Maria Marchinkoski
In the Kunstkamera
The American student takes the long walk over the river, past the palaces and statues of Lenin. A blue building decorated with white trim stands along the canal, a tower with a colonnade rising from its roof like a slender waist from a ball gown.
He has come here for an exhibit. He has come to see us.
The building looks like any other mansion in Saint Petersburg. His friends call this a museum. The locals call it the Kunstkamera. He heard about frightening exhibits, about death and deformity, but none of it matches the air of the small woman who ushers him through the turnstile for 300 rubles. By the first step up the stairwell to the second floor, he almost doubts the existence of the specimens he has come to see.
On the final step, he finds us illuminated by our backlights.
We see everything from our shelves and pedestals. They are our desks and chairs, and this room with pastel walls and arched windows could be our classroom. We have learned Chinese and German and English and even some Japanese, but we have always known Russian. We peer out from our bottles, eyes black and smooth like rosary beads. Our gray faces swell against the glass. The same woman comes every morning before sunrise to turn on the lights. With every step, the keys on her hip rattle like bells on a troika. She never looks at us.
She has become a provisional member of our class. A schoolteacher. A mother.
“Fotkat’ nel’zya,” she reminds the visitors.
A collector. An employee.
We would thank her if we were able. Camera flashes whiten our already colorless skin, and the glare of lenses reminds us how we lost our irises. The visitors wander to our room past wax families in glass cases, carved statues of the Buddha, and the long, bilingual descriptions of artifacts. They don’t care. We’re the freaks they’ve come to see—our knotted spines, our engorged heads, our conjoined bodies.
I have watched young men and old women faint and hit the polished floors with a hollow sound. I have tasted every flavor of shock and boredom. Mothers have shielded me from view with a well-placed hand. Grown men have cried. Children have looked into my waterlogged eyes and laughed. The American college student standing in front of me now, hands in his pockets, makes no face. I can only stare back at him, lips parted as though a bubble might burst from them into the solution that keeps my body from ever rotting or touching ground again. Any moment, the boy thinks, I might blink. Any moment I might take my thumb from my mouth and speak. Any moment a sentence might travel around my jar and wrap around me like a ribbon.
How long has the American boy lived abroad? Not long enough to read my description in its original language. His eyes flit between Russian and English, desperate to steal spare vocabulary. He must justify his visit here. The note below my jar can only say so much.
This infant suffered from advanced hydrocephaly and lived only three days outside the womb. His remains were sent to the court of Tsar Peter the Great from a peasant farm outside Novgorod in the summer of 1718. They debuted at the Kunstkamera with the Tsar’s collection of physical abnormalities in 1727.
His lips fumble in silence around new words, and as he glances up at my face—my expression caught somewhere between a dream and a death rattle—I work my features into his memory. I must look like I’m about to break apart. My oversized head might dissolve. Kneecaps and elbows the size of fingernails might drift into nothing. They will not. I will not. I will stay in here forever. The longer he looks at me and the longer I look at him, the less I see him and the less he sees me. Fascination draws him near, but the closer he comes, the more his eyes and nose and lips curve out of shape and proportion. The glass has come between us. My reflection has come between us.
Beneath my swollen face, I can trace what’s left of my mother—brown eyes and pale lips I have only ever seen twisted in different forms of pain.
When I was about to be born, she stumbled and whispered but never cried out. She stretched her arms toward the rye stalks as though they might save her from falling, but this rye field had a memory—it watched her slash away at it for a decade—and so she collapsed. Scythes, rakes, and whips rose and fell over the grass. Blood furrowed through the soil. A birch tree swayed at the edge of my view. The leaves bent in the wind toward my withered fingers, never to touch them.
“Akulina?”
A callused hand wedged itself between my head and the ground. An older woman had made her way to me through the grass.
“No, this is too early. This is not—”
The woman did what she needed to separate us.
“My God, my God—No, darling, all is fine. You have a son. Stay here. I will get a man to carry you inside.”
She, like all the women here, had seen hundreds of newborns, some moving and some not, lifted from these fields. My large, soft head demanded all her care. My limbs, no thicker than wisps of smoke, dangled from her arms. She stumbled away with me, speechless and pale, toward the men with the scythes, rakes, and whips.
“Akulina has given birth already, has she?” asked one. “Let her hold it.” He wiped sweat from his face with his sleeve. “Why isn’t it crying?”
“He breathes like a fish breathes.”
He looked down into my eyes and spat into the dust. “Then he’s already gone.”
After they stanched my mother’s bleeding, they taught her how to hold me. She learned to support my head. It was all I had.
Only after she mourned the shape of my body did they tell her how—no matter what she did or how she prayed—I would die within the week. She wept and wrung the blanket beneath us because I was her firstborn, because she dreaded bringing a girl into her world, because she thought all would be well with a son. At fifteen years old she still thought she could clench her fists, close her eyes, and twist the world into proper shape by repeating its injustices back to it. She didn’t know yet that she would have more children whose bodies would grow and decay. She didn’t know yet that my cry for help would one day lose some of its power over her. I wouldn’t haunt her always. Only sometimes.
Only sometimes would she wonder what became of my body.
It has, like any good child’s, outlasted its mother.
The longer she looked at me, the less she saw me, but did I ever see her? I scavenged the name Akulina from stray exclamations like an anatomist collecting corpses. I have no family, no father. There will never be a name other than the tsar’s printed below my jar.
What can I say about Akulina? She gave me my shape and my name. She cried and cried until crying seemed stupid. Her face went numb and her lungs empty. Her ears pealed with a ring that in one dumb, beautiful moment reminded her of church bells. Daring to look, she marveled at how my ears pinkened in the sunlight. She counted the veins in them and promised she would never forget their maplike lines.
When night came, dreams comforted her. I could be anyone in them. My arms and legs would thicken, my eyes would shrink down into their sockets, and my body would grow to fit its head. We would talk in them like I talk now. The sunlight would pierce and pinken my ear with all the luster of stained glass, and we would sit there, talking and talking forever. We would never step outside again. She would never need to see the rye again.
Some nights she allowed herself to believe she had reached that room. The weight of the past kept her from saying everything she wanted to say, even if the dreams were hers. The face she imagined me wearing at my wedding or ordination shared the same lines as the face she saw gasping and drooling beneath the summer sun. Every fantasy withdrew into the truth it had been designed to escape. There is no day, dream, or daydream where I am still alive.
I left Akulina without her knowing. My death rattle sounded no different from my exhale. Death died when I stopped breathing. I was never there. I am already gone.
“There is an ukaz,” said the man from the field, rubbing at the dirt on his sleeve. “15 rubles to send the boy to the tsar’s court. They will preserve his body and his incorruptible soul.”
“Rodion. His name is Rodion!”
“They will give you 15 rubles, but they need him today.”
Men with mustaches and papakhas moved my body from box to box, cart to cart, and room to room until a man in a powdered wig placed me in my jar, poured a mixture of liquor and mercury over me, and fit my thumb into my mouth with a pair of forceps because this, he thought, was how a little boy should look when he dies.
The people behind the American student have started to grumble. They want to see me. They paid good money. The line must move, like it always has. Every year it costs more for them to see me, for them to laugh, cry, or breathe deeply and take pleasure in the fact that they are not me.
The sunlight no longer strikes and pinkens my ears. I will never smile in confusion or laugh the way children do at things they don’t understand, because I understand it all now. The cornfields in Schenectady, New York, are not so different from the rye around Veliky Novgorod. This boy across from me thinks he will fly back to New York and leave me in the Kunstkamera. He thinks that I haven’t loosed myself into his body, but I have already snapped my shriveled fingers and lit a fire behind his eyes.
My face will come to him like it came to my mother, and he will look out his childhood window onto white streetlamps and naked trees. He will lie in bed and wonder how it feels to give birth in a rye field or watch a child die in his arms or be a child dying in someone’s arms. He will wonder whether my name was really Rodion, whether he saw that name in the description beneath my jar or stole it from Dostoevsky. But like Akulina, he’ll find the strength to put me away, because he is his own tsar. He is his own ethnologist, with his own museums and shelves of personas. He will file me away with the thousands of other people confined in his heart—family, friends, lovers, strangers. He will take me out and turn me and watch the light fail to change the color of the solution that suspends me above him. It will not look so different from the amber that fixes the prehistoric fly in its forever. Brushing his finger over my lid, he will see the trail his skin clears through the dust that spent centuries gathering there.
He will put me away again.
Or maybe he won’t. Maybe—hands emerging from his pockets, heart rate steadily climbing—he will grab me from the shelf and run. The grumbles behind him will grow into shouts. The room’s attention will fall over him like the ray of a lighthouse. The woman in the corner will stand and yell, the keys on her belt loop chiming. He will tuck me in his arm, running, running for the big arched windows as people scream and stare and rush to stop him, and as he somehow undoes the latch and throws the windows open, he will heave me up and over the cobblestone sidewalks and into the Neva. The water will splash and spin and rush and topple over me, bobbing my jar up and down, up and down. And as a hundred angry hands fall on the student, I will find the strength to raise my arms. For the first time I will press my palms to the smooth underside of my lid. I will push it and spin it and feel it give. The dark river water will spray over me. The twenty-first century will wrap its air around me. My solution will froth and churn from the river into the street as I’m borne out of the city and into endless acres of birch trees and rye fields, and I will laugh for the first time, laugh like I’ve never laughed before, laughing with the American boy.
And he will lean back on his pillow and see his bedroom again. He will decide my face was real and terrible. He will hope it taught him something, but he won’t be able to say exactly what. Sometimes he will want to tell someone about me, but he won’t be able to say what he wants to say without sounding vague and crazy, so he won’t say anything. The lid will stay screwed shut. He will look out his window at white streetlamps and naked trees.