Laura Kasischke: Mind of Winter

And speaking of the dust! My God, it was everywhere. It was Holly’s exhaustion. It was floating and impossible, still bearing cat fur in it after all these years without the cat, as well as strands of Tatiana’s long black hair. When Holly complained about the dust, Eric claimed he didn’t see it, that he had no idea what she was talking about, but that if it bothered her that much she should hire a housekeeper again.

And yes, she could have hired a housekeeper again, but she’d never even found the energy to do that, not after the last one, and her accident on the back steps, slipping on ice while taking out a bag of garbage. And even before that, her allergies, her rashes, and Holly’s guilt at paying another woman, a poorer woman, a Spanish-speaking woman, to do this intimate work for her that she should have been perfectly able to do for herself.

Dust, exhaustion, it was in the air:

Something had followed them home from Russia.

Repeat it, Holly thought. It is a refrain. As in a poem. Write it down. Write down the way some shadow face is finally peering around a corner on this Christmas morning (they’d slept so late) and shown itself.

Something that was here all along. Inside the house. Inside themselves . It had followed them all the way home from Russia.

BUT NOT THE baby! Not Baby Tatty! Of course not the baby . They’d brought the baby Tatiana home from Russia. She was no follower, no revenant, no curse from another country.

No. Of course not Baby Tatty wrapped in her Ratty Blankie. Not Tatty the Beauty. Gorgeous Russian dancer, howler monkey, sweetheart, wanderer, love of their lives. Not Tatiana.

No. Some Thing. And the only thing it had in common with their daughter was that it came back with them from Russia.

Holly was still simply trying to wake up, imagining a pen in her hand, writing it down… How late was it? Ten o’clock?! Why was she still asleep, or asleep again, on Christmas morning? She patted the place beside her for Eric. Please, God , she thought, let him be gone . Let him be gone so I can have a few moments alone to write. She’d almost managed to open her leaden eyes. Please, God, let Eric have taken Tatty with him to the airport to pick up his parents. Please give me half an hour to write it down, to make sense of it, to look at this thing. Otherwise she would forget it, she knew, and then she would never know it, this thing she knew. It would never be a completed thought, let alone a poem, this thing that—

That had broken three of her mother’s iridescent water glasses! And scratched every one of their CDs, as if with a penknife. Left them unplayable. Unreplaced. Not even downloaded onto iTunes yet (but would they ever have gotten around to that ?). The Water Music. The Four Seasons. The Patti Smith. Even the Beatles. Had Holly even heard those Beatles songs since then? Even on the radio of a passing car? It was as if those songs (“Norwegian Wood,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand”) had never been written, or played.

And the cat. The horror of that. And before that, the hen, their favorite. How the other chickens had turned on her. Not even pecked her to death, but just pecked her so close to death that she was only a forgotten brokenness, left behind them, as they went on with lives.

And the notebook full of poems snatched with her purse from the coffee shop, and her laptop full of poems from the hotel in California—from the safe.

And the housekeeper, Concordia, whom Tatty had loved, but who’d suffered from allergies and rashes she’d never before had when she began housekeeping for them, and then twisted her ankle on ice on the back steps (taking out their garbage, full of plastic bottles Holly should have recycled) and never come back.

And, my God, Holly had almost forgotten the daughter of her coworker Kay—a twenty-two-year-old hit by a car while crossing the street with the light at a crosswalk on a perfectly sunny day. How irrationally and completely Holly had felt that she herself should take some blame for that. After all, Holly had never liked Kay, and the day before the accident Holly had slapped an employee handbook onto Kay’s desk and told her to read it (she’d been so sick of Kay’s tardiness, her long lunches, her personal phone calls, but what difference did any of that really make?) and that night Kay had gone home with the handbook, in tears, and (who knew?) maybe she’d told her daughter that she was having trouble at work, maybe the daughter had been hurrying across the street the next day, worrying about her mother, and hadn’t looked both ways?

“That’s insane,” Eric had said to Holly. “If the universe works that way, it means that you yourself are God. I thought you were the atheist, the one who had no superstitions.”

But what if it hadn’t been insane? What if they’d brought something back with them from Russia? Something malevolent. Or something desperate to return to its origins? Maybe it wanted to go back!

Hadn’t one of the nurses in Russia warned them? Tried to warn them? That one with the drooping eyelid and the hair like a Renaissance princess, all down her side in a braid made of gold, seeming slicked with oil.

Had her name been Theodota?

She’d been the one who’d worn some strange thing in a bubble of glass pinned above her breast. It was a dried rose, she’d told Holly, that had been touched to the tomb of some saint—the patron saint of stomach ailments, one of which had plagued Theodota most of her life. The thing in the bubble had looked, to Holly, like some kind of tumor, something shriveled and internal, and she’d complained bitterly to Eric about the religious mania of the Siberian nurses. Weren’t they supposed to be done with religion in this godforsaken place?

“No. That’s us,” he said. “You’re confusing Russians with Americans. Americans are the ones who’ve forsaken God. The Russians have found Him again.”

He’d always defended religion, hadn’t he? Although he himself attended no church, prayed to no god. It was a way of defending his parents, she supposed, whom he always felt she was criticizing whenever she criticized religion or old-fashioned values or pickled foods.

Had it been in Siberia that the thing on Eric’s fist had begun to sprout, to grow just under the skin? Holly had a vague memory of one of those nurses, perhaps Theodota herself, at the Pokrovka Orphanage #2 taking a long look at his hand, shaking her head, trying to communicate something to him by speaking slowly and carefully in Russian, not a word of which Eric or Holly understood.

About Tatiana, Theodota had said, “No. Don’t name her Russian. Name her American. Or she’ll be back.”

The nurses had called her Sally. They had explained to Eric and Holly, “We give her American name so that in her life and in her death she will not be restless in America, try to return to Russia.”

“But we want her to be proud of her Russian origins,” Holly had tried, in turn, to explain, not sure if any of her English was being understood. “We want to call her Tatiana because it is a beautiful Russian name for a beautiful little Russian girl.”

The nurse had scowled and shaken her head vehemently. “ Nyet, nyet, no,” she said. “Sally. Or”—here she softened, as though sensing that they might be able to compromise—“you name her Bonnie. Bonnie and Clyde, no?”

Holly had been smiling, but she was having a hard time keeping the spirit light. She said, “No. Tatiana.”

“No,” the nurse had said right back to her.

“Oh my God,” Holly had said, later, to Eric. “What is wrong with these people?”

Even Eric, at that point, had regained his sense of humor enough to shake his head in disbelief at the superstitions of these people in Siberia.