On the Edges of Sunlight

In the silence engulfing us at night, there was always a question mark we left untouched. Words cut like shards of glass. This we knew through our bodies. It did not matter what you said. Even the most mundane of things—a slice of bread, grass, the rain—could be used against you. Turned into razor-sharp weapons. We drew closer together at the center of the room while dense webs of eyes and ears encircled us. We whispered. They prowled in wait for a moment of forgetting. When the state said it was not raining outside, it did not matter if you were soaking wet and shaking like a leaf. You were expected to surrender your imagination to a new reality.

Water was a precious commodity. The animal odor rising from our bodies blended with the sweet and sour cloud pooling from our evaporated sweat. In the sunless cellar, there was no room for inhibitions. Guided only by somatic ties, we shared a sense of vulnerability, the absences lingering between us. But the question mark remained. It was made of fear, forgetting, and things left unsaid.

After we were disappeared from daylight, we understood silence could no longer protect us. We experienced every adversity, every scarcity like an extended family. Pulled together blindly into the comfort of affinity, despite our differences. We came from every corner of the country. Women born in the abundance of the old aristocracy, in the obscurity of the city amid the clamoring chaos of busy streets, and in the austerity of peasant life among the swaying stalks of corn. Our allegiances rooted within every ethnic community of our patchworked homeland.

We fought against planned erasure by holding onto a shared language. Not the one we were born into, nor the one taught in school. But a language manufactured from fragments and leftovers. It first began with whispers, then surged into furtive words, then syncopated laughter. We spoke, and we breathed, and we laughed because it unsettled the footsteps outside the door. If only they could have outlawed this too: our drawing closer, forming attachments. The inevitable cohesion of bodies thrown together by chance. That we could even enjoy ourselves from time to time must have been a genuine affront. Evidence that they were not doing their job properly.

The punishments came promptly: skipped meals, no more walks in the courtyard, a prohibition to look up at the sky, beatings, sometimes solitary confinement. We tolerated these calmly. We knew that, in the logic of the state, retribution had long been disconnected from guilt. That some of us had been twice marked for eradication. And what was a crime anyway if the law was manufactured by our jailers and executioners?

Our laughter erupted from a deeper inner dimension they never managed to unravel.

*

The women’s rhythmical breaths accompanied me into the night as I quarreled with my insomnias. The tidal rise and fall of a liquid bedding I never asked for. Each breath was different, some softer than insect hums, some labored and heavy. Others crackled with light snores. I often imagined them dreaming themselves out of confinement. For each woman, the texture of the dream was intricate and viscous. To summon it required an ability to read closely the details of their slow, reluctant movements in the waking hours, their hushed first words, their melancholy.

I knew, for instance, Maria revisited the fields of her childhood buzzing with legions of cicadas. And Stela cocooned herself like a newborn in her mother’s arms, her adult body, a clutter of clumsy limbs poking out of a swaddle that could have been a shroud. For Arpi, all I saw was blinding light as her lithe body soared high aback her horse, her long black hair unbraided, carried away with the wind. Rachel, my dear Rachel, was surely at a party with friends, cocktail glasses overflowing, as the chatter enveloped her in its life-giving grasp. For Elvira, it was harder to tell, but I suspected her mounted at a podium, papers and glasses clenched tight, addressing a querulous student crowd. Yael was surrounded by children, their furrowed brows shading eyes focused tensely on the first letters of the alphabet. And Zsuzsi disappeared into the night with one of her lovers, their footsteps dissolving in the fog as they passed old churches, cafés, and the crumbling apartment buildings of her hometown. Hanna sat with her little boy at a table in front of a pastry shop, sharing one small ice cream bowl, two scoops exactly. Camelia tended to her chickens, collecting warm eggs from a bed full of puff and straws, then painted imaginary landscapes on them with a thin brush. I imagined Esther running a covert mission, maybe distributing fliers or placing explosive devices at the fascist headquarters in her hometown as she had done during the war. Tatiana skied with her husband and daughters, their frost-bitten cheeks, a drop of color against the bleached mountains. And Ana surely travelled on a train to the seaside with her daughter, nothing else packed in their suitcases except oranges, books, and sunlight.

As for myself—if only I could have persuaded the beating drum in the heart of my brain to give me a moment’s rest. Then, I would have let my body be carried by the sea. Instead, flashes of awareness intruded through the tenuous threads of my sleep. If only we had not joined that meeting or attended that protest. If only we had been better guardians of secrecy. If only I had taken the car that morning instead of Ilya. His elegant hands bruised and broken by the cudgel. His lifeless body dumped like garbage into a common graveyard. At home, Eli and Cori, still in denial, played with their dolls, pretending they were someone else.

One night, someone forgot a cup of water on the bare cement floor. It was small, made of tin, the paint chipped at the edges. I stared at it for a long time. I could not push away the thought that it had been left there for the dead.

 

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