Frida Kahlo, Me and My Parrots (1941)
“She’s too old,” said the crippled courier on seeing my fast-developing darling. “No one will believe me.”
“But she’s just a child,” pouted Ms. Demirovic. “Younger than Tatja.”
Another two months would pass, with the miserable man sleeping fitfully on a divan in the living room, occasionally shouting in the night — “I know your family! Don’t fuck with me! Don’t make me kill them!” — and in Tatja’s room, in Tatja’s bed, my wife would try to bury herself deeper in the folds of a blanket that seemed to be shrinking every day.
There was talk of a tunnel. A secret, not very big, often flooded, with rumors of suffocation and drowning — but it led beneath the guns, the airport, to a place of safety and freedom. It offered yet another reason for my wife to curse her shameless, tameless growth. In her dreams the source of her frustration would appear as one of those talking parrots that South Seas pirates were known to adopt. A Macaw or a Lory, some flashy colorful creature that would sit on her shoulder in class and fluff up its feathers, spread its wings, dance about, say embarrassing things while the teacher attempted to conduct the lesson.
My wife would desperately try to shoo away the feathered jokester, but its talons would expand and dig into her aching joints, and its wings would flap wildly as it repeated the words: “Nobody cares! Nobody cares!” With a terrible pang of sorrow and self-pity, my wife would suddenly realize a horrible truth. It was over. Not just her childhood. But she’d outgrown the small of this world, the precious, the things worth caring about. The small was safe. The small would survive.
She would awake with her face snuggled beneath a pillow, or deep in a blanket-fold, mistaking it for the soft wing of the bird in her dream.
“Mr. Rodic” — the disfigured sleep-talker — “is your new father,” explained the Demirovic’s. “He’s adopted you, Jasmine. He will take you through the tunnel.”
When she thought of the tunnel, my wife imagined it no bigger than a rabbit hole, just like the one in Alice in Wonderland; but if she was the Alice of this story, then she’d already eaten the “EAT ME” cake. She was too big, growing too quickly. Not only could she not fall down a rabbit hole, but if there happened to be any gunfire (a real possibility) when visiting the tunnel, she was sure to get struck by a bullet. If there was a bomb, her over-sized body was sure to take the brunt of the blast.
When the morning came for her departure — a dark, moonless August 5th — the Demirovic’s wept. My wife, however, never thought much of the plan, never thought she’d actually enter the tunnel, let alone reach the other side alive, with Mr. Rodic, her fake father chaperon. She envied little Tatja, showed no emotion in her farewell.
She paused at the bookshelf for a moment and thought of taking one of the books (Rebecca West’s Black Lamb) in which she had secretly pressed her ant specimens. But the shelf seemed as good a place for her ant mandibles as anywhere. Instead she took a small collection of banal epigrams, compiled by a Uzbek charlatan named Zander Noznibor. “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” “Familiarity breeds contempt — and children.” But she was more interested in the number of pages (64), the number of epigrams (8 per page), the number of words per page, letters, punctuation. The space that snaked itself between the print.
“They’ll never believe us,” complained her new father. The streets were quiet. The stars illumined their way.
…tbc
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