This got rejected by Shimmer in a way that feels strangely like a triumph. It wasn't rejected out of hand, it was bumped up to the editorial board and then it was rejected on grounds that were entirely different to the reason I believed they would reject it. I'm posting it again (while I experiment with my own structural changes and seek absolute clarity on the definition of temporal cues and what cues are ideal). First, though, I have to knuckle down and get it together with the 'Coffee' rewrite which is moving at the pace of about a sentence a day mainly due to my own stupid procrastination.
The Fourth Gift
by Pierre Mare
Papa Medved, our Papa Bear, was with us in the little cottage in Bogomazov, even when he was away. He was the ghost smell of cigarettes, vodka and sweat. Our noses remembered him.
Mama's fear and anger told us when he was coming back. We saw it in her startled jumps when she didn't expect one of us behind her. We listened to biting words and hellfire outbursts of anger, tears and hysteria. Slaps and beatings told us to be as quiet as owls in daylight.
He returned every year with honey, salt fish and happiness, after winter, when bears wake. The sun came into the cottage when he opened the door and spread his arms for hugs.
Papa wanted us around him, to hear his stories. Mama herded the four of us away with hisses, glares and flapping hands behind his back.
She stayed away from him, walked along the walls, hid in rooms where he was not. She put meals before him without words or smiles. Late at night, when they shared the bed, we listened to her angry crow cries.
Papa's visits did not last long enough. He vanished after a few days, same as always. Mama returned to the tea leaves and made her medicines out of herbs from the garden. She beat down any show of concern with sudden, hard words.
Papa sent money. He gave us the roof and walls. The gifts other children received, dolls and toy cars, never came. He gave us different things.
Papa's first gift arrived when Alexei took ill and lost his smile. Doctors foretold his death, and told us to say our goodbyes. Mama turned into a damp, gray specter. She wept all the time, up and down the passage and in every room of the house. Papa returned at this one time when we did not expect him. Mama's reaction was a mystery and a shock. She did not rush to him for strong arms, comfort and there-theres, as a mother should. She fell where she stood, and wailed on the floor.
Papa stepped over her, as if stepping over a floor rag, and stomped to the door of Alexei's room. He turned at the door, reached into the pocket of his tattered goatskin vest and held up a small brown stone. His raised his eyebrows asked us to tell him what the trinket was? Our frowning brows and closed mouths told him no, we didn't know the answer. He flicked his head to the right, snorted and entered the room.
Sasha, Micha and I pulled Mama from the floor and pushed her into the kitchen. We served her hot, sweet tea beneath the icon of Maria and her baby. Micha wiped snot and redness from her face, ran fingers through her hair and looked into her eyes to tell Mama she was not alone. I was glad she didn't know what Papa held out. What comfort could a stone give the mother of a dying child?
Ten minutes later Papa entered the kitchen, with a wolf-tooth smile and rooster nods. He patted Sasha, Micha and I on our shoulders. Mama's eyes widened and her mouth hung open. He took the vodka from the shelf and banged his Papa vodka glass on the table. Mama stared the way a cat stares a snake.
Four glasses, a cigarette and a long burp later, he called in his big bear voice, "Alexei, my little Lazarus. Time to get up now."
The bed creaked above us. Footsteps led our disbelieving hopes down the stairs. Mama hooted once but Papa's stop sign hand silenced her. Alexei entered the kitchen, as thin as a child from Ethiopia, yellow and white as old bandages, yet his eyes were healthy. He held out the stone to Papa, but Papa folded it back in his hand.
"Your gift is early. You will keep the little stone as close and safe as the greatest treasure of kings."
Mama went mad with rage. She slammed both her arms on the table, then swept away the vodka bottle and tea mug to tinkle in shards on the floor.
"You are not right to give a child such a thing!"
Papa's hand flew across the table, caught her on the face. Mama's grabbed her mouth, to sooth the pain, but also to hold her tongue behind her teeth, hidden from Papa's anger. Her eyes were wide and bright as silver coins. Two tears fled from each eye. A single red tear wandered its lazy way down her chin.
"You see, Alexei. Your Mamushka would rather you were dead than accept my gift, even if my gift gives you life," said my father. His eyes told us of his pain.
"I have lived long with the stone and now I give my years to you. That will make your Mamushka happy."
Mama shook, aged by this one angry moment, gray and pale before her time, with palsy. Papa sneered at her and turned to the three of us.
"Alexei has his gift now. You are my children and precious. Each of you will receive one gift from me," Papa paused. "Just one."
He looked at us, the bear staring at his cubs.
"Not now. When I give them to you. When I am ready. When you are ready. I will decide."
He laughed at us, our six wide eyes in a row. Turning to Mama he tossed coins on the table.
"Buy them sweets. Go."
While she went shopping, Papa went as well.
Mama built fences between ourselves and herself after Papa's visit. To be fair, they were fences, not walls. We could still reach through or talk over them, but the your-place, my-place separation was a new border in the map of our family. Alexei's part of the fence was a bit higher, with barbed wire.
Two houses in one house is not easy. Sasha, Micha and I pulled around Alexei and warmed him with the love we could find, but the warmth was not hot enough without Mama's fire. He lived. He grew. He stayed thin. He never lost his pallor. He never found his smile. The stone hung round his neck on a thin strip of leather, held him to the earth.
Micha received her gift a year later, on a day when Papa came back bloodied and scratched. He wore the shiny eyes of a warrior, but we could see the deep wounds on his ragged shadow.
Those bright eyes are everywhere you look. You can find them on playgrounds, when one child snivels on the ground, and the victor looks for the obedience he has earned with the threat of blows. You will see them shining among the bruises as the big man in the bar brawl is led away by the police. The police cell can cage his body, but not the joy of his triumph.
Papa wore his eyes well. He turned in the kitchen the way a rooster does in the farmyard as he searched for Mama. Perhaps she read his return in her teacup. She left in a rush before he arrived. Father picked up her cup, swirled it and glanced at the leaves.
"Go and get your Mama, Alexei. She is with Alyona in the tea room behind the butcher. Be quick. She is finishing the cup she drinks. Give her my greeting before the leaves tell her to move on." He tossed the teacup into the sink, pulled off his bloodied shirt, reached for his vodka and sat at the table to drink away the minutes.
When Mama returned he pointed with his eyes to the stairs. Mama's feet moved as if by the strings of a puppeteer, slow and high and wide. Up. Over. Down. Up. Over. Down. Her back arched. Her head wobbled left to right and back again, shaking no, no, no. Father's eyes never left her. Halfway up the stairs her shoulders slumped and she walked her Mama walk again. Papa followed her. We left the house to sit in silence on the drums, among the herbs at the bottom of the garden, but her crow cries followed us.
Mama stayed upstairs that afternoon, and through the night. I went to the butcher to get meat for Papa. Alexei and Sasha poured a bath. Micha left the room to drink tea with Mama, having reached her fullness. When Papa's dried blood flecked the water and stained it brown, Sasha called Micha and handed her his fishing line and a needle.
"Good that you sew me into my skin again, Micha. These wounds are for you," Papa told her as she worked.
Micha's hand paused for a minute then pulled the thread tight, with a glint in her eye.
"I am also pleased you are a healer, but it is not enough for my daughter," Papa rumbled once he found his voice among the pain. "There are angry men who fight everything, and I want you to be a warrior who can match them."
Micha pulled hard again.
Papa reached for his vest, Scratched in the pocket and pulled out a rusted wedge of iron. "This is special, from an old spear. Not sharp on the edge. It cuts in different ways."
He laughed his loud laugh and said, "You will pierce their hearts with it and then you will sew them together into tapestries."
He slapped the flaking lump into her hand.
"Wear it between your new breasts, on a string, the way Alexei wears his stone. Wear it till your charms are old like the breasts of Mama and Alonya. It will look after you."
Papa's seat at the table was empty the next morning. We studied Micha. She could not be one of the women boxers, who fought at the Saturday market. Too thin. Would she be a ninja from the movies late at night on the television? Would we sleep safer if she hung from the beams with fists of death and a knife between her teeth?
Sasha checked her room one day but found no guns or bullets, not even a knife. Instead Micha joined the debating club and shone in the eyes of teachers and officials. Her words pierced their patriotic hearts and twisted their minds around the spindle from which she wove many colored tapestries of truth that were yet to be.
The boys from the upper school started to wait for her outside the garden. Sasha, Alexei and I found smiles and nods as we walked to school and, as her words became better known, rides in cars. From time to time the boys joined Sasha at the river and helped to clean his fish. Micha's thoughts and words were our golden goose.
Papa stayed away long. After the first year we asked Mama if he would return, and she nodded, so all was well.
He came back the next year, five days after the Moscow dirty bomb. He wore a fine, shiny jacket, trousers and closed shoes with laces but the bear in him looked twitchy and itchy in his new city skin. His beard was still big and strong, more strong than the scissors and the razor.
Papa sat on the new water drum in the herb garden. The man-boys who drove Micha and I home made big muscles when they noticed him, puffed their chests and growled. Micha's gentle hand on their arms, a few soft words and a smile, turned them into happy puppies again.
Papa welcomed her with wide arms, took her by the shoulders, looked her up and down, as if she were new to him.
"You wear the spear well," he smiled.
The kitchen was dirty but Papa's vodka bottle had moved from its place on the shelf to a new home in the rubbish. His breath smelled of tobacco and salted herring, nothing else.
"The clever ones are friends with both sides in these times," he told us. We knew he was talking of only one side, the Jihadis.
"Perhaps Micha here will bring reconciliation to the two sides, or peace of a kind. But for now we must be content with making ourselves useful, and the reward is long wanted, even if one must say goodbye to old friends for now."
He waved to the vodka bottle as he said this then flapped his hand for Sasha and patted the bench next to him. Sasha sat.
"For you," Papa said, handing our brother the oldest book we had ever seen. "This book is from one of the Jihadi's philosophers, a man almost as powerful as me. Make yourself useful with the knowledge you can take from it. Learn their language. This book talked of in whispers over the centuries. Even degenerate Americans, who could not spot the truth if it pissed in their eyes, wrote of it."
Sasha looked at Papa with a question in his eyes.
"This one is the true one. It is in his hand."
He stood up, preening himself. "I met him once, you know."
We waited for Papa's tale but the story didn't come. He looked around the room, displeasure in his eyes.
"Micha, your Mama also deserves gifts: paint, tiles on the floor. The toilet doesn't stop running when you flush it. Ask your friends for new carpets or furniture. And fix the kitchen. You know what to do."
Promises of gifts did not make Mama's cries joyful that night, or the next night.
Sasha had problems with the book. Staring with empty eyes at the half-faded squiggles gave him no knowledge, no power of his own. A few weeks later a thin, dark man with eyes big and wide apart, brought a note from Papa. He was to be Sasha's teacher
A Jihadi man in our village was unusual. Children followed him. The skinheads stayed away, but did not welcome him with the expected beating. After a while a few began to greet him. That we owed to the magic of Micha's words.
"What you get from the book, you owe to me," she told Sasha.
Sasha's nose crinkled up when she turned her away from him. He flipped through the pages but his eyes carved wounds in her back.
Alexei did not thrive with his stone, the way Micha and Sasha took power from their gifts. Life held no interest for him, not school, not vodka, not girls. Day after day, he held the stone up before his pale face, squinting at it, questioning it with his eyes. There are just so many times you can take a horse to the hay, so we left him to his mystery.
That was how we put the blade in the heart of our family. We came home on an awful day to find Sasha holding Alexei on his lap, half breathing, on his way now, years late. Micha and I ran to the quarry where Alexei said goodbye to his gift with a flick of his wrist. There we learned that a stone among stones can only be another stone, even if the wishes are strong and the tears are hot.
I cursed Papa then, for not giving me a djinn in an Turkish bazaar lamp. One small, small wish would be enough.
Alexei left before we got home. His leaving was more bitter for the time we spent seeking the life he did not want. Some moments are more precious than others.
Sasha, who was with him at the end, was calm, pointing to a last smile Alexei must have found hidden in his soul. Hoisting his big old book under his arm Sasha explained this was just a small thing to put right, to bring back Alexei, and his smile.
If we knew what was in the book, we might have taken it from him and told him death was the way of life.
He slept in the Mosque, and we did not see him but for the visit, three months later. He said he would show us something wondrous later, but first he pulled Mama off with come-come-comes, like a child who sees shapes in the star or the clouds.
She came back in the evening with eyes as lonely and hurt as her soul.
Alexei lay on the edge of the graveyard the next morning, staring at the sky with yellow skin, hard-boiled egg eyes and a tight, smiling mouth. Lazarus had walked for the third time. Micha and I looked at him to tell the police, "Yes, that is him. No, we don't know how. No we don't know why."
We put him in the ground again that afternoon. Mama did not join us. Old men stood by with the tools to cure those who should sleep, not walk. Micha spoke to them, spat foul words from her mouth, and they left with their crosses and garlic in a hurry.
She turned to me with fierce anger on her face. "Sasha got it wrong, but at least death gave him a nice wide grin."
Sasha ran from the town, from Mama and the truth of his pride. His thin teacher from the Mosque told us he went away on a ship, an oil tanker, headed for Yemen. He asked us what to do that might bring Sasha back? Micha told him there was nothing, pledged his safety, and the safety of the Mosque, but asked him to leave the district. Faces bring back ghosts, so sometimes it is better to send them and their specters away.
We heard of Sasha one last time. The ship owners sent a messenger with sacks of money, to make it easy for us to know the ship sunk, and Sasha with it.
We had nothing to put in the ground so we dug holes in our hearts. Mama suffocated on her memories, living a little less every day. Three weeks after the messenger ran from our house with Micha's men chasing him, we remembered Sasha as we buried Mama. Our tears and wails choked us.
Papa was at home, with a new vodka bottle for friendship and conviviality, when we returned from the death garden. His face was as gray as Mama's had been. Micha called her men around her, but I stood between them. As bad as Papa was for the family, there was still one gift to come.
Papa sat among pieces of my game machine. "Modern magic."
He held up a circuit board, twisted it in a shaft of light. "It enslaves minds just as well as the old ways, but different. You will have a better game to play."
I ached as he brushed it from the table to the floor.
"Your gift. You have come for your gift, Petya. You were the last of my gifts to your Mamuschka, so my gift to you comes last as well."
"I gave five gifts to your Mama. Love and four children." He showed them with his fingers. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
"She hunted me and caught me to win those joys. She had a small power herself then, but she learned to see later. I think she knew what lay ahead, and she died a bit more as every bad thing happened."
From his bag, he pulled an old clay pot and tossed it as you would an old bone for a backyard dog. Micha's man stopped me from toppling into the wide screen, as I staggered from making the catch.
"If she were here, I would ask her what she saw this time." Papa patted for me to sit on the leather couch beside him. "It has been opened once, many years ago by a young Greek woman. It was her destiny to open it. People believe it to be a box but that is wrong. It was always a jar. People also say that the last thing it holds is hope. They may be right, but I believe it to be a leveler. When you open it, maybe men will become equal, and the world will be as flat as the steppes."
The pot was no bit of pride for a babushka's best china shelf. The clay looked rough, red and uncooked. Greek letters were scratched on its rough clay, highlighted with charcoal. It was sealed the same way the babushkas in the old market closed their jam jars: wax and twine, fragile, easy to open.
"I am going now," Papa said. "I will join your Mama in Samara, and find some of the gifts I gave her. There are one or two old friends with who I have to settle matters first. Abdul, the man who wrote Sasha's book. He is there. I will have words with him. Micha, you know what to do."
He left. I looked his back for the last time. Micha did not walk with him to the gate to hug him goodbye. Her eyes looked at my pot, but she was on the phone giving orders to her people in Samara. They should arrange a conference. In Chelyabinsk. In Yekaterinburg. Kazan. Omsk. Anywhere. Not Samara. A conference about something, like organizing quotas for the figs to drop from trees, or making potatoes grow faster and square. Anything. Don't wait. Do it now.
#
After the Samara event, Micha became a person of great importance. Her calming words on every television in the world when Papa's phoenix set fire to the sky, made her the biggest goat in the pen. The organization stepped in with aid for the ragged survivors. She collected donations. She got power. She took it all with both hands, always wanting more, more, more.
Micha gives gifts now. As it was with Papa's gifts, her gifts are poisoned as well. It is our family tradition. My apartment is big, with a balcony, looking over the Don in Rostov, her first gift to me. I have the wide screens which babble day and night, her second gift to me. I leave them off, silent and dark. I hold an important title which comes with an important black car and a fat wage for doing lots of nothing, her third gift to me. No matter how big the cage, the bird is still in a cage.
Micha does not sit in the parliament. She is an expert at making cages, and she knows she herself could be trapped there. She wins her freedom as an envoy, a messenger with the power to write her own truth, to deal with our oil supply, to talk to the Arabs.
Her mouth and tongue do not work their magic easily among the Jihadis. My big, black, very important, very empty car stands still, the same as a donkey cart without a donkey. The other cars stand as well. Donkeys are good. You can scratch a donkey on its head to make friends with it. You cannot scratch a car on the head to make it drive for you. If the pump is as dry as the Arab desert, all the friendly words you have will not make it piss petroleum.
When talk is just the useless noise of tongues, and weapons are in hands, then mouths are closed and actions speak loud. This is the other secret of the metal heart which hangs between her breasts.
She is always in Saint Petersburg, at the new, radiation-safe military headquarters. She has become the sheltering willow among the boars that shit and fight and grunt around her.
A pack of secretive dogs called the Abdulahim has been stopping the oil, bombing pipes for almost a year now. There has been talk of whole villages and oil installations falling off maps like leaves from autumn trees. Micha said if the problem is not Sasha, then his book has come into the hands of someone with knowledge. She answers the proud Arabs with guns and bombs, and says the word 'stability' when questions are asked. That one word, and the thought of rivers of oil, makes everyone at peace with the rivers of blood and screams.
I do not listen. I remember the old times. Before the gifts there were donkeys, and babushkas in the market with jam and cheese and bitter black bread. The village hadas changed. It is a place of big white buildings that hold no love, just theories and practice. What remains amongst the institutes is our house and the quarry where Micha's men search without end for the pebble bound with leather.
Micha does not share my happy memory. She talks of progress and prosperity and regional hegemony. She talks of my jar and her spear which together will bring these fine, fancy words into the world.
One year ago, I went to remember in the old place where Mama and Alexei left us. I did not find the memory, only the ghosts. My anger overwhelmed me and my hands thought for themselves. Micha does not know I opened the jar there.
I expected her call when I returned, but Micha wraps herself in the silky patience of a spider. Months later she told me to give it to her for the good life in her designer-furnished, air-conditioned cage. I told her to wait. She told me to think fast. She said I am her brother. What she really said is she will spill my blood to hold my gift.
After I hung up the phone I opened my jar once more. Now the lifts and the lights in the building no longer work. The planes can fly as well as stones. Micha cannot call me or e-mail me. It is the work of a clever computer kid with a grudge against everything my neighbors told me.
Micha's messengers arrived a few minutes ago in my new vertical village without the jam and cheese, donkeys and bread. They wear her thoughts and feelings in their heads. I wonder how she got them here so fast. Do they have a steam train? Is it horses? I can hear them kicking open doors, looking for my apartment. They introduce themselves to my neighbors with bullets.
Some cages allow unintended freedom. I take the jar to the balcony which does not have bars. I toss it into the street below.
There. Open forever. Screams on the street. More screams. Louder screams. Are the dead rising? Have the blood drinkers from the television arrived? Is everyone leveled now? I do not stop to look.
Micha's pogrom will find me soon. I walk in to face the door and wait. The fourth, most welcome gift will be here in seconds. Mama, Alexei, Papa? I will see them. Sasha? Perhaps.
I think of Alexei and smile my best smile.
My Papa gave us four gifts. Life. Strength. Knowledge. I have the fourth gift, hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment