smoked chicken, sausage, cheese, pickles, tubs of soup. All the food they needed to survive was, overnight, free and plentiful. For Mama, there was no greater solace.

  Occasionally, when her mood turned grim, Mama would tell Sasha about the hunger of her own childhood, less as an ache than a burning lack of hope, one that filled the stomach with bile and the mouth with a bitter taste, which she could still summon, no matter how much she ate.

  The job at the deli saw Mama’s faith reaffirmed. God had a plan for her and her daughter, and she trusted in Him, even if things were never easy, and getting harder. At times she thought that other gods must be working against her, that some petty, petulant demon she’d insulted along the way had condemned her and Sasha to suffer like the old ways – always rolling rocks uphill, having their guts ripped out every morning.

  Brooklyn was a city on the move and they could not catch up. For every step they took, the city danced two beats to the side. One by one the Polish-speaking families on their block moved out and were replaced by young white couples with disposable incomes and obnoxious sound systems. The thump of hip-hop rattled their windows at all hours. These newcomers didn’t speak to Mama when she passed them in the hall, and she scowled at them, behind their backs or from behind the lace curtains as she watched them on the street.

  The landlord began to raise their rent, pushing it as far as he could lawfully, then some more. Mama complained bitterly; he responded by shutting down her heating, pleading a bad boiler in the basement.

  As winter set in and the windows iced over, they huddled together in bed to keep warm. At Mama’s urging, as night set in they made a game of their frosted breath. She showed Sasha how to breathe on the icy window to make a canvas, how to carve out whole worlds with a numb fingertip. They made believe they were magic, fire-breathing witches and shape-shifting dragons, hiding out in their Brooklyn walk-up.

  Mama would not be frozen out of her own home. She fortified their apartment against the winter, sewed thick drapes and stalked each room to track down and block draughts. They visited a thrift store and Sasha came out swaddled in so many layers of scarfs and puffer jackets that she could topple over and feel nothing but a delightful little bounce.

  The leaves fell, and at night ice crept over everything. Sasha was startled from sleep every morning by the cold, the first breath of the day a crystalline gasp of surprise.

  When a glass of water left on Sasha’s bedside froze overnight, Mama organised a credit card and purchased five space heaters. When they blew a fuse and knocked out power for the apartment block, and the landlord threatened to sue, she made inquiries for a lawyer of her own, measured the price, gave up and vacated. The landlord doubled the rent and a young couple moved in before Mama had even gotten her dismal furniture off the sidewalk.

  Mama and Sasha ended up in Long Island, in a two-bedroom flat above a TV-repair shop and across the road from a basketball court caged in chain-link fence that took up one whole side of the street, a cul-de-sac that nobody ever drove down.

  Her mother’s commute between boroughs was long, the bus to Jamaica station then the subway, and with no friends or family in the new neighbourhood to babysit her, most of the time Sasha was alone.

  She had a doll, a little wooden thing with squeaking articulated joints and sparse blonde hair stitched into its scalp. It was very old – old already when Mama had found it in a thrift store – and not quite right. A mechanism behind its eyes had slipped so that when the doll was placed on its back, its eyelids sprang open, and when it was sat up, its eyes slammed shut. Her name was Sarah.

  Sasha would sit Sarah up on her lap and they’d watch TV through the afternoon. As one show switched into the next, Sasha would whisper to her, keeping up a running commentary on what was happening on the screen. The plot points from previous episodes of a show, the arcane world-building of Sesame Street and all its citizens, which of the square-jawed men who populated the soap operas she would most like to marry when she grew up. In between shows, she told Sarah about her small life, how nice it was to have someone to spend the hours with, but how it would be even nicer to have a sister, a real person, someone she could look after. If one day Mama came home with another child, a baby, then Sasha would never be lonely again.

  Mama left before sunrise and returned after dark. She left the TV on with the volume turned up just enough to make the apartment seem busy from the outside. Before she left she poured a glass of milk and prepared a sandwich – mayo and mustard on rye, one slice of kielbasa, one slice of smoked cheese. The sequence of the television shows marked the passing hours, in the same way the shadows moved across the basketball court through the window. She’d leave them on the table, and, as instructed, Sasha waited until The Bold and The Beautiful to eat the sandwich and drink half the milk. There’d be a cookie on a separate, smaller plate, but she was forbidden to touch it, or finish the milk, until the hands reached far to the right of the clock, or right after Sesame Street ended.

  Around the time the evening news ended, her mother would come home, exhausted but cheerful, loaded with plastic bags full of deli containers with their dinner. For this reason, the evening news soon became her favourite part of the day; she watched wide-eyed as America landed a robot on Mars, moved to impeach the president, mourned a princess killed in a tunnel – flashing lights and grainy footage seared into her memory forever. Her entire body started to glow with the anticipation of footsteps in the hall, keys in the door, warm arms to run into, steaming food decanted into bowls.

  One day the news ended and Mama did not return. Sasha didn’t know what this meant, but decided the most sensible thing to do was nothing. She knew how to wait. Hours passed. She returned to the kitchen table and used a finger to gather up the crumbs of her sandwich, then those of the cookie, upended the glass to let the final drops of milk trickle down her throat.

  The apartment was lit only by the television, which bathed everything blue. Sas
ha watched until her eyes burned – Mama had told her it was dangerous to watch TV with the lights off, but there was very little she could do about that. The chintzy chandelier that lit the living room was controlled by a switch on a chain, which Sasha couldn’t reach, even when she stood on a chair on tiptoes.

  Instead she pushed a kitchen chair, an inch at a time, until it stood under the window. There, if she climbed up and stood on the chair, she could follow the basketball game playing out on the street below, watch as the boys in baggy mesh singlets wove around each other, bumped, pushed.

  One show ended, another began. Sasha tried to concentrate on the TV but the shows for grownups were on now, boring programs with adults talking around a desk, and she could only hear the increasingly aggrieved complaints of her stomach. She tucked herself into bed, tried to sleep, but was tossed and taunted by the thought of food hiding in the cupboards above the kitchen bench. She had been warned not to climb up there under any circumstances, but as time passed she became more and more convinced that not only could she make herself something to eat, but that Mama would be impressed by her ingenuity. In fact, she decided – given that her mother failing to come home seemed as impossible as the sun failing to set – the night was almost certainly a test of her fortitude.

  Sasha hauled the chair from the window over to the kitchen bench, then clambered up onto the wooden benchtop. Using the handle of one cupboard as a handhold, she stood on her toes and swung the other cupboard open. She reached inside and, using her finger pads to navigate, located bread, mustard, sausage, cheese.

  Carefully, she retrieved them and took them down to the kitchen table. She clambered back onto the bench and scooted along on her butt until she was able to reach the drawer where Mama kept the knives and, after carefully testing the edges in the dark with her fingers, selected the long, serrated bread knife Mama preferred.