“Once there was a star in the sky who fell in love with a fur spinner,” Aster began.
Her smile widened with satisfaction. She kept turning the object in her hand, out of sight beneath the kitchen table. “And they lived across water, in a place that used to have land bridges. And the land bridges before them carried their ancestors,” she answered.
“Who is telling the story?” he asked her, grinning.
“You are,” Laisvė said.
He continued. “Far enough back in time, yes — a land called Siberia. Though, before that land was taken over, it had other names.”
“Where is Siberia? What were the other names?”
He walked over to the tiny kitchen window, crisscrossed with duct tape covering cracks in the glass and sealing the edges. On the wall nearby, he’d hung an old map from the turn of the last century in America. He’s made this journey across the kitchen before, has told his daughter this story before — it doesn’t matter how many times. “Siberia lived inside what used to be Russia, and before that, it was the Soviet Union. Here.” He pointed to the expanse that once — before the ice melted, before nations became unstitched — was Siberia, traced it with his forefinger. Then he lifted his pointer finger and studied his own skin for a moment. His finger had a cut that never healed properly, never quite scarred over as it should have, like the land and the people.
“What were they like? Countries? Was the Soviet Union a bad place? Was Siberia? Was America?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on who is telling the story. Times change.”
“You’re telling it.”
“Nations were like forever-dancing animals. Sometimes one was the prey, sometimes the other; sometimes they both were but neither one knew it. Nations used to be forged by wars and power. And Siberia? It was a kind of enigma—”
“What’s enigma?”
“Am I telling the story?” He began again. I could not love this girl more. In fact, sometimes I think this is all I have left of love. The way I carry it in my body — it may kill me. That’s what happens when love is desperate, when it’s filled with a skin-shivering terror.
“Siberia was a place bigger than just a place. It was unknowable. That’s an enigma. People lived and died there in a way no one knows anything about. People were sent there and they just disappeared. Or they formed strange communities in the nothingness. It was a land covered in ice — until one day the ice began to give, to melt, and it revealed what had been unknowable before. That’s the afterlife of an enigma.”
Aster paused to feel the weight of the fact that their very existence — a father, a daughter — remained an enigma to him. He stirred the stew. “The earliest Siberians — some of the very first of them — they left their home to cross the great land bridge called Beringia in the glacial time, and they landed in the Americas. Before there were Americas.”
“Or they went in a boat.”
“Yes,” he conceded. “That may be too.”
“Or they swam…” Laisvė whispered, but her voice faded into the wood of the table in front of her.
“What?” Aster asked, stirring.
“And what about this place. Where we are. Is this home?”
The word home. It was there and then it drowned, which is how he thinks of everything now: language and people and his dead wife and what she knew about words. His infant son, the small warm weight of him, lost. His own heart an abyss — like some giant empty iron tank.
Who would his daughter be if he could allow her to go to school like children used to, a classroom where she might learn whatever it is they’re teaching in this place these days about things like history and geography and anthropology and the existence of countries and nations? Is there even school anymore? In a place where fathers and daughters are not? He could brush her unruly black girl-hair forever, and he would still never know how to be the father of a twelve-year-old girl, her life snared in such a liminal state — thanks to him.
The skin around his eyes tightened. He ground his teeth against the truth of it — their secret lives, years and years without proper paperwork to live legally in this place. Or any other place. All the borders in chaos, all the countries shifting underfoot. A father and a daughter nested inside a crappy apartment building. His labor and the trades they made for food and clothing and shelter — a tenuous living at best.
So he told her the story, over and over again, and soothed his guilt.
“So you fell off a boat and turned into a whale.”
“Daaad!” Laisvė moaned, cracking a smile. On the paper before her, she’d drawn a girl inside the belly of a whale.
“What? I just wanted to see if you were listening.” Nothing on earth is more beautiful than her smile. How does he not die from loving her? His head swam with terror and anger. And then a different question came into his body: How does she carry so much in so small a body without feeling it?
“Your mother, Svajonė, was studying the Yakut indigenous languages when I met her in Siberia,” Aster said. “The first moment I saw her, I actually had a seizure.” Aster held his breath. Sometimes he wished he had died right then, in that moment, inside the image of her following his fall to the ground, kneeling to put his head in her lap. “She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen in my life.”
“My mother was a linguist. And a philologist.”
“All right, all right.” Aster surrendered. “I will tell you the story of your mother. Show me what’s in your hand, and I’ll tell you.”
He walked the small distance to her and gently took her hand in his and removed the object. His face instantly hot. “Laisvė. Where did you get this?” He turned the tiny object over in his hands. An old coin, rusted and dull. It looked to be some kind of penny, but not like any penny he remembered. Pennies had been out of use for years. He barely remembered them at all. Rubbing the coin with a dish towel over the steam from the stew, he saw the date: 1793. Across the top, the word liberty. The kind of thing you might find in a museum — or a pawn shop. His ribs ached.
“Where did this come from?”
Her eyes widened, but not with fear. “Close to here.”
Aster couldn’t stop himself — his worry leapt ahead of his logic. Without conscious intent, he grabbed his daughter’s shoulders and shook her. “Laisvė, how many times do we have to have this conversation? You cannot steal things! Ever. Is this from the shop across the street?” His voice crescendoed and thinned. “Listen to me — this is serious. It’s dangerous. That man could turn us in! He is not your friend. We cannot trust anyone. Ever. There could be a Raid at any moment and we could be on their damn lists. I don’t even know where they would send us anymore. We have no identities, no home, nothing to tie us to anywhere…. I’ve told you a hundred times you cannot steal things. Not ever again. Or—” His voice fissured with terror, rising in tone and pitch until it was almost like a mother’s. In his mind, a familiar storm took shape: Have they seen her? This daughter who sometimes roams the neighborhood unsupervised, this daughter whose curiosity is as untamable as her tangled hair?
“I didn’t get it from the shop! I didn’t steal it!” Laisvė stomped over to the map on the wall and jabbed her small finger on the fading blue part, the part that was not land. “I got it here. The water.”