People I Wanted to Be: Stories - Softcover

GINA OCHSNER is the author of two collections of short stories, People I Wanted to Be and The Necessary Grace to Fall, both of which won the Oregon Book Award, and a novel, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award, the William Faulkner Prize, an NEA grant, a Guggenheim, and the Raymond Carver Prize. She lives in Oregon.
 

ARTICLES OF FAITH

THE GHOSTS of the three children set up residence in the kataa next to the fishing rods and burlap sacks of potatoes, behind the shovels and rakes. Not kataa,” Irina corrected Evin when he tried to describe the footprints in the sod. And not sarai,” she said, broadening her stance and placing her hands on her hips. Shed.” They were working on learning proper English, teaching their ears the subtleties of intonation, pitch, and diction. Though they lived in Karelia, which was shared by Finns and Russians, they had agreed he would drop his Finnish and she her Russian so they could carry a new language between them. But that had been when they were first married, nearly ten years ago, and now it seemed to Evin that English was simply one more language with which to misunderstand each other. And when they wanted to nettle each other, he’d noticed, they would retreat to their more familiar languages.
Last night they had listened to the shattering of glass. All night long they lay beneath their covers, guessing: bottles, or jars of the winter pears in heavy syrup she’d made the year before; kholodets, the meat in aspic, she guessed in Russian. A souvenir rifle, Evin’s metal reel casing, his tackle box, he offered in Finnish. Finally they kicked off the covers, dressed in their thermals and boots, grabbed the flashlight, and went out to the sarai. The latch, a red-and-white fishing wire looped in a knot, had come unhooked, and the door wagged open and closed. Inside, puddles of broth and brine had begun to freeze at the edges.
Maybe it was the neighbor boy,” Irina said, and went to find a broom. Evin considered the boy from the other side of the laurel hedge motherless and hollow-eyed, with a tendency to skulk and shook his head. Through the window he saw movement in the pear tree just behind the shed. It was the ghosts, he decided, their ghost children, climbing the tree limbs and watching them mop up the shed. When he felt a prickling sensation, the hairs lifting along his forearms, he knew they’d come into the shed, passing themselves off, as they always did, as sudden shocks of chilly updrafts or, if it was daytime, as shafts of light, motes of dust, scraps of sky.
As he bent for a broken bottle, the neck a jagged collar of teeth, he could feel quick pushes of air around his elbow and the backs of his knees. Last week, while picking stones out of the little potato field, he had felt them behind him, and all the rest of that day Evin had kept jerking his arm, throwing out the point of his elbow to see if he could catch them unawares, maybe finally glimpse them. Now, as he reached for a bucket for the shards, a draft lifted the hair off his forehead.
On her papers Irina was listed as Karel, and therefore a Finn. But her mother had been Russian and Irina had received a Soviet education. By the time she met Evin, she had forgotten what little Finnish she had once known and preferred to think in Russian, pray in Russian, and shout in Russian. Russian was a roomier language, and what was language anyway but vague ideas looking for clothes to wear?
English,” the matchmaker who lived near the lumberyard had insisted. All the offices in the yards were adopting the English-only rule, and Irina had better learn it if she wanted to work her way into the lumber office, especially if she wanted to find a hardworking and sober man who’d strayed across the Finnish-Karelian border.
And so they lied a small lie. Vaina, the matchmaker, told Evin Haanstra, a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor, that Irina had passed second-year English courses with a troika. A three nothing to sneeze at!” Vaina told Evin more than once. Evin shrugged. For him, speaking English was like stomping around barefoot in the dark. But if Irina wanted to speak English, fine, and if it convinced Aila, her supervisor at the lumber office, to give her a promotion, that was fine too. He wanted a Russian girl, that much he knew. The Finnish girls never even gave him a nod, and he liked the way Karelian girls knew how to wear makeup and even flirt a little. And so he paid Vaina what she asked, a month’s wages. She pulled out a work pencil, one of the thick square ones used in the yard, and licked the nib.
You have a rare soul,” Evin said in Finnish, and Vaina, seated behind her blocky desk in the corner of the office, translated the message to Irina. The translation was not the best Let’s have radishes in the shower but the match went through anyway. Irina stitched the family icons of Saint Seraphim, Saint Boris, and Saint Gleb, and of course the Theotokos, Mother of God, to the stays of her wedding dress, and in the end everyone agreed that it was a good match, all thiings considered. Evin had provided everything he had promised: a small house outside Petrozavodsk with a plot for potatoes and even a ssssshed that doubled as a coop for her geese. The only thing he hadn’t been able to give her was living, breathing children. And for this, he knew, Irina harbored a small cache of anger.

Irina withdrew her little calendar from the kitchen drawer and circled the numbers of the days she was fertile. On the days circled in red, she pulled the calendar back out at night and drew an X at the bottom of the square, after she and Evin tried to make a child. Now she flipped through the calendar and sighed. All those X’s and still no children. All those months, each one passed as another exercise in grief.
Irina snapped off the light and squeezed her eyes shut. Evin was still out in the shed sweeping up that mess, while all around her, in houses in other fields, couples were making love, making babies without worry or even much effort. It made her sick. People who didn’t care either way would finish their business and drop off to sleep, some of them pregnant already. Irina considered her supervisor at the yard office. Aila had once confided to Irina that she had a deep and abiding fear that she would make a bad mother and that she had never wanted children. Now Aila had a little girl, and her biggest concern was how to get rid of the weight she’d gained from the pregnancy.
Anger bloomed in Irina’s chest, the muscles along her jaw tightening. A bad joke, this life. She’d always believed hard work brought you what you wanted. That’s what she’d been taught, that’s what she had come to expect. In Karelia, a divided land of upland and rock,water and forest, the soil would give if you just worked hard enough. Irina sighed. Now the hardest work Aila did was to sit behind her particleboard desk and clench her butt muscles when she thought no one was looking. But the way her face gripped at her mouth as if she’d heard a dirty story and was trying hard not to laugh made it obvious to Irina.

Evin had first noticed the children a few months ago, on his way out to the sarai to check his fish drying on the racks. He loved his shed, a rundown shack of peeling tarpaper and shingles. He loved the smell of the fresh sawdust Irina spread over the floor, the drying rowan and cowberries hanging in swatches. He loved the diesel fumes and the oil that beaded up as a dark resin along the old boards on hot days. He even loved the smell of the lake salmon and the scent of the mud from the lakes on the tips of his fingers. He was thinking of all this when he opened the door and instantly smelled something new: a clean, brisk aroma, like the rush of air from a freezer when the door is yanked wide.
Then he observed the rattling of his rods, the tarpaper peeling from the boards. At the same moment he felt a shift in the air, and he knew that whatever it was had passed by and gone outside. Evin followed it, stood next to the birch tree, and pointed his nose north, toward the swamp. The air was still, as if it were holding its breath. Evin thought he could just see the outlines of three children as they jostled one another and kicked their feet in the tree. He stood without moving for a moment, then jumped, reaching for their ankles.
It must have been the cold, Irina had said matter-of-factly, her eyes flat and gray. Evin had stumbled into the kataa, breathless, anxious to tell her what he’d seen. Irina had just driven the geese through the yard and into the small pens Evin had built for them, and she was now killing and dressing them, one by one. Those couldn’t have been our children out in the tree.” She clapped a goose between her legs, pulled its neck alongside its back, and gave a hard twist, falling backward on her heels.
It could be the cold,” Evin agreed in Finnish. They both knew that the cold could make you clumsy, make you silly, wishing for the impossible. The lowering frost could make you see things, make you parse figures from the shadows.
But that night he heard the back door rattle open and shut as gusts of wind plied it. Later he heard laughter, a liquid sound like water bubbling over, and then, near daybreak, a bumping around the hearth and a whoosh, whoosh, as if they were taking turns sliding down the flue.



Up there in the birch, a sickly thing that Evin had promised Irina he’d chop down. Sometimes in the shed. Of course she knew the children were there. She wasn’t blind. She saw how the wind riffled the blackened leaves, how it missed certain patches, those dips and grooves in the limbs, the best spots for sitting. On still days she’d seen a wiggle in the topmost branch. Twice she’d heard the shout of laughter, once a tiny, gasping cry. Now that the frost had set as a sheer veil over the field, she sometimes heard their little feet scraping over the ground. She would have loved to gather them into her arms, bury her nose in the napes of their necks, taking in their warm, oily smell. She would have loved to run her fingers over theirs, cup her palm around their heels, or count their toes. She would have done all these things and more, but they were not real, she knew. Real enough to displace air, but not real enough to hold, to kiss, to rock.
Perhaps she had not given them enough attention during their earliest days, and perhaps that was why they were here now, trying to be noticed. While they were in the womb, as sinew was meshing with the soft, trellislike bones, there must have been too many moments when she was thinking of other things her geese, Evin’s fish, the lumberyard. Perhaps she didn’t pray steadily enough. Perhaps she and Evin were speaking their separate languages and there was a pause, a word dropped, and that was the moment when the babies were lost, when their tiny hearts grew weak, stopped fluttering, and she didn’t even know it.
All summer long and into the fall, a short season marked only by a change in the wind’s strength and direction, she knitted sweaters and mittens and thigh-high socks for them. But they weren’t cold, she finally decided. If they were, they’d curl up in front of the fire she fed every night until looking at the flames began to pull her toward sleep. They weren’t cold, just curious. She could feel their little eyes drinking in every detail of color and substance, every movement, so that later at night they would have something to dream about. She hoped they weren’t watching and listening to everything she said and did. The English she used around the house it wasn’t so good. And while she never used to bother with matters of modesty, she’d recently taken to shutting and even locking the door to the toilet.
She hoped they were not huddling under the bed or hiding in the closet on the days circled in red. At the ends of these days, she put away her knitting early and she and Evin went to bed. She would pull up her nightgown to her navel, the signal for Evin to unbuckle his trousers. Even with her eyes squeezed shut as she prayed earnestly for conception, for the perfect forming of fingers and eyelashes, elbows and roots of teeth, an uneasy feeling would wash over her. It was a creepy feeling the Karelians described as jaa ssa veri, to be living among the dead, seen by the unseen an expression having to do with ice in the blood.
Afterward, Irina would pull her nightgown back over her hips and straighten it around her knees. Evin would kiss her quickly on the forehead, for luck, and then thump down the stairs and out the back door to the shed, where, she knew, he’d rearrange his spinners and lures. She would lie perfectly still, her whole body tightened into a hard fist as she listened to the dogs barking. From that moment forward, her every thought would be fixed on keeping what was inside her from spilling back out. She even followed Aila’s lead, clenching the muscles of her butt into fierce knots, as well as that female muscle Vaina had told her about with a wink. Irina practiced squeezing that one too, while she lay flat on her back.
At last, when she thought that whatever was supposed to happen had had long enough either to do it or not, she would kick her legs out from under the covers. She’d rise from the bed and kneel in front of the icon of the Theotokos, a raised metal image of Mary holding little baby Jesus. It was difficult, looking at Mary. Irina would feel that familiar anger, faithful and unbidden, like a dog at her heels. Here was one more mother who hadn’t even tried. But then Irina would make the sign of the cross and bend to kiss the little Jesus. This was when she’d feel the children drawing near, and she could sense that they were sad. I’m sorry,” she would have liked to tell them, for she was sure that she was to blame in some way. Then she would climb back into bed, a shiver taking hold in her spine, her hands clammy. She’d hold her breath, waiting for the children to go back out to the shed.

During the six months the children had lived in the yard, Evin had noticed that they preferred to play in the kataa. Maybe because it was where Irina kept the geese, and, longing to see more of their mother, they curled themselves around Irina’s many hooks and knives as well as his tools, his rods and reels. That was the only way he could explain it, why they would prefer the cold, the cracking frost that pinched the nose and eyebrows and squeezed down on the ribs. Still, it bothered him that they were out there, and every night for the past week, after Irina drifted to sleep, Evin had crept from his bed, heated up mugs of hot chocolate, and set them along the windowsill of the shed.
For the children were astonishingly normal in some ways. They liked the hot chocolate he brought. They also liked to play games and practical jokes. One of them or maybe they were taking turns moved Evin’s eyeglasses so that when he woke in the morning, all he could see was a watery world of light and shadow. This morning he was on his hands and knees, feeling around for the frames. Just when his fingers brushed the rims, he felt a small current of air and his glasses skittered out of reach. Evin laughed, sitting back on his haunches in surrender. He remembered being a boy, teasing his father in the small ways children do.
Pull!” A fierce shout rose now from behind the laurel hedge, and Evin jumped to his feet. The neighbors, the father and his seven-year-old son, were out in the yard. Evin could hear the man teaching the boy to shoot at clay pigeons, only they didn’t have a launcher, so the father was standing behind a pile of stones and lobbing up a clay disk. They didn’t have a ri- fle either, so the boy threw a rock at the clay pigeon as it plummeted back to the ground. The man was teaching his son the importance of aim, of watchfulness. But the boy was a bad shot, and Evin could see how this frustrated the father, made him wring his hands.
From behind the bedroom window, Evin watched another disk climb the air slowly, then fall gracelessly, the air being too thin for such birds without wings. The exercise seemed absurd to him. Evin recalled his lovemaking sessions with Ir...