When a dead calm came over me, I made a pyre of sticks and sage and the only thing I had to give to her, my hair. All of it I could sever. Great clumps of American blond. I placed her body and my hair atop the pyre and lit it on fire. I watched her burn. I did not cry while she burned. The smell of burning skin and ocean and sage. I did not look away. I collected the ashes in the morning and walked into the sea with them. So there was a moment when we were together in the same waters.
Then I entered a cataclysmic silence, a white vast, for nearly a year.
After grief — strange sister self — left me, I thought, stupidly, that I could live my life, and love the artists who are in it, and carry on by writing. I gathered them together for meals, for art events, for films and readings and gallery exhibits. I thought I could narrate over everything. This. . what I am still doing now. I am writing a journal of the girl. But I don’t know if I can withstand it. I hear my husband and son in the kitchen, making dinner, setting plates, and I close my eyes. My heart is beating me up.
I am an American woman writer. I am in the room I write in. The room with midnight blue walls. Dark red carpet against deep brown hardwood floors. Two windows with long off-white curtains. And books. . books everywhere — on floor-to-ceiling shelves, on the floor, on the desk, piles of literature, art, photography, philosophy. The colors of their spines and covers the colors of skin, blood, fire, water, night. A black iron lotus Buddha with a broken hand that we glued back on — me and my husband, my now-husband. A good ironic metaphor. Various feathers from birds I have come upon: eagle, heron, crow, crane, and swan. Bowls of rocks. A photo. The cat’s food bowl. Desperate talismans, the colors of blood and night and the bottom of an ocean. And the scent of someone over-saging a room because they are afraid they will make something to death.
I think things like, Be brave. Hold on to voice. It’s your only chance. Pick up the glass of scotch. Bring the amber liquid to your mouth. Drink. Large. Hold it there. Close your eyes. Move your goddamn hands before your mind makes a mess of it.
I see an image of a dead girl — an arrested image.
My breath jackknifes for a moment.
It’s the girl. I don’t know if she will kill me or save me.
Women and Children
The white is flat.
The girl does not look at her feet. She looks straight ahead, willing the shape in the distance to become the farmhouse they said it would be. The sky has smudged out the sun. Under each footstep she knows there is death: land mines and the graves of disappeared people. If she looks down it could kill her. Part of her wants to be blown to oblivion.
She is nothing but body: her legs and chest are burning, her jaw aches, her eyes swim in their little sockets. Then a farmhouse and barn emerge like ghosts before her; there is light in the window of the house. And another small forest — black-and-white-barked birch — on the other side of this place. She stops at the fence line and stares down. She sees her own breathing in white erratic gusts.
Little by little, her breathing eases. She can feel her tongue and teeth, her ears. She is at a crossroads: a child’s violent will to survive lodged in her chest where her heart should be, but an utter indifference along with it. Dusk is falling. She closes her eyes. When she opens them, she ignores the house and walks to the barn and chooses an empty horse stall next to a black mare. She finds a thick horse blanket, as worn and coarse as an animal’s skin. She buries herself in straw and the smell of goat, horse, pig, and chicken. When night comes, she is nothing more than an animal in a barn.
She doesn’t think about entering the farmhouse. For there is a woman in the house; she catches glimpses of her in the window at night. Her mind is on the eggs she sucked down raw. On the mason jars filled with root vegetables. On the milk she squirts from the goat’s teat into her mouth.
Next to the barn, she double-steps ten feet one way, then ten another, until she has walked out a square in the snow. With her broken knife she goes about clearing the snow away so that dirt and dried-up grass and thistles and weeds and rocks emerge. Then she digs. By the time the woman comes out of the house and spots her, she is all hands and concentration. She doesn’t even look up.
If the woman is thinking, Who is this girl, what is she doing, it has no effect on her digging. The girl is just fingers moving, nothing more.
The woman is stricken by the loss of her husband to a Siberian prison. Everything she sees has the same weight — next to nothingness.
She sees the girl when she gathers the eggs. She sees her when she feeds the animals. When she puts the horse in the field. When she milks the goat. She sees her each day, furiously at work on the ground. She sees her pile wood from the woodshed, cover it with kerosene, and light it on fire with matches from the barn. The two of them do nothing to care about each other. They take note of each other’s tasks and respectfully circle around them.
This happens for days.
The girl never comes to the door of the house; she never needs anything.
It goes like this. Six days, seven.
Then one day the woman is patching the roof and falls. The girl looks up for an instant, turning her small face to the falling. The woman’s body, then head, hit the frozen ground with a great thud. She is momentarily stunned. Then she opens her eyes and her body comes conscious. She has hurt her back, though not irreparably. She turns her head there on the ground and looks at the girl. For a moment, their eyes lock. Then the woman heaves herself up and goes in the house.
The next day the woman does not get out of bed.
In the dirt, the girl builds a forest surrounding the village, and begins the hard work of digging a trench for a river.
The next day, when the woman feeds the animals, she also brings the girl a jar of water, one half of a cooked cabbage, and a lump of sugar. She places it in a box just inside the barn.
Each day the girl builds more and more of the small village in the mud and snow and rocks and thistles. A small mound here for the center of things. The old church, the butcher’s, the small building where handmade paper was crafted, the store for ink and paint and pencils thick as a finger — pieces of charcoal in thin waferlike lengths or in rows like thumbs, oil paints she has dreamed of. She builds people with small bits of dead grass, twigs, little stones. Lining the streets. For trees, she uses pieces of the ends of trees. For walls, shale set upon its side. For the hills just outside the village, mounds of mud. Streets and bridges are made from pebbles and bark. For the sun, hay is wrapped and wrapped into a misshapen ball, set upon a hill, endlessly setting or rising. And for the photographer, the last person she saw before she shut out sight, a speckled stone.
By the time the girl’s eyes had risen to the fallen woman’s head on the ground, she was already lost in some other world. When their eyes met, the girl’s felt nothing. She turned back to her city of dirt and her hands caked with mud and continued her work. There is but one thing left to build and that is nearly unimaginable. Her house. Her father, a shattered starscape. Her brother, blown to bits like tinder. Her mother. . she shuts out the image.
She flashes to another image, smaller, that lives between her ear and her jaw. It is an ordinary image, routine as a baker’s truck delivering bread, or a woman carrying her great bags of groceries from the market, a dog barking as she passes, a flock of birds lifting to the sky as hands in prayer. It is ordinary because that’s how memory replayed over and over again works — each act of remembering deteriorating the original and creating a memorized copy. It is herds of soldiers, the colors of stone or wall, lifting up from stone or wall as drawings taking on life, coming into motion, marching; the mud-thudding of boots and heels. It is the gray-green uniforms moving in unity, erasing human as if human were a smudge on a perfect black-and-white page all the shades of pencils. It is the faces of men passing by in rows and rows, the flesh changed color and texture to some thick putty ball plopped atop shoulders, the eyes black. It is bodies bludgeoned and the splatter of red onto the gray-green arms onto the stones of the gray street onto the gray walls; it is the bodies going limp as a fish brought to shore thunked on the head and rendered lifeless and dropped into the pile of the day’s catch; it is the almost-eyes from behind windows or doors not there and yet witnessing, it is the light — not night and not day, an in-between, not horror or joy, something without a name or place, something without a color. It is a mother and a father and a brother fading from color to ash, or a woman in a house mad with grief, her love lost to white, or just a child stubbornly representing a city in the snow.