Unspeakable Things (13 page)

She arched her body to receive him; she could not contain her cries of joy or the large tears that welled up in her beautiful eyes. Her body was not large enough to contain it, their passion. He saw her arousal. He played with her. He watched her again, her angelic eyes and mouth, her consumed expression. She bore down on his organ, and they lay together for hours and hours. A throb, a vibration, an answering one. “Pray, my little Countess,” he murmured to her as her ardor rose toward his. “Christ is risen.” Tears came into his furious eyes, and he let them fall, his large head heavy on Anna’s narrow chest. “Our two weeks are almost over,” he murmured. “Let us pray.” Anna stroked his bulging forehead; she had always known they would part.

Rasputin put his hands into his handprints, which lay like large silver leaves on Anna’s body. “You shall have something to remember me by, eh, my Countess?” he said. “You shall always remember thy Lord, thy true God.”

And then Rasputin took her again and again without stopping, as if he would slake a mad thirst by consuming her. Anna, crouched like a dog, endured his repeated entries. A mad lust rose from her body, a wild, bitter scent filled the room, and the flowers outside the window in the garden withered instantly. Anna’s body was an opened red poppy,

Rasputin kept Anna with him until after the first dawn’s light. The monks were already chanting their dirgelike sounds, but he did not seem to heed them. With half a mind, Anna worried about the hour. But this thought was pushed away by her body’s answering desire. This time, Rasputin did not come; he thrust and, quivering, thrust again. He held his rosary, watching her come almost to the brink of satisfaction, then withdrew pleasure again. Anna writhed, biting her lip. He watched her, brought her to the brink again, and then watched her body twist, pleading for more. His eyes were still abstractly focused. He made her kiss his crucifix. He made her kiss his penis. “Kneel,” he commanded. He entered her again. He held himself back. He watched her spasms, impaled upon his penis.

Finally, he threw her down disdainfully and pushed her away from him. “It’s over now,” he said. It was time to leave: the end of her two weeks’ pact. Anna lay in an exhausted heap. She thought she would expire from her own heat. Rasputin swung himself away from her. “Well, my Countess?” he said quizzically. But his face and voice were tender. He tied his robe once more around him. “Now you shall remember me.”

“No. I beg of you, my Little Father.” Anna held her arms to him, imploring.

Rasputin threw back his large head and began to laugh. “So,” he said. “So it has happened. Good, then. Now I return you to your husband, the Count, and your house and land. But money, house and land, and a poor figure of a Count for a husband, all that is nothing, my lady, nothing.” He hissed, his dark eyes glowing, putting his face close to hers. “We know that now, don’t we, little lady?”

Anna’s body burned. “I implore you,” she said softly.

“You made a bargain,” he reminded her. “And we have had the best of it, both of us.” He scrutinized her naked, unprotected body. “Something you’ll never forget, eh, Countess?” She looked at him. “But it’s over now. Over and done with. Never let it be said I broke my vows.” He threw back his head and laughed, a deep, rusty laugh that broke the pitcher beside the bed. “Pray for me,” he commanded. “If you dare.” Rasputin turned on his heel and, without another look at Anna, left her forever.

Anna pushed herself to her feet, a large, passionate, sorrowing cry rising, even as she stifled it. She tottered after him a few steps, but Rasputin was gone. Only the smell of brimstone lingered—a smell that was never to leave her flesh thereafter.

The weak Count was never returned to his grateful family, weeping and slobbering with the miracle of it all. But the house and lands and money were once again returned to him. “The Tsar pardoned us,” his old mother kept repeating over and over in dazed wonderment. And though no one ever spoke of unpaid gambling debts, the Rat was never to have peace of mind again.

Over and over, she replayed the two weeks with Rasputin in her mind. Her head burned; her ears rang. She could think of nothing else. Although sensible to the world around her, the Rat merely went through the motions of her life. Her children did not move her, and her husband, whom she realized she despised, seemed a little stuffed doll to her, propped up in the Crimea, which she imagined as a painted cardboard panorama:
The Tsar’s Officers at Rest.
Complete with tents, horses, cannons, binoculars, gaming tables, and outspread maps. Like hand-painted wallpaper.

Obsessively, the Rat remembered the scenes with Rasputin: the pain, the terror, the excitement. Wildness rose up in her. Each night, she regarded her body, putting her small, wondering hands against the large, passionate handprints burned into her flesh. She thought of Rasputin’s gleaming organ every time she prayed. The Rod of God. She climaxed each time she knelt in church. She bit her lip so none could hear her cries.

As if at a distance, as if it were happening to someone else, the Rat lived through all the later ensuing horror: the complete disappearance of her husband, the flight from Saint Petersburg, the loss of her children. She heard, as in a distant dream, news of the slaughter of the Holy Family. Of Rasputin’s fate, no one knew. But even this did not move her as one would have thought—she merely thought of his large face, the hooded face, the hairy body, and what looked like a tail. And she touched her body and dreamed of the time when she would meet him again.

But something finally cleared in the Rat’s mind when she was reunited with her beloved cousin Herbert and his grandchildren. Dumped unceremoniously on the floor of a large, vacant, echoing space, the New York Public Library, Anna came to. Suddenly, she snapped out of the obsession—that obsession for sexual experience, for union with evil, that had managed to cloud all subsequent suffering. That obsession that had silenced her during her flight through Europe, the long wait in detention camps for passage to the United States. The long, silent wait, while she kept herself sealed in her own thoughts.

The Rat was freed from all this, and although she remembered dimly, as if at a distance, all her losses, once carried home in Herbert’s arms, she returned to herself, as if all were washed away.

The Rat was once again the earnest young girl she had been, arguing seriously with her cousin about the meaning of life. She and Herbert looked at each other as if no time had passed. They did not see the age upon their faces, only the simple joy of being.

Watching Maria and Philip, the Rat knew happiness. She dreamed, and her dreams were gentle ones, not the hot, tortured sexual ones that had carried through the long years of a heavy life.

In this stuffy room, rejoined with the little family, Anna knew once more a simple purity of being. She was content to sit by the window, hearing the sounds of New York rising up, and watching the faint rays of sunlight cross the room. Everything here made Anna happy; she was a simple Rat after all.

Anna watched the little girl in bed beside her, her breath rising and falling as she slept peacefully. Her hair caught the light. Anna drew the bedclothes about them both more snugly. She had entered another time of her life, the easiest time.

Anna adjusted her small aching body. She knew there were modern ways of getting rid of marks. She had heard already that doctors were voluntarily removing tattoos—one did not need to be marked forever. In conversation, Herbert had told her that Felix, their friend from the old days, was one such doctor. Compassionate, humane, Felix treated only the escapees from Europe. The Rat remembered him from the old days, their fierce intellectual discussions. Yes, she would offer to go with Maria to her next appointment with the old doctor, and there she would ask him to help her. Almost regretfully, the Rat stroked her own marred thighs. It would not do to go to her Maker with the mark of evil on her. She knew her time was coming; she was already preparing for it.

M
aria did not know then that she would not be dead a long time. In 1945, when the war ended, she would be ten. Inexplicably, her visits to Uncle Felix stopped before then.

But until that time, each week on Saturday afternoons, Maria was taken to his office, where Uncle Felix would give her “vitamins.” Often before the visits, Maria lay on her cot in the family room, stiffly, passively, refusing to respond to her mother’s pleas. “Maria, put on your coat. It is time to leave now.” Then, more forcefully: “Come, Maria, you must.” Maria tried hard to make herself even more dead; with a little effort, she could almost tune out her mother’s existence.

But inevitably, she didn’t know how, these refusals would end. Larger than death, her young and beautiful mother would win. For her mother was helpless and angry. And it was somehow Maria’s fault.

Years later, Maria was to read about Gandhi and the principle of passive resistance. She had almost invented it, she felt. With just a little more time, she might have perfected it. She read of swamis lying on beds of nails and not feeling anything. She read of people staring at the sun. Maria practiced all this, or the equivalent.

At night, she stared into the darkness of the room and pretended not to hear little Philip when he cried. She found she could tune out the grown-ups when they talked to her. Later, in school, she practiced not moving at all, although sometimes she would blink when her name was called.

Maria practiced being clean. She practiced being good. She was a top student. She practiced being invisible. “How good she is,” the adults marveled. “Maria is always so polite.” Maria liked this; it gave her more time to be herself beneath the facade. But there was no self. Maria practiced and practiced being dead. It would become a useful skill.

Maria felt most herself, that is to say, most dead, when lying on Uncle Felix’s examining table, her hand forcibly pressed to Uncle Felix’s “broken leg.” She let herself float out of her body, up near the walls among the photographs of the angel children. Had they, too, been in this room? She wondered, regarding their grave little faces. They all seemed so clean, so purified. Maria knew that she would join them someday; Uncle Felix was making her ready for that other life. She longed to wear white.

Somewhere in the room, far away, Maria listened to the sounds of water running. Felix washed his hands. Maria lay before him, naked, meek, and sacrificial. She thought of heaven.

Maria encountered another little girl waiting in the entry, a child also accompanied by a nervous, fussing mother. Maria did not want to think about this too much. The two girls would, in passing, lower their eyes in shame and confusion, avoiding each other’s too-careful scrutiny. Did they share the same experience with Uncle Felix? Did the other girl need “vitamins” also? Maria wondered, turning her head in sudden, sharp, unbearable pain.

After her sessions with Uncle Felix, Maria sat outside the door on the little sofa and waited for her mother. Did her mother need “vitamins,” too? Maria heard, through the door, her mother’s hypocritical laugh, and a growl that seemed to come from Uncle Felix. She buried her head in Schatzie’s neck. Sometimes, as the door closed, she saw, in her mind’s eye, her mother’s beautiful slip, her blouse, flung over the top edge of the yellow Chinese screen.

When she was older, her mother stopped going with her to Uncle Felix’s. But this was after Maria’s father, David, had returned to the family. “You’re old enough to go there by yourself,” Maria’s mother said.

Maria was too thin, with deep bluish circles under her eyes, and an anxious expression, which she tried to tame into impassive calmness. She didn’t protest too much, had long since given up protesting. The dead feel nothing, after all, so what did it matter? Meekly, she went.

Felix’s room was always warm, and with a certain voluptuous dread, Maria partook of his rituals. His “broken leg,” her “badness,” all these she accepted. After Felix was finished, he stroked her forehead, her hair. She was his “good girl” then. She felt loved and soothed. Maria imagined that at those times she heard the angels singing. Yet, immediately after, Felix dismissed her with a brusque dislike. She could see she wasn’t good enough yet; and each time, between the visits, Maria was a “bad girl” again.

Maria wanted to stop eating. She wanted to stop going to the bathroom. She ate less and less, and although the family did not have much food, she gave half her share to little Philip. Maria’s mother, noticing this, began to scold the girl. “Can’t you see how hard I work for our food? Be grateful, you ungrateful child!” Maria held the tears back from her eyes and stared at her mother while at the same time trying to make her vanish.

“You must eat.” Irritated, Ilse steeled herself angrily for this new development in their lives. “The child does not eat.” Maria’s mother expostulated to Felix during one of their visits the following month. With frustration, she regarded her wan girl.

Felix bent down and scowled at her. “What is this, you bad girl?” His brows beetled. “Now you worry your poor mother? She has enough already to worry about. You must eat, my child! Otherwise,” he hissed, “you will go to the hospital. And do you know what they will do to you there?” Maria shrank back. She did not want to know. “Do you know what they do to little girls there, hmm? They make them into liverwurst!” he exclaimed, his voice a dramatic whisper.

Maria tried to cover her ears. “Yes,” he insisted. “Liverwurst! Do you want that?” He stepped back a pace. “So…,” he said in a low, threatening voice, “I want to hear no more of this nonsense, hmm?” He flipped a sugar cube to Schatzie. “If you do not eat, you will come to me every day.” His voice rose to a shriek. “And do you know what I will do to you?” Maria tried to shut him out, but his hot breath was close to her face and his voice at full volume. “Uncle Felix will beat you, bad girl!
Ja,
every day! You will come to Uncle Felix every day and he will beat you.”

Felix looked up at Maria’s mother for emphasis. Then his tone changed again. He fixed Maria’s mother with his black hypnotic eyes. “Authority, my dear madame. What this child needs is some authority! You are much too lax.” Maria’s mother unloosed the silken scarf from her neck. She looked down at Maria. Maria could see in her mother’s eyes fear and determination, as well as the sense of being utterly alone. Felix seized both Maria’s and her mother’s hands in his own. “Now,” he said, “this is better. We will be a good girl now, yes, and eat for Mutti?” He stroked Maria’s hair. “And Mutti will be happy.” Maria nodded. “And you will make your old Uncle Felix happy, heh? He does not really want to beat you.”

Maria nodded and shrank back. He took this for assent. Felix pressed her mother’s hand. “You see, dear lady, all that is needed is authority. A man’s authority.” He looked significantly at Maria’s mother. Maria despised them both, but she did not show it.

“Mutti will tell me if you do not eat,” Felix warned Maria. He took her into his office then. His hands spent a long time with her, but they were not so nice. “Remember, you promised.” He was angry with her, impatient as he pressed her against his lumpy leg. He was eager to be done with her that day. But with her mother, he took a long time. Maria sat on the couch outside, waiting, and pondering her sins. Her stomach gurgled. She felt suddenly ravenous with hunger.