But she did not.
And so, now, she runs.
In her running, her mind leaves her.
And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf.
There is a great white silent empty in her running.
She runs.
She runs to the dark oncoming line of the forest.
Her hands making little man fists of anger.
The edge of the forest coming into focus.
Her teeth clenching in her mouth.
The moon, Ménuo, big white eye in the dark.
It is snowing.
Miraculously, the snow will cover her tracks.
The branches of trees opening their arms.
Her panting.
Finally the forest holds her.
She keeps running.
The forest is black and white — illuminated through the trees by the moon.
She runs until her legs and lungs cry child.
She stops.
She looks up at the night sky, visible through the treetops.
She looks at her own breath making fog in front of her face.
Then she walks and walks, placing her hands on the bark of trees for courage.
Tree by tree, her breathing comes back to her.
She has no thoughts, just this body.
The forest is made of tunnels. Each tunnel opens into a deeper place in the woods, and the deeper she goes, the more surefooted she feels. Many times she has been hunting in these woods, and even as her mind is filled with cotton and electricity she knows she is far from alone. There are, for one thing, trees. And animals. Deer, rabbits, hawks, wolves. Ménuo, the moon. And Saulé, on the other side of the night, the sun mother, goddess of all misfortunates, especially orphans. And Aušrine, the morning star, and Vakeriné, the evening star.
And of course the rebel camps.
So when her legs have nothing left, and her skin is as cold as a dead person’s, it is fortuitous that she is knocked to the ground by a boy made into a man by war. She thuds thankfully in a small heap to the forest floor. He puts the long hard of his rifle against her throat, which she cannot feel. He shines a flashlight in her face. He smells of boy and rifle and dirt and sweat. She cannot see him and is glad. She makes her body limp, she makes her eyes dead, and then she loses consciousness, smiling.
When she wakes, she is inside a small makeshift tent. She is on the dirt of a floor, covered with blankets. Her feet and hands and cheeks feel very hot and they sting. A woman wearing the clothing of a man is petting her head, saying ssshhh. Almost like a mother. Drink this. She sees a submachine gun hanging from the woman’s shoulder, rocking slightly, accompanying the woman’s voice. In the corner of the tent, a man is being dressed in women’s clothing, his gun and knife at his gut being wrapped with scarves. Then she sleeps again.
The next morning the sun is there and the woman is gone, and there is the same manboy with a rifle standing over her. She can smell it’s true. He gives her a nudge in the ribs with his foot. Get up, he says. She gets up and finds that she is wearing heavy boys’ clothes. He hands her a pair of boots that have straw and leaves stuffed into them. Then he tells her that he and another man will take her to the edge of the forest. Do not cry, he says. You are lucky to be alive. Luckier still not to be in a Gulag, little pig. I said we should put you in a hole in the ground to watch for the enemy — you could squeal if you saw anything. If you cannot fight, you are nothing. I said we should use you as bait. He spits on the ground. Then he takes his dick out and pisses right near her feet. The steam rises between them. I said we should kill you. I don’t care if you live or die.
She is not scared. She can hear him and she concentrates so hard on his face and mouth she can feel her eyes become bullets. She wants the boots. Violently. She wants the coat — stained and torn and smelling of piss. He grabs his dick and moves toward her and she readies herself to go dead, but he just rubs it on her arm. Harder. Faster. The reddened muscle of a boy. She counts the dead air. Soon he comes in a hard hot spurt on the coat. She puts the coat on without hesitation, looking him in the eye. There is a scarf on the ground with some of his piss seeping into it that she would snatch up even if it were on fire. She wraps and wraps it around her head, covering everything but her eyes. She wants the pouch of dried-up bread, the canteen of dirty water, the broken knife. She wants everything he is giving to her.
They march her to the edge of the forest. They point to a spot across the whitened landscape. They say there is a farm there. From where they are, the spot looks like it could be anything. Or nothing. She begins to walk. She could be walking into a whitened oblivion. She wonders if they will shoot her after all. She thinks she hears them laughing. She turns only once to look back. He is pointing his rifle at her. She sees a wolf out of the corner of her eye, watching her, or maybe all of them, as it backs into the forest and she moves slowly forward, toward some unseen form in the distance.
The Writer
My daughter. Say it — hold it in your mouth, look at the words: born dead.
To be told there is no pulse at the precise threshold of birth — water breaking. To be told to deliver anyway. Death.
The day birth came at last, the labor had lasted two days. I nearly gave in. I kept thinking, To what end? It seemed true that at any point I could simply surrender to the pain of an ordinary body and. . leave. I looked at the people around me — my eyes puffy, my skin done in — and thought, I love you, I love you all, enough, good-bye. But I did not leave, and the dead girl was born.
I expected her to be blue, and cold. Lifeless. I expected her to feel dead weighted. I expected to die, quietly and with soft breathing, from holding her.
But she was not blue, and she was not cold; she was like the weight of the history of love in my arms. Her skin was flushed and her eyelashes were very, small, long. Her lips were in the hue and shape of a rosebud. Her hair. . she had a small halo of almost-hair. And her hands were curled in the shape of something tender and potential. I was holding life and death — those supposed opposites, those markers of narrative worth; a beginning, an ending — all at once in my arms.
I did not die.
But I could see the grief coming like a towering wave of water about to swallow the world. When grief comes, you must breathe underwater. I knew I didn’t have much time. You know, hospitals will not allow you to take a dead baby home with you. You must make arrangements, with the hospital or with a coroner or a morgue. They send in “grief counselors,” and, if you let them, god help you, clergymen.
I just wanted her body. I wanted her body more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. And so I did what I had to do.
I asked the poet — my lifelong rival, beloved friend, a borderline criminal — to steal her from that fucking place for me.
You will think it sounds impossible, but it was not. It was laughably simple. The poet was close friends with an attendant, an addict, at the morgue where I agreed to send her. The morgue had its own crematorium. In lieu of her lifeless body, a little pig covered in a soft blanket was sent down the metal road to the fire.
Instead, I took her to a place where a river empties into the sea. I drove there alone, with her perfect weight next to me in the passenger’s seat. I talked to her and sang to her and recited poems to her. When I got there — not anywhere anyone would be — I placed her in a backpack that also contained kindling and sage and waited for night. The wind was unusually still, and the surf had the rise and fall of breathing. The moon’s giant eye looked on. It was the end of an Indian summer. I removed my clothes. I held her body to mine for a long time. Until it came, the great flood. Animal sounds came from my throat. Nearly all of the night we rocked that way.