Milena had something of her own. She looked at her creature. She knew that she and her creature protected each other. Milena felt love for this tiny thing that was alive and intimate with her. The idea was implanted: I grow things out of myself.
The trees sighed in the wind. The sun baked the hot white wall, and made the vines overhead glow with light. Birds whistled. People laughed. This world was paradise, too.
The kaleidoscope turned.
Milena lay in her blue crib, in the dark, but the dark had gone evil.
From the bars of her crib, toy painted heads grinned at her discomfort. The sheets were clammy, another damp veil, and a smell oozed out of Milena, a sour tang that ruined her perfection. The infant knew her perfection had been damaged. All along her arms and into her head, there was a buzzing. A numb vibration hummed in the tangle of her nerves. The infant had not known she was a tangle until then.
The Milena who was remembering thought: this is virus. This must be the first time they gave me virus.
The infant howled, as if to expel it.
The door opened, and the infant hoped for comfort. Milena swallowed the sounds of crying in anticipation. There was a fluttering of light, and the mouth of a lamp opened, bringing light, but the light looked orange and sick as well. Mami came, cooing, and leaning over the blue crib. She lifted Milena up and patted her, but nothing changed. As Milena was jostled up and down, she sensed in her mother a kind of grim forebearing. Her mother said something cool, with a twist in it, a false sing-song note at the end. It seemed Milena’s mother was determined she should be ill. The infant did not understand the words. But she understood their import. In some way her mother condoned this; in some way her mother was part of it. Milena knew then that she would not be helped. The whole world was sick and ill and twisted, dim and ill-suited to itself. It had been invaded, not by music or by love, but by something alien.
The aliens tried to speak. They tried to speak inside Milena. The words were muffled, like voices heard through a womb. Milena could feel the voices stir, like larvae. Words had been deposited in her head like grubs. They began to seethe.
It was the world that was threatened, and Milena wanted to save it.
Ne! thought the infant. She resisted. Ne, ne!
The alien words were woven, like blankets, out of thread. Milena could feel the thread, touch it with thought. The threads were tightly stitched. At first Milena could only feel how harsh they were, like blankets on her skin. Then she felt more carefully. The threads were ladders, tiny, granulated. The ladders were spirals. They spun about each other in a double helix.
Ne! Milena told them, and the grubs went still. She could feel the ladders change. The ladders fell silent, moulded themselves to her thought. She hunted them with thought. She gave chase, through the spider’s web of her nerves. Ne! she told the invaders, and they went still and tame, waiting to be filled.
The viruses were supposed to fill her, but Milena filled them instead. She made them her own. Ne was the word of rejection. Ne was the word of independence, of freedom. It worked when you had power.
The infant Milena was touching the DNA of the viruses, and changing it to her own purpose. That young? thought the adult who remembered. I knew that much, so young? How much else did I know, before words?
The viruses went still. They would now store information. Milena was augmenting her own memory. She was making a bigger, silent self, a larger No.
She opened her eyes.
Her little room, with its doilies and dolls still looked ill and evil, the orange lamplight as steady as a headache. Even the face of Milena’s mother looked ill, baggy, tired. You, thought the infant. You did this!
It was the betrayal that made the infant howl and wail.
To the Milena who remembered, each shift of memory made the world tamer and more secure. It became more adult, less like leaves scattered in layers, and more like butterflies pinned in rows under glass. With each shift, the adult felt more at home, could find her bearings with more ease. Emotions came with names, already controlled and bearable. Milena the infant now knew words. But these were words that she had learned for herself. The words belonged to her.
The room around now came in only one focused shape, four walls. The wooden table, the wood-burning stove, the rickety chairs, the bean bags on the floor, the string of garlic, were all as the adult remembered them. They showed only one side of themselves at a time. Outside the windows, there was blazing daylight. Milena could now hear the ticking of the clock in all its soulless regularity. Tick-tock time.
’Milena,’ said her mother, quietly. ‘Your father wants to talk to you.’
Tatinka, her mother called him. The words unleashed a sense of loss. Milena, the adult felt an undertow tug of strangeness, of loss. The adult had lost a language.
Milena felt another chasm open up under her. Time had hauled her away from her mother and her mother tongue. She felt the vertigo.
The infant was looking at her mother’s face. There was something very grave and serious in the world. It made her mother quiet and noble, and Milena’s heart swelled with love. Her mother was young and beautiful, and now noble as well. Her mother took her hand, and led her out of her old world, into another one, through the door to her parents’ room. Her parents’ room was where Milena went at night, when darkness frightened her. This room was darkened now. Milena felt panic.
’Is it night? she asked. The infant lived in a world where day could become night without warning.
’No, Milena. Its just the shutters. The shutters have been closed.
The room smelled acid like sour lemons. Milena the infant knew that smell. It rose off your body, from the tangle, when the world went sick.
The walls were brown, the sheets were brown, everything was jumbled, and dirtier than it should be. Her father was brown and jumbled, crucified on a bed. His black hair pasted slick and flat over his forehead. Now that Milena was older, people only had one face at a time. Words, even Czechoslovakian words, gave things only one face. This face had black stubble and dark flesh around the eyes.
Milena’s mother nudged her toward the bed. She stood next to him, at face-level, and a hot, damp arm was drawn around her. He was burning. Milena knew then that he had the illness. He had the burning and the shaking. He looked at her with eyes that were different, a stranger’s eyes. Milena went wary. They could take your father and give him someone else’s eyes.
‘Svoboda,’ he croaked.
Like Ne, the word meant freedom. But it was a Czech word, and not the same as English freedom, and never could be. Svoboda was something natural like apples, like the earth. Like paradise, the way to it was barred.
You can fight it, Tato. You think at it, and it changes. You can do that can’t you Tato? Milena wanted to explain, but couldn’t. Then she thought he would know that already. She had already been taught that adults always knew more than she did. Tato took Milena’s hand in his own. Milena could smell the hand. He spoke in rough and alien voice.
‘Be good, Milena.’
Adults were always telling her to be good. It was not possible to know what good was. It always seemed to change. Milena knew she could not promise to be good; she wasn’t sure what good was. She didn’t want to lie, but she knew she could not say no. So Milena nodded yes. She knew it was a lie, so didn’t say the words. She wanted to be good, but if he had to ask, did that mean she really wasn’t good? What should she do to be good? No one ever seemed to be able to explain it fully. The word good seemed to spread out, diffuse, as part of the brown walls.