Fringe Magazine - Issue 10

Issue 10: June 2007.
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Home > Issue 10: June 2007 > Non-Fiction

“[T]he things which are seen were not made of things which are visible” (Hebrews 11:3).

My husband Dima rattled his keys in the locked side door to our kitchen. With a sharp intake of breath, our two-year-old exclaimed, “Daddy!” I smiled with the sound of his childish zeal. Giggles rang like bells as little Vitka toddled to the stairwell. The cottony feel of his flushed cheek, the silken brush of his hair—I could nearly feel these things as he pressed against his father. I closed my eyes and leaned against the futon.

Dima walked downstairs to the family room. He leaned down to me, and I reached around his neck, the smell of cold and dust from the warehouse where he worked mixed with bread and garlic on his breath. The hum of evening news rolled under his Russian.

“Kak de la, Vitka? Gidyia magic—hodoshor, sladkey, hodoshor.”

Magic. The word meant “ball” in Russian. But my mind filled with images of an indigo wizard, velvet hat strewn with white crescent moons, chalky fingers sprinkling parsley above a cauldron. He had a kind face, white beard trailing toward the wooden floor. He lived in a wooden hut, one room and rounded—there were no edges in his earthy-colored home. The hut and all who happened upon the place were warmed by a fireplace. There was no electricity. Three thick candles on the kitchen table lit the wizard’s small space in the evening or early morning before slivers of day fell through windows on either side of an open oak door.

The door had no locks and the windows no screens. Whatever came through the nameless forest was free to enter the wizard’s tidy cabin. He always cooked enough soup for the hiker, lost child, or hungry bear. Even flies were welcomed on occasion. He talked in code, at least it would seem so to a person not sharing a meal with him. His language was a mix of French, Latin, English—a bit of Spanish for seasoning.

The wizard served one thing: chicken star-noodle soup with a dollop of sour cream and parsley. Some speculated that there must have been magic in the broth because even upon the first bite people believed that the wizard knew everything. He said that people were one, that they came from the same star and would return to it. He never seemed to suffer doubt concerning his changeless message.

Those who heard the wizard speak could not explain his message, in part because the idea was beyond human words. Still, people tried to articulate their experience with the wizard, despite the ways language made the message nonsense. Despite the ways it would sound too simple, too naïve, too mystical even, for those who had been in the warm cabin, the wizard remained an icon of truth—as ancient and as peculiar as myrrh-seeping runes. And yet, the idea seemed as new as it did old. Perhaps the mystery wasn’t in his particular answer as much as the visitors’ mutual belief. Whatever the case, those who wandered through the wizard’s nameless forest longed to preserve the magic that spun through their spirits assuring them that hope and faith were timeless and universal.

As Dima called out for the ball, I pictured him as a child: wide gray eyes; full cheeks; thick, pale skin; our son’s same broad face, open features. A handful of childhood photographs showed Dima wearing the appropriate Soviet mask—straight-faced and blank, as though impenetrable. Yet, I could read a trace of impatience, of eagerness in his eyes even then. I could hear his thoughts: When’s the hockey tournament? Hope no one steals my slice of watermelon (never mind that he’d stolen it from a train the night before and stashed it in his school bag where books should have been).

Dima was a child of the moment, living for the instant pleasure of cold air racing past full cheeks. I imagined him scraping his skates back and forth before the goalie net, ice-dust accumulating at the sides of the metal cage he guarded. The ice shavings seemed clearly divided, like the East from the West. The only place that existed for him was exactly where he stood, elbows to thighs.

The government sponsored promising athletes as examples of the Soviet Union’s power and capability. Dima’s father hoped that someday his son might find a way to America, to that unknown side of the world where bananas were abundant and people could freely listen to The Beatles.

I heard his father’s tired sigh as he entered their one-bedroom apartment after days traveling through Moscow, a city eight hours from their hometown. Bus-driving shifts like these left Dima free from his father’s insistence that he train for hockey. As an only child, his father gone for days, he was free to have his mother to himself, free to hold her warm hand as they strolled into the city. She was free to impress upon him the beauty of the Summer Palace, the gold fountains and waxy, bright flowers. Dima absorbed her fierce passion, hardly noticing that his mother was as set as his father to prepare him to take the East to the West. He noticed instead that there was no belt that would leave scars on his adult thighs.

Though he loved sweating through a hard hockey game, he dreaded the endless practice. His father pushed. His father must have believed in his son’s capability, must have believed there would be a better place for him to grow older, grow old. Maybe the circular pattern of work and weariness that marked his own life created a sort of tunnel vision through which he saw Dima’s future. Regardless, the boy would escape because his father always returned, and with him the rigor of training.

When his father returned from work, he smelled ripe, looked loose. His cheeks, as pink and round as ham, pushed back with a grin. He handed Dima a tennis ball. It was grayish, fuzzed with age, but bouncy as Dima threw it against the wall at the Sports Complex the next day. There were red mats and metal gymnastics equipment. There were free weights and an Olympic-size pool. Other fathers and sons trained for hockey, for soccer, for gymnastics—for a ticket to the West. Under his father’s study, he squatted low to the cement floor, and his thighs burned.

Growing up, my mother’s pink slippers seemed like weapons of mass destruction. A deep flush rushed over her chest and neck as she curled her thin lips, “Ssstop it,” she spat into the steamy bathroom, slipper hovering mid-air. But my sister and I continued splashing each other in the bathtub, not letting Mom’s rage dampen our own.

My family dramatized love and hate—whether through a pink slipper stinging our bottoms or a sisterly nipple pinch. Whether tearful hugs of apology or bouts of backseat wrestling (which led to Dad pulling the minivan over and Mom prying us apart), growing up was loud. Everything felt was expressed. My parents insisted on “time together as a family,” to the extent that growing up was stifling. I wanted more time to grow outside the lines of our family: piano lessons, museums, and colorful people different from Mom and Dad.

In my mother’s photo album, stashed in the back of a dust-free closet, my sister’s toddler legs climbed a South Carolina sand dune. A vacation like the others we had annually committed ourselves to: cheap and on a beach.

We drove to South Carolina in an old Nova and rented a one-room cabin steps from the ocean. We lived on Mom’s bran muffins for a week. We batted hostile horseflies swarming above my grandmother’s quilt, which we’d used through the years as the beach-blanket. Had my mother been more artistic, it might have been hung on a wall, at least draping a bed—it was a rich swill of color.

One evening, walking the beach as the day reflected off the rippling water, my father cried, “I’ve got a stingray! Diane?” We followed my mother as my father dragged the writhing, sea-winged beast to the edge of the water. It seemed to glow there in the dying day. A gray back glistening with the lingering energy of the day, I imagined how it longed to swim through the sea. Sadness pulled inside, despite my sister’s giggles, her toe dangerously near the flapping tail. The water looked dark and smooth, glassy and unreal. It seemed to have lost its blue forever as darkness seeped deeper through the breeze.

“Dad, can’t we let it back into the water?”

“No way, Lea! I want to go swimming,” my sister said. Our father said we had to keep it here, away from the shore. He’d been talking to other fishermen who said a stingray had stung a child. So we stood there, watching death descend. Maybe it was only minutes as the animal moved less and less until it seemed to deflate in the sand. My father carried it in a towel to a private corner of the beach. His arms flexed with its weight. My mother dug a shallow hole with my plastic shovel from McDonald’s. Dad gently placed the stingray in its grave, and we all kicked sand over it.

Deep inside us the most indelible imprints had been cast. We were becoming our parents. In ways, we would become each other. It couldn’t be taken from us, this trained way of being. But I wondered if maybe there was a way to recognize where we’d been and slow our steps into those same hard places. Was there a way to act more peacefully in love? Was there a way to avoid the welts of the buckle and the slow death of the stingray on the shore?

It seemed too easy to want to control things instead of respond to them. Perhaps this desire was the seed of peoples’ internal wars, the emotional unrest we daily ignored. Perhaps we stopped listening to each other, stopped seeing the world at all because we focused on the broken pieces of our individual lives and vainly tried to fix them. We failed to be silent, to be reverent, and crucified the unity that was at the center of all. We forfeited what was meant to make us whole and one.

“Viktor! No somersaults. Swallow what’s in your mouth,” Dima said.

I said, “Here, honey, I’ll hold your milk.” He shook his head, chin down, head cocked. He leaned forward with his sippy-cup, preparing to roll.

“Nyet! Ya scazal, nyet!” Dima’s voice sliced through the evening as tears sprung to Viktor’s eyes.

“You do not need to be so fierce, Dima! You scare me with that voice, let alone Viktor.” He shook his head, no sign of regret on his set face. Despite the weariness of the day, it was sometimes easier for me to be alone with our son—to cover dinner, to wash our faces, to read the bedtime story, on my own. I told Dima to go get dinner, drawing Viktor to my chest. I held our son and zoned out with Sesame Street while Dima finished his dinner in the old recliner.

Viktor had my olive complexion. The tips of his ears folded out, and when he smiled, Daddy’s eyes changed to almond shapes more like mine. Viktor expressed his passions. Sharp tones and angry stares, even when not directed at him, cracked his eager smiles. He could cry with fury. I liked to think his nature was like mine, but maybe it was just that he was an American child. He was allowed to wear emotions as changeable as the northeast Ohio sky.

“You don’t need to nag him about everything,” I mumbled, breaking the silence as Dima moved toward the steps for dessert.

Dima and Viktor shared a bowl of peaches. Viktor pawed at Dima’s hockey warm-up pants. “More?” Viktor smiled. I tip-toed from the family room and upstairs for a shower before bed, smiling with the freedom of escape.

Viktor was so trusting, so willing to accept however we treated him, and it made me cringe inside to think he’d grow up under every little Russian idiosyncrasy Dima possessed. No Tylenol, heavy wool hats in spring, garlic and butter in warm milk—and a biting stubbornness that made veering from such golden rules impossible.

I would protect Viktor. He was with me more often. There would be Tylenol and vitamins. If not vacations, there’d be days together at the beach, even if I had to drive the hour north to Lake Erie and share the day with Mom. Viktor and I would share long walks and open talk, the way I still did with my mother.

Little balls bounced over the shower curtain: ping, ping, ping. I didn’t say a word. Dima was in the bathroom holding Viktor, who giggled as he threw ping-pong balls over the shower curtain to get a rise out of me. I squeezed my eyes closed and washed the Pert Plus from my hair. Cool air grazed my legs. I opened my eyes to the sound of bells. Viktor gripped the shower curtain, grinning. He pointed to the small balls pooled at the drain.

“Magic!” he said.

Before bed, we watched a documentary filmed in Iraq. Dark-skinned boys pounded their chests and chanted to Allah. They were partially dressed and dirty, smiling with white teeth as they imitated their fathers. They stomped thin legs, shook blithe bodies, a full room of boys and men celebrating a god whom they believed instructed them to hate me as a Christian, as an American—I was an infidel.

And I felt the anger rise inside. I hated them, these innocent children with eyes as bright and open as my son’s. They were mindless shadows of their father’s intolerance. The smell of burned flesh, the maze of twisted metal, the vaporous ash and dust like demons raging over Ground Zero, all replaced what seemed like my sky, my light. I hated them.

Outside was the desert, blowing sand dunes and nothingness, edged with families living in small shacks. Listless children in rags squatted in the dust. Women wrapped in mangy cloths huddled in corners with infants.

In a half-destroyed school near Fallujah, an eleven-year-old said, “Americans are bad. They killed my family. God will send all Americans to hellfire!”

After school, children played “executions,” enacting the violence and death around them. Children weaved through people swarming the dusty street. They seemed so hungry, so reckless with anticipation. Rusty cars honked and rattled on.

Young men strapped with explosives videotaped tearless goodbyes. They urged families to rejoice. After a martyr’s death, they would be in heaven. Their pride pooled in dark eyes, tightened under thin faces.

Dima slumped beside me as we shared the last of the day’s duty, tucking in our son. I realized that I still believed peace was possible when I read to my son of a gingerbread baby running through the forest to a hut with jellybean doors.

But I was annoyed by the garlic on Dima’s breath, angry at the way he slumped against the bed when I was just as weary.

Dima snapped, “Stop crying, Viktor. It’s time for bed.”

“Shut up,” I hissed at Dima from the side of my mouth, rubbing Viktor’s back.

Later I lay in bed thinking. Sleep wouldn’t come, and I gave up the hope. I placed my palm on my heart, just to feel the calm beat of time. I scooted close to Dima’s body, but it was too hot. I backed away and felt content to be alone and have hours to think, if not to sleep.

I thought of the violence and hate bred into our children. How my son’s giggles could turn to screams, how someday these emotions would reach for things beyond me. Who and what would he love? Hate? All seemed empty, and yet too full as I imagined my son chasing his red ball, spring teasing the air.

I thought back to the end of summer. I had pushed the stroller around Silver Lake, a reservoir across from our neighborhood. As Viktor and I made our way home, people lined the main street. A boy from the area had been killed in Iraq. Before us, an endless stream of cars with American and purple funeral flags moved toward the afternoon sun. I pushed my legs faster, past the dread of the future. The breeze pulled over my face like fingers, washing my tears into the sides of my hair.

The world was larger now. Elementary schools had procedures set in place for terrorist attacks. Viktor’s father was from the other side of the world. And while I saw Russian rigidities alive in my husband, political naiveté and intolerance were the marks I bore. Too often, I did not care enough about those far away from me. Too often, I did not care enough about those next to me, like Dima. Was it possible to foster a gentle spirit in our son, a spirit that loved easily and abundantly? Was it possible to teach him to accept the differences among people and still genuinely care for them as human beings? Was I too old at twenty-eight to learn the spirit of unity which I longed to teach my son?

I savored mornings. Endorphins swam in my brain after a half-hour on the treadmill, and there was the promise of coffee and pause before the day. On alternating days, I taught a writing class, and adult conversation filtered into my life. But on days like today, endless hours with a two-year-old could make my mind mushy. I flicked on the Today Show and stretched my legs before Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, hopeful for a dose of long sentences before Viktor awoke.

After the weather report, Meredith smiled. “Thank you very much,” she said. Diet pills had to stop their unreasonable claims, she reported. Matt added that New Year’s resolutions to eat healthier and exercise would be discussed later in the show. Then, with uncanny speed, Meredith mentioned evangelist Pat Robertson’s prediction of a nuclear terrorist attack. Meredith asked Chris Matthews what Democrats would do to fight President Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq.

I raised a water bottle to my lips and gazed at a photograph of Dima’s childhood hockey team. The corner was torn and the black and white print made “antique” a picture not even twenty years old. The team was gathered on natural ice in Dima’s hometown. Dima lay on his side, propped by an elbow. I grabbed the recent photograph of Viktor, also black and white, sitting on a rocking horse. An Elmo shoe appeared below too-short khakis. Though there was a six-year difference between their ages in the photos, the likeness between the boys was remarkable. The simple shades of dark made the pictures seem cooler, less frivolous and showy than the photographs of my family. Tucked away on shelves, there were color prints of my family with bright smiles and sun-kissed summers: grandparents in front of their home in Florida, parents at the lighthouse down the beach, my sister and me cheek to cheek in sea foam and violet, wedding veil behind my face.

For years now, I had been thinking about the differences between the worlds Dima and I were joining together. Suddenly, it seemed important to understand the ways these were exactly the same. The need for love, peace, joy; the desire to physically respond to the world; the pause that existed in quiet acceptance of life fringed with hope in a greater reason for it all—all of this, and more, we shared.

Three thousand Americans had died in Iraq, according to the Today Show this January morning. Three to four U.S. soldiers were killed in roadside bombings daily. Over forty thousand troops had been injured, and the fifteen brigades of American troops currently in Iraq were to be maintained through 2010. I wondered about these American families. About the children the soldiers left behind to go fight. I wondered what would ever be strong enough to take me from my son—or my son from me.

I feared with all my heart that he might someday go to war.

I inhaled the aroma of coffee, sensing a brittle joy. Television, photographs, the silver faucet reflecting my face like a fun-house mirror—all were distortions. My life, my days with a toddler, these were mine only in the moment at hand. And though I hoped to teach my son love, to show him love, so often my eyes were half closed, my mind abuzz with nonsense. My hands could press too tightly on his thighs when he wiggled against a diaper change. My tone could be too sharp—to his Daddy, to him. My “shit” was his word, too. My impatience and quick temper pressed upon him just as my mother’s slipper had stung my bottom. Too often I was aggressively fighting to control my son and husband, as my husband—perhaps one day my son—would fight to control me.

That night for dinner, I made pecan and garlic couscous, chicken patties and mixed vegetables. Dima stretched his long body toward the ceiling, a small potbelly puffing over his belt. Viktor climbed into my lap with a sippy-cup of milk.

“Michael Savage had a great show,” Dima said, crumbling into a kitchen chair. “He was talking about the war in Iraq and how it’s a battleground for everyone who’s against the U.S. What people in this country—”

“It’s your country, too,” I corrected him.

“Anyway, what people don’t understand is that we’re not just fighting Iraqis. Iran’s behind everything.” I stared ahead at the night falling through the window. Viktor crossed his ankles just like his father had. I felt our son’s glassy eyes drink my face.

“Lea, Americans don’t want to admit the size of this war.”

I didn’t want to. Who knew the real size of the war, anyway? Certainly the snippets shown on the local news were far from reality. A strange tingle in my stomach began as I thought of the slight glimmer in the dark eyes of the Iraqi boys. It seemed their pain was their joy, excitedly declared to Allah, and this felt sad and dangerous.

I feared my own sense of love and hate unnaturally blended. How had we become so blind as to reject one another in the name of love and faith?

“I think it’s more than that,” I said, losing my appetite.

Dima tucked Viktor and me into bed and drifted to the basement for a round of shoot-em-up videogames.

“Maybe it’s not the best pastime, but it’s how I unwind,” he argued when I stomped into the family room and turned down the volume. “It’s how I practice strategic thinking.”

I looked at the chess board.

“I know it’s a little more violent,” he grinned.

Sometimes I sensed that life was coming and going, like a shadow. I wondered where I was when I opened my eyes in the middle of the night and our bedroom, the color of cherries in daylight, appeared blood-red in the light of the moon. Sometimes, deep inside of me, nascent love and hope warred with hate and despair—for so many things, and for no thing at all. For my child and my husband, for my mother and father and sister, for Dima’s family so far away—for the whole world that I could feel within the tiny bubble of my heart. I longed for something beyond a word.

It was another predawn, the air unseasonably warm. The moon was full. I breathed the morning deep into my lungs, calmed. Stars like sugar crystals pressed the sky. Milky clouds washed unevenly across the night sky.

Walking past familiar bungalows and postage-stamp lawns, dark turned indigo. Bare branches scratched the sky, the promise of green hidden inside their limbs. An owl sounded in the distance. Day stirred pale orange, hiding the stars. I opened my mouth, cool air in, hot breath out. I blew into the morning to see my breath freeze as the stars slowly disappeared into the light of day.