The winters no longer embody the innocence
of sled-riding and falling on my backside.
When I close my eyes every night
and day that I create my own cemeteries
from play-times past,
I signal a reunion with the enigmatic sound
of smashing in the dollhouse that I never
got for Christmas.
A dose of magnesium numbs my nightly
routine, bedroom linoleum is my muse.
I caress my deeming desire to carry through
the spring, as if the waking deer expect my woe.
The unfortunate reality of having only been to Ukraine a handful of times as a child, on jam-packed itineraries is that only a few photographs from that time exist in my possession. By this logic, my memories of my grandparents’ physical presence, and of their house are few and far between. I do, however, know that there is a chicken coop. I snuck out there once just before nightfall. It was a splintery shack with a half-broken door wedged into the dirt of the yard in the back of the house.
The coop, which in comparison to my miniature size, appeared to extend vastly into the unknown. My grandfather threatened me and shouted that I was not allowed to go inside after dark, because the chickens needed rest from my rough handling and because the roosters would peck my eyes out.
I don’t remember being scared.
The photograph related to this semi-opaque memory feels more unreliable than the memory itself. The images that I hold onto dearly, simply dance around the memory, clipped from my mother and my’s trip to Ukraine in 2004, and dwindle in the sticky summer air. My earliest memories only loosely parallel the images, and at times, their dreamlike qualities feel fabricated whenever I try to recall them. Especially since I don’t remember my father coming to visit my mother’s parents, and he is nowhere to be found in the pictures, even though the composition and use of flash feel familiar. I have learned to decode his photographing and to distinguish it from my mother’s by going back to our photo albums over the years.
Past the infinite yard of my grandparents’ disintegrating house, through the gate, my mother and I venture into a luscious field. It is a humid day, but there is a strong gust of wind cooling off the top of my head. The sun is high up in the clouds, dispersing as we wander into a Slavic Eden. The trek overwhelms my eyes; I blink repeatedly to adjust the curious abundance of green. We walk through the tall grasses to an awning in the field where the edge of the woods trickle into the open land. A sparse herd of cow’s graze in front of us. My mother warns me as I approach the gentle beasts. Tiptoeing, tiptoeing, I stretch for a touch. The cow’s hide is warm. My mother beckons me towards the bushes by the woods. To protect my shiny blonde bob, she weaves a crown of flowers, those of which I have never seen before. She crafts the crown quickly, recalling her own childhood to remember the ins and outs of the stems intertwining. She places it on top of my head, and I marvel at how strongly the flowers are held together.
The memory is still silky as I embroider it into the corners of my mind, fastening it tenderly to guarantee its immovability, but I am afraid it will split off from my consciousness. It is a memory that feels so fragile, like a wilting houseplant that no amount of water or fertilizer will save. My mom and I entertain ourselves with memories during most of our conversations, and sometimes it feels like all we can talk about. Yet somehow, it is the most protective measure I can take.
All of a sudden, I have begun venturing to unfamiliar landscapes in the hopes that there will be some resemblance of a “home” in the shadows. When all that I have that defines my name are negatives in envelopes, birthday cards and squeaky matroyshka dolls on my shelves, how am I supposed to find comfort in an American counterpart of a good bite of pelmeni when that is all that my aching belly craves? Underneath the drooping vines nestled by the roots of oak trees I hope to find a sprouting mushroom, one that won’t numb my tongue and poison my body.
My friends and I who have retained our mother tongues tend to trip on our pronounciations, but when we sit down at a Georgian restaurant or with an older generation at a dinner party, we share not only the cuisine of wider Eastern Europe, but a knowing that we will be held by each other if the sky falls in on us. Upon coming home we giggle in English and nibble on Napoleon cake.
Simultaneously, every tear on the window netting of my own apartment reminds me of places I shouldn’t be able to remember. Every blister on the top surface of my walls, painted over the decades, makes me fuss.
I was not made to work in the fields
reaping what I sowed.
18-hour days
scythed by the Slavic children before me.
my great aunts
grandmothers
great uncles
fathers
ripped root vegetables out of the
Soviet soil so they could feed
the babes born when the first
podsnezhnik struggled out of the snow
in the ambiguity of the month of March,
which then get trampled
by a hunter’s shoe.
a beet would nourish
my father’s insolence
and a carrot would rid
my mother of her pride.
we get cranky when
we don't eat
so, we stockpile carp and perch
and now the freezer door won’t close.
my birthday cake falls out and shatters.
There comes a time when every heroine
notices a steady decline in heavy
courting and the offering
of lost rings.
Usually, a tell-tale sign
is the lack of talk of gifts.
I keep bouncing up and down
by my door front
expecting the mailman
to bring empty slides of film.
Giddy with the plausibility
of what could’ve been—
circus performers juggling fireballs and walking
on scratchy rope—
choking on trapezes.
Isn’t that what we do?
Walk on eggshells as a party trick,
make rings disappear.
Drop them in the back of my throat
where swords should fit.
They’ll appear every time,
under the radiator as a surprise,
transient corridors will lead me
to a begging conclusion.
I find out that your lips are wax.
Parting ways becomes a sport,
rusty fingers rotating
silver bands that leave skin green,
which one of us then will flip a coin,
lean in first and risk chipping teeth?
I had been meticulously scrubbing off crusted tomato paste, flinging a piece of chain mail sloppily back and forth across the cast iron surface of my cooking pan, when the combination of the two metals conjured up a scent so particular and vibrant that I stopped what I was doing entirely and stood at my sink until the tips of my fingers began to wrinkle. I could not lift my hands out of the running water. Perhaps it was the waste slipping into the depths of the disposal that had stirred me so evocatively. It was in fact a rancid kind of smell. But this was a peculiar and rare instance; the sight of an average kitchen had suddenly transported me against my will to a memory of a rundown, nonfunctioning bathroom, one that was thousands of miles away from my current address, in a different country, and from a different decade. My grandmother bathing me: fuzzy. The color of the walls is indifferent. Why was the shower broken? I could not recall. But the smell of the tub was ghastly and the act of being bathed was unpleasant.
Instead of standing under a working showerhead, I patiently let myself be cleaned by my grandmother with water from a bucket. I remember feeling like a ship in open ocean as I sat naked in her bathtub. It was another one of my earliest memories. It was also summertime, but every square inch of my grandparents’ apartment was cold. I was surprised by my inability to catalog the memory as happy or sad, but I can guess how the outside looked of where my father’s Soviet upbringing transpired. The apartment was a nearly identical copy to the one next to it, a khrushchevka wrapped up in everlasting concrete. Other than that, I don’t have an exact description of the outside of this apartment, or much of the inside, other than remembering smoke-drenched oriental rugs hanging from the walls. The rugs must still be positioned exactly as they were two decades ago and during sunsets, radiate a reddish tint. I can’t say whether my grandparents’ stereotypical khrushchevka evoked any childlike joy. I was too young to understand why there was a draft inside and why the play structures like slides and monkey bars outside of the building were shedding flakes of white paint, revealing dull copper rust underneath.
I was always sticking my hands where they didn’t belong on the rim of a baking sheet fresh out of the oven or a drawer full of knives. I still give myself a new constellation of paper cuts every week it seems. My hangnails worsen in the winter when the frigid air gets to be too much, and out of all the injuries that I give myself year-round, it is this time of year that I am tasting blood the most. My dry lips suffer from the same affliction as my hands. Letting my morbid curiosity get to me each time, when I suck on my lips or nails, I find that there is always a metallic savouriness under the layers of my bodily surface.
I give it some more thought: my bare palms…one gripping the handle of my cast iron pan, the other swishing around the piece of chain mail. The contact of my skin against these two metals is what produced the odor. I was smelling “my own rust”.
A 2006 scientific study titled “The Two Odors of Iron when Touched or Pickled (Skin) Carbonyl Compounds and Organophosphines”, published in Angewandte Chemie by Dietmar Glindemann Dr., Andrea Dietrich Prof. Dr., Hans-Joachim Staerk Dr., Peter Kuschk Dr., reveals in the abstract that touching iron such as coins produces an illusory metallic scent. It is a human body odor linked “to the decomposition of skin peroxides”, that toys with the senses. Reading the article, I discover that Fe2+ (Ferrous ion) is found in my own vessel and that when skin meets metal or blood, I am experiencing my awareness of my own self. The study details how chemicals are the explanations for illusions.
“Ironically, the iron odor on skin contact is a type of human body odor.”
I have a hard time believing that science can be humorous and light-hearted, especially since my father –who also happens to be a scientist and merely a stone statue of a man– has passed down his DNA to me. He is my blood, and I am his.
Without a doubt, this evocation of a memory of a Russian bath, a bucket, and a cast iron tub, was an ingenuous reminder of my living, breathing, apparatus. Perhaps it came to me because of unidentifiable smells mimicking the inefficiency to understand my own emotions. Here, now, or then. I’ve been writing down definitions for what “my own rust” might mean. Is it holy or evil? Is it an unstoppable, crippling disease that will consume the mind or muscle? Or is it a simple fact, a trait, embedded in what I have inherited, such as I inherited my cast iron pan from an old roommate?