NOBODY'S DAUGHTER

Trauma doesn’t only happen when a wicked villain does some wicked thing to an immaculate hero.

 

We’re more perverse than that.

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When the gate screeched closed behind her, Ana took pride in ignoring its plea. She knew no one would trim the ivy. Soon, it would occlude the windows, leaving her books to mould and her pillow to rot in the same tomb where her youth lay buried.

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Better them than me, Ana thought, tightening her grip on Laika’s lead to tighten her grip on herself. She tugged her away from sniffing the flattened Coca-Cola bottle on the side of the mountain road and followed the sole discernible direction: that of the telephone wire as it dipped and rose, dipped and rose overhead.

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All her life she’d contemplated it, imagining the conversations it would have carried if Artur hadn’t slashed its cable before she could even speak. But that one ‘if’ presupposed many more impossible ‘ifs’: if Artur’s theory hadn’t been so strict, if she’d been able to leave, if she’d had anyone on the Outside to call. But she didn’t.

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Instead, the heavy curtain of the thick woods blacked out the world from her, and her from the world. Some nights she’d allowed herself to come out of the villa. She’d sit in the middle of the road, wild and shameful, blinking at the brightening horizon only to retreat and lock the gate herself, like some sort of domesticated freak.

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But now, stepping out of the thinning foliage, it didn’t take long to spot the tight cluster of the sleeping village below. And there it was: civilisation. Houses, smaller than she’d imagined, squatted shoulder to shoulder, washed-out roofs and walls blended into one single body that breathed one single breath. The gaping windows of the clustered buildings stared up in the half-light of dawn: And who are you? they asked. For now, she could only stare back.

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As Ana walked down into the village, the hints of life piled onto themselves. Haystacks. A rug drying on a clothesline, a banged-up turquoise car, a single dusty shoe. Then, the first house—nothing like Artur’s—its walls caked in soot, one window shattered. Ana stole glimpses inside, hoping to observe the rhythms of life, someone watching the morning news or making breakfast or existing, but the village slept still.

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Then, a man. When they spotted him in one of the shoddier gardens, Laika froze; she didn’t even bark. Ana didn’t dare move. Smoking a cigarette out of the corner of his mouth, the villager looked like he’d been sunburnt through his skin, down to his liver. He hurled corn onto the ground and, with each throw, a hurricane of plumage at his feet convulsed. The grey chickens pecked up seeds and dirt and their own shit in hungry jabs, dumb necks jerking back and forth, blank eyes staring at air as their master coughed spit and tobacco overhead.

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Should she have asked him for directions? Perhaps. But before she could think it, Ana found herself hurtling towards the village, her steps quickening so much that she had to hold down her heavy bag to keep it from hitting her hip. Maybe she could ask someone else. Someone who wore a suit, like Artur, or at least a clean shirt.

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As she hurried down the hill, dirt road turned into paved road, the houses inching closer together until one’s wall was another’s fence—then Ana found herself in what was trying to be a main square. But if these were the streets where life happened, they were sorely lacking life. Ana let Laika sniff aimlessly, trying to steady herself and hold the rising tide of disappointment at bay. She looked around, hoping to find something not as extravagant as their villa seemed now, but at least something good, clean, cared for. All there was was dust.

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Advertising sunflower oil in crinkled plastic bottles, the single storefront broke the promise of its opening hours with bolted doors. The rest of the buildings, most of them slathered in cement, propped up ugly signs: ‘Construction Materials,’ one announced in hand painted letters that got smaller as the artist ran out of space. ‘Second Hend Feshion,’ said another. On a hill in the near distance, the white tower of a church held a cross made of two welded iron bars, on which a pigeon perched, watching.

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Where is everyone?

 

Just then, a chair screeched against pebbles. The sound had come from the other side of the square, and whipped their panicked attention to the front of a peeling building. Ana had thought it abandoned, but its door was now propped open with a broom and there she was: a woman. Kicking some plastic tables together, she dragged herself back inside and disappeared under the communist-era sign, coughing as it tried to scream in faded red letters: ‘HOTEL COSMOS.’

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The fear climbed further up Ana’s throat, but she knew it would. She’d prepared herself for this, the task that put even Artur’s endless assignments to shame; starting her life, unshielded by anything other than her own intelligence, her own strength, her own force. This was it. Ana ignored the feeling of hot blood pounding through her ears and walked towards the front door.

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Although the morning sun was strong, the hotel entrance—half reception, half café-bar—was so dark it blinded her for a moment. The room revealed itself to her gradually, in swollen stairs, stained upholstery stretched over old chairs, still lifes hung up on the walls like forgotten suicides. They all seemed covered with a thick layer of dust. So did the woman behind the reception, who was quiet enough for Laika not to notice her.

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‘Hello, sir—madam. Good morning,’ Ana stuttered, digging her nails into her palm for her mistake, but the woman was too busy pressing a plastic pen into a notebook to notice she was there. Counting, not breathing, her shoulders and cardigan lumped together in a congealed dumpling: meaty and glutinous.

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‘Good morning,’ Ana repeated, more pleased with the tone of her voice this time. It sounded strong. Perhaps too strong—the woman cocked backward as if she’d just noticed an axe suspended overhead. When she looked up at Ana’s face, she saw it fall.

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‘Weren’t you coming at nine thirty?’

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‘Pardon?’

 

‘You’re the audit lady, no?’

 

Ana stared at her; this scenario she hadn’t practised. ‘My apologies, but I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.’

 

‘Oh, thank God,’ the woman said, looking up at an imagined sky where Ana could only see a mouldy ceiling. Then, hunching back over her calculations, she continued a half-interested enquiry. Ana would’ve found it rude if it wasn’t such a relief to not be looked at. ‘You wanna check in, then?’

 

‘Oh. No.’

 

‘Then what do you want?’

 

I want to see what a normal human looks like, Ana contemplated saying. But she kept her gaze as casual as she could, just in case the woman looked up, and forced a smile at her thinning scalp: ‘Um—is your café open?’

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‘Just about,’ the woman said, pointing her pen at the askew clock nailed into the wall behind her. Its second hand struggled to move forward, some faulty mechanism inside forcing it to jut backwards again and again and again. ‘Bit early, though.’

 

‘That’s why I need coffee,’ Ana said with a little laugh that didn’t sound like a laugh. The woman either didn’t register her joke or didn’t find it funny. Ana tightened her lips.

 

‘Milk. Sugar. Hm?’

 

‘Neither. Thank you.’

 

‘Take a seat,’ the woman sighed as she pushed her belly away from the desk, eyes still lingering on the figure her old pocket calculator blinked back at her.

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Unhooking Laika’s lead, Ana hurried to the seat closest to the door as if towards a life raft. When she got there, she held onto the plank of wood underneath her with clenched fingers, allowed herself a few seconds to get used to the turbid waters. Five minutes, one coffee, one short conversation to find out about the trains. Easy, easy, easy, she told herself, as she watched Laika’s billowy white fur scuttle around. 

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When she caught her reflection in one of the glass cabinets, Ana thought she looked much too stiff, obviously uncomfortable, but leaning back into the sticky wood of the chair felt like easing into a mud-filled gutter. The tacky touch of it against her long hair and bare forearms made her shoot upright again.

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Could anyone condemn her for thinking what she was thinking? Artur wouldn’t. Despite his disgust for what lay outside of the villa’s walls, Ana had spent her years imagining a wondrous place. How could she not have? The Dostoyevskys, the Tarkovskis, the Beethovens he’d taught her to appreciate were undeniable proof of it. But all of that seemed incompatible with the sight of this modern troglodyte spooning some dubious powder from a cloudy jar into a chipped mug.

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‘No dog in ‘ere,’ the woman said as she banged Ana’s watery coffee onto the table. Her fat finger pointed at Laika, whose nose was still ping-ponging its way from one delicious stain to another.