Magnificat

The women washed each other’s feet. They unrolled thick stockings down thick rolls of ankle. It was cold. Even the light, though the room had the inoffensive anonymity of all community center rooms, was cold. The meat of their calves, white and heavy. Some kneeled and the water poured down into plastic tubs. Then they stood, held each other and prayed. My soul magnifies the Lord.

Nastia, in her pink dress, more pink ribbons than dress, weaved through them with her sing-song phrases. In the year since I lived with her family in Kaharlyk, she has learned so many words. She made up stories. A fox goes into the woods to pee. As she is peeing, a wolf comes along and yells, “Go away!” So the fox goes home and goes to sleep. The end. The other stories were variations on this one theme, though with different animals.

Other children stood quietly. They were stunted, milky, with blue shadows under their eyes. One boy stomped around muttering, “Fock, fock.” Once they came with their grandmother to the house. Her hands were enormous, all bone. Taras complained to her about Ilya’s poor grades with Ilya in the doorway. She made her grandson read aloud Ilya’s report card, with her running commentary of “Oh, terrible … terrible,” as she clamped an enormous hand to her face in horror.

In the cold room, the women prayed the way little girls in watercolor paintings pray: hands tightly clasped below the throat, arms pressed to their breasts. Blessed is she who has believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. I think I would wash a stranger’s feet if I was asked. I was not asked. When men came back into the room, the minister prayed in a high, breathy voice. “Praise, praise God,” he repeated, his eyebrows knit into an upside-down V. When they pray, they always seem on the brink of tears. My attention slid off. Pieces of the day – no, that’s too poetic, it was mostly thoughts about sex – came sliding into my brain to fill up the idle space, like swampy water where children dig holes in a riverbank. 

…

Nadia and I went to the market one morning and saw the spice seller. In the middle of a day that was colorless – half-melted snow, asphalt, drab black-clad bodies under a leaden sky – the spices stunned me. Cumin, saffron, star-shapes I’ve never seen before, all the dark reds and yellows. The spice seller is from Azerbaijan, his face composed of sharp angles and deep hollows. He talked on the phone as his hand, swift and accurate, scooped up spices. Something that’s maybe Arabic came from the back of his throat, punctuated with odd hard Russian words. His beauty stunned me. It was ancient. Like that of a mournful onlooker at the crucifixion.

…

Barely suppressing a wave of giggles that welled up in her, the angel arrived at the annunciation. Nastia (my host brother Igor’s girlfriend, not the toddler) recited her lines in front of the church in white-feathered wings. Igor made an uncomfortable Joseph, arms stiff at his sides. All of the teenagers bit their lips in the half-smiles of trying to laugh at themselves before anyone else can laugh at them.

That afternoon, at the youth group party, Nastia traded the wings for a plastic set of bunny ears. They flashed red and blue lights. No one explained to my friend Megan and I why we had to attend this party. Maybe we are still “youth,” though we were some 10 years older than the others. That is, except for a middle-aged man whose presence also went unexplained.

Boo Radley, I thought. Doughy skin, pale blue eyes blinking with an infant’s guilelessness, gray teeth. He wore a yarmulke. “My costume is a Jew!” He seemed kind of off, maybe autistic, which is now the more medical-sounding catch-all for those who seem “off.” When he sat beside Nastia, she’d squeal and edge away. Mouth curled, she shook off his hand in the prayer circle as if it were contaminated. I took the hand. It was thick and rough, almost crusty, as if covered in scabs.

He thought it a good joke, whenever laughter broke out, to add a scream-laugh. His neck tucked down into many folds, and he shrieked, “EEEEE-hee-hee-heeeeee!” The minister’s young son mimicked him, cake frosting smeared on his face. Stretched in the mock-laugh, his face looked not yet formed, almost fetal. He pointed and shrieked and shrieked.

In the rising noise, I felt myself trapped in some kind of Fellini film. At any moment, Boo Radley would stage his own funeral and fat tears would roll down his doughy face, and Nastia would dance around him with bunny ears flashing, and the child would shriek his unbearable laugh.

…

It is difficult to forgive children. Adults are worse. But adults have logic, even if it is used perversely to justify cruelty. Children are cruel just to see what cruelty feels like. Maybe I will renounce this statement later. I am trying to figure them out, children. When handed baby Pavlik, at first I am alarmed – he is heavy, and wriggly, and kind of freakishly muscular for a baby. He tries to wriggle from my arms. I bounce him around, raise him up in the air. He had a fever, and then one night my head is burning, pounding like no pain I can remember. I wake up Nadia at one a.m. She gives me some pills, then puts a wet cold cabbage leaf on my forehead. It feels wonderful. “Everyone is getting sick,” she says. “First Taras, then all the kids, now you…” She stares in front of her and looks so tired, like she could lie down and sleep for days and days. I touch her arm, in a lame sort of way; I am the cared-for one and caring comes strangely.

…

In 1968 my friend Penny wrote a book of poetry that she never talks about. She Who Has Believed is about the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth. They walk quietly in the hills. They love each other. “Wisdom without answers,” she wrote. When I told her I found the book, Penny said not to take it too much to heart. She speaks in a voice so quiet you fear a careless motion might shatter it. Everything she’s said I take to heart. She loves purely. And so she is the only person I love without selfishness, without self-consciousness or fear of being shamed. What would it take, to love like that always? “She has seen her mother on hands and knees,” another friend, Amy, once wrote in a poem –

She only knows that there is bowing involved
when caring for some other thing’s mess,
and she has never bowed.