Unspeakable Things (23 page)

Far away, in a turquoise and fuchsia land of palm trees and jungles and dust, the homunculus that had once been Anna, the little Rat, stirred uneasily, enclosed in a jar. And the fingerprints of Rasputin blazed, dancing once more to music sensed rather than heard. The marks on her body flickered out forever.

Felix, ensconced in an underground laboratory, happily engaged in holding her jar up to light, found himself humming. He whistled, recognizing it was Mozart he was whistling. “Beautiful, eh, Schatzie?” he said as the dog wagged her behind, happy that her master was in such a good mood. Felix squinted once again at the jar. “It was a good trade, was it not, my darling?”

“M
aria, hurry up. We haven’t got all day.” So saying, Ilse left her daughter at the door to the now-denuded room. She had so much to do. She stood for a moment, uncertainly, then changed her mind again. Philip was with her parents-in-law at the zoo, so at least they were happily occupied. Perhaps if she hurried, she might have some time to organize the little house a bit before they all came back from their day.

“I’ll be back for you in a little while. Just wait here. Be a good girl.”

It was moving day.

Room. Doom. Gloom.
These new American words clanged together in Maria’s head as she stepped, for the last time, across the crumbling threshold into what had been the entire world just a few hours before.

Now the room held only vacancy. Its secrets blew across the floor, and the graying curtains fluttered listlessly. The clothesline, which had supported the blanket dividing Maria’s little section from that of her grandfather, still delineated a space, but the space was open. The room was dirty, she saw. The cold-water faucet in the sink dripped, a worn brown track wending its way toward the drain. Gone was the small hot plate upon which Anna had prepared the morning tea. The sooty windowsill, which had held the family’s milk and cheese, was an empty slab of stone. Out in the hall, the toilet gurgled horribly.

Maria shivered, alone in the desolate room. Her body felt hollow, shabby. She had grown, even though she had not wanted to. Her dress was again too short; her knees stuck out from the frayed hem. Washed forever, thin with the washing of it, the dress, made by Ilse, candy-striped and gay as an American girl was supposed to be, hung in listless folds about her body. Her long hair was limp, too, exhausted from brushing against her body. She rubbed her eyes. Her chest ached.

“I am leaving home,” Maria told herself. Leaving home. Nothing, not her mother’s bright false optimism, not the teasing love of her father, could cheer her up. She and Philip were nothing, she saw: two children, torn from their home. For what? A little brick doghouse far away?

“Why, Mummy?” Maria had asked. But her mother had not answered. The child was not important, Maria knew. It was only the grown-ups, the grown-ups with their squabbles and problems and sometimes their marvelous stories.

“I hate you,” Maria muttered to her absent mother. It was only the old ones she liked. Some of them. Sometimes.

Obscurely, she blamed her mother for Aunt Anna’s disappearance. If only her mother had taken the trouble to be nicer to the Rat. Anna, with her wonderful stories and romantic, suffering life, had been replaced by her grandmother Adeline, who was capricious and temperamental and forever having hysterical fits to which the whole family had to pay court.

Maria recognized in Adeline a definite threat. Before Adeline’s arrival in their little room, Maria had been Herbert’s pet. Her grandfather had fussed over her, lavished his love and attention. Maria smiled smugly. Even little Philip, a stupid baby boy, could not compete with the affection she, the elder grandchild, received. Philip? She traced a circle with her toe in the fine dust on the floor. Oh, he was cute, all right. But why did everyone expect her to love him? Well, she didn’t, wouldn’t! He was okay in a pinch, when there was nothing else to do, no one else to pay attention to her.

Maria smoothed her dress, then quickly, surreptitiously, felt her chest. Her little nipples stood up, hard as pencil points. She fluttered her hands over them. “You are beautiful,” she whispered to herself. “You are my little beauty.”

Who was saying these words? The wallpaper closed in on her—the buglike flowers she had always hated.

Maria stood in the small, stuffy, enclosed space and put her hands on her stomach. “You are my little beauty.” Her stomach gurgled.

She put her hands down lower, there.

“No,” Maria said firmly to the whispering. “I am not. I am dead. Can’t you see?”

“You are not dead.”

A wave of desperation rose up in the girl. She was dead. Nothing. Dead, a piece of garbage. All the hatred she contained for others—her mother, her brother—must mean that if she were not already dead, then she deserved to die. To be dead.

Maria felt faint.

“It’s all right, my little darling. You’ll be all right.”

“But I hate everyone. I hate them so!”

“Yes.”

Maria allowed the room to engulf her. It gave forth its wrinkly, cobwebbed, dusty smell. She felt completely alone in the world. There would never be anyone who would really understand her. Overcome by a feeling of sadness and loneliness so suffocating that she thought she would never get over the pain of the weight of it on her body, she sank into the far corner and covered her face. Her dress lay in the dust, the brave stripes fading even faster.

Maria wanted to be forgotten, left behind in the room while the family moved away. She was ruined for life, and no one in the family could even see that. All they saw was the hollow shell of a little girl, a “good” little girl. But that “good” little girl was a mockery, a farce. A pretend person, not real. A bad girl, in fact, a shell of a person, someone who would never grow up, never love or be loved.

Her mother and grandmother could not imagine her feelings. Somehow, Maria knew, Uncle Felix had taken the soul out of her, removed the essence of Maria, and substituted a fake puppet, a sawdust doll who went through the motions of being good. “I’m dead,” she told herself.

The curtains rustled, waving their thin fingers across the sunlit sky outside. “Listen.”

As Maria crouched alone in the corner of the room, the whispering grew louder.

A thin ghostly hand brushed her hair back from her forehead, smoothing as it went.

Maria did not dare remove her fists from her eyes. She sat, still hunched over, but now she was listening, her whole body, ears and every cell, straining to hear what was being said to her. “You are not dead. You are alive.”

The ghost of Michael regarded her with compassion. Or so she imagined. “Michael?” Maria could not breathe. She had only heard of him, always in the family.

Michael curled his ghost presence around her, stroking her with softness, the softness of a cat’s tail, softer than Mitzie, who had a rough Germanic coat. “My child,” he said, stroking her.

Maria did not move.

“Listen carefully to what I am saying to you,” he said. “You are alive. It is I who am dead. Do you understand?”

Maria’s breathing stilled to comprehend what was being said to her. Was it the curtains whispering? Was it the breeze? The sunlight? The dust, easing against itself across the pitted floor? Far away, the toilet gurgled, and cold water still dripped from the single faucet of the sink, etching its rusty snail-like train on the horrid white porcelain. All blurred to distant sound. What mattered was that tender voice, that soft caress, brushing the hair from her face and stroking her.

“Yes,” the voice continued. “Take my strength, my life. It is for you.” The ghost of Michael wrapped itself around Maria protectively. “Think of me always, if you like. You are the child of us all. Our hope. You must live for all of us.

“You are not dead.” He rocked Maria as she crouched, trying to listen and not listen at the same time.

How long he held her, Maria did not know. The shadows of late afternoon darkened the corners of the room, and still she sat, unmoving. Something was loosening itself. She felt her chest open, swell with sadness for Michael, and then for herself. A warm melting began.

The warmth rose through her body into the center of her abdomen, into all the hurt places, and then, finally, into her chest. There was a sharp, tight pain, so piercing that she became it for a moment.

“Yes, cry. It is better.” The skinny hands of Michael held her forehead. “If you can cry like this, then you are not dead.”

Maria sobbed for her ruined childhood, her hollow body. She cried for all the times she had contained herself—been quiet when she wanted to scream—for all the times she had been a “good” girl. She cried for the lack of love and understanding she felt. For her parents, who were so caught up in their own problems of survival that they had no time for her, no time even to see what was happening to her.

She cried because she had no right to cry in a family with a history such as hers. She cried for her loneliness, for her inability to deal with the husk she had become. She cried for the love she so desperately craved. She cried for what she perhaps would never find.

And most of all, she cried for her own selfishness, her clandestine longings. “I have no right to live.” Her despicable selfishness in the face of everything else. Even now.

“And then he did to me—unspeakable things.” Maria could hear the Rat’s voice, incantatory, as she recounted her tale. Over and over, stopping always at those words: “unspeakable things.”

“It does not matter,” said the voice of Michael. “Forget it. You must go on, my girl, for all of us.”

“And you, Michael?” Maria’s asked sadly. “Do you suffer a lot?”

“No.” His eyes looked deeply into hers and now he smiled. “I do not suffer. I am happy to be around the family. I’m always here, you know.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Maria told him firmly.

“No one does. Call me a memory, then,” he said. “A memory you can hold on to.”

He smiled. Her crying had subsided now. “One day,” he promised, “you will be a woman, as beautiful as your mother and grandmother. And you will love and be loved. Really.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Do not let anyone break your spirit. I don’t want to hear any more of this dead business. Survive, my girl, survive. It is the only way.”

“Will anyone ever love me?” Her pleading entreaty.

“Of course.” The voice of absolute conviction.

Michael, entering the boxcar once more, the boxcar that was to take him toward extinction again, turned and looked back at Maria. The conductor blew his whistle; the train pulled out of the station, gathering speed. But this time, Michael did not fling himself against the closing doors, pressing his desperate face to the outside for the last time. He stood at the opening, a casual, smiling, jaunty figure, a lithe young man, smiling and waving at Maria as he left. “Don’t forget,” he called. He blew her a kiss. “Happiness will come.”

The tightness unlocked in Maria’s body. Her stomach, with its terrible cramping, relaxed. Her chest and throat were open. She breathed. Molecules of sunlight entered her heart.

“Not dead,” she told herself. And now the warm slow tears of release and relief. She felt her body, stroked it. “I am not dead.”

What did the move out of New York accomplish? Everything and nothing. Madness to go on doing what one has always done while history manages without us. Some people, betrayed, are taken and lost. A few people evolve; some merely survive. Perhaps these are synonymous. There are no solutions, “final” or temporary. History is merely hindsight, the impotent illusion of control. Why some people were killed. Why others were crowned. Stupidity rewritten. More unnecessary suffering will come. More history to write.

Winds blew about Europe, and the human race, scurrying and dislocated, mammalian creatures, shuffled to find food and shelter, to bury themselves in dark earth far from conflict. What was survival now? Some luck, some treachery, some confidence in self and long-acquired values. Whatever it took to manage. Selling out. Endurance. A willingness to learn new languages. Luck. Flexibility. A little courage. Some help. A lot of luck.

Like a rock laced by water, Herbert stood in the midst of his historical moment. Each wave overtaking him made a slightly different pattern on his surface, then fell back into the general oceanic pool. Each person, each life bore with it a slightly different need and despair, yet they were of one body, one saline gathering, the surface shimmering and shivering.

Rounded, granite, Herbert endured the water pouring over him and then rejoining its source. The wave broke from its smooth surface to trace its longing upon his veined perception. Then, soothed and dispersed, it fell back again. Herbert was, for a moment, visible. But then the next life came, claimed him for a moment, wrote its history upon his body, and left.

His daughter-in-law was much more practical than that. His son David was already growing older, weakened by the past. Adeline screamed her wants, growing less powerful each day, baffled by loss. Ilse, like a small flower growing between stones, pushed new life forward.

It was Ilse’s will that forced her family to move. Ilse had no patience with the past. She refused mere survival; down-to-earth, she wanted something more. She arranged it so obviously and quietly, they had no choice. Before they knew it, they were living another life. Outside of the city, in a small boxlike house with their own beds, each of them. Ilse needed some space for herself; she could hardly stand the family around her. “Come on,” she said to herself impatiently. Gently, she pushed them all around. “I know this is best.” There were many things that Ilse did not say aloud. She just managed to make them happen, quietly. It was easier that way. She insisted on moving: she was pregnant again.

“Put your hand right here,” Ilse told her daughter a few weeks after they had moved. “Can you feel the baby? Can you feel it kicking?”

Maria put her hand on her mother’s body. Nothing, and then a faint flutter trembled underneath her hand. “I feel it!” she said in wonder.

Philip, watching the two of them, ran across the small lawn to put his head, too, against his mother’s stomach. As he did so, he managed to butt Maria’s hand away. “Do you feel it?” Ilse asked her little boy tenderly.

“This is no time for another child,” David had groaned, raising his body from his wife’s after she had told him the news. “We are already overworked. I cannot manage even as it is.” He was exhausted, impatient. First the move, then this. He was still commuting, coming back once a month or so, irritated to find himself so quickly displaced and taken over by Ilse’s plans.

“Of course this is the time. This is exactly the time.” Ilse stroked her husband. “My darling, we will be so happy in this new country. You will see.”