Our father was nine feet tall. Our mother, a gaunt ten. They moved for
a living, moved every two weeks. The houses were large and empty. Furniture
was backbreaking so they never bought any. The windows stretched from the
first to the second floor, large ragged gaps of the sky invading the quiet.
When it rained, the panes would be formidably streaked, blurred. The sand
dazzled beneath their feet. Father would watch the portable television,
lounging on a dune with a thimbleful of water. Mother bent into the earth,
obsessively creating an oasis at each turn, hoping the gardens would creep
and merge into an endless sea of grass, shiny mounds of eyebrows plucked
with flowers. She planted vivid hard daisies that scorned the name, Black-eyed
Susans that interrupted the gaze with a bitterness. On certain days, she
would be overcome by visions and drop pignoli nuts into the ground. Her
mind was intent upon the forest primeval descending years from now, drawn
to her plot of earth by the delicate signals emitted from a single pignoli
nut.
Our father was a man of many mansions, many wives, endless offspring that
bathed and tanned in the farthest corners of the world. Our father was a
powerful, whimsical man. When he was angry, he would leave us on the roadside
for hours. However, he was only a moderately wealthy and powerful man when
my mother married him. She knew this, dug houses for him, and tried to increase
the immensity of wealth that he had hoarded. She grew old quickly, as all
first wives do, and achieved nothing. Her hands were saffron, her skin slick
and crumpled like a week-old magazine or hatched poppies. My father's feet
were continuously soaking in a paste of egg white, pine oil and marzipan.
He whistled into the air, she whispered then buried her words in the ground.
He recited advertisement jingles within the cool shadows of the house. He
would clipcoupons for roasted almonds and leave them piled on her footstool.
This, she felt, mocked her existence. She crouched in the sun, burning her
hair to a blond stump, muttering, munching her seeds in anger.
She wanted a palace that sprawled in minarets and aqueducts, hanging gardens
that approached jungles, a city with winding streets swarming with her children
and her children's children. My father wanted a plate of frosted grapes,
lemon twists and a young girl's breast to dandle away the noonday heat.
So they moved.
My mother believed in the portent of dreams: she dreamt they lived upon
a slope of wild poppies, magazine orange, parched and powdered. Other weeds
grew with them, spiny and barbarous. She found a wounded goldfinch and knew
it was a fledgling because the mouth was encrusted with a bright yellow
growth. It writhed like a large snake, the livid yellow outlining the darting
tongue. She panicked, dropped it and then spent the afternoon trying to
find it in a small avalanche she had startled. She knew she had killed it,
most likely. My mother had never seen a slope of wild poppies. She had lived
in sand all her life, in mansions and tents, in extravagance and poverty
swirled together like water and oil. She wanted a goldfinch. He bought her
a gilded blowfish.
Once she made a pilgrimage to each of the twenty houses that they had supposedly
sold. A beautiful lady came out to greet her in each, showing her the magnificent
gardens: Ladyslippers, pomogranate, freesia, trembleroot, snakewort--the
house and garden and the silk slippers were all gifts from her generous
admirer, Mr. Kohl. Her pignolis had been dug up and eaten by the pekineses
and the chows.
One afternoon, when I was four, my father told me about the youngest and
most beloved of those beautiful sighing ladies---it was our aunt. He would
attempt to guess her every whim; hewould monitor her dreams. I was told
that he would bring her roomfuls of flowers. She would awake neck deep in
lilies, amaranth, marigolds. We never knew where or how he found so many.
I remember this afternoon clearly because, the very next morning, he began
placing food in front of us then snatching it away. He would wait until
the last moment, take his thumb and his index finger, and deftly pull the
morsel out of our mouths as though it were a magic trick. My sister bit
his hand once. He told us that food turned to fat, that we would spread
like puddles of oil, that we would become too heavy to carry. We stopped
growing altogether, our limbs were stunted. I stood two feet high, Yasmina,
a mere ten inches. Yasmina began to cry when she sprouted breasts. It was
simply more fat. I did not listen to him, continued eating, gained only
weight. Three years later, he dropped me on the side of the road and did
not return. I found a small cave and fell asleep for years; the pine needles
made a scented mat, pervaded my dreams. I dreamt of goldfinches buried up
to their necks, burning like candles. I envisioned my sister and mother
grown old, my father dying. I dreamt I grew wings and flew to a foreign
land.
When I awoke, I found I was in England. I saw a queen kneeling at a clump
of bluebells. Her tiara and veil were black but her hands were saffron.
It was my mother with a teaspoon. She was furiously trying to unearth and
deposit the clump into her mouth before the guards of the Botanical Garden
swarmed in. She was eating dirt as they took her away. That same year we
found an obituary upon our father in a large magazine. It showed a picture
of his caravan prostrate. My sister was in the foreground, an impossibly
thin woman with upswept hair and too many teeth. She wore a yellow dress
and matching gloves. A note beneath the photo read: on the death of her
famous father, Alexander Kohl, Yasmina, Turkish femme fatale, searches for
her brother, Fear, and mother, Dofora Kohl, clues as to their whereabouts
or any information concerning their deaths. Separated twenty years ago.
Notify the editor.
I spoke with Yasmina over tea. The warm afternoon before her death, she
brought me to a small field behind her home. In the backyard were innumerable
birds buried neckdeep in the flowerbed; there were cardinals, bluejays,
sparrows but primarily it was goldfinches, approximately five hundred, all
swarming with ants and scarabs. In each of the houses that they had moved
to, she had caught and buried a live goldfinch. When the goldfinch died,
it would always die with its head bent in a certain direction. By this,
she knew where our parents had gone. It was infallible: this bird-death-compass
was how she had found them after four years. That evening she was instantly
seized by a neighborhood dog and died of contusions. I had forgotten to
ask her how she had learned of this trick.
How did the birds know? I closed my eyes and imagined the large expanse
of the world lit up at night by the soft swiveling lights of goldfinches
that connected into lines, patterns. Did these patterns mimic any specific
constellation? Had my parents travelled in the route of Orion or the migratory
path of the Arctic plovers? Why had Yasmina never told me? Had I known this
infallible method, I too could have found and stayed by my parents until
they had grown feeble. Or else, my parents would have travelled lighter,
swifter, their journey a clever game of hide and seek across continents,
oceans and wastelands. Our parents would have shrugged us off merely to
find us at their doorstep, confessing the eternal boomerang of birth that
links a child to two utter strangers. It is a fascinating thing, the magnetic
propensity of goldfinches.
To prove the infallibility of this method, I forced my wife to close her
eyes. I then left our child with a family in Peru. It has been five years
now and, due to civil unrest and inner turmoil, we have lost touch with
them. My wife points out bitterly that there are no goldfinches on the South
American continent. But we move every month on schedule because I am afraid
that years will pass and that, one day, my son will catch up, wearing a
robe of pale yellow feathers. He will pitch his tent upon my heart and the
sand will rise miles high, scratching the sun.
If my premise holds true, this son of mine will be even smaller than I am,
even more still: he will travel in my ear like a earwig, a mite; he will
insist that we never be parted, that each parting forces the death of a
creature that owes nothing to either of us. I can only move faster and faster,
leaving behind no trail of my existence, no crumbs, no stain, no smell.
He pursues me at night, flying above, a dervish. I tunnel underground, in
the sand, waging war with the scarabs who keep their distance but remain
near, waiting. He stands at the entrance with a stick, poking, until I come
up for air. Surrounding him are cages piled upon cages, each filled with
frantic wild birds who fly repeatedly against the bars. He begins to bury
them one by one in the mud although they are still alive and struggling.
I wonder who has taught him this or if this cruelty is instinctual, inspirational,
a love of rote learning, the only proof of a link between us and our children.
Above me, he stands, bawling miracles, stamping the dirt.
All the stories Mika sent to me, I keep in a folder. This folder is a faded
blue violet folder covered with a sketch he made of me holding a clock.
You can hardly tell it is me, my face is so covered by the hands of the
clock.
This sketch, he called the violet hour.