It isn’t me, someone else is suffering. I couldn’t.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
cover it with a black cloth,
then let the torches be removed…
Night. -- Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem” (translated by Sasha Mayakovsky)
Inbal is perfect in her suffering. Her hair is short like a boy’s, a reddish fuzz harsh against her skull. Her cheeks and her eyes are hollows in her angular face, and the bones of her shoulders are like knives threatening to stab anyone who brushes against her. I have a huge crush in Inbal – a childish, innocent crush. I cling to her every word as though pearls fall from her mouth as she speaks. When she smiles at me, the warmth of that smile lingers with me for hours. I want to vanquish her enemies, to serenade her. She is so unreachable, so distant, so beautiful.
Inbal sees me as a little girl, I think – she’s nineteen, to her I’m just a child, a cute little thing that tags along behind her and occasionally smokes her cigarettes. I don’t mind. She shows me her art sometimes and I feel awed just to be in the presence of someone who can create like that. Awed and then incredibly saddened that such an artist would be hidden in an isolated institution, that no one’s really seen what she can do.
She’s sick all the time, and I worry: she’s pale, and there’s always dark shadows under her eyes. At the nurses station, in the kitchen, in the hallway, her eyes roll up in her head and she collapses: some mysterious illness that doctors can’t diagnose. Anorexia doesn’t help, either. Usually staff doesn’t notice when she faints, and she eventually rises, ghostly and shaking, to eat another piece of dry, burnt toast.
Monday (or Wednesday, or Friday – I have no idea, the days all blur into one here), I am in the kitchen making tea, while Inbal peers suspiciously at a bag of bread. Everyone knows there are rats in the kitchen. This bag is chewed, so she tosses it into the trash and joins me at the counter. There’s nothing in the kitchen but bread and tea, so she makes tea.
She starts talking and for once she is vulnerable. I already kind of know she isn’t really as tough and harsh as she likes to appear – I’ve seen the slashes across her wrists, over her arms, her shoulders, disappearing into her shirt. I’ve seen her face just before she collapses to the ground: suddenly a deathly white, scared, feeling darkness overwhelm her and not knowing if she’ll be able to rise if she falls again.
She hasn’t revealed her fear in words before but I hear it now – her voice is soft like a child’s and hesitantly, she is confiding in me.
She tells me a thing she remembers. A childhood memory – in it she is six or maybe seven. She is in the shed behind the house, where her brother’s friends go to hang out. She is sprawled on the floor amidst empty beer bottles, some of them broken in sparkling pieces on the ground. There is blood on the inside of her thighs. It hurts. And she gets up, and brushes off her dress, and goes back to the house. She has no words for what happened in the shed, so she doesn’t speak of it – eventually, only remembers it as one might remember a long-ago nightmare.
She is telling me this and I can’t say anything because suddenly she’s not so distant, so alien. She’s talking about bad dreams she doesn’t want to remember, secrets she can’t tell anyone, even herself, and suddenly I have so much to tell her. I want to tell her that I am like her, that I’m not just a distant observer chronicling the suffering of others. I want to tell her how when I was nine I learned you must always stay awake and watch the crack of light under the bedroom door, watch for when the shadow crosses it. I want to spill the secrets I can’t even remember.
I want to tell her she’s not alone in her suffering, but to do so would be to admit that I am, in fact, suffering, and here that would mean admitting I really am crazy, and freedom will be further away.
I say nothing, and eventually she tugs her sleeves a downwards so they cover her arms a little more, takes her tea, and lights a cigarette, and we both sit and watch the smoke curl around the bars of the window and out into the night.
I have learned how faces fall,
How terror can escape from lowered eyes,
How suffering can etch cruel pages
Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.
I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognize
The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
That's why I pray not for myself
But all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall. -- Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem” (translated by Sasha Mayakovsky)
One day Avikhai tells me he’s going to kill himself.
Avikhai is seventeen years old and incredibly tall. He towers my own four feet ten inches, and has to hunch under the low ceiling of the kitchen. His hair was shoulder-length when he came here, but now it falls to his chin, since Inbal and I cut it.
That was great fun. We tried to brush Avikhai’s tangled hair but it was too knotted, so we took him to the girls’ sink and washed his hair, using liberal amounts of conditioner. Then we borrowed a pair of scissors from Staff and cut his hair, giggling madly the whole time. Avikhai just sat there patiently, smiling his sad little smile.
I love Avikhai like crazy and wish he were my big brother for real. I could wish I could somehow take on all his pain and make him happy again.
When he tells me he’s going to kill himself, I don’t try to talk him out of it – his voice is too firm, too sure. Instead I ask him when, where, and how.
Then I quietly leave, and tell Staff.
“In the next few hours, in the phone room. He’ll hang himself with his sheet.” I tell them how serious he is – Avikhai doesn’t joke around about stuff like that. He doesn’t joke around at all.
I pace the hallway for the next hour, then doze off for a bit. When I wake up there’s a commotion in the hallway, by the phone room. I know what happens before I get there.
I catch a glimpse of something long and thin stretched out on the tiled floor with the remains of a sheet around its neck, something limp and silent. Something that can’t be Avikhai, but is.
Something inside me breaks and I’m sliding downwards and whispering, “I told you.” I’m watching people rush by to attach machines to the thing in the phone room and I’m sobbing, “I told you, I told you.” I told you he was going to do it and you didn’t stop it and now there’s a limp, dead thing lying on the dirty tiles.
Everything around me is blurring and spinning and I’m saying over and over, I told you, I told you. Over and over, thinking how unglamorous death is, how ugly. You see, when you die, your bowels let go. There’s nothing glamorous about shitting your pants. Nothing glamorous about people crowded around your still body, struggling to revive you, choking on the stink.
After that I don’t remember anymore. Or I don’t want to remember anymore. I’m tired of writing this.
This is what matters: I told them. I told them and they didn’t listen and that was the harshest, cruelest betrayal. I told them and still he lay there with the sheet knotted around his throat. I told them, but I went unheard and again I was silent, again only I knew that once, once I had told.
But now, I’m telling you.
Now, you know, too.
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