Thrust: A Novel

She sealed the case in an unusual way: by showing me a coin she said she carried with her at all times, a one-cent piece from the nation’s earliest days, its central figure a woman with the hair of a lion. “When this penny first emerged,” she said, “people thought the image was a horror. They thought she was monstrous, that she looked insane. Her unruly hair, is what they said.” She turned the coin over and over in her hand. “Like mine,” she said. Her own long black hair, wrestling its way down her back, was unruly — beautifully so. I reached out to touch it, but she pulled back. My hand hung suspended just above her head. Something about the coin, the girl, something about women and children and monsters, set into my abdomen.

There exists a city within this city, made by women and children.

Cagey, sly, and ingenious girls with barely-there breasts furrowing paths beneath the ebb and flow of city life. Bellicose wives with tongues as formidable as whips and torsos the size of battleships. Hopeless-to-the-point-of-reckless house cleaners and cooks and ladies’ maids. Bands of little-girl thieves, their faces of hunger merging with their oncoming sexuality and drive to survive. Tiny ambitions in collision, or collusion, with desire. The city they inhabit inverts its own alleged social structure. Women and children first may be its cover story, but women and children creating their own society — their underground economy, below where its very sex sits — that is a deeper story.

This girl, she had an unimaginable plan for our escape. I remember feeling a little dizzy from the sheer will of her. But the story she told, in trade for my trust, won me over.

“This is a story from my father,” she said. “But it is actually the story of my mother. Aster has carried it long enough, though. I think perhaps he is dying from carrying this story,” she said, and the sorrow on her face seemed larger than a body.

“This is the Tale of the Fur Spinner,” she told me. “Sit down in that green chair and I will perform it for you.” And then she began.

“The moment my father first saw my mother, Svajonė, he had a seizure. Sometimes I think he wishes he’d died right then, inside the image of her following his fall to the ground, kneeling to put his head in her lap.”

“What kind of seizure was this?” I asked. I had not yet been enveloped into her storytelling.

“Epileptic. People with epilepsy have suffered greatly, you know. They are thrown into places with criminals and mentally ill people, just like prostitutes and poor people and orphans are. If we ever meet again, I’ll tell you the story of the Salpêtrière — which started out as a gunpowder factory and later became an infamous hospital. In your time, it will become a teaching center for those who study the brain.”

I was restless for her to continue. “But what became of your father?”

“There is nothing wrong with my father. Sometimes he just slips time because he can’t hold the weight of his life. That is the story I came here for. But you need to listen. Can you hold still while I tell it, as still as a statue?”

From that moment, I understood. My task was to listen.

—

“My mother was studying the Yakut indigenous language. My father’s mother had been Yakut. When my father met my mother, he knew only a few phrases, words really. The village he grew up in within Yakutia rested inside a tension next to a former Siberian gulag. Former gulag prisoners taught the villagers how to grow potatoes, how to fight for a life — so many things about the space between living and dying. After the collapse, most of the villagers became hunters and fishers. The villagers simply never found someplace else to go. A woman who lived alone in the woods where my father grew up gave him a bone necklace that she claimed belonged to his mother. The woman had no idea if the shards of bone were from a human or a reindeer or what.

“Maybe it was from his mother, maybe from some other woman. Stories multiply and disperse in a village like that.

“His father was an exile — or so the story goes. They said his father murdered a soldier. No one knew what kind of soldier, only that he had a uniform and a rifle. A guard? Or was he military? His father — my grandfather — was maybe a Yakut, but maybe not; everyone my father spoke to was hazy on this. Some villagers described his father’s hair as black like night; others thought it was blond; some said he was a Jew, or Ukrainian; still others shook their heads no and said, Turk! or something else. He could have been anyone’s son from anywhere, and yet he knew, whoever he was, that there had been ice and water and earth and blood all around him.

“Both his mother and his father were dead and gone before my father reached the age of three. Both shot dead in some kind of Raid, the story goes. Both buried in ground near the village, near enough sometimes that he could still hear their bones singing in the wind. Or he thought he could.