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Excerpts, Bombardirovka
Jada Perlmutter, Labor Day, 2005
The sun just peeks over Roosevelt Island. Refreshing to look down from my apartment window for once on a Monday and not see traffic backed up the Eastside Highway. Labor Day. Have to love it. At least one more day of freedom before I’m back to my classroom, dissecting decimals, mooshing out multiplication.
Holding both crutches in one hand, I fold the futon back to reset the couch. I brush a crumb from the woven mat, slide to the floor by easing down the crutch-legs, then launch into my full usual routine of exercises: light weights for arms, crunches for my abdomen, light stretches for my one hip; I turn over and do kneeling push-ups.
From the physical exercises I prepare for the mental ones. I light the white, unscented candle on the end table. I haven’t been able to handle a lot of perfumes since the anesthesia and medicines. After the hemi-pelvectomy my immune system has remained weaker, my sense of smell more sensitive.
Using my fingertips, I scoot toward the couch and prop my favorite pillow behind my lower back. I close my eyes, envision a life free of physical pain, free of phantom pain; I plan my goals just for the day [today = breakfast, planning curriculum, cooking an early dinner by myself; I will do these successfully, free of pain, free of phantom pain, and have energy left for socializing late into the evening with friends]; I see myself that day on crutches, moving smoothly on the New York streets around pedestrians, angling myself correctly around fire hydrants, hopping with ease onto buses, bending adeptly into cabs.
I end my morning exercises [I go through a longer set at night. To sleep without pain, to try to sleep without nightmares] by massaging my lump through the folded-over pant leg. There isn't enough left of my pelvis to have a stump, so I call it my “lump.” Often colder than the rest of my body, I wrap it in a blanket.
After the lump is good and warm, I pull my prosthesis over. My prosthetist Waleed did a great job. Thank God, this one is more comfortable, although I'd become attached to the last one. Waleed laughed when I'd commented that no matter what, it's never easy to lose a leg.
I unfold the straps on the corset, but when I unwrap my lump a pain shoots down the leg-that-isn't-there, taking my breath. I sit upright and fight. The ghost is not going to ruin my day. I slide out of my pants and shove my prosthesis against the strange empty scoop next to my vagina. I run my hand along the scar from removing my womb and ovaries. Doctors removed them a couple of years ago when my womb started to fall from lack of support underneath. It took a long time to get over that. I mean, I couldn't have supported a baby with half a pelvis anyway, but I knew that.
Because I have found other things to love. That's what you do. Find other things. Other ways to fill time on this earth.
I slip the corset around my waist and fuss with the new Velcro straps.
Alabaster, Waleed joked. A limb of ivory, eh, beautiful? A master sculptor, kind, an Algerian, hairy and smiling and flattering with gold rings and eyes the green of a preying mantis. Eh, something dazzling, eh, precious? A limb of jewels. Something spectacular, a bedecked and wondrous ornament. Not that he hadn't even matched the dimple in my knee with perfection, but... Together we decorated my new leg, setting into the "flesh-toned" covering a mosaic of multicolored rhinestones and sequins and tattoo designs in acrylic. Then we pulled my new appendage over the light, metal frame.
I fasten the straps around my waist, strap an electronic impulse to my side. Then I pull myself to the futon, slide backward, grab a crutch and push myself to standing.
I hobble 'cause that is what I do quite visibly and awkwardly. I “walk” closer to the fireplace, to look again at what Alya had sent me that spring, before I went back, before I went again to Armenia, to Nagorno-Karabakh:
The painting from our Lyosha. Four feet by three. In it I am fourteen years younger. My hair hangs past my shoulders in waves. Lyosha painted onto me an electric red bikini. He'd once asked me my favorite flower; he'd never heard of a tiger lily. I'd described the bends, the points, the long stems, the petals—orange with black dots. In the painting, tiger lilies creep up my leg. They aren’t really what tiger lilies look like, but in the same way a prosthetic is not what a leg looks like, either.
Bombardirovka, Chapter 1, Excerpt, pages 6 - 8
That afternoon near Red Square a press conference was happening, the most logical place to start a story. Politics. Politics and logic. Maybe protestors already chanted. But not I, not me, I walked in the direction opposite, into the wind dampening with the smell of coming snow.
I turned. In the row along the narrower walkway, a matushka squatting on a stool patted her cheeks, sighed an “ah” of relief. The tchotchkes on her table drew me. Through my glove, I fingered a bright and shiny speckled box resting on faded black velour. The box’s painted-flower top glistened red and white and clear and bronze, freckled and fluorescent. Letting loose with the ends of my fingers, I picked up a heavy and wide metallic bracelet. Some sort of writing wrestled along the side.
“What language is this?” I asked, jump-starting my Russian for the first time that day.
“Armenian,” the round-eyed thick-glasses-wearing, pear-shaped, be-shapka-ed hawker answered, not looking up from her thin pamphlet of word puzzles.
“What’s it say?”
The hawker filled in a letter, sighed. “A prayer. A prayer. It’s a prayer.” She squinted at the paper. I didn’t pray. I was not a pray-er.
Relief raised along the metal struck me as broken, repetitive, too hard for anyone’s everyday use. Rubbing my gloved finger along the words, winding again and again the same bends and curves, I asked, “What’s the prayer?”
The woman looked up, then back down, “Hope, faith, love.” She scratched with a small pencil in her book as she spoke. Pausing, she wrote, then glanced again at the metal in my hands. “You want it?” she added, her voice flat, low.
“Which word says ‘hope’?” My mouth popped out the words in staccato.
“Does it really matter?” Her voice dropped.
The broken lines and curving figures hooked like crooked fingers. “Then how do you know,” I pointed at a random group of letters, “That says ‘love.’”
I was successfully being a pain.
“Here, let me see,” she sighed again, nodded. Fumbling through a ratty handbag, the hawker withdrew a magnifying glass, stacked its thick bottle before her right eye. “This one,” she pointed at an upside-down horseshoe next to a half-cross followed by a p-shaped squiggle.
“What’s the word in Armenian?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “What’s the difference? Hope, faith, love—all the same really—”
“Which word?” I pointed at the bracelet. The woman’s jaw flexed.
Pointing to a shape that seemed to start with two different u’s,’ “s-ehr,” she pressed air through her teeth, a hard ‘s’ with a trilled ‘r’ rolling. She dropped the magnifying glass back into her bag and the bracelet back onto the velour.
Retrieving the band, I fingered the word she spit. “How much?” I asked.
“Fifteen dollars.”
“Three,” I countered. “Yep,” I could also play games. “Only worth three for love.”
I succeeded! The hawker choked a laugh. “Maybe true... but unlike other loves, this love is permanent.” She one-upped, her grin missing teeth, bearing out one tooth of shiny gold. “Three for love, three for hope, three for faith and just three for the translation—how about twelve?” she countered. “Devushka, it’s a steal! For a love that lasts!”
“I wouldn’t know the difference,” I said. “Lasting or not.”
“But aren’t you married? You’re the right age.”
“We don’t marry so young where I’m from.”
“Oh, you Estonians!”
I nodded, laughed to myself. Yes! Not an Amerikanka. She was fooled! Most Russians mistook my staccato accent for a Finnish or another type of Ugric speaker.
“And you? What are you?”
“I’m—” she swallowed. “It’s not important.”
“But you read Armenian?”
“I read several things,” she answered, her face sinking into the loose skin on her neck. Terrible of me to pry. Circumstances forced many to do what they’d never imagined.
I rubbed my fingers again on the relief, breathed the damp air deep into my lungs till they burned, then I told her the truth.
“I only have five dollars,” I said, and with that, disappointment robed her and she stood, smirking, opened her palm and reached across the table for the bracelet.
Jerking away, I glanced toward the Irish pub on up the street. A couple of cars slid toward each other on the road’s new ice and blared their horns. Faith, love. A moister, thin haze entered the atmosphere, softened the looks of the corners on the two-story buildings across the Arbat. Hope. T. was dead.
“Prayers don’t come cheap, devushka,” the woman said, her voice flat. The tone change worked, as if she’d wanted this, to make me even sadder. I hated her. I knew that any moment I would reach across the table and one, two, smack.
Away I turned, toward the thug-varsovshek who’d earlier caught my eye, but spite, spite! I tossed the metal at the table. “I see that,” I said.
She caught the band as it rolled.
“Go on,” she said, her face flushing. “Go! No need to act a fool!” A few hawkers looked up. She called behind, “Rich foreigner and she wants me to give things away! To hell with her!”
“To hell with you!” I returned, over my shoulder.
Sappy sad-sack.
I was crying. Light, but real. The Soviets would laugh—what would an American have to cry about?
Bombardirovka, Chapter 2, Excerpt, pages 26 - 30
But now Misha was here. Azerbaijan. Here, at her door. Would risk it again for all he felt just now. Alive like he hadn’t been. When had he ever been so alive? His skin prickled, electric. Electric. Here he was. He made it. Slow. Easy. Don’t scare her. Take time. Slow.
Misha looked up, scanned the garden, bent, took even, measured steps on top of old footprints in the snow, matched up old boot prints to the back door, always left unlocked in case he managed to come. He pushed the lever on the handle, opened, slipped inside. The love of his life, Zhanna, slept, her head toward the opposite wall. In the quiet, cold night, her breath purred. From the next room, Zhanna’s grandmother snored steady and long, with a whistle at the end. Misha didn’t know how Zhanna slept through the racket. He guessed it was maybe the way people would get used to sleeping through bombs. He pushed the door closed, lifted his weapon from around his body, and set the Kalashnikov in the corner. This moment, free, he stood, breathing in. For the first time in weeks he wasn’t wearing a gun. In the pocket near his heart, he patted the dead man’s ear, felt its stiffened cartilage through the cloth he’d wrapped it in. The man’s blue eyes. An ear.
He’d made it. Here he was.
He stood. What next?
Pests. Rid himself of pests.
Misha watched again, listened. Zhanna’s blankets were piled to her head, her fist by her face. Fist. Ready to fight. A fighter she was. Misha’s heart filled with fire. Her breath—purr, purr. He reached toward the middle of his chest for that now clear and burning space, and steadied his free hand there a moment, two fingers touching, like he’d seen in icons of Christ. As he calmed, he used the same palm to wipe at his face.
How, Misha, loved, her!
Did Zhanna dream of him as always he dreamed of—?
She said she did.
Oh, jealous, jealous love!
Misha straightened. Not much time, not much time. Near the door, over the newspaper left for this purpose, he unlaced and removed one mud-soaked boot. He dropped the Chechen’s ear inside, then took off the other shoe. Zhanna stirred but didn’t waken. She could sleep through a hurricane!
His senses returned. Here, in this room, there was no war. He could forget. Just forget.
Although the fire in the stove had gone out and the room was cold, Misha relished stripping down to his bare skin, taking off everything but the wooden cross around his neck. Out in the field and on duty, he hadn’t worn any other clothes for three weeks! After her grandmother fell asleep, Zhanna washed the undershirt and old Soviet army button-down he left, dried them in her room and hid them in the shoe cupboard under some rags. Misha pulled out an undershirt, sniffed the clean and smoky odor absorbed from the stove. He placed it near the basin, which he filled with cold water from the large jar Zhanna left for him, for this purpose, then leaned toward the wall, pulled a smaller jar from beneath the wash basin, unscrewed the lid, and inhaled to make sure he’d chosen right. He picked up a clean rag, and in light from the window, rubbed his body down with gasoline to kill off what lice or other bugs he could. Then from his pants pocket he pulled out his own comb, dipped the plastic teeth in the jar, and ran them through his beard a dozen times. He followed this “insecticide” with a hard soap mixed with ice water from the basin. From underneath the cupboard he withdrew a small box with his toothbrush and scrubbed at his teeth. And still Zhanna slept. Misha fought an urge to wake her. He wanted to be clean, in some way, as much as one could, during whatever this was, during a war. Plus, he had slipped away from his lookout post and come empty-handed. If he had no present to give her, the least he could do was make himself presentable. He would slip under the blankets, touch her, let her find him as if he had always been there.
To this day, to now, he could draw a line from five years ago, that first day, the first day when he ached to touch her. The first day of their last year in high school. In the town center, boys slouched on benches in Leninsky Square, called out in new-low voices to the newly shapely girls, their arms or hands linked, their long hair blowing in the coming autumn wind. Over the summer the kids in their class sprouted and filled like the overgrowing bushes, wild with mountain flowers in late, warm-weather abundance: the Karabakhtsi-Azeri boys and girls plumped while sitting in dachas high on the hill in Shushi, or in summer homes on the Caspian; the Karabakhtsi-Armenian boys and girls ripened while in dachas in villages near Vank, or on special trips to the Black Sea in Georgia, to Sokh- or Batumi.
Before that summer Zhanna just had been one more skinny girl that Misha ignored.
That morning had been cold, and finally, after a dry spell, dew began falling again in their mountains. Misha’s skin was sticky, damp with humidity, but the strange, too-early wind blew up hot, then cool. With his buddies, Misha also sat and watched the girls go by. The day before, he’d received a shorter than usual cut at the barber’s and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled; he fought urges to touch them. The girls stopped passing. It was time to go in. Walking to school, thoughts about the sort of job to get when he graduated later that year plagued him, though his parents desperately wanted him to go to institute; it was damn near impossible to think of disappointing them, but, even so, he stupidly looked forward to going directly to military service, to have a chance to see something other than their mountain town. Unlike those of his friends, his parents weren’t much for travel. Though his father was from Yerevan, he visited there only once every couple of years by himself by car. His father hated to fly, and the trip into Armenia was rough and rocky, and no train connected in, and their dad was a nervous type anyway. And he himself? In his own fifteen years, Misha hadn’t even been to Baku.
That first day of his last really good year: with his friends he lumbered into the building, kids still hanging all over the halls. The school was difficult, reserved for better students and for the children of party members and the elite, mostly Azeri and Russian officials. His parents had pulled strings to get him in. Happy, he shook hands with other friends, patted their backs.
Misha sensed more than a physical change in the boys next to him. Yes, voices buzzed deeper. Faces were hairier. Of course, guys talked more than they actually achieved, if they did anything at all, and this was as true among Azeris as it was among Armenians. But that morning, before their tenth and final grade in secondary school, Misha’s life shook, and it was a great coincidence, the kind that changes a life. Until then, like every boy in his grade, Misha madly loved Oksana, a doe-eyed, straw-haired pug-nosed Russian whose father oversaw governmental affairs in the region.
But that day, as he walked into his first class, literature, this Azeri girl, Zhanna, she looked up from the desk where she’d been scribbling, and for the first time Misha saw her eyes, smaller than those of most Armenian girls. He noticed for the first time that at their rims they were hazel, and inside, green. And more amazingly, they met his black ones. Live wires tapped together in his spine. Thick pincers grabbed his trachea. Her open mouth closed, her lips pressed together lightly. These candied almond eyes of hers shifted down. His friends slapped him on the shoulders to move along, get the hell out of the way. Misha stumbled to his seat, on the near side of the room, and an alphabet away from hers, and opened his own small writing notebook and scratched across the page, Ya tebya lublyu, “I love you.” And in writing it down, it was as if he always had. He thought he’d die until he could tell her.
But for them to be seen together, for him to tell his friends he was bothered and hot under the collar and in love with a Turkish girl, for her conservative brothers to find out she’d even considered him, looked in his direction! And later that day, in science class as they walked from experiment to experiment, he mustered the courage, slipped his note under her observation papers, and she’d known... and there, in the rich Karabakh soil, they planted seeds with words, slipping notes to each other, then letters disguised as Russian assignments, then full notebooks masked as examination dictations, in Russian of course, with names changed and love left unsigned.
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