Watermelon Syrup: A Novel

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ber anything except the funeral, the wide-open pit with the dead inside, her Opa and Onkels and so many others, the limbs twisted and all wrong, and Mama’s cold, shaking hand. Lexi sat hunched over, arms crossed over her chest, rocking, until the kitchen was cold and she’d begun to shiver uncontrollably. She was frozen inside. A stone. An empty vessel. She slowly got up, put the notebook back into its drawer, threw a log into the stove and stumbled into the bedroom. Hildy stirred a little when she got into bed and then flung one arm over her. Lexi nestled her cheek into Hildy’s warm hair and felt her wet eyes closing. seventeen “Lexi, will you help me finish my dolly’s skirt?” “What?” Hildy held out the skirt with its half-finished hem. “I’m stuck. My thread’s all used up.” Hildy had stitched to the very end of her thread so that the eye of the needle was only half an inch from the hem. Silly girl. When would she ever learn? She motioned for Hildy to sit beside her at the table. “We have to take out some of the stitches so that you have enough thread to finish off. Then you start again with a new thread.” “But I don’t want to take it out. It took so long…” Lexi had already unthreaded the needle and was ripping out the uneven stitches so fast that she was almost ripping the material. “Rethread the needle and I’ll show you, again, how to finish off.” Hildy began to unwind a long thread from the spool. “Long thread, lazy girl.” Hildy looked up, offended at the accusation. She immediately wished she hadn’t said it. Mama always said that. At the thought of her mother, her stomach tightened again. “You’re doing fine,” she said, softening her voice. Nausea was rising. Like the other night. Oh, God! Mama! 138 Annie Jacobsen jacobsen_text 8/27/07 10:05 Page 138 For the last two days she’d thought of nothing else. Every time she had a moment to herself she saw her mother’s frail body, her legs, still thin even though they were swollen, the gnarled stomach and breasts. Had she missed seeing the scars Makhno’s men must have left on her mother? She imagined brass buttons cutting into her mother’s breasts, swords and rifles clanking on the floor, fetid breath stinking of alcohol. Stinking like the alcohol she poured into those crystal glasses at the Olivers’. Her mother. So beautiful. Breakable as crystal . Her mind wouldn’t stop jumping and twisting. Her thoughts were like snakes. She clutched her stomach as she watched Hildy. And another terrifying thought had come to her in the middle of last night. Had Makhno or one of his men made her pregnant? She remembered the midwife with her blonde hair tied back under a babushka, the baby howls from the bedroom when Mama gave birth to Maria in Hierschau. But that was three years later, when Lexi was six. During the drought and famine of 1922. So Mama couldn’t have gotten pregnant. Unless she’d lost the baby. Lexi had a sudden horrifying image of a misshapen monster squirming its way out of her mother’s body, something like a grotesque frog or lizard, and then of herself bashing it dead with a shovel. Hildy moistened the battered end of the thread and then stuck her tongue out as she concentrated on getting the thread through the tiny eye. She’d been two years younger than Hildy was now, only three when the Blumenort massacre happened. She’d heard that date over and over: September 8,1919.The day that Makhno and his Anarchists invaded Blumenort, rounded up eighteen men and shot them, including her Opa and two Onkels. Because they were prosperous. Because the Anarchists were angry with the prosperous. Why? They’d built their lives through hard work, not through hurting others. She remembered hearing horses’ hooves in the yard, Mama screaming at them to run, Henry almost pulling her arm off as they raced to hide in the barn. She didn’t remember seeing Papa. There was crashing in the house and men laughing. Henry, who was seven, putting his hands over her ears behind the haystack.And then, after what seemed like days but was only a couple of hours, Papa returned and brought her and Henry...