Perhaps it is the name of my son, or my husband.
Or just a name, my name, my brother’s, a friend’s, an artist’s, a poem, a country, any name.
But no name comes from my mouth.
My voice — language — is swallowed up by the white.
I see the girl’s blond tangled hair as she walks away from me into the white, into some other story. I hear a blasting sound. I follow her.
The white turns to a scene of war. Like a movie.
I open a door in a bar in an Eastern European village. My husband and son are there too, but I am not near them. I am near other people — artists who are dear to me. My brother. The poet, the photographer, all of them. I can see my husband and my son, though. Across the space. They’ve made hats from paper cups. They are laughing. My husband is drinking beer. My son is drinking apple cider. His cheeks little apples. Someone is playing a guitar. Someone else is playing an accordion. There is amber-colored wood on the floors and walls and chairs. People seem intimately close, like in a not-American bar. Their faces warm and rosed. Their gestures swept up in song or laughter. No one is picking up on anyone, or arguing, or using money, or wearing a certain thing. No one’s hair matters. This is a not-American room, a room not made for money and action and ready-made lust thrusts, a room where people are speaking intellectually while drunk, the artists and the farmers giving each other equal weight, and leaning into one another’s bodies without concern — men leaning into men’s bodies and women into women’s — so that the air of it carries all of our hearts and loosens all of our minds and anyone could be from any country for this moment. Loving anyone they want. Saying anything.
The myriad conversations make a kind of voice-hum over the room, and I look up at my husband and my son and I smile.
But there is a war raging just outside, and the information comes to be known that we are all about to die, that a thermonuclear blast is coming. The information is coarse and immediate, as I assume it is for farm animals. They catch the smell, their spine fur shivers, they shift weight from one leg to another, feel restless, look up. The time we have left is understood. I hear it and know it and within ten seconds I make my way to the beating heart of love (my husband and son) so that we can be inside a group embrace, looking into the planets of one another’s eyes as the white life-ending cataclysm occurs.
The embrace and the blast happen at once, comfort and annihilation. Our bodies the universe.
I am in the white again.
Energy never dying.
Just changing forms.
I lie down in the white.
I know why I am here.
I’ve come to ask my questions. The ones my dead girl left inside me.
Is it my fault.
What happened to you.
Are you happy.
What do you want from me.
The girl is here, inside the white. When the time is right, I will ask her my questions. And then I will either go back or she will take me.
The woman in the room, the one who is maybe me, they say she is dying in a hospital bed.
Bloodsong
The widow is in the kitchen making soapy circles with her hands on plates at the sink. I can hear her humming. How long have I lived here with her? How old am I? Am I still a girl?
I am looking at the widow’s book of paintings of the crucifixion of Christ. It is beautiful, this book of Christ paintings. It is the size of my entire torso. Death, I’ve learned, she lives in all of us the moment we are born. The pink wrinkled skin of a squirming infant can’t hide it. It’s just true. Maybe that is why there are almost no paintings of babies — except the Christ child, and what kind of baby is that? A fat little fiction — a baby that comes from the sky through the body of a dim-witted woman.
All bodies are death bodies. But the best death body of all is the crucifixion. A beautiful womanman hanging naked from a cross, stuck with nails, bleeding, thorn headed. Of all of them, I love the Velázquez the most. I am looking at it now. I lower my head to the image and close my eyes and rest my cheek upon his body. I put my mouth to the page and lick it. I wish it was in me.
I can feel my body. I can feel the heat at my chest and ribs and belly. I follow the heat story with my hand. I can make fire between my legs any time I like. I open my eyes and raise my head from the page of the Christ body. I look at it. I don’t care about this puny faith. I have died and been resurrected hundreds of times. What’s the Christ story compared to the bloodsong of one girl? How flimsy that story is. I believe in Velázquez. With our hands and art. I believe we must make the stories of ourselves.
My name is Menas. This is my story.
There was a bomb.
Once I asked the widow, when I could not find the story in any of her carefully collected news accounts: where is the story of my bomb? There is no war, she told me. There’s been no war for fifty years. There is only the occupation, and what that has meant to people. Your family killed. My husband sent to Siberia. The bomb that killed your family?. . Listen to me. No one knows where it came from.
What has happened to us — there is no story.
But there was a family. My father the poet. My mother the weaver. My brother, my other, child gone to ash. I am like a blast particle — a piece of matter that was not destroyed, a piece of something looking for form.
There is the widow and her house and how I came here. Through the violence of men, through the forest, across a snow-covered field. I do not believe in the word meilè—love. Nor tëvynei—love for one’s country. Nor vaikams—love for children. Motinos—maternal love. None of them. In the place of love there is art.
There is my body and what has happened to it.
There is painting.
I paint on wood. Sometimes the widow and I pull the sides of abandoned houses apart. My paintings are of girls. In one painting a girl is chewing off her own arm, her hand caught in a steel trap. In another, a girl’s mouth has a house in it. Unlike a photograph, my girl faces are blurry. I want them to be blurry. I always make myself stop from putting them right, for what will it mean? Right for whom? By whose hands? The face of a girl should be blurry. Like she’s running.
There is a history to art, I’ve learned. Religion. Philosophy. Myth. Photography. I am reading about them. But there are chapters, whole books, missing. I see the stories of women, but they are always stuck inside the stories of men. Why is that?
The widow fills a kettle and puts it on the stove.
I pull down from the shelves a book of world mythology and my sadness grows. Artemis, why the paler sister of Apollo, whom she brought through blood into the world from her mother’s womb with her own hands? I turn to the section about my part of the world, and in the mythology of my so-called people — the goddesses — what use are they? Why did I ever like these stories? What is Gabija, goddess of fire, who protects against unclean people? I do not need this protection. It is a trick to place fear there. What use is Laima, goddess of fate, luck, childbirth, marriage, and death, if she keeps women inside the house, away from the open space of the world? Saulė—saint of orphans, symbol of the sun. . who cannot teach me what the fire inside me is. Who would have me put it out, or give it to a man? Still, I have torn pictures of them all from books and pasted them next to my own paintings in the barn, hoping for company. Though I find it hard to trust them. I wonder about what they want.
The kettle sings. The widow pours hot water into a cup filled with tea leaves.
History, mythology, literature, all the pictures and stories in time: women as witches and monsters, women as prizes and slaves, women as frozen bodies. A woman burning on a stick, queens about to lose their heads. Where are the artists? Where are the bodies who would break out of the story and rescue the others? Where are the daughters with fire in them?