Chapter 8
Episode 8
Idivsizduoji kur galejo uzdaryti kamila uz rai kad mane zudziusi ji isveze nane pavogusi i maskva i keksiu auklyba ir i rygs vaikud kurtus grishomid jos buvo vidos berlyno nikitos..
I imagine the room where Kamila could have closed me. Four walls of a Moscow apartment that smelled of cabbage and someone else's cigarettes, a window barred by snow, a cot with a hollow where a body had wept itself thin. I imagine it because I have to place the grief somewhere, give it a floor plan, a lock on the door. She who killed me took me there. Stole me like a photograph from an album, slid me between her winter coats, carried me east on a train that rattled through the dark like a judgment. I was a child. I was cargo. I was the orphan she could show off to the neighbors, look what I have saved, look what I have made my own.
Moscow gave me a language I didn't speak. I learned to nod at the right times, to smile when the auklė pinched my arm, to swallow the salt of other people's soup. The whore's nanny — that's what I called her later, when I had words, when I could name the shame — she taught me to kneel at the edge of my own life and watch it happen elsewhere. Kamila was not the nanny. Kamila was the one who bought me, who carried me, who dressed me in doll clothes and told me I was fortunate. The nanny was just the hands that held me down.
And Riga. Riga with its cobblestones and its gray Baltic weight, where the children gathered like gulls around a pier. I was among them, but I was not one of them. I wore their knitted sweaters, their knitted patience, their knitted falsehood of a normal childhood. Grishomid — I don't know if that is a name or a curse I invented, the sound of my own mouth trying to say something true. The children laughed at my accent. The children asked where my mother was. I said Moscow. I said heaven. I said I don't know, and each answer was a small death that Kamila had already arranged.
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