“Maggie, just tell me what you need from me, and I’ll stay as long as it takes.” He stood in the doorway and watched her slam her mug in the sink, the sickening sound of it vibrating and settling.
“You get the hell out of here.” She moved to the cedar chest without looking at him. “I mean it, Johnson. I got some money. You take it, take the bus out of here, find your friend.”
“What about the roof?”
“It’s best that you go right away.” She swung open the cedar chest and emerged with an envelope. She licked her finger, and counted out ten $20 bills. “I realized that when you were gone.”
They rode in the boat down the Missouri. Johnson stared at her back, the width between her shoulder blades, imagined his head nestled between them. It was possible to wear her down, to massage open the heart, to be patient and let her tell him, in her own way, that she loved him. She already had. But why would he subject her to such cruelty, when all he saw in the shadows of his thoughts was Kate, just out of reach, around the corner, behind the door?
She stayed in the boat. He hugged her while they moved this way, that, against the tide. It felt more like they were hanging onto something other than each other. He thought about asking her whether he could visit, but as soon as he stood on firm ground, his weight on his own feet, she waved a little wave and the boat bounced away, seeming to glide over the choppy waters, not touching anything.
1964
In the forest, there were sounds. She did not know what they were at first, the clipped song above her, far away and close. Her fingers spread in a cold soup of mud. Water pelted her face. Rain, so much rain, making the dirt soft, gauzy. And birds. The song of birds. She stared at hands, small and pale with deep whorls on the fingertips, little hair. Smooth skin that glided gracefully upwards and connected to shoulders, her shoulders, a torn dress, an exposed nipple on a flat breast. She felt her feet in the mud and pressed, pushing herself up to stand. She was in a gully, a mud slide. A depression in the earth made by rain. So much rain, the only good thing about it was the way it cleansed the dirt from her legs and her hands and her hair.
Where was her matka? She remembered the bone house, a trailer chased by death. Mongrels. A woman with sunken eyes, blood-smeared lips. She moved her feet in the mud, a slippery floor of fish, and felt them graze something of permanence. She knelt and removed it from its grave. A long bone, longer than her own forearm. A glint of white, like diamonds, grew in the mud as the rain attacked it, had its way with it. More bones, slighter larger than her own. An arm bone and a leg bone, ribs.
A skull. She brought it to her own face. A slightly older child than she. Above its left eye the skull had caved in from the clumsy precision of force. She put her finger through it and felt the power and trajectory of it. It seemed to cave in her own skull, stir the memories that had settled like the paste of leaves and grit on her. The officer’s bullet. Ferki and the trees. Ferki. Her heart was alive and it pounded pain through her, releasing memories like a gorged stream. Weakness washed over her. She squatted and wove her hands through the little white pieces that had comprised one of Ferki’s hands, and already they were fragile, like winter branches. She put them in her mouth, to warm them, to taste them, but Ferki was long gone, with his grandmother Tsura and perhaps his parents and her own mother as well.
A grave washed away by rain, so much rain it seemed determined to reveal the dark secrets of the world. One by one, she found the pieces of Ferki, and she was angered that he had been dead so long, with no one to know, not even her, except the Nazi soldiers that put him there. And she was angered that the grace of God had shined on him, taken him away, and left her here in the mud. For what?
“Niech cięszlag trafi!” She shouted at the sky. Drop dead. “What did I ever do to you?”
She gathered the bones in the bottom of her dress, so thin and threatening rupture, an embryonic sack ready to birth a skeleton, and walked. She walked and the sun sunk and rose. She walked barefoot, her hair knotted and frizzy, layer upon layer of salty sweat drying to her face. She walked until she came to a farm, where a man spearing hay dropped his pitchfork and hurried to her.
“Child,” he said in Polish. “Oh, child. Where have you come? And what is that you’re carrying?”
“My husband,” she answered, and because her arms were so tired, let him rain from her dress to the ground.
Alojzy the farmer and his wife, Anatola, fed her stew. They grew potatoes and rye and their children, Benedykt and Daniela, went to school in town. Their house, with three small bedrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchen, was to Ela a palace. But they moved in and out of the kitchen, around the kitchen table, in the sitting room, with great difficulty, as if they lived in the bone house. It was easy to see what the problem was—so many things! A wooden box that glowed in the corner and from which voices and strange music vibrated, to which Daniela swayed in a way that would cause Ela’s matka to slap her. Chairs that were dressed with fabric finer than any of her dresses. Tables and papers. Light that came from the ceiling and from statues on the tables. She pressed the switches on and off for minutes to watch the little suns appear and disappear. Pictures on the wall, not drawn, but of the family, captured on the paper. Photography, Alojyz explained, scratching his beet-shaped head, a frown above his whiskered chin. A spring of blond hair sprouted from the top of his head like a carrot tussle.
“Where is it that you come from?” Anatola was hardy, like an ox, and seemingly as strong. Her features lived in the puffed folds of her face, her eyes blue and hard like marbles.
“Reszel,” Ela answered between bites of meat. In the corner, a cast-iron box held fire and kept the stew warm, along with coffee. Alojyz had put Ferki’s bones in a sack so that their dog, Opi, would not bother them. They rested under her chair. From her chair, her bare foot grazed the top of the burlap to ensure that they remained.
“Oh, yes.” Alojya left the kitchen and returned with a piece of paper, which he spread out on the table. “You see, Reszel is here.”
She looked at the picture of a green blob with blue at the top. Words were written all over the green blob.
“What is this?” She leaned over her bowl and studied it. Perhaps it was a potion.
“A map.” Alojya coughed, looking at Anatola. “I show you where you are, from like, bird’s eye, from the sky, and where you are from.”
“How do you know from the sky where you are?”
He ignored her, pointing his finger toward the middle of the map. “Bydgoszcz. We are here.” He moved his finger up higher and more leftward, toward the blue. “Reszel here. Not very far, but far enough. How did you come about this way?”
“What is the blue?” She trailed her hand on the paper.
“The sea.” He shook his head and folded up the map, disappearing from the kitchen. Momentarily, he returned with another piece of paper.
“You see?” There were lines that went up and down, making boxes. “This is the year. 1964. September 1st.”
“Where are the Nazis?” She peered at him. “Will the Nazis come for me?”
“She is not old enough,” Anatola shot a look at her husband. She rubbed a cup made of glass with a rag. “She must have had family tell her.”
“The Nazis killed my husband—you understand?” She nodded her head toward the burlap sack. “They kill him and I hide. I…fall asleep. Then I come to you. This is the truth.”
“Child, it is not possible.” He pointed to the piece of paper again. “This here, you see? 1964.”
She stood in the chair. “Well, how long have I been asleep, then?”
They arrived from Reszel, from the Child Welfare Services. When they came to Alojya’s, a middle-aged woman with outdated glasses that slid down her nose and a younger graduate from the University of Warsaw who was being groomed to take her place as supervisor, Ela learned of other strange things that had happened over the years, excluding the wars (they were a constant): carts that moved without horses but with the
speed of them, telescopes that one wore in front of one’s eyes to see better, clothes that looked like she did not know what. Especially Daniela’s. Everything had shifted, the world a foreign place that did not have room for her. And yet, it refused to let her go, a tree from which an apple did not fall, soft and rotten and swaying in the breeze.
“My name is Ana.” The older woman put her suitcase down on the kitchen table and held her hand toward the younger woman. “And this is Emile. We’d like to be your friends.”
What Ela said was, “I’d like you to help me.” What she thought was, I want you to help me die. Surely, it could be done—metal birds in the sky, soldiers with rifles that shot many bullets at once, wires strung across the sky on poles, and people’s words sent across them—why could they not kill her, chop her up in little pieces and bury the parts far from each other, not like the mongrels, who even the Nazis had driven away, beat when they had began to pull her limbs from her body?
“Oh, dear.” They looked at each other when Ela pulled Ferki’s skull from the sack and placed it on the table.
“My husband.” She said matter-of-factly, as if his presence gave her an advantage, authority. But she realized, more than anything, that she was entirely alone. She was alone and no one could help her, not even herself.
“Don’t cry, little one.” The older woman patted her shoulder as she cradled her head on the table, big boulders of tears tumbling from her eyes and dripping down her forearms. “We’re here to help.”
At the facility outside of Reszel, they weighed and measured her and took her vitals. They bought her corduroys and a turtleneck with an embroidered turtle on the collar, fitted her with Mary Janes. They bought her a lalka. It peed like she did, but only water, and its eyes closed when she laid it down. They asked her about her mother, how old she was. Amnesia. She asked them what herbs they had used to bewitch it so. Schizophrenic. They consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Delusional. They gave her a bed in the orphanage and did psychological and IQ testing and set up interviews with potential foster parents. She refused to leave her bed, bit at the hands that came toward her, that tried to take Ferki’s skull, which she cradled at night, eyes closed, rocking.
Flat affect. Behavioral issues. She was tutored in the modern dialect, but when not in class, she reverted to her old language or did not speak at all. She found she liked Chips Ahoy! and stuffed cats.
Couples came and examined the orphan girls lined up in a row in the play yard. Ela was always the plumpest, healthiest; her hair shone like liquid silk, and her skin was unbroken and taut and vital; yet her slit of mouth and her hard eyes repelled them, sent them looking for a lipstick in their purse or for their wallet in their suit jacket as they moved onto the next girl, emaciated but with a soft wetness in her eyes, a ragged boy’s haircut they could soften and curl, tight shoes they could replace with a roomier pair, things they could fix.
Seasons changed; twice she ran away. Both times, they found her in the forest grinding leaves and twigs together into fine powders, any number of natural toxins she had collected there to constrict her breathing, to stop her heart, to swell her lungs and throat, to paralyze her. And she had lived through all of them, nights of terrible vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, delirium. Eventually, she woke up from the fever dreams, as if they had never happened. At the facility, she saved her pills under her tongue or coughed them back up, hoping to save what she thought would be a lethal dose. In dreams, she pleaded to her matka for the answers. So many years, many lifetimes, had dimmed her memory of her mother’s words, her scent. There was no scent among the antiseptic surfaces, the steel tables and cement walls of the orphanage. She peed in her new clothes and rubbed them in the dirt outside the playground; they always came back from the laundry, bright, soft, smelling like nothing. She did not understand how they could erase her so thoroughly, and yet she was still there.
Every month, they took her vitals, identical to last month’s numbers, the last six months—weight, centimeters, blood pressure, cholesterol panel, as if the numbers had cloned themselves, had cloned another Ela.
“Kallman’s syndrome, Dr. Czyeski thinks,” Emile explained to the nurse as Ela sat on the metal table, waiting for her two Chips Ahoy! in a napkin. “The children—they never age.”
At the university hospital, they gave her a teddy bear and stuck her in the arm with a needle. They fed her barium and injected gadolinium contrast and radiographed her neck, her uterus, her brain. And when they could find nothing, and could find nothing else to do, they contacted the only person they knew who might want her—Dr. Henry Palmer, a gerontologist in America.
It just so happened that his wife could not have children.
Emile went with her on the plane. She kept a vial of liquid Xanax for injection if Ela became agitated on the flight, a bag of graham crackers as another means of placation. She fingered both when the plane took off and Ela went into a litany about the devil bewitching the silver bird, that they were flying straight to hell, and decided on the graham crackers, pressing them into Ela’s palm. Ela crunched them dryly with her teeth, little brown boulders tumbling out of the corners of her frowning lips, before falling asleep. They landed at JFK and were met by Dr. Palmer. He was tall and handsome in a suit, his dark curly hair brushing the collar of his white shirt. She thought she might find him attractive, think about him naked, if she did not think of Ferki still.
He wore a gaudy tie, orange and purple splotched sunset patterns, as if to reassure Ela he was harmless. He clutched a new lalka in his hands, dark haired with a green dress trimmed with lace. She had tired of these children’s things, had even beheaded the one at the orphanage that peed and left the head in the fruit bowl. But this one looked like her mother, she decided. She accepted it as he held it out, smiling.
“Hello, Ela. I’m Doctor Palmer. I’m very happy to meet you.” He crouched down to her level. She touched his face, very clean shaven, inhaled the spice of his aftershave.
“I am happy to meet you, too.” She curtsied, like they taught her at the orphanage. You catch more flies with honey, she figured.
She read the street signs at the intersection as the cab went further and further from the airport. 34th Street. 67th. Finally, they stopped at 87th off 1st. Each side of the street was lined with thin brown brick buildings, three stories, blocky and uniform.
“Is this hospital?” She asked from the backseat of the cab.
“Oh no.” Doctor Palmer laughed, placing his palm on her shoulder. “This is my home. Your home.”
She wondered how they would live together in the bed if she was not entirely a woman. Perhaps it was okay in America to marry, to sleep with little girl women. Perhaps America was truly free, as she had been told.
The woman looked too clean, too refined, to be the maid. Her mane of strawberry hair curled away from her face unnaturally, stiffly. She wore makeup and her sleeveless brown dress was open immodestly to her breastbone. She bent toward Ela, the round cantaloupes of her breasts filling the opening, grabbing her arms.
“Is this our little angel?” Her nose almost touched Ela’s. “Oh, Henry, she’s a darling. Our little girl forever.”
“Ela, this is my wife, Carol Palmer.” The doctor put his hand on Ela’s shoulder. “But you could also call her Mrs. Palmer, or Carol, or mother, or just mom.”
Her room was painted in shades of pink and lemon yellow. A bed with a ruffle canopy. A stuffed giraffe. A small desk painted white. A dollhouse called “Victorian” that was only a little smaller than the bone house, with little lalkas and things to lie and sit on. Everything smelled of candy, or flowers. She put Ferki’s skull on the white-painted bedside table that had bumble bees and butterflies stenciled on the side. But, the first night, she slept under the bed. Even there, she could find no dirt, nothing to press her cheek against, to remember home. The second and third nights, the Palmers searched the house frantically, opening cupboards, closets, fireplace grills, before findi
ng her asleep among the potted geraniums in the gardener’s greenhouse on the roof.
Twice a week, a woman came to work on Ela’s English. She gave Ela a marble notebook and told her to record her thoughts in English, a diary.
I do not like color pink I would be better green.
The next week, the painters came with drop cloths and covered Ela’s furniture, floor. Two days later her walls were emerald green, with matching bedspread and area rugs.
I like more Chips Ahoy! With her afternoon snack of carrots and apple slices, two Chips Ahoy! rested on a napkin.
Once a week, she went to the lab with Dr. Palmer. He held her hand as they walked through the rows of steel hoods and tables, past men in white coats with little coats tied across their faces. Animals that would have been happier in trees and holes and even on the plain earth grabbed at her from cages. They put Ela in small room, not a cage, and they hit her knee with a rubber hammer, listened to her heart with the silver medallion, shined light into her eyes and mouth and ears. They looked at her womb, took scrapings. They took blood from her arm with a sewing needle and tube. They gave her a lollipop. Then, she sat in a laying chair and talked to a doctor about anything she wanted to. She did not know what to say. She talked about the toilet paper in the bathroom, how it seemed too nice to put on your dupa.
I should like the animals be let go.
The animals remained, except if they died, in which case, they were replaced by new animals.
I should like animal of my own.
One day, Dr. Palmer brought home a kitten. Black with a white face and paws. Ela named her Psotka, prankster. She slept at the foot of the bed and batted Ela’s feet.
“Why don’t you write something about your mother and father in your diary?” Her speech therapist urged. That day, they worked on fruits: oranges, bananas, apples, lemons.
Tide King Page 19
