Whiting Award Winners

Spring of 1954, my mother stood at the threshold of Henry Picotte’s abandoned chicken house, a bouquet of hens dangling in either hand, and eyed the enormous prairie rattler coiled on the dirt floor. Killing the snake would be inconvenient, hampered as she was by a midterm pregnancy and the hysterical chickens swooping left and right around their new hoe, but a weapon would not have been hard to find. Stout diamond willow sticks leaned against every gatepost on the place, anywhere a man might step off a horse. Such readiness suggested an extended family of snakes, more than she wished to dwell on with her hands full of squawking chickens. Stepping back out, she hollered for my father to bring a spade.

She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.

Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.

Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.

In this wet season my gone mother

climbs back again

and everything here smells gutted—

bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,

our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling

this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared

orphans out bleating with the mongrels,

                                    all of us starved

for something reclaimable. What chases them,

her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,

shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.

I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s

neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,

her tar this same fish odor I am washing.

I know I am one of them. The emptied.

BEDER: (fuming) Independence Day fireworks. How can the Israelis call it Independence Day and not choke on the words? They celebrate forcibly removing people from their homes? Killing men, women, children? This is cause for a party?

ADHAM: Let’s not get political.

BEDER: Who’s getting political?

THERESA

I’m worried she’ll be a fish out of water.

ROBERTA

When do we meet her? When’re they movin’?

THERESA

Not now. Soon. We’ll see. They’re waiting to see if Mingjing can transfer jobs.

            ROBERTA puts down her cookie.

ROBERTA

What’s her name?

THERESA

Minjung.

ROBERTA

Theresa.

            THERESA sips tea.

THERESA

She’s in architecture, works for a big firm out there

ROBERTA

(indicating the under-eye skin) Those dark circles, no wonder.

THERESA

But she might give it up and teach.

ROBERTA

You seen her only once?

THERESA

Tim never said any—why would I think

ROBERTA

Such a rush.

THERESA

My brain’s exploded.

ROBERTA

I knew it: how far gone is she?

Note: A male actor plays the roles of both THERESA and her son TIM. A second male actor plays the roles of both ROBERTA and her son ROBBIE.