The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  I breathed through my mouth for fear of hyperventilating so incomprehensible, so terrifying this story seemed. For whatever prison I had with my own family, at least I could count on them to protect me from the outside world, at least I knew we were safe in each other’s arms.

  “Do you ever want to be on speaking terms with him?”

  “No,” he said, “lives have been ruined, and I can’t turn that off in my head.” He looked at me and tears streamed from my eyes, and as if receiving my permission, tears streamed from his.

  “The girl never danced again,” he said, burying his face in his hands. He let me hold him in silence.

  A Girl Named Sarah

  He led me by the hand the way a dog guides its unseeing master into a dark palatial room. When I opened my eyes, I was confronted with a giant Jacuzzi rising out the floor like the parted jaws of a whale. The walls, floor, and even the tub were encased in a gleaming black reflective marble, giving one the unnatural sensation of being seen from every angle. Only the silver framed black-and-white images of cliffs and oceans, with their opaque white calm, allowed one’s gaze to escape self-scrutiny.

  I laughed at once. “What a chick magnet—did you design this yourself or did it conveniently come with the property?”

  “I like to think of it as the intellectual man’s den of sin,” he said with a self-mocking grin. “Anyways it’s not my fault—it’s from the eighties.”

  He lit white candles on the windowsill and looked at me with renewed desire, his melancholy dissipating into steam. We were naked, wrapped in blankets, and we dropped them simultaneously and climbed into the black gurgling water and intertwined our legs, our bodies sliding against each other.

  But I couldn’t relax. “I was just thinking something strange, something I’ve never thought about any American: my life seems strangely easy in comparison to yours.”

  “I told you everyone has baggage,” he said, but in an instant, his gaze was cloaked in rage. “My family life is nonexistent. You have a rare thing—real love in your family. But for most of us, parents and children are thrown accidentally together—people who are so different from each other forced to live in unwanted intimacy. That’s what I’ve got—a terrible mismatch. I want to create my own family—”

  “Oh, Eddie, don’t—don’t look at me like that—I’m an impossible case.”

  “Sure you are—that’s why you’re for me, the only one for me.”

  Tears gathered at the corners of my eyes. “Oh, Eddie, you don’t know me. I’m lost and confused and I’ve been broken so many times I don’t know how to put myself back together—I’ve never known how to do the right thing.”

  He appealed to me in silence, waiting.

  “There are things from my childhood that no one knows. There are things … I believe they are better left unsaid. And yet, yet I want to tell you—I don’t want anything to be left unsaid between us—I don’t want to keep such secrets from you.”

  “I want to know everything about you, Emma, everything,” he murmured, caressing my body in the water, his fingers gliding over my wet calf.

  “When I was a child, oh God!”

  I looked up at the black ceiling and through a skylight saw clusters of stars sitting like conspiring deities across the glass. I covered my face with my hands, covered the tears scorching my cheeks. What else could I tell him! What else breathed with such horror, what else constricted and unraveled and explained me all at once—as I was now—as that moment when I was so happy and innocent and seven?

  I began to speak but after a while I couldn’t feel myself talking, couldn’t remember his responses; the memory overtook me. I returned there, to the wild meadows, to the birch forest, to the time when I was a child at a special camp with my mother, a special camp for intellectual children or rather children of intellectuals: a camp for the progeny of writers, journalists, newspaper columnists, TV personalities, editors. A camp for the elite, where we were taught the arts and sports and survival skills, a distinctly Russian take on the ancient Greek gymnasium. Interspersed among us were the children of the KGB. Though we were Jews, my mother’s position as an editor at the preeminent Communist establishment, the Soviet Union of Writers, gave her unprecedented access—to all the coveted privileges of the KGB. In addition to the usual infusions of special passes, Beluga caviar, and an array of German salamis, my mother was offered this camp—a wonder, really, a beautiful place with a deep clear river and meadows of irises and daisies where we would gather bouquets and weave wreaths for our heads and fry potatoes and freshly picked mushrooms over campfires.

  Painting #7

  I cannot paint yet: I’m still piecing it together, still sifting through memory, still avoiding the explosions of color. I can’t remember which day, which hour, perhaps it was toward the end of August, on a Sunday, a day of unification between parents and children, a day I mark in memory with sunlight, heat, buzzing bees and butterflies, a day magnified in my mind’s eye by startling beauty. My mother and I are playing in a lilac meadow surrounded by a birch forest—rows upon rows of delicate white pockmarked trees ascending in straight lines, their branches holding hands with pines and ancient oaks, the generals of all forests reaching for the sundrenched sky.

  I’m making a wreath from daisies for my head, when out of nowhere three teenage boys appear—I’ve seen them before at roll call. They’re smiling at me. Then a dark-haired boy says, “What a nice wreath you made—do you know what the word pizda means?” “No,” I reply, smiling back. A blond boy smiles and the others egg him on: “Do you want to know what it is?” I nod. “Because we really want to tell you but you have to come with us into the woods, just for a second,” the dark one says. I rise and follow them without any hesitation. I wonder if “pizda” is a mushroom I haven’t heard of, or a special tree. The blond boy is handsome and he puts his arm around me.

  They bring me into the heart of the forest where the thin white birches are so beautiful and close, you feel your eyes water and your mind grow still. I inhale deeply as though I’m underwater.

  I see her immediately in the distance tied to an old massive oak: a girl, naked, ropes round her ankles and wrists, ropes wrapping the thick brown trunk. Her face is wild, eyes unfocused as if blind. I only know one thing about her, she’s older, eleven years old, and a Jew like me. We’re not friends, our activities don’t intersect, except at night when we sit with our mothers at the bonfire, and comb the ground with our mushroom sticks.

  At roll call every morning the counselors call out everyone’s name: the normal names like Petrokovsky, Yagodova, Pomidorov run though our ears like water, then ours appear like plugs. She is the butt of all jokes: Sarah Fichtshtein.

  In those years, no parent names their child Sarah. Why did hers? The name itself is used to mock the Jews—pronounced Sa-r-r-ah—giving the “r” a Yiddish tint. Stalin wiped Yiddish out. All that remains is the “r” and “h” in Sarah and Chaim. You’re “Sa-r-r-ah” if you are acting too “Jewish,” or “Chhhhhhaim” if your nose is crooked or too long. The Fichtshteins came to Moscow from Tashkent; they didn’t understand the cruelties of modern city life.

  The counselors cough, mix consonants, crack up as they call her name. My last name gets the same treatment. When your name is called, you say “present.” Sarah and I always whisper, and the counselors yell, “Louder, I didn’t hear you, Fichtshtein! Didn’t hear you, Kabelmacher!” I scream “present,” she screams “present,” and all the children laugh. Sometimes I’m spared on account of my mother, sometimes on account of the smile and the small-doll like features they say reminds them of Snegurochka.

  But Sarah never smiles, she’s never spared; she has thick black hair and a long thin nose with a sharp tip. Her brown eyes are elongated almonds, Roman eyes with pronounced lids, full of anguish. She’s beautiful but not in the Russian sense. Hers is the face I paint, the face of my subconscious. But she envies me. “You’re lucky,” she says, “they look at you and they forget.”
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br />   God, she speaks like everyone: you don’t look It! You’re too pretty for a Jew. Too light skinned for a Jew. Nose too small for a Jew. Eyes too light, too green for a Jew. Personality too lively for a Jew. You never complain like other Jews, you’re not greedy, manipulative, dirty like a Jew. Maybe you’re not a Jew—maybe you’re a Slav or at least half of one, a hybrid, a half-breed, a trickster!

  Her parents applied in 1976, people v podache—waiting for exit visas, three years later they’re refused, they’re the official refuseniks, in the flesh, in our camp. Why are they in this camp? Rumors swirl, no one knows. They’re the devoted Jews, the Jews’ Jews, going straight to Israel, not America. In Israel she’ll say “Sarah” with pride.

  But Sar-r-rah is treated like a beloved scarecrow, everyone’s relief and mockery. Even the staff and camp leaders and theater directors mock Sarah. She loathes Russia and Communism and isn’t afraid to say it, but I tell her to be quiet, to keep her trap shut. Now she’s hanging from a tree, tears streaking her cheeks like rivulets of blood.

  “We want to show you what a pizda is,” the dark-haired boy says. “So why don’t you take off your underpants like Sarah and then we can all play.” I’m wearing a short white summer dress decorated in tiny pink tulips. And instinctively, I pull the hem down, my mind in high alert. I want to run and get help but they surround me—the blond one and a lanky boy named Grisha.

  “Where are you going, Kabelmacher,” they taunt, “isn’t that your name? What’s with you people and your unpronounceable names? Why must we mangle our tongues? You always make life so difficult for everyone, you stinky kikes!”

  “But she doesn’t look like a Jew. Can someone explain that puzzle to me?” the blond-haired boy exclaims, staring down at me as though I’m an algebra equation he wants to solve. “Why do some of them look it and others don’t?”

  “Probably because their moms fucked one of ours, that’s why, but they’re all the same underneath,” the dark one theorizes.

  “Hey,” the lanky one says, “some of us are different.”

  “We’re not talking about you, Grisha,” the dark one assures him. “Besides, your father’s the kike, not your mother.”

  Grisha grins and says, “What are we gonna do with these two?”

  “Well first we gotta get this cute one to drop her panties.”

  “I ain’t dropping no panties for you! Get Sarah down,” I yell. I imagine myself to be a great menace. “When my mother finds out,” I shriek, shaking my forefinger at them, “you’re all going down with a good beating!”

  “Ha, ha, ha, a good beating, ha?” The blond one breaks into laughter. “I highly doubt it, little fool, do you know who my father is?”

  “If your mother finds out”—the dark-haired boy grabs me by the collar of my dress and lifts me in the air, his grip choking me—“we’ll kill your mother, you understand me, you little Yid?” I want to cry but I tell myself to be strong for my mother—crying is for the weak, the stereotypical Jews.

  “I tell you what,” I say, “I’ll show you my—my—my pizda—if you get Sarah down and give her her clothes back.”

  “So you learned some anatomy today, right there between your thighs,” Grisha says, pointing his finger toward my crotch.

  “You first,” the dark one says, “show it first.”

  Only the blond boy shifts on his feet, grows uncomfortable. “I think we’ve had enough fun,” he mutters, “let them go now. They’re too young. We need some real tits.”

  “Oh, she’s got tits, that Jew up there.” Sarah’s wrists are blue and her sides have red scratches running along her ribs and buttocks. She has two pointy red nipples sticking out of small mounds of flesh. The black-haired boy and Grisha pick up sticks and start poking Sarah between her legs. But it’s the black-haired boy who sticks the end of one stick in, right between her thighs, into her vagina, and as she cries out from pain, I see blood drip along the side of her leg.

  “That’s where the pizda is located, little one, you see that—that’s the blood of a dirty Yid,” the black-haired boy says.

  Grisha drops his stick and grabs the boy by the arm: “What are you doing—you’re going too far—you’re gonna seriously hurt her!”

  “What—what did I do wrong—I did her favor, took her virginity from her! Why? Are you chickening out, or are you sympathizing with your fellow Yid? Do you want to be a real man?”

  “I’m not chicken,” Grisha says, “but—”

  “Now I’m gonna make this little cute one lose her virginity,” the dark one announces. “Do you know what sex is, little macher kike?” he cries out, laughing, looking down at me. Then he pushes me on the ground and jumps on top of me and straddles me and laughs and laughs. “Oh, I could really start to like this little kike! Are you scared, little one, are you?”

  “No!” I punch back, stare at him defiantly. I’m not afraid; I only feel fumes in my gut, fumes of loathing. “I’m going to put a spell over your head, a Yid spell, an evil eye to make you suffer! May you eat shit all your life and pee in your pants—I hope you die, you stupid weasel-brained durak!”

  “And I’m gonna hang you up there like Sar-r-rah, ha, ha, ha,” he screams through laughter and I spit in his face. He wipes my spit with the sleeve of his shirt, and his face changes from laughter to hatred in an instant. He lifts my dress and tears out my underwear with a small pocket knife that seems to materialize out of nowhere. He presses the knife against my thigh and pricks the skin.

  “Do you think I’m afraid of your little knife?” I say but my voice falters.

  “Let her go, Vladik,” the blond boy commands, “let her go.”

  “But Sarah stays,” the dark one retorts, submitting halfway, because the blond boy’s father holds a high position in the Politburo.

  “Agreed,” the blond boy says, nodding. “This one’s too little. You don’t know, Vladik, she may not even be a real one.”

  “Yeah, that’s true, have you seen her mom—now that’s a hot blyat! I want me some of that cunt!” It seems miraculous, but they aren’t looking at me any longer—they’re speaking with one another about other cunts they want, other girls they’d like to hang up on that tree, interspersing their desires with pragmatic subjects such as sticks better suited for picking mushrooms, their fantastically idiotic counselor, and how to elude the important Politburo father who is too strict. I can only exhale—I can’t inhale air into my lungs. I consider sprinting at the tree and somehow pulling Sarah down, but her wrists and ankles are securely tied and the boys will string me up, too, if I try. I grab my underwear and run in my torn dress through the white birch forest, tripping over stumps and leaves, falling, picking myself up again, twisting my underwear in my fingers, tears pouring down my face in a torrent. I must bury the evidence—the underwear—I whisper to myself, I must find a place to bury it, to keep it a secret from my mother. The white-black trunks blur into a mass of gray, and the leaves, so sparse, seem to expose me to the burning sky. I’m afraid of the sky, afraid to be seen by it.

  In the clearing I see my mother talking to the art teacher and other girls weaving daisy wreaths. I stand still, feeling the warm breeze on my arms and goose bumps pricking my skin. I feel safe again, but only for an instant—for the fear settles all at once like a giant black cloud in which I’m forced to breathe. The sides of my legs are wet from pee, and I keep thinking what a horrible thing I’ve done. Grisha and Vladik and the blond boy will kill my mother if I talk so I need to shut my mouth, glue my lips together. When my mother finds me crying I say I fell and wet my panties and bruised my thigh and a tree stump scratched my arm. She carries me back to her cottage and caresses my hair and covers my cheeks with kisses, and says, “I told you to stay near me, but you’re a firefly, you’re always flying.” And I smile at the thought of my red wings—I’m Zhar-ptitsa.

  I inhaled air as if for the first time, as if I had just been saved from drowning, and met Eddie’s eyes.

  “Sarah was found late t
hat evening by an old fireman who lived in the woods,” I explained. “She never returned to that camp.”

  “You were a child—what could you have done?” he said, but I was still stuck there.

  “I was a coward, been a coward ever since.”

  “It’s terrible what happened to you,” he murmured, “but you need to heal.”

  “How I wish—” I took in a quick breath, and went on. “I can’t be a coward again. You have to know the whole truth.”

  He looked at me in confusion.

  “I told you almost everything but the final, invidious little detail I meant to keep to myself—because the shame of it, the shame of it—” I felt my heart multiply in my head until there were five, six, seven hearts all thumping in different parts of my body.

  “I hated it. I hated being Jewish. I couldn’t digest it, couldn’t understand it. Even the horrible boys who harassed Sarah said I didn’t look it. How terrible it was, I had thought then, not to look it and yet be punished for it. But that was no excuse for what I did—” I met his gaze in a blur. “You see what I neglected to mention was that after the incident Sarah had reported the boys to the camp authorities, and named me as a witness.”

  I closed my eyes and fell down the rabbit hole, down, down into a bottomless subconscious, the putrid undergrowth of memory—surfacing, festering, ugly.

  There was a tribunal at the camp. The head honchos, the men, were going to excavate the truth, dig it up from the well of lies we all lived in. They alone were going to catch it, this elusive thing with butterfly wings and a fox’s tail and a horse’s ass … In an enormous starkly painted room, ten men were seated behind a long black table, notebooks with identical pens arrayed in front of them. I was placed in the witness chair, a small wooden stool facing the men and the audience, made up of camp counselors and staff. From my perch, I could see Sarah and her mother in the empty auditorium, clinging to each other. I could see my mother watching me, biting her nails, her consternation so extreme that her features appeared to fuse together. Everything was a blur, faces merged, features swam, switched places, danced with one another, coalesced into one terrifying glob. I couldn’t figure out where I was, who I was, couldn’t remember my name. Fear with its big fat capital F invaded my senses, knocking Memory out with one hard blunt punch.