Such Small Hands Read online

  Suddenly Marina thinks: “I’m going to stop eating.”

  The hole made her feel sick even though the food smells good, even though the springy, golden omelet awaits.

  I’m going to stop eating.

  “Marina, aren’t you going to eat?”

  “No.”

  The adult’s voice: measured, reasonable.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “No.”

  The girl looks up at the adult slowly.

  She no longer wants to be like her, to look like her.

  Time passes and only her thought remains.

  The other girls finish eating and trickle out of the cafeteria. All through lunch Marina remained impassive, didn’t touch her food, and with each passing moment her prestige grew. A solemn prestige, a city within a city: Marina’s not eating. The news traveled through their skin, through the contact of their elbows at the table. Maybe in some remote past there existed another mythical heroine who once attempted what Marina is now attempting but didn’t make it. That sinister decision, sealed tight like an almond: I’m going to stop eating.

  When Marina is left alone she sees that from time to time an anonymous head appears, peeking through the crack in the window overlooking the playground, and she knows then that the mystery has been established.

  “Just have one spoonful of soup and your omelet.”

  “I don’t want any.”

  Sometimes two heads, impossible to recognize.

  They look in, and then immediately disappear. And that spying is the girls’ first real act of love for Marina. She savors it like a delicacy; now she has to be true to that act of love. Like always, like every act of love, there is something urgent and coercive about it, something that forces her to hold to the decision to defend the love she inspired. If that act were never-ending, infinitely drawn out, Marina would go through what lovers sometimes do: she would become a slave more to the act itself than to the driving force behind it; she would be trapped by the act, would see nothing but the act and be forced to repeat it obsessively.

  “Just three bites of omelet and the fruit.”

  “No.”

  “Aren’t you hungry, though?”

  “No.”

  The adult and the girl are not really talking, they’re whispering; the realization is fresh and they’re both still feeling a little faint.

  “Fine. Don’t eat. You’ll have dinner tonight. Go on, then. Go.”

  When she goes out to the playground the girls stop playing and turn toward her. Now that Marina has triumphed there is no reason to delay fear, or contact. Marina walks over to them and smiles. The girls, however, stand rooted in their solemnity.

  Marina didn’t eat dinner that night, didn’t have breakfast the next morning, either. At lunch she’d gone exactly one day without eating. Although the adults had grown increasingly insistent at each meal, Marina had not relented. And at each meal, she left the cafeteria a little later, a little more tired. Each victory was decisive. There was something majestic and tough in Marina’s pallor when she made her way from the cafeteria, a sort of ritual mask, a repository of strength the other girls found inconceivable. If the adults had all exited the orphanage at that moment and left them alone when Marina emerged, they might have knelt down right there on the playground and worshipped her.

  Her expression had changed, too; she looked more like a lynx now, like a cat. Her movements were feline, maybe because she was weak. Her steps were spaced out, but had a sort of nervous spring at the end that made her look tense, taut. Even her eyes seemed to have changed color. They looked both challenging and inscrutable, as if the battle were only being waged inside her, as if she were absolutely indifferent to everything going on around her.

  At recess on the day after Marina decided to stop eating, the girls were jumping rope on the other side of the playground. It was as if they’d caged her over in the opposite corner; they wanted her calm. And although she was, she’d never been as threatening as she was then. One of the girls broke away from the group and approached her timidly. She did it so slowly, her steps so apprehensive, that she didn’t realize she was trying to approach her until she was almost beside her already. Even if she didn’t pay any attention to her, she’d still be there, trying to get closer. What was her name? She still didn’t have it. Finally they looked at each other.

  “Come here,” Marina said.

  The girl stood expectantly, open, not knowing what to say. She came, fearful. The thought of being touched by that girl made Marina tremble. “Come here.”

  The girl came. If she’d reached out her hand, she could have touched her face.

  “We have to hide,” she told her.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to show you something.”

  The grass behind the fig tree was still damp from the rainfall the night before. It smelled of moist earth, of rot. Marina unbuttoned her shirt, pulled it down off of her shoulder. They sat down together on the damp earth. Nothing brings two people closer than being scared together. Her scar had faded, too, like a blemish. The stitches’ tiny indentations had disappeared almost entirely; now there was just a curved, raised bump running from her shoulder to her sternum. The dazzling seduction of the scar. It was still cold and cloudy out. The skin around the scar contracted in a fleeting spasm and the girl opened her mouth, as if she wanted to devour everything: the air, the feel of the fig tree, Marina’s arrogance, her own fear. It wasn’t the same scar she saw in the bathroom every day when they took their showers; this one was crying out to be touched, to be admired, nothing made it hide now.

  “I got this in the accident.”

  “Oh.”

  “And there was this white stuff you could see and it was my ribs. And then they picked me up by my shoulders and put me in an ambulance.”

  “Why aren’t you eating?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Now there was no refuge. The cold air took her breath away, made her hope wane. Marina didn’t want this conversation, she wanted to be touched but didn’t know how to communicate her desire.

  “Before you could see the stitches but now you can’t see them anymore.”

  The girl turned back to the scar again. Her gaze was lost in its abyss. Marina felt the weakness of her own blood; she hadn’t eaten in thirty hours and was lightheaded; she felt like she was going to fly. For a second the girl’s face turned white, bluish, like an overexposed photo. Was her face going to disappear, too?

  “Then the stitches disappeared and then it turned like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this, with no stitches, now you can only see the skin and the scar, like a little worm, like when you take a cloth and fold it over.”

  Marina scooted closer. So close she could almost feel her contact, the warmth of her body. She stared at her hands; the girl bit her fingernails. Some of them were dirty, as though she’d been digging in the dirt. She wanted that hand on her, wanted it to touch her. She wanted it like something impossible, like heaven itself was contained in that hand and she longed for it to swoop down onto her.

  “Before I never wanted anyone to touch me there because it gave me the chills, but now I do, and sometimes I touch it too and I can’t feel my skin, it’s like having a piece of paper on your skin and what you’re touching is just the paper.”

  She angled towards her more, feeling the girl withdraw, tense, brusque.

  “You can’t feel it?”

  “No. Well, only a little.”

  Desire passed through the girl, too. Like stagnant water that suddenly begins to drain, imperceptibly.

  And devotion mixed in with the desire.

  “Do you want to touch it?”

  “Yes.”

  But the girl didn’t react right away. After saying yes she sat still for a few moments, not moving. She looked up. Marina felt as if they were surrounded by people, as if the ground was full of heads, right there in front of them. They swayed all t
ogether now, an ocean of heads, of penetrating, unblinking eyes. It seemed they’d been there for a month, sitting there, just like that, unmoving.

  “Touch it.”

  The girl reached out her hand.

  “Touch it.”

  She felt like she was going to faint, she dreamed that her neck tensed and her head shot up. Her neck was elastic; her head stretched up, above the fig tree, above the house, the statue. Her jaw contracted, her tongue stuck out.

  “Why are you sticking out your tongue?”

  Her arms jerked. She tried to get up but her head was so heavy it felt like there was a weight on top of it. Now she’d have that weight pressing down on her forever, that weight that made her head wag back and forth, made heat surge up her back and then turn freezing cold; she dropped to her side, feeling the damp pleasure of the ground, of her own exhaustion.

  “Touch me,” she whispered.

  But the girl ran away. She heard her steps grow fainter as she rushed off across the playground, and a moment later the sound was barely audible. The voices of the other girls playing still echoed off in the distance, but their song was no longer the one they sang to the rhythm of the jump rope, it accelerated like a crazy dance, their voices shriller, more piercing, almost inhuman. She lost consciousness.

  The adult panicked when she saw her there beside the fig tree, skirt hiked up to her waist, shirt unbuttoned, legs splayed. She looked as if she’d been rattled back and forth for hours and then dropped, a beautiful disjointed dance step frozen in time, isolated in space; an impossible, infantile, scandalous-yet-spirited dance step, a dance step of unimaginable strength for a body so small. She was kneeling, face to the ground, her skirt folded up above her slender legs. Her toes pointed in, like a baby, so defeated, so devoid of humanity that the adult felt a wave of repulsion.

  The two adults carried her to the infirmary like a bride with a train of silent girls trailing behind. They put her to bed and covered her up. The doctor diagnosed a slight case of anemia and told them she had to be fed immediately.

  PART THREE

  EVERYTHING WAS DIFFERENT at the zoo. It all started at the zoo: the smell of the zoo, the nervous excitability as we stepped off the minibus.

  All that was new: the zoo. All that was violent: the zoo.

  And the idea that the whole world is contained in one fang, and that that fang can be seen in its mouth, and it’s white, and made to sink into flesh, and that the wolf, who is bad in real life, looks good when he’s in his cage. Then you sense how they were made for each other, the wolf and the cage, how the wolf has been tamed and his fur has turned yellow in the shade, how the forest is contained in his eyes. We were allowed to put our hand almost up to the railing, so we’d be scared and say:

  “What if there were no bars? Can you imagine?”

  The wolf seemed hear us, to understand our words; it raised its snout and gave us a look full of saliva and wanted to pounce on us.

  And the elephants? And the rhinoceroses? And the seals? No, the seals were predictable and silly, nosing the ball around and getting rewarded with little fish; but the elephant was tired of its peanuts and had thick skin, and we had to shout at it for it to even turn and notice us. Then it looked up, exhausted, and drank listlessly from a dirty trough, lumbering heavily, as if each movement were bothersome, each step a tremendous effort, a fight it never won; and we pitied the elephant more than the seal, because it was bigger, and sadder, and more like us.

  Marina was uneasy. She had been all morning, since we got up and took our showers. Then, at the peacocks, she stood there transfixed. We were near her and could sense her uneasiness. But at the same time it was as if her uneasiness transformed her, made her radiant and luminous.

  “What are you looking at, Marina?”

  “The peacocks. They’re so pretty, the peacocks.”

  “They are.”

  “They’re pretty but they’re not, the way they look around like that, with a thousand eyes on their tails.”

  Inexplicably, we all edged closer, without meaning to. An inevitable attraction made us crave contact with her, seek out her voice, yearn for her to look at us. We no longer cared about the animals, or felt scared of the wolf, or sorry for the elephant, or admired the glimmering grace of the dolphins; we wanted Marina’s contact, and we didn’t know how to cast ourselves into that desert.

  We wanted to ask, “Where are you, Marina?”

  And yet she was right there beside us, overflowing, gazing at the peacocks; we knew she was going to speak to us, and we longed for her word. If she’d said, “Surrender now; throw yourselves to the wolf,” we would have done it. If she’d said, “Jump on that peacock and kill it,” we’d have done that, too.

  “Tonight we’re going to play a game,” she said.

  “What game, Marina?”

  “Just a game I know.”

  “How do you play?”

  “I’ll tell you tonight.”

  “Can’t you tell us now?”

  “No. Tonight.”

  So the rest of the trip was tinged with the anxiety of the wait. The wait was essential. And at lunch we watched them feed the tigers and saw that they, too, were anxious when one man entered from one side while another one distracted them from the other and put down enormous slabs of raw meat for them. Behind the cage, as the man was leaving, something cracked, and the tigers fell instantly upon the meat. There were three of them. They coiled around like ivy, their backbones coming together at a single lump of flesh and fury so that they resembled a make-believe, three-headed creature, devouring the meat. Their snouts covered in blood. They had told us tigers were beautiful; they lied to us.

  On the bus back we tried to sing songs, but we couldn’t stop picturing the tigers’ snouts, the wolf’s fangs, the elephant’s smell, the dolphin’s plasticky skin, the monkey’s neglect, wanting to be human and not succeeding.

  Minne Minnehaha went to see her Papa,

  Papa died, Minne cried,

  Minne had a newborn baby,

  Stuck it in the bathtub to see if it could swim.

  “How does the game go, Marina?”

  “I’ll tell you tonight.”

  It was night now. We were in bed; the lights had been turned out. With the lights out we all looked surprisingly alike. The game hung over us before we began. Anxious for the game. A secret told twenty times under the covers, fingers crossed: the mystery of the game and the joy of the game as we waited, arms crossed, holding our breath.

  “Everybody come here.”

  “Where, Marina?”

  “Here, to my bed.”

  How did our desire begin? We don’t know. Everything was silent in our desire, like acrobats in motion, like tightrope walkers. Desire was a big knife and we were the handle. And nothing happened, really. Night happened, just as the zoo had happened. In the dark, gathered around Marina’s bed, we could see the zoo better than during the day; we saw that what we had felt watching the wolf was bottomless and unfathomable, and that we would never understand it, not then, not the next day, not in a year.

  She’d never been so distant as she was then, so absent. At the zoo, it was not too late to have said, “We know who you are, Marina; we know your father died in the accident and your mother in the hospital. We know you’re sad and we know you love us.”

  But at that moment we had to decide who Marina was to us. The one who invited us to her bed. Our hands and feet were cold. But she was still hot, as if she’d been locked up in the infirmary with just-baked bricks for a long time and was now giving off their stored heat. “The game is easy, and it lasts for days, because every day a different one of us is the game and every day it’s different.”

  The room was still dark but we could hear her voice, boundless as the horizon. We know now, that we were brave that night, but we didn’t know it then. We know now, too, that we didn’t have to go to her, didn’t have to get out of our beds, didn’t have to feel the cold of the floor tiles, that it would have been
easy to take her violence and her magnetism in our hand and crush it. And yet we went.

  “It’s easy,” she repeated. Then she picked up her pillow to reveal blush, eyeliner, lipstick. “Each night, one of you is the doll. I put on her makeup, and she’s the doll. And the rest of us look at her and play with her. She’ll be a good dolly, and we’ll be good to her.”

  “Where did you get that, Marina?”

  “In the infirmary. The teacher left her purse there and I took it.”

  Finally someone turned on a light and we saw the expression on her face.

  A tiny light, hidden under the sheets so we wouldn’t get caught. We’re supposed to forget everything, forget it all, pretend it never existed, but the way Marina looked when she taught us the game, that’s something we have to hold on to: a cherished object.

  “The doll has to be quiet; she’s not allowed to talk. And she has to be very pale and sweet and wear this dress. She’s like us, but in doll version; she can’t live without us.”

  The differences between them diminished: from now on they were doll necks, doll hands, doll eyes and lips.

  “Every night we’ll all get to play with the doll and kiss her and tell her secrets. And she’ll just look at us and listen to us, because she loves us, and we love her, too.”

  Suddenly she was spent, clammy. She struggled to speak, as if the idea of the game overwhelmed her.

  “And every night when we go to sleep, we won’t go to sleep. We’ll dress the doll in the doll dress and put makeup on her and play with her. That’s the way it’s going to be.”

  That’s the way it had to be.