The children wanted to walk, and the mothers agreed that a change was necessary, even though the beach looked the same farther down. The mothers left their towels by the sunbeds. Between them, they shared certain similarities. They had grown up in the same city. They were born the same year. They spoke the same language. They were slanted houses with memories of defeat and betrayal. They wrote. They were women. They were strong. They were incessantly agitated. Their strength and weakness infused the other, and like scales they balanced a jagged temperament. The children ran into the water and back out, and sometimes ahead of their mothers and sometimes behind. The sunlight was disorienting and the mothers occasionally lost sight of the children, but the children did not lose sight of them. The beach went on for miles.

  The medusas drifted, and when weakened by age or illness and without a central nervous system, dispersed to the seabed and formed new polyps. The immortal medusas walloped to the surface, feeding through touch, at night, and in turbid waters. They were carried and carrying. Their expert drifting, pulse like, with and against currents. Their bodies see through windows, which could survive even an emptied seabed, a death zone. The medusas were forthcoming, and they were drifting closer to the shore.

  Nets broke, boats tipped. When they released their venom, it went unnoticed.

  The children did not notice the tentacles around their arms, a gentle hold, before disappearing again. When the children felt the sting and pulled their arms out of the water, their arms looked as if slashed by a weed or a cutting plant. Something had touched them, but they did not know what. They did not cry. They grew quiet, their legs still holding their bodies upright against a darkening sky, and their mothers squinted, noticed the silence that drew over the water. They noticed their children far away, as if in a dream, and they could not reach them, they could not move fast enough toward the water to grab hold of their bodies. The children stood in the water, and the mothers stood on the shore, solidly. The children had been touched. The medusas retreated. The mothers felt a deadly quiet befall the beach. By the time they pulled their children from the water, the stings had crawled around their wrists toward their elbows.

  The mothers had always been slow, slow in thinking, slow in acting, slow in deciding. They were slow in birthing, slow in forgiving. And it was the screens’ fault for forging this narrow, slow-moving self. It was their father’s fault for passing down the violent broken slowness through their sleep. It was the universe’s fault, one had to blame the universe above all, for slowly pressuring species into being that did not believe themselves capable of living among others, that wanted vantage above all else, a species that could die slowly in so many painful ways.

  They carried the children from the water, their eyes closed and their arms hanging reddened and limp from their bodies. The position of mothers carrying their children in their arms a million times remembered now. The beach rose to its feet. They rose to come and see the children in their mothers’ arms. They circled them and talked in a language that the mothers did not understand. The mothers moved in slow motion through the sand, their feet sinking with each step with the weight of their children in their arms. The people on the beach all muttered medusas. This word the mothers understood, though they did not understand what had touched the children. They had seen jellyfish drift behind glass in the eerie blue rooms of the aquarium during school trips, passing the memorial church and its toothlike open roof, though they learned much later that the open roof of the church, remembering the bombing sustained, was a deceit, flat glass had been installed inside of the church to cover the ruin.

  They laid the children onto the sunbeds, their pale faces turned inward, similar to their faces turned away in sleep, at night, next to the mothers’ screens, which illuminated the dark room. The mothers talked softly to their children and looked at the patterns on their arms. A cold stone formed in their stomachs, an ending that awaited the story. An ending they would refuse until the end. They carried the children to a car, which a man on the beach had offered them. They held their children on the backseat as they drove down the dusty roads toward a hospital that would not open. The whole island asleep now, the midday rest from which no one stirred, and to which all emergencies had to submit. The man spoke to the mothers soothingly, and his voice was the only sound. The mothers looked at the children’s faces, and holding them reminded them of when they had been born, holding their life in their arms for the first time. Before anything infiltrated, the children had been held like this, and the children remembered this position in their sleep too, returning to the very moment in which their life began outside of water. Their skin salty and shriveled, they were somewhere that their mothers could not reach. A part of them carried off with the hollow tentacles of the medusas.

  The smoke was no longer visible. The car buoyantly rode with the sun following along through the windows. They drove in a lulling, bumpy rhythm. The island of women always at an angle, a little lump in the sea. When they reached the boat in the harbor, the man got out of the car and disappeared. The shipyard was deserted. The mothers moved their heads from children to window without seeing anything. How many times had they almost died and then escaped death again? When the man returned, he opened the back door and took the children’s arms, looked at the red lines before applying a yellowish cream to the medusa’s print.

  The mothers remembered how small the children once had been, barely visible, a dot in their wombs. A leaf falling from the tree. The slowness of a sentence forming in the mouth, urging its way toward an opening. A thought forcing itself toward thinking. Living forms coming from the twilight water. They longed for their children like a mother cow. The children were pulled into more than one direction, and currents with no agenda formed their transit. The children began to blink and mutter. They could not really speak and gazed at their mothers involuntarily. Their eyes, not fully dilated, fabulating in the void. The man ruffled their hair and laughed, and the mothers gradually came back from the frieze of death. Their children were alive, a bit moody from being woken. They did not like the color of the cream, and they were hot in the car. Their arms burned. They looked at their mothers, their doubling chins, their agonized grimace. The mothers could not stop saying, it was just a sting. The medusas stung you. The children turned away their faces and squinted. They looked at the sea and garbled. The medusas still in their veins, they felt drifty and remote. They did not want the ice cream their mothers eagerly offered them now. The children didn’t want anything. They had not seen the medusas touching them. They did not remember what had been in the water. No language could carry the children out of the water, but they carried a sting with them, some parasitic toxin on their skin, mixed into their sleeping bodies. They felt the medusas’ invisible eyes in their own. Their breath opening and closing, pushing water away.

  They could not remember where they had been while asleep or how they came back. They kept wondering what the medusas looked like and why they had sought them out. They would not go back into the water or yell at the waves. They did not want to go back to the beach at all. The mothers, who recovered quickly, suggested other beaches, their brittle fingernails scrolling the screen. They held on to the yellow cream the man had given them, in case the medusas came back. But the children were firm. This argument they won. They stayed on dry land.

  BURIALS

  YOU TOOK THE TRAIN THROUGH FIELDS, a landscape barely changing, though it did, and the air felt thicker. It rained heavily when you arrived. The train station was surrounded by widening lakes. The highway underwater. He picked you up, not concerned about the conditions, racing through the lakes to noisy music. The car ride took longer than anyone thought. Almost as long as the train ride, and the train ride was long. He took the bucolic route through villages, the roads narrow and uneven. The child at home called and let him know they needed cayenne pepper for the soup. It was almost ready. Your child in the backseat restless. You stopped at a gas station for some snacks and coffee. He let the car know of the situation: the dog would be put down tomorrow or the day after. The child, who was not sleeping, would need additional medical testing. The sewage had broken and spilled into the studio. He did not really go into details. It was clearly a mess. They had cleaned all night to prepare the studio for your stay.

  You worried about the ferociousness of the downpour, about sleep, about not sleeping. About being too cold. You worried about more illnesses. How the illnesses would talk to each other. You were either ill or angry, or other people were ill or angry. There was a deafening sense of fallout, of life falling apart. There was an insatiable appetite for destruction. Everyone was at war, in small ways and in big ways, and each day began with a counting of the wounds sustained. One wrong word and you could be mutilated, never see one another again. Despite an overall increase of methods and procedures, conditions were worse, worsening. Even the most accomplished stood weakened, and this weakness angered them. They thought they would be spared and live apart from general ordinary misery, but on a planetary level, misery had infiltrated the atmosphere. And children, your child their child, inhaled this weather, often ill or angry. You felt unprepared for the rain and a stay in the woods. The winding roads and the long drive started to make you nauseous, and why did this presence of time take rather than give.

  Already, the rules were changing, emerged in another order or no order at all. The rules had read the same each day. Do not trust your faculties entirely, work the body in all manner in all ways, do not drink caffeine after three p.m., sleep restlessly, feel guilt when not able or willing to mother, agree ultimately, keep a suspicious eye on unproductive extravagance, and, despite how little love comes in, desire to understand this as possibility. You noticed that the words began to change, the order of words that make the rules were changing. Similar to the performance in which the performer had put on a mask, which changed their voice. The mask allowed the performer to speak in a voice truer, farther away from themselves.

  At first there was the dog. The growth on the dog’s nose. A growth that produced snorted breathing. The dog, camel colored, short legged, had escaped a violent village existence. Was he hung by the neck from a washing line at one point? The dog slept in the center of the kitchen and was deaf. You had to push him to the side or walk around his body. Did the dog know that he was a few days away from dying? Was he hoping for it, praying as he slept on the kitchen tiles that something would sweep through and annihilate him and his labor of breathing? Or was this simply life, another dead end, an effort of the body that the body could still perform and did? The growth made his face look unfortunate. His face looked kind and unfortunate. There is a German word, elend, that came to mind, but despite this elend, the dog maintained a friendly demeanor. He moved through the house, taking what he could, a nice word, a pat, some food.

  But before the dog, there was the open roof. The house that had a partially open roof, where the drunk neighbor lived. He didn’t mind it, or he could not fix it and slept in the part of the house where the roof was still intact. The car passed the open-roofed house, a shepherd dog called Hermann furiously barking behind the fence. Through a wooden gate, down the slope, the car parked on a small plateau. The house barely visible below.

  You open the car door and look around. The air is cool. You descend the slope, and time ends. No one mentions it again until the very end. It does not really end but goes on without anyone paying attention to it. You bow below branches, skirting down the little path that leads to the house. The house is still farther down. Pine needles on the roof. Beyond the house, another steeper slope, a mountainside with trees and woodland below which a lake, another road, more dogs, and where mosquitoes will eat you alive.

  He walks to the studio. Inside of the studio she sits with the child, who is drawing two figures hugging each other. The child greets them and then disappears quickly. The child was born in Berlin. They named her after their favorite Polish revolutionary murdered in Berlin.

  You and your child watch their child as she walks from the studio to the main house to go to her room and close the door. There is a wooden dollhouse for insects that stands between the main house and the studio.

  You will sleep high up on a platform from where you can see the work below: wings, sketches, pencils, pictures, cut-out photographs, feathers. Above are slanted windows, the sky. To move around, you must crawl on your knees. The beds are made.

  The studio is cold and quiet. She cleans the ashes, builds a small fire. Her eyes drive, choosing each moment, where to turn, how to focus, when to shut. She hushes from corner to corner, concerned about the smell, wafting incense. Despite the sewage spill, the space is welcoming, animated by an open fireplace, trees gazing through the windows.

  You giggle, you wait. It is embarrassing to speak when others do. It is embarrassing when others continue speaking as if they did not hear you, as if only you could hear the spoken.

  At night, high up on the plateau and covered by heavy blankets, you wonder if there could be any worse signs. The dog dying, the child’s symptoms, the sewage spill. Lately, there have been no good questions. If the depression is hungry, manifold, like language toppling over, you feed it other afflictions. The affliction of accumulation, of bigness; a big life syndrome as opposed to a small life syndrome. The big life syndrome must consider too much of the outside world at once. The small life syndrome, in touch with only a few things, a handful of people, is from the outset a failed life.

  You sleep deeply and dream. Dreams similar to the ones you have when sick, bold strangers walking into your vision, secret notes and worlds dancing with one another. It’s refreshing to be taken by dreams, by their veracity and color. The lines on your face draw themselves, places alive in your temples and chin. The dreams wash you.

  The dog, with his growth, sits monolithically in the kitchen, a mascara-like line appears below his eye, a dried tear in the shape of a river. The dog stands slanted, like the hillside. The dog was born in this village. His death is being discussed.

  He is in the kitchen with the dog and his growth, baking bread, which you will all eat in the morning with berry jam and cheeses, sitting close to each other around the table in the sunroom. The sick dog and the younger black dog, who also ran away from his owner and decidedly toward the child, sleep in baskets next to each other. He feeds them both. The dogs hover around his legs, the source of food they did not always have. The house is wooden, reminds you of a hunter’s lodge. Small stairs between the rooms. The dog and his death sentence have a saintly flavor, happily walking into life with this elend, down the steps, kind eyes on everyone.

  Your memory is bad, as is her hearing, the child’s eyesight, the dog’s growth. You share in elend, and you all want a seat at the table. Like precarious stones about to be swallowed by the sea, you grow heavy in the sand and sit for hours without getting up. Eventually, the child gets up, retreats upstairs. The adults remain seated around the table. Your child stealthily follows the older one, hovers by the stairs, wondering how to join the mutiny.

  At the table, she whirls with stories, which you try to stitch together. Your memory is bad, and so only the skeleton of each story remains. In the eyes of time, you have done little but listen. Your life, in the eyes of time, has been taken into oblivion, so you jot it down hurriedly before it vanishes. This way, you are deteriorating yet equipped, decaying yet disciplined.

  The child is in her room and does not want to play with your child, who is much younger. Your child is whining. You read the story of the pied piper of Hamelin, in which children, a total of one hundred and thirty, disappear and are never seen again. The same troubadour who took care of the rat problem has a tune that makes children follow him. No one knows where the children were led or how he enlisted them. You wonder how long you will be able to keep your child, who spies on the other one, wanting to figure out what is kept hidden from view. The dogs have retreated to their baskets.

  There is a path to the lake where she goes swimming every day. She needs the activity first before entering the studio. Up the slope, past Hermann, the shepherd dog, and the hole in the roof, there is a road. She has to hold on tightly to the dog’s collar, because the neighbors have vicious dogs that throw themselves against the fence with murderous howls. There are several large oak trees by the main road. A church on the right. The wooden church burnt down and was rebuilt with stone. A sunken house at the crossroads. Once you get to the cornfield, past the church, you can smell warm butter mixed with sugar from the factory. It lasts only for a few moments. There are elderberry bushes and apple trees. There is no one by the lake. It’s too cold to swim. She goes in anyway, a small body disappearing behind the reeds.

  Your favorite game as a child was turning yourself into an adult, a world in which you set the rules and made the food. Each day, you waited for your time to enter your room alone, just leave me alone, you thought, to lay down the rules. The reasonableness that the adult world casually furnished became part of the rules you liked to play by in your own version of adulthood.

  You watch her swim daringly out into the icy lake. The farther she swims away, the more desolate you feel, as if the spell, a kind of cure, is fading. Your rules don’t follow you, and you recall the boat in a dream that once took you to meet a strange creature, an oracle, that seemed disappointed.

  There is trash by the path, which she picks up. She walks fast. You are already breathless. The lake looks like any lake in central Europe. Walking along its shore, the water appears both calm and menacing. Wayward thoughts visit. Anger is still anger but also a lovely mushroom, and it passes with the clouds. It’s of no real importance. You have not changed your clothes or showered, shunned mirrors. You don’t know what you look like, it will be a surprise when you leave.

  On the way back, past the howling dogs, the oak trees, and the house with the open roof, the neighbor comes out to touch the faces of the visitors. The dog barks. Everyone smiles, walks through the gate, down the slope, slightly ducking below the branches. The forest is sovereign but sickly.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12