Lidia Yuknavitch - The Small Backs of Children

When I open my eyes she is back in a chair in the corner, sitting like a beautiful and quiet bird. Taking film from the camera. As if it was all the camera.

She never speaks to me that way again.

This is the only night between us like this.

After the poet has slept the sleep of crossing countries.

After she has moved through the rooms and faces, the déjà vu and pulse, the light and shadow of Prague — the mother of cities — and entered its black-and-blue night.

After she has taken the performance artist — spoiled brat — to the apartment of a Russian washed-up gymnast turned sculptor — dearest friend — who will take the young woman in for as long as it takes. An apartment shared with a post-op Czech transsexual. Overlooking the river Neva.

After she has dined with her friend the poet journalist from Krasny 100 % . They talk the talk of outsider writers. The poet is warm in her chest.

After she has gotten drunk with the poet journalist and his friends — a collage artist and his contortionist cousin — after she has witnessed the sexual excess of all of them together in a five-star hotel room, the impossible bend and lurch of the cousin’s body, her eating herself, her howl still animal in her head. How travel loosens sexuality until it hops like a parasite from host to host, feeding, always feeding.

After she has made her way into the further night of this city — walking with sex smeared against her pants and thighs, and alcohol still blurring her vision and the taste of blood, cum, and ecstasy still tangy on her tongue — this city haunted by its own past, the ever-lit-up Crystal Palace with its winding bulbs and sword spires, the opulent squares and palaces seemingly divorced from modernity, the pieces of land fondled by the finger of the Neva River, kissed by the tides of the Baltic Sea. City of waters. Canals. Rivers. Lakes. Floating city. City of a night sky reflected in waters. City of lost names: Petrograd. Leningrad. City of revolutions: Decembrist. February. October. Bolshevik. Lenin’s Great Terror. Stalin’s Red Purge. City of Dostoyevsky. Akhmatova. The Stray Dog Café. Pushkin. Gogol. Tchaikovsky. Shostakovich. Nabokov. City of white nights. City of the stone of tsars carved through with animals and poverty and piss-stained alleyways. City of women trafficked like fruit. City of locally grown poppies and the sweet stench of Black. City of child junkies. City of gypsies. City of porn with the thick-tongued accents of Soviet-era fantasies. City of war and sexuality. City of domination and submission.

City of the Tambov Gang.

She has not come here for the Summer Literary Seminars. Not this time.

Greshniki. The Sinners Club. A gay club styled as an old mansion taking up four floors. The motto of the club: “We’re all sinners. We’re all equal.” So many rooms: a dance floor with mirrors, a balcony, a restaurant, a video Internet bar with free wireless access, and a “dark room.” Young naked men dance all night on the stage, their flex and thick getting under the skin. Her sitting at a table.

This is where she is to meet the man from the Tambov Gang. When he walks up she is writing a poem.

I’ve weaved my way to stand

between two seated, manly queens

dressed down in thin denim.

The boy on stage, sexual

and sure, enters his finale.

I’m drunk. I’ve never felt

such love in any room.

I join the thick applause,

cry and lurch a little, ignore

a hissed sit down! sit down!

and pursed lips from the drink

I’ve spilled with a light hip-check,

launch more hoarse cheers,

monstrous American daughter

with real tits, tears without salt,

snotty air-whistles, a real cunt.

When the man from the Tambov Gang touches her arm, she looks up and she is startled by his exquisite androgyny. It takes her American breath away.

“You will drink, then?” His voice a masterpiece of Slavic history.

“Yes,” she offers, letting her hands go slack on the tabletop.

He looks to the bar, snaps his fingers, and sits.

The music’s beat massages the soles of her feet, the chairs. She can feel it in her palms on the table.

“Do you have a light?” He leans toward her with a brown cigarette.

The poet commits chivalry. Pulls the silver lighter from her leather jacket pocket. Lights the cigarette. Smiles at his smile curling under the veil of smoke. He is wearing gray sleeveless mesh. His arms are. . written. Tattooed in a language she sees as beautiful skin symbols. He looks at the stage. Laughs deeply. Then throws his beautiful head back into a deeper laugh, his blond sculpted hair like oiled wood shavings, his lips full and wet, his neck smooth and exposed. He turns back to her.

“It is good like vodka, yes? It is like holding something very good in your mouth, before you swallow, these boys. .” He laughs again. “. . these beautiful boys.”

The poet examines the thinness of his skin. She thinks perhaps she can see the veins gleaming. The skin of Russians and Baltic peoples — so white it carries other colors. Blue. Green.

Four vodkas arrive. In shot glasses. No ice. As they do here. He says, “We drink Zyr first. It is not perfect, but it is not American either, yes?” Laughing, he drinks the shot in a single gulp, and she follows, holding the cold in her mouth, letting her teeth take it. They eat little crackers immediately. In the way of this part of the world. “Again?” They kill the next two. He laughs. He looks at her — around the whole of her, his eyes outlining. Then he says, “Next is coming the Jewel of Russia Classic. . you will not be able to stand it.” He smokes the cigarette and the music thuds up through their spines and the boys move and move and she wants more and more.

They drink four shots of the Jewel of Russia before he says, “We talk now?” But another four vodkas have arrived, and he holds his hand up with something like the power of history. “No. We drink. This. This is something the world did not expect.” He holds his glass to hers and taps it. The sound coming from his mouth: za ná-shoo dróo-zhboo . He has made a toast. They drink.

In the poet’s mouth the vodka becomes a poem: a slight oiliness. A hint of apple. Faintly sweet. And the burn. Pleasing. She closes her eyes and lingers there. She opens her eyes and mouth and says, “What is this?”

“Chopin. Isn’t that simple? Distilled from potatoes, of course. Stubborn Poles. But what they have done to us all! The irony.” And his laugh fills the space around them like a cave swallowing a body whole.

“Now. We talk. Yes?”

“Yes.” The word emerging from her lips like something she can taste.

He puts his cigarette in an ashtray, crosses his arms over his chest and leans back a bit in his chair, lifting his chin up, looking down on her, but not with malice. “I have a question for you. Why do you seek this girl? This girl is unknown to you, yes? Is it a little pet that you want? Or will she be. . a commodity, perhaps?” He smiles, barely.

“Nothing like that. We just want to get her out. I can’t explain.” The words sound impotent even to her.

“I see. Just another American taking the world’s children from harm to safety. What a wondrous benevolence. Just like your American movie stars, yes? The power of American. . love.” He picks the cigarette back up, takes a graceful drag, and blows a smoke ring upward. She stares at its slow, blue ascension. “And money!” His laugh thunderous. “You know, you do not look what I expected.”