No, the girl says. The donkey has risen again in her, kicking, and surprises me. She sits up against the headboard, though it clearly pains her, though she has not stopped bleeding, and levels a finger at me. Give my baby to me.
A demand? I say. You are in no position to demand. All I have to do is call the Ministers, and off you go. You wouldn’t survive a year in the work camps, you know.
The girl’s stupid face has turned into a fist. Whatever the Ministers do to me, she says softly, will be nothing compared to what they will do to you. For a long, horrible moment, this gives me pause. Even idiots, at times, can stumble on truth.
But. One could never have survived the purges I survived in my own youth without being canny. Survived; not unharmed. My leg twisted when they sliced my Achilles tendon, my womb twisted with forced use. I scrubbed potatoes in the rebels’ kitchen, reciting poetry in Romance languages, keeping fresh my Ph.D. in comparative literature. I spent the bad nights on my back translating the poems into English. Such ugliness as mine has been earned.
I played along with the girl. For two days, as she became peremptory, demanding food and help, picking up the telephone threateningly when I even neared the baby, I pretended fear. And then on the third night, I slipped some ground passionflower into her tea. Passionflower, with its variegated petals, with its good, black heart. Her face closed like a letter. She slept and slept.
The infant also drank the passionflower in her mother’s milk and slept for over twenty-four hours. This was fortunate, for by the time the child woke I had ridden my bicycle through the night and the day and the night again, with her bound to my back like an extra hump. By the time she began to stir, I had abandoned the bicycle and was on the train.
I had made a giant bottle in the station, and as the infant was struggling to wake, I put the nipple in her mouth and she sucked and sucked her hunger away.
Now she looks at me, sated, clean, lulled by the quick flash of the very fast train over the countryside, and I smile down to her. I imagine her mother in my bed, just now awakening in her own pain and mess, slowly lifting a hand to her lovely pale face. She winces, I imagine, at the light through the curtains, parted for the first time in so many months. The sun falls on the empty bassinet beside her, and the silence in the house becomes an accusation.
A man in a business suit looks at us over today’s State News and smiles. Grandmother? he asks, and I smile back. Godmother, I say. He says the required response: Blessed be the Godparents, though there is a glint of interest when he looks at my twisted old body. Godparents are normally young and hale, able to raise the children if anything goes awry for the parents, if they are denounced and deported, if the Ministers find deviance in them at all.
I must be the most unlikely Godmother this man has ever seen.
I am the most unlikely mother, I know, that’s a certainty.
And so we slide, quiet and calm, into the city by the sea.
The afternoon of our arrival I buy a house on a path lost through thickets of dune-weeds, a high-gabled antique with wind-battered gray boards. The Realtor tells me hesitantly that the house is so cheap because it has been on the market for years and years, and has been on the market because it is haunted. I laugh, and the baby makes a little birdlike coo in response.
Ghosts, I say, do not bother us.
It is isolated, she says. Five miles from any store.
We require no company, I say.
Where the house is, the ocean is too rough against the rocks to sunbathe, she says. And even if you were to go swimming, the riptide will take you out to sea in a blink.
Do I look like the beachgoing type? I snap bitterly, and her eyes slant away. Then I say more calmly, We will take it.
If the Realtor is surprised to see me count out the money bill by bill, she doesn’t show it. She hands me the key. I will have a boy bicycle groceries up to you today, she offers. It is a courtesy we show to all our buyers. I smile at her, and take a few minutes to write out a list of things I need. Her eyes widen when she scans it, but she swallows and nods, and I can feel her relief cracking when I finally leave the room.
The boys arrive after I have opened all the doors and windows and the strong sea wind is carrying the dust out the door. I have scrubbed the kitchen tiles to their original white, and have swept and washed the bedroom where the baby and I will sleep.
The seven boys stop their bicycles, exhausted, at the porch. They carry up the wooden crates and put them in the hall, their sweat dripping on the floorboards. The baby gurgles, and one handsome blond boy with eyes the pale of sage stops to smile into her face. I tip them all generously, and they ride off into the dusk, down the hill again into the city.
I close the door. I intend for those boys to be the last males ever to step foot into this house. I say it aloud to say it at all. My words hang in the air, then chime back to me, silvery and quick. The ghosts approve.
After a quick supper and bottle, I take the baby out to the back of the house, where the garden ends at a cliff’s edge. Stars pulse over the last red line of sunset. I hold the child up to show her all this vast beauty, to let her feel the night wind, full of spray.
This is happiness, my girl, I say aloud, and find myself laughing for the first time in years. The baby sticks out her tiny pink tongue and licks the salt from the air.
It takes until the baby’s head stops wobbling on her neck for her name to come to me. When it does, I cannot believe it took so long. The herbs her mother was plucking that night when I stopped her in my garden; what I feel growing furiously in the world we left behind, a building storm of the birth-mother’s wrath and sorrow.
Rue, I say, smiling. A cousin of rouge; my well-chosen road. I say to the baby who blinks and focuses, My daughter, your name is Rue.
I scan the State News every day until I find the notice about a runaway returned home to our old village; I think of Rue’s mother’s body slowly healing in my cottage, the girl eating my food until there was no more to eat, then waiting it out another week until hunger drove her home.
It goes on to say that she was in the public stocks for a week; and I think of the neck-polished wood on the little dais in front of the Library. How it would smell of accumulated sweat and shame and rain in the pores of the wood.
She will be sent to a work camp for a few months, it says, in light of the complications of her case; and I think of the girl cracking rocks, picturing each rock my ravished face.
I shiver. But then I put my hand on the baby’s back. Her breathing, in and out, calms me. It plays between the sound of the waves, echo or source: and who would be so foolish as to try to tell the difference?
The wind turns icy. My bicycle slips over the road under my body when I try to ride it, and I fear for Rue in the little seat behind me. I stay in the house and order groceries by telephone. When the man puts them on the porch, he picks up an envelope of cash. It is such a smooth transaction, and I have come to fear the glances of strangers so, the feeling that everywhere I turn in the world I have Rue’s mother’s eyes upon me, that I continue the practice into the spring when the winds quiet and bring the sweet perfumes of washed-up seaweed and cherries in bloom. I stop taking the State News. If the world hums and clanks and grinds its machinery elsewhere, I don’t know or care. The baby grows, sits up, grins. Her hair on her skin is a smooth, soft pelt that I love to rub my cheek against. Her hair on her head is the color of the world seen through a glass of wine. I speak to her in French and this is the language she first learns. She speaks falteringly, then lispingly, then clearly.
Some days my daughter is mermaid, some days she is water. We walk slowly beyond our rocks to a calmer stretch of the beach and she crouches beside the tide pools, watching the creatures within.
