Kathleen Spivack - Unspeakable Things

Herbert ushered his family out into the breaking day. Maria sighed, lavish with the music she still heard. The family clasped the music to them as Adeline did her little foxes. They wrapped their coats, their music around them. The wind beat against David as he tightened his coat around his neck and, with his free hand, held Ilse against him. Neither of them spoke. Ilse carried Philip, and Maria clung to the hem of her coat. Herbert and Adeline walked together thoughtfully.

Maria heard the silver strains of the music as she walked, half-asleep. In counterpoint against it, jazzy, optimistic, came another sound. Morning in New York: another song.

“Come, children,” Ilse said briskly. “Look, we’ve been up all night.” The children tried to clear their eyes.

“Remember this.” Herbert sighed. “You will not hear a concert like this again.”

At home, a supper — now a breakfast — had been laid out in the little room. All was waiting for the family, the Quartet, and the audience known to Herbert and Adeline. They would host their friends, drink and talk into the full bloom of day.

Walking homeward, Ilse and David thought exhaustedly of their couch, and their desire to be quiet together, to sleep. “Father has so many friends,” David said, sighing, resigned, when the celebration had only been in the planning stages.

“We do this for your parents,” Ilse reminded him. “It is our farewell to the city of New York.” She looked at David tenderly. “Soon we shall have our own room together. Be patient, my darling.”

“Herr Hofrat!” The Tolstoi Quartet, flushed and shining and out of breath, caught up with the little family just as they entered the foyer of the apartment building.

Far away, in a turquoise and fuchsia land of palm trees and jungles and dust, the homunculus that had once been Anna, the little Rat, stirred uneasily, enclosed in a jar. And the fingerprints of Rasputin blazed, dancing once more to music sensed rather than heard. The marks on her body flickered out forever.

Felix, ensconced in an underground laboratory, happily engaged in holding her jar up to light, found himself humming. He whistled, recognizing it was Mozart he was whistling. “Beautiful, eh, Schatzie?” he said as the dog wagged her behind, happy that her master was in such a good mood. Felix squinted once again at the jar. “It was a good trade, was it not, my darling?”

“Maria, hurry up. We haven’t got all day.” So saying, Ilse left her daughter at the door to the now-denuded room. She had so much to do. She stood for a moment, uncertainly, then changed her mind again. Philip was with her parents-in-law at the zoo, so at least they were happily occupied. Perhaps if she hurried, she might have some time to organize the little house a bit before they all came back from their day.

“I’ll be back for you in a little while. Just wait here. Be a good girl.”

It was moving day.

Room. Doom. Gloom. These new American words clanged together in Maria’s head as she stepped, for the last time, across the crumbling threshold into what had been the entire world just a few hours before.

Now the room held only vacancy. Its secrets blew across the floor, and the graying curtains fluttered listlessly. The clothesline, which had supported the blanket dividing Maria’s little section from that of her grandfather, still delineated a space, but the space was open. The room was dirty, she saw. The cold-water faucet in the sink dripped, a worn brown track wending its way toward the drain. Gone was the small hot plate upon which Anna had prepared the morning tea. The sooty windowsill, which had held the family’s milk and cheese, was an empty slab of stone. Out in the hall, the toilet gurgled horribly.

Maria shivered, alone in the desolate room. Her body felt hollow, shabby. She had grown, even though she had not wanted to. Her dress was again too short; her knees stuck out from the frayed hem. Washed forever, thin with the washing of it, the dress, made by Ilse, candy-striped and gay as an American girl was supposed to be, hung in listless folds about her body. Her long hair was limp, too, exhausted from brushing against her body. She rubbed her eyes. Her chest ached.

“I am leaving home,” Maria told herself. Leaving home. Nothing, not her mother’s bright false optimism, not the teasing love of her father, could cheer her up. She and Philip were nothing, she saw: two children, torn from their home. For what? A little brick doghouse far away?

“Why, Mummy?” Maria had asked. But her mother had not answered. The child was not important, Maria knew. It was only the grown-ups, the grown-ups with their squabbles and problems and sometimes their marvelous stories.

“I hate you,” Maria muttered to her absent mother. It was only the old ones she liked. Some of them. Sometimes.

Obscurely, she blamed her mother for Aunt Anna’s disappearance. If only her mother had taken the trouble to be nicer to the Rat. Anna, with her wonderful stories and romantic, suffering life, had been replaced by her grandmother Adeline, who was capricious and temperamental and forever having hysterical fits to which the whole family had to pay court.

Maria recognized in Adeline a definite threat. Before Adeline’s arrival in their little room, Maria had been Herbert’s pet. Her grandfather had fussed over her, lavished his love and attention. Maria smiled smugly. Even little Philip, a stupid baby boy, could not compete with the affection she, the elder grandchild, received. Philip? She traced a circle with her toe in the fine dust on the floor. Oh, he was cute, all right. But why did everyone expect her to love him? Well, she didn’t, wouldn’t! He was okay in a pinch, when there was nothing else to do, no one else to pay attention to her.

Maria smoothed her dress, then quickly, surreptitiously, felt her chest. Her little nipples stood up, hard as pencil points. She fluttered her hands over them. “You are beautiful,” she whispered to herself. “You are my little beauty.”

Who was saying these words? The wallpaper closed in on her — the buglike flowers she had always hated.

Maria stood in the small, stuffy, enclosed space and put her hands on her stomach. “You are my little beauty.” Her stomach gurgled.

She put her hands down lower, there.

“No,” Maria said firmly to the whispering. “I am not. I am dead. Can’t you see?”

“You are not dead.”

A wave of desperation rose up in the girl. She was dead. Nothing. Dead, a piece of garbage. All the hatred she contained for others — her mother, her brother — must mean that if she were not already dead, then she deserved to die. To be dead.

Maria felt faint.

“It’s all right, my little darling. You’ll be all right.”

“But I hate everyone. I hate them so!”

“Yes.”

Maria allowed the room to engulf her. It gave forth its wrinkly, cobwebbed, dusty smell. She felt completely alone in the world. There would never be anyone who would really understand her. Overcome by a feeling of sadness and loneliness so suffocating that she thought she would never get over the pain of the weight of it on her body, she sank into the far corner and covered her face. Her dress lay in the dust, the brave stripes fading even faster.

Maria wanted to be forgotten, left behind in the room while the family moved away. She was ruined for life, and no one in the family could even see that. All they saw was the hollow shell of a little girl, a “good” little girl. But that “good” little girl was a mockery, a farce. A pretend person, not real. A bad girl, in fact, a shell of a person, someone who would never grow up, never love or be loved.

Her mother and grandmother could not imagine her feelings. Somehow, Maria knew, Uncle Felix had taken the soul out of her, removed the essence of Maria, and substituted a fake puppet, a sawdust doll who went through the motions of being good. “I’m dead,” she told herself.