Thrust: A Novel

“What did she think of him, my mother who fell into love with him, who agreed to take the most dangerous journey with him across water so much bigger than the hubris of a man? Why did she agree to go to North America with him? For what? Because he could not stop the rush of fever dreams telling him to go? To leave forever this forsaken place? To protect his family? Or for some dreamstory about America? Or for some even smaller reason? Because a man needs work to have worth, or a violence grows inside him?

“When the permafrost began to thaw in their area, the tusks of ancient mammoths began to rise from the mud like giant bony fingers. The past was not so dead, as it turns out, though the smell of death was everywhere. Of course, as always happens, some people made themselves rich by recovering the ivory.

“Yakutia had once been rich in farmland. But the melting of the permafrost turned the farmland into swamps or lakes; whole fields just caved in until they pulled down the ground and whole villages sank. Rivers around villages ran so fast that they swept neighborhoods away.

“My father worked for a while as a reindeer herder, but the pasturelands gave way to the rotten stench of plant and animal life that had been frozen for thousands of years, their decomposition coming back to life, an invisible stream of carbon dioxide and gas pluming into the atmosphere.

“They’d heard of massive craters popping open on the Yamal Peninsula, created during the eruptions of methane gas that happened as the permafrost thawed. They were all waiting for the ground under their feet to explode.

“One of the last times my father herded reindeer, he found a she-calf stuck in a mud lake. One of its eyes had been gouged somehow. My father pulled the calf free and took it home. He thought about slaughtering and eating it, but Svajonė wouldn’t let him. Instead, she sewed its eye shut, nursed it with a bottle, and brought it back to health. When I was a baby, my father told me, I sometimes took naps curled up on a blanket next to the reindeer’s stomach. The reindeer protected me, or so Svajonė believed.

“When my father was just a person living on the edges of wanting to be alive at all, nothing really mattered to him. Who he was — if he lived or died — didn’t matter in this place no one knew existed. After Svajonė, everything mattered so acutely that he almost couldn’t breathe. One night, he broke down and told her he was afraid. Afraid for her. Afraid for me and my unborn brother. He knew she was happy, but he begged her to leave. He told her he knew someone who could find him work in America, or what was left of it.

“She stared at him a long time. Then — as if her mind had already arrived at the place he meant to take us — she said, The Haudenosaunee languages include Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora, and Huron-Wyandot. Among others. When we leave, those are the languages I want to study next. The death of languages is what precedes the death of the world.

“They married in the woods, my mother and father, a ritual of their own making.

“My brother was born shortly before they tried to leave to cross the waters.

“In that moment of time, we were a family. Now, all of that is lost forever. Like a lost language. Like a forgotten word.”

She fell silent.

I felt the room soften when she stopped speaking. She’d been using her hands a great deal while she spoke; now they dropped to her sides like objects without use. A lamp flickered and then went out, giving the moment an eerie punctuation.

Her story held me caught, like some great epoch brought to stillness after a seizure. The story of a mother’s death, maybe also the story of all mothers, the dead and the living. “I don’t know what to say,” I said in a kind of breathless gasp. “Your story, your song of your mother, is beautiful.” After that, I would have done anything for this girl.

—

Before I die, I want to give everything back.

To mothers. Everything our mothers took from us when they couldn’t understand how to exist inside the impossible contradictions; everything that was taken from our mothers as a means of keeping the house, the country, the world in order. I would give them back their arms, their legs. Return to them their heads, their hair, their lips and eyes. Mothers, here are your bound and heavy hearts, stricken by the beatings they tricked you into. Mothers, I give your body back to land, your original intimacy. Most of all, I give mothers back their breasts, their wombs, their cunts, their desire.