Gita Nazareth - Forgiving Ararat

Tim believed Ott’s every word and longed for his chance at glory, but by the second day of waiting for the real combat to begin, boredom set in. Tim got into the habit of conducting hourly searches of the mushroom house with his flashlight, examining the walls and dirt floor to see if Sarah and I were tunneling an escape. He would end his inspection with a pat down search of my body, demanding that I lean with my face and arm against the wall and my legs spread wide. I still wore my black skirt and cream colored blouse from work, and the sweatshirt Ott had given me; my stockings disintegrated on the rough surface of the floor, and I had long since abandoned them. With each pat down, Tim would linger a little longer around my crotch and breasts, then call me a slut or whore and walk out. I made no reply, worried it would only agitate him further.

Late during our second night in the mushroom house, Tim performed his usual search but at the end walked up to where Sarah and I were huddled in our sleeping bag and yanked her away from me. I fought to hold onto her, but he hit me in the mouth with his elbow, knocking my head against the block wall, then carried Sarah to the opposite end of the building and plopped her down in a corner. She whimpered softly for a moment and then became quiet again. I tried to get on my feet to go after her, still dizzy from my head hitting the wall, but Tim slammed me back down onto the sleeping bag and in the dim yellow glow of the flashlight began tearing off my clothes. I screamed for Ott and tried kneeing Tim in the groin and scratching and biting him, but even with two good arms he would have easily overpowered me. He was a large man-I no longer thought of him as a kid-built strong and solid with a thick chest and arms. He slapped me across the face and told me to stop screaming, and when I continued, he started punching me over and over until blood spurted from my nose and mouth and I fainted. When I regained consciousness, he was on top of me. He had my panties off and my bra pulled up, and his pants were off.

Ott slept for two or three hours at a time during the night and had just awoken to make his rounds. He was outside relieving himself when he heard my muffled screams coming from the mushroom house. Still half asleep, he had left his gun behind. When he burst through the door and saw Tim writhing on top of me, he thought at first that he was dreaming the same nightmare that had terrorized him as a child, of seeing his mother being raped and his Aunt Bette being raped and beaten to death. To toughen up her son, Barratte Rabun had begun telling Ott at an early age about the terrible things the Russian soldiers had done in Kamenz, sparing him no detail in recounting the story and repeating it over and over, as if to inoculate him by the horror of it against those same impulses that she believed coursed through every man, even her own son. She would not stop until he started to cry, which indicated to her that the vaccine was working. Thus, growing up, Ott Bowles had no basis for distinguishing between sexual crimes and sexual relationships. Intercourse was, to him, the ultimate evil act, and this led him to fear girls and withdraw from them, and to believe his attraction to them was shameful and a sickness. He never had a girlfriend, and when his friends talked about having sex, he recoiled from them with loathing and disgust.

Tim looked over his shoulder and laughed when he saw Ott standing in the doorway. “She only screws Jew boys,” he said. “She thinks she likes them circumcised, but it’s time for her to find out what a real man is like. You wait your turn outside and we’ll see what she thinks. It won’t take long.”

Ott went wild. He charged Tim and kicked him in the head with his heavy boot as if he were knocking a humping dog off of a neighbor’s leg. Tim was stunned for a second, and then he reacted like the male of any species when another tries to take his mate. He roared up from the floor, unleashing on Ott all those years of training for combat and the frustration of waiting so long for the opportunity. He beat Ott mercilessly, slamming his panicked body against the racks and walls inside the mushroom house as if it were a doll. The violence became sexual for Tim, a continuation of the act he was determined to consummate with me.

I crawled over onto my knees to get Sarah and run, but then I saw Tim’s pants and holster piled in the corner. In his desire to destroy Ott Bowles with his bare hands, Tim had forgotten about his gun and me. My grandfather had taught me how to handle and fire guns on the farm; I knew how to chamber a bullet and remove the safety, although steadying the gun with one hand while firing was difficult for me and bullets often went astray. I found Tim’s gun, rose to my feet, and fired a shot into the dirt beside me. The sound was deafening and immediately stopped Tim and Ott from fighting. They both turned toward me, astonished, and then, as he did with his father in Ott’s museum in Buffalo, Tim lunged at me. I leaped back and squeezed the trigger three times into the darkness. Tim dropped face down onto the floor at my feet. His body heaved once and a pool of blood oozed out into the mushroom soil beneath his chest. His bare buttocks glistened with sweat in the flashlight, like Nero’s loins after kicking Poppaea to death.

I pointed the gun at Ott, shaking, my finger on the trigger, trying to summon the will to shoot him too. He just stood there, waiting, almost hoping, still in shock from the beating he had sustained and, now, seeing Tim killed. But I couldn’t do it. He had risked his life to stop Tim from raping me, and he had stopped Tim from shooting me when I tried to drive away; he spared Sarah’s life when he could have shot her through the window. Somehow, even though he had put us through all this, I felt sorry for Ott and didn’t want to hurt him.

“Why?” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Why? All this for what? For what?” I backed away toward Sarah with the gun still pointing at him.

Sarah had started crying when Ott and Tim started fighting, but she had become quiet after I fired the three shots at Tim. I fumbled around through the darkness at the opposite end of the mushroom house to find her; she was curled up on her side and very wet, as though she had been perspiring and peed through her diaper. I just wanted to take her back home to her daddy and the life we had made, where we would all be safe again. Cradling her and holding the gun with the same arm, I made my way back toward the door. I could see Ott the entire time, illuminated by the flashlight and the small amount of light from the nighttime sky. Ott watched passively, as though he had accepted the truce I offered and agreed that we were even; but when I stepped through the threshold, he moved toward us. I was ready for him and didn’t hesitate this time; I turned and fired the gun. A bullet struck him low, in the leg; he collapsed, writhing on the floor next to Tim. I watched him for a moment, deciding whether to shoot again, trembling; and then I realized Sarah wasn’t crying or moving even though I had just fired a gun close to her. I kneeled down to see her in the flashlight. Her clothes were soaked with blood and her tiny chest was ripped open. There was blood all over her beautiful cheeks and the creamy white perfection of her stomach. Her brown eyes were wide, staring out into nothing.

One of the three shots I fired at Tim Shelly had hit my baby, my Sarah.

I had killed my own daughter.

The skies open as if the bladder of space surrounding the earth has been punctured and an ocean of water falls from the heavens. I have never seen it rain so hard.

Through all this rain, Elymas and I scale the rock cliff of a shrinking island mountain, climbing higher and higher above a shoreline that only minutes earlier had been arid grassland and Mediterranean forest. The branches of olive, cypress, and pomegranate trees sway like seaweed fronds in the surf, collecting floating grasses, berries, wilted flower petals, pieces of dung, logs, pottery, and the distended carcasses of animals-the detritus of the earth over which these trees once reached toward the sun. And one might ask, what sun? For despite the noontime hour, only a hint of ultraviolet gloom passes onto the despairing planet below.