by Laura Furman
“Then one morning he said, ‘You must stop this. Your mother is weeping. The princes are weeping. The cobbler is weeping. He has threatened to kill himself if he has to make any more shoes.’
“ ‘Tell him not to cry, Baba,’ the oldest daughter said. ‘We don’t even like shoes. He need not make us any more.’
“ ‘Yes,’ her sisters echoed. ‘He need not make us any more,’ and the youngest daughter started a pirouette on her bare toes, but the oldest caught her in her arms and stopped her feet. ‘Not now,’ she whispered in the youngest daughter’s ear.”
“Celine, you’re still not telling it right,” Fadime said.
“Shush,” we told her. “Let us find out what happens.”
“The cobbler killed himself,” Celine said and we could hear her lips press tight.
“Oh, Celine,” we said. “He didn’t.”
“I don’t want him to,” Fadime cried.
“Fine,” Celine said, “he didn’t kill himself but he refused to make any more shoes and so the girls had to dance barefoot and the next morning when their father woke them he found their sheets soaked in blood and their toes worn down to nubs.”
“Celine!” we cried out.
“The daughters could not walk so they spent the rest of their lives in bed where nurses brought them food and drink and they peed in pots that were kept under their beds and they even got married in bed and their husbands, all princes, lay in bed next to them. Twelve big beds all in a row.”
“I don’t want to grow up!” Mualla cried out.
“Don’t worry, you won’t,” Celine said.
“Oh, Celine,” we said. “You don’t have to be so mean.”
“I’m not mean,” she said.
“You’re selfish,” we said. “We all know it.”
“I’m not selfish,” Celine said. “Say it. I’m not selfish.”
“Celine,” we said.
“Please, I’m not,” she said.
She was and she wasn’t; we all knew that.
There was a pause and a stifled hiccough or sob and Celine said, “Tell my brother I’m sorry I stole his Fenerbahçe jersey.”
We were quiet, until Gul said, “I’ll tell him.”
There was another pause and another stifled hiccough or sob.
Then Sahiba said, “But are you sorry?”
Celine often wore the jersey under her uniform or slept with it in her arms as if it were a stuffed animal. We had even named it Mehmet after her favorite player.
We giggled.
She giggled.
“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe you should tell him it was a comfort to me.”
“We will,” we said. “We’ll tell him.”
“Yes, yes,” the others said. “Tell my brother my sister my mother my father my aunt my grandmother my best friend from when I was five the boy I never talked to the boy I never met the husband I would have had the children I would have had tell them we are sorry we love them we are all right we will never forget them never forget us. Tell them.”
“Yes,” we said. “We will tell them.”
“Everyone be quiet,” Celine said, and we could not help but smile. “Once there was and once there wasn’t,” she said, “in the time when genies were jinn and boys remained boys and girls remained girls and nobody was born and nobody died, in the time when the earth stood still and the sun shone bright, in that time, there were fourteen princesses. And they loved to dance. They danced all night when they were meant to be sleeping, and then in the morning when they slept they dreamt of dancing. Night and day, they spun and spun, circling round and round, arms out wide and arms at their sides, spinning wider and wider until they could not even be seen.
“ ‘Aren’t you tired,’ people would cry at the fourteen dancing princesses, but inside the dance the fourteen princesses saw only each other and heard only each other and they spun and they spun and they never stopped spinning and their feet never hurt and their heads never hurt and their hearts never hurt. Inside their circle, they spun and they never stopped, not ever, not to grow old and not to die and not to work and not to marry and not to have children and not to eat bread and butter or sleep in the cold or the hot, not to do anything but spin. Together. Always.”
She was quiet and so were we.
“Thank you, Celine,” we said.
“I don’t care,” she said, but we knew she did.
“You’re not selfish,” we said. “We didn’t mean it.”
“We’re spinning, we’re spinning,” the dead girls said.
“Watch me,” Fadime said. “Can you see me spinning?”
“Yes,” we said, though of course we couldn’t.
The history of girls is always told as a tragedy. Growing old is a tragedy and so is dying young.
What, we had always asked each other, could it be like to be stoned? Were girls pelted like the stray dogs we saw being chased away with rocks by shopkeepers? Was it like dodgeball, which our American teacher made us play in the yard until only Celine was left standing and we all refused to play ever again because she was so vicious? Was it like the snowball fights we read about in books? Or was it more like being hit with a hammer, close and bloody? Maybe it was the weight of human hatred that knocked girls from their feet.
Once we tossed rocks at each other just to see, but we missed every time.
Sometimes we fell quiet. Sometimes another girl died. She would let out a small sound or a loud one, death still a surprise, even under the circumstances.
“Hello,” the other girls would say, as if she had entered a room they were in. There were so many more of them then.
How hard it is to explain, what it was like. We were together, as we were so accustomed to being. We made our present worth living, as we so often had. But then the rescue took so much longer than we expected.
“Oh, we’re on television,” the dead girls said. “There are cameras and reporters and even Americans.”
“What can you see?” we asked, but the dead girls wouldn’t say.
“Are our parents there?” we asked, but the dead girls wouldn’t say.
“Are you still there?” we called out and they did not answer.
What is the heaviest thing you can imagine? A boulder? A house? An airplane? In all of the world, what is the heaviest thing? Can you even imagine it?
“Where are you?” we asked.
But they did not answer.
How quickly it happened then. One girl, then another. Gone.
“Please,” I said, “don’t leave me.”
“Where are you?” I asked. “Can’t I come too?”
“Please,” I said. “Precious,” I said. “Precious.”
But they did not answer.
“I hate you,” I said. “You are all mean.”
“Take me with you,” I yelled. “Please take me with you.”
And from somewhere I could not see and in voices I could barely hear, they said, “Oh, Zehra, don’t be silly,” and, “We’ll miss you. Don’t forget to tell them,” and, “Goodnightgoodnightgoodnight.”
“I don’t want to grow up without you,” I said.
But they did not answer. And though my arms were at my sides, and my legs were beneath me in a way they never should be, and my voice could not be heard, and my eyes could not see, I felt twice over that I always would be—and I never would be—without them.
Have you ever seen a girl?
She is my history.
Andrea Barrett
The Particles
ONCE HE WAS IN the water, it was easier to see what had happened to the ship. The stern already low in the waves, the empty lifeboat davits and twisted rigging and the blackened, shattered wood on the deck, where the exploding hatches had blown deck chairs and people to bits. They’d been at dinner, spoons clicking on soup bowls, cooks poised over pots, Sam Cornelius thrown from his chair as he pushed aside a bit of carrot. Now it was past nine and fully dark: September 3, 1939. The searchlight picked out bodies
floating near the boat, and when the woman crouched behind him gave her life belt to her wailing son, Sam gave her his and then was even more frightened; despite his age—he was thirty-four—he could barely swim.
In the distance a shape, which might have been the guilty submarine, seemed to shift position. The moon disappeared behind a bank of clouds and then it rained, drenching those who weren’t yet soaked; more than eleven hundred people had been onboard. When the rain stopped, the moon again lit the boats scattered around the slowly sinking ship. The three of the Athenia’s crew in Sam’s boat took oars, as did the three least wounded—Sam was one—of the four male passengers. The others, just over fifty women and children, bailed with their shoes and their bare hands, scooping out the oily water rising over their shins.
As the two dozen lifeboats separated like specks on an expanding balloon, one pulled toward Sam’s boat to let them know that several ships had responded to the Athenia’s call for help. Soon, in just a few hours, they’d be saved. Those hours passed. Not long after midnight, a faraway gleam, which might have been a periscope caught by the light of the moon, caused two women to shriek. A U-boat, one said, the German submarine that had torpedoed them rising now to shell the lifeboats. But the last beam of the searchlight, just before the emergency dynamo used up its fuel and the Athenia went completely dark, revealed enough to convince Sam and some of the others that this was a rescue ship.
Steadily, Sam and his companions rowed toward the Norwegian tanker Knute Nelson, which, in the light of occasional flares, popped sporadically out of the darkness. A little string of emptied lifeboats tossed in the swell beside the tanker, the boat closest to the stern still packed with people. Some grabbed at rope ladders while the bosun’s chair went up and down, hoisting those not agile enough to climb until, in the grip of a heavy woman who pushed off too vigorously, it overturned and left her suspended upside down. The crew struggled to retrieve her, but before they were done another boat nudged in behind the one still being emptied.
The man rowing next to Sam muttered, “They should stand out, that’s dangerous,” and when Sam drew his anxious gaze away from the faces he was searching, he could see how little space separated the last boat in line from the tanker’s huge propellers. He turned back to his oars. The sea was rough, the boat’s seams were leaking, many of his fellow passengers were wounded or seasick or both, and Sam was working so hard to keep their boat steady that he failed to see exactly what happened a few minutes later. By the time he heard the screams, the broken lifeboat, impaled on one of the propeller blades, was already rising into the air.
“Row!” said the seaman in charge of Sam’s boat. “Row, row, row, row!”
Sam, the tallest but not the strongest of those at the oars (he was out of shape), lost his grip and banged into the man beside him, who shouted at him; then all of them were shouting at each other while women wailed and children cried. Unbearable to think about what must have happened to those drawn into the propeller. The boat sped into the darkness, headed, once the assistant purser spotted it, toward an enormous, brightly lit motor yacht that had appeared from another direction. Before they were close enough to hail her, Sam saw two lifeboats tangle at her stern, one crowding the other under the angled counter—the swell had increased, making everything more difficult—which, after rising unusually high, crashed down on the gunwale of the inner boat and tipped it over. Suddenly, struggling figures, too small to identify, also dotted the water.
That was enough for the seaman in charge; Sam’s boat pulled away until it was clear of everyone. “Let’s wait,” the seaman said, “until sunrise, when we can see more clearly what we’re doing.” The swell grew heavier; dawn finally broke and three British destroyers arrived. The little boy whose mother was wearing Sam’s life belt pointed at them, smiled for the first time since the ship had been hit, and said, “Ring around the rosy!” Sam couldn’t see what the little boy meant, and then he could: two of the ships were racing after each other, herding within an enormous circle the remaining lifeboats, the tanker, the white yacht, and the third destroyer, which was plucking boatloads of survivors from the water. Twice, he thought it was turning their way, but each time it moved toward another, even more crowded boat.
The sky was red and then pink and then blue; Sam’s hands were numb; he hadn’t been able to feel his feet for hours. Once or twice he either fell asleep or passed out. Once, he lifted his head just in time to see an old woman in a lifeboat not far away leap toward a lowered rope ladder and miss, slipping into the narrow space between the boat and the destroyer’s hull; the boat rose on a swell and the space disappeared. He was barely conscious when, in the middle of the morning, a U.S. merchant ship arrived, cleaned out one boat before taking in a crowd transferred from the motor yacht, and then waved over the boat that Sam was in.
The injured and frail went up in a bosun’s chair, but Sam, jolted awake by the prospect of safety, scrambled up a rope ladder with the other men. A person reached out for him, grabbed his arm, and heaved him over the side—not a stranger, not a sailor, but someone Sam knew: Duncan Finch. Part of him wanted to jump back in the water. Duncan, here? But there was the ship’s name, City of Flint, mocking him from the smokestack.
“You’re all right!” Duncan shouted as Sam dropped onto the deck. “Are you hurt?”
Sam flexed his elbow, which he’d cracked on a thwart but which still seemed to work, and then inspected his shin, where all the blood appeared to be coming from one long scrape. “Nothing serious,” he said.
Duncan pulled him toward a dry corner. “Is anyone else with you?”
Anyone, he meant, from the meeting; they’d been at an international genetics congress in Edinburgh, cut short by the situation. Sam shook his head. Families had been broken apart, siblings had ended up in different boats, and friends had been randomly assorted: where was Axel? Eight other geneticists had been on the Athenia with Sam. One by one, in the thick, dark smoke, they’d climbed into lifeboats, dropped down to the water, and then disappeared.
Duncan said, with apparent enthusiasm, “But at least you’re here. You’re safe.”
Omitting, Sam thought, the fact that on their last day in Edinburgh, Duncan had asked Sam grudgingly, and when it was too late, to join the small group he’d finagled aboard this American freighter loaded with wool and Scotch whiskey.
“I did warn you,” Duncan added now. Still, after eighteen years of annoying Sam, unable to rein in his red-faced, bullying self. “I warned you not to take passage on a British ship.”
Anyone else would have understood how few choices existed. Sam’s booked passage had been canceled, the other ships were quickly commandeered, and on September 1, as he boarded the Athenia in Glasgow, it had still seemed likely that they’d get away safely. They’d had to pick up passengers in Belfast and then more in Liverpool, both ports packed with Americans and Canadians trying to get home, but by the afternoon of the second, the ship was heading north up the Irish Sea, rounding the coast early on the morning of the third. By the time the declaration of war was radioed, they’d almost cleared the most dangerous territory, their ship overbooked but still comfortable and, Sam had thought with a twinge of pleasure, less crowded than Duncan’s. Before Duncan left, not only his handful of stranded friends but also a group of college girls caught midway through a European tour had been stuffed into the City of Flint, making thirty instead of the normal five or six passengers. Now it bulged with another two hundred people, some freezing and still in shock, and among them—
“Is Axel here?” he asked.
Duncan turned, reached back to steady an elderly woman coming over the railing, and then pointed her toward a man who was giving out fresh water. “Of course not,” he said, inspecting Sam more closely. “Did you hit your head?”
For Duncan, Sam realized, Axel was still in Edinburgh, where he’d stayed to visit a friend despite Duncan’s frantic urging that he board the City of Flint. When the situation grew so dangerous that Axel’s
friend cut the visit short and delivered him to the Glasgow docks, Duncan had already been at sea.
“He was with me,” Sam said. Two teenage boys tumbled onto the deck, their hair matted with oil; a girl in a tidy jacket rushed over to them. “The Athenia was the only ship that had a berth.” In another situation he would have enjoyed seeing the color drain from Duncan’s cheeks.
“He wasn’t.”
“He was,” Sam said. “We were eating dinner with that couple from Minnesota when we were hit.” One of what should have been many meals; what luck, he’d thought, to have Axel aboard! An unexpected benefit of letting Duncan sail without him. They might walk the decks, share quiet conversations, sit side by side in reclining chairs, and repair what had gone wrong in Edinburgh. At the dock, the sight of Axel’s battered gray hat and unmistakable nose in the crowd had suddenly made everything broken and ruined seem hopeful again.
“But then,” Duncan said, “how did you lose track of him?”
The smoke, the darkness, the wounded people, the babble of different languages as passengers crowded boats already full, launched half-empty ones too early. Sam drew a breath. “We went where the crew told us to go, and they assigned us to separate boats. Then the boats scattered. Can you find out if he’s here?”
Duncan disappeared with a curse, leaving Sam to be herded down below with the newest arrivals. In a long room lined with barrels, they dripped into a growing puddle, which the crew and the freighter’s original passengers tried to avoid as they ferried in spare clothing pulled from their luggage. A plant physiologist from Texas, transferred from the motor yacht, slipped an old sweater over his head as he said that these merchant seamen were a lot more welcoming than the Swedish billionaire who’d originally rescued him. Sam tied his feet into a pair of slippers a size too large, thrilled to find them dry, while his new acquaintance described the smartly outfitted crew who’d handed out soup and hot coffee and blankets and then—the sun was well up, the Athenia had gone to her grave, and the destroyers were making their rounds—told the rescued passengers that the owner couldn’t interrupt his planned trip and needed to transfer everyone who’d been picked up. “To here,” the Texan said, stepping out of his oil-soaked pants and into a seaman’s canvas overalls. “Oh, that’s much better.”
