Thrust: A Novel

“The village raised him. People who’d been exiled or forgotten, indigenous Yakut people mixed with Siberians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Albanians, Turks, Russian Jews — even an American or two whose wits had atrophied. He still knew some people in the village who knew more Yakut words than he ever would, so when this woman arrived to study the languages, he offered to help her.

“That woman was my mother.

“Svajonė came from Lithuania. In her case, there was no question of who she was or where she came from. She came with a real story — an important lineage. Her grandfather had been a famous book smuggler, a knygnešys during the Lithuanian language and press ban instigated by the empire. Her father had continued the tradition later by opening a bookstore in Panėvežys. It is thought to this day that, had the knygnešiai never existed, the Lithuanian language itself would have slipped away forever.

“Language slips away sometimes, like objects, like peoples.

“Svajonė became a linguist in order to study what happens to languages under siege. She understood profoundly how power could drive individuals underground and reshape them into a new species capable of a kind of resistance and resilience no one had dreamed of. When her grandfather was caught delivering books to a secret transport on its way to America, he was shot on the spot. Her grandmother swallowed a wail larger than a country as she stood unmoving next to his body on the ground. All she had were her eyes locking eyes with the murderer as he spit on the ground, laughed, and walked away. My mother’s grandmother and mother raised money to send her away from her country of origin to receive an education, away from the violence of a family narrative. But the violence never left her body.

“Stories have a way of burying themselves underneath skin.

“Svajonė was the most beautiful woman Aster had ever seen. According to my father, she looked nothing like him or anyone. She looked like she’d been spun from moon and water — her skin alabaster, her eyes a clear blue, her auburn hair falling down her shoulders in unkempt tendrils. She had tiny lyrical lines around her eyes and mouth — lines that looked like writing, he said, like a poem trying to write itself on her face when she smiled. The first time she spoke to him, my father wanted to touch her face. This continued for the rest of his life. He wanted to leave everything he’d ever known to enter the world of this woman, who knew more words in his so-called ancestral language than he did. Did he even have an ancestral language? From whose mouth?

“I don’t know if this was love or not, but if what he felt about her was love, it was love-unto-death from the very beginning.

“Everyone and everything there loved her. In a desolate place, she was life — a woman giving meaning to what seemed like a dead environment, dead animals, dead vegetables, dead people, dead hearts. It was the power of her desire to learn that brought them all back to life.

“He loved to listen to her mind race. The fascinating thing is, ‘rain’ in Mohawk is ayokeanore. In Turkish, the word is yaghmur. Can you hear it? The Turkish word for ‘five,’ besh, is also the Cayuga word wish and the Mohawk wisk. The Mohawk negative yagh is the Turkish yok. Waktare, an Iroquois word — well, I shouldn’t say Iroquois, because that’s an idiotic French colonizers’ word for the Haudenosaunee people, I should say People of the Longhouse — anyway, waktare means ‘to speak,’ and the Yakut word is ittare. ‘To hide’ in Haudenosaunee is kasethai and kistya in Yakut. The word ‘three’ is ahsen in Mohawk, ahse in Tuscarora, uch in Turkish, ush in Yakut… Do you see how exciting?

“My father would stare at her and smile, as contented as a child listening to a fairy tale. But he did not see. He just wanted her to keep narrating sounds and languages to him for the rest of his life.

“I believe that this itself was a kind of love…”

The girl stopped for a moment, staring into space or maybe time. I considered offering some comment or question, but then she looked at me and her eyes seemed to hold me silent. Do not enter this story. Do not reroute its meaning. She continued.