They circled her, kicked her several times, as if testing for tenderness, and when they talked, she realized they’d been watching her, targeting her for weeks. They stripped her then, pushed her face-first into the ground, raped her while her mouth filled with dirt. They swore at her, taunted her, wrenched her to face them while they slit her from pubis to sternum with a cracked liquor bottle. They would have cut every inch of her skin, gouged her eyes, she’s certain of it, had her host father not appeared behind them swinging a board from the fence, flattening one boy’s face and scattering the gang with vicious blows.
Days in the hospital, waiting for her body to grow back together, her jaw to mend, and she could not erase the look in the boys’ eyes—anger, hatred, yes, but something else. She’d awaken to the blue light of the moon spilling across her bed, the answer almost within reach. The day she arrived back at the Alekseevs’ home was the day before she left Russia for Canada. She stood in the backyard, forcing herself to remember the moment, and it was then that she sensed what had scared her the most about the attack: if they’d hated her so much, why did they want to touch her so intimately? She was vaguely aware of explanations of power and control and humiliation, but they had exposed themselves, penetrated their skin into hers, been vulnerable, too, despite their malicious intent. Not until she had spent a month recuperating at her aunt and uncle’s in Barbados did she think that maybe what she had detected in the gang’s eyes, was elation.
§
The limestone wall shows signs of two hundred years of erosion: stained and pockmarked by weather and history, rough against her back. She breathes deeply, calming herself, then stands, trying to put the memories of a decade ago, behind her. Focuses on the wall. She wants to read the latent stories with her hands, the way Tophe tries to decipher her body at night, wondering at the jagged pink scar splitting her body in two, the reason why she can’t completely close her jaw. She has offered lies, half-truths, accidents. She will not have him grieve her.
A month of healing along the east coast of Barbados; hours spent sitting on the craggy rocks, hearing nothing but the crashing of waves, Lexi allowed her body to unfold, to accept rain and sun and wind to caress her skin. She shied away from human company, avoiding the men who searched for sea urchins along the shore, shucking their spiny shells into heaps along the sand. Lexi only joined her relatives late in the evening for drinks and stories on their lantern-lit porch. Her mother’s sister never questioned her, instead, let her hoard her secrets in the concealed crooked line upon her skin, in her skittish reaction to visitors, crowds, anyone she didn’t know.
Eating fish cakes and cou cou at the shore, Lexi remembered being with her grandmother many years before, watching the tiny woman’s gnarled hands mixing okra and cornmeal with peppers and her own hot sauce, her voice a lullaby of love for her family, for her gift of food to them. Standing by her grandmother’s gravestone before she left the island, Lexi felt her presence encircling her, empowering her, willing her to look forward, not back. Several of her grandmother’s ancestors had been brought to Barbados from Ghana in the seventeenth century, surviving the horrors of the Middle Passage, only to endure slavery on a sugar plantation, a legacy passed down for generations.
We’re free now, Lexi’s grandmother used to say, her arms sweeping the expanse of her large porch overlooking the ocean. I don’t look back, she once told Lexi, but where I’ve come from is in here—she thumped her chest—and I’ll never forget who I am.
Lexi blinks back tears, aching for the warm scent of her grandmother—cooking smells and salted air—for the strength of the lithe woman’s arms around her, for her voice murmuring Lexi, reclaiming her.
The walls in Dockyard cast shadows that are too hot for so early in the morning. Lexi wipes at the sweat forming on her brow and imagines the men who built Dockyard: black slaves and white convicts. Wonders what it would have been like sailing on the British Sea Venture, heading towards Virginia but shipwrecked on Bermuda in 1609 for nine months. Discovering the uninhabited island wasn’t haunted, like the Spanish believed, but ideal for colonization. Strategically located near America, isolated enough for a penal colony, for slaves and convicts to bear the brunt of the work.
Lexi runs her hands along the stone wall as if reading Braille, slips her fingers into the holes, not hearing the sound of men’s voices calling or singing or grunting with effort as they construct the fortress that will keep them imprisoned, but instead, she hears her grandmother telling her how in Barbados in the mid-1700s, slaves weren’t allowed to play musical instruments, horns, drums, anything that might act as a means to pass covert messages from plantation to plantation to other slaves who spoke different languages. “Didn’t always stop them,” her grandma would laugh, jabbing the air around Lexi’s head as if performing a spell. “Can’t stop people from communicating, from seeking freedom.”
“Freedom,” Lexi says aloud to the wall, to the clouds in a sky so blue it hurts her eyes, “is arbitrary,” she adds and leaves the yard.
§
She’s touching the peeling paint on a pair of weathered doors near the old water storehouse when a voice behind her says, “Into restorations?”
Startled, she thinks it’s Tophe, but the man behind her is shorter than her husband, about forty-five years old, his blond hair thinning. He’s wearing a pink polo shirt and the ubiquitous Bermuda shorts with high knee socks.
Lexi smiles at him. “I don’t like the crowds.”
He tilts his head to the side, studies her for a moment. “Would you like to see the inside of one of these buildings?”
She nods, knowing her expression is overly eager, but it’s too late, he’s already signalling for her to follow him. Since meeting Tophe, Lexi’s been taking chances, acting on impulse, as if she’s making up for her lost decade. He’s made her feel reckless, open to exploring beyond her safety zone. She follows the man around palm trees that look as if they’ve been peeled into rectangular pieces and glued back together again with all of the pieces pointing skyward.
He leads her across a deserted parking lot sun-blanched white, behind another building, then up a wide set of stone stairs to a small landing. “I’m Jerry, by the way.”
“Lexi.” Don’t go in. What if he’s a rapist? What if he lures single female tourists into this building and there is a whole gang of men lined up for a turn? “So, how come you can get into locked buildings?” She tries to make her voice sound casual, confident.
“I work here. I’m an engineer.” He opens the padlock with one of many official-looking keys, gives the door a shove with his shoulder, and hot air bursts out from the room, as if he has just opened a furnace.
Lexi feels sweat pooling in her armpits, on her forehead. She steps through the doorway after Jerry, relieved when he leaves the door wide open. Inside, the air is stifling, smelling of salt and rotted wood, the enclosed memories of bodies sweating in the heat.
“So where is your husband today?” Jerry asks, nodding at her conspicuously diamonded left hand.
“At the mall. What is this place?” The expansive empty room spans the length of the large building, its hardwood floor rough and scarred, exposed limestone walls, charred. Huge windows flood the space with rectangular light. Overhead, exposed beams criss-cross and disappear at one end where what looks like an enormous metal box or room with square holes cut into its side perches oddly on metal posts.
“This,” Jerry sweeps his arms out, “was a sail-making room. See over here,” he leads her over to a wall and points out a large metal ring embedded in the stone, “these were used for stretching the sails. And that,” he crosses the floor to the raised metal room, “housed the projector when this place was turned into a theatre for a while. The movie room is metal, because forty, fifty years ago, films sometimes caught on fire.” He turns around, looking pleased with this tidbit of knowledge.
Lexi shivers as a rush of wind coming through the door carries the barely audible sound of voices talking, and for a moment she sees the expectant dark before the movie starts, the men in their uniforms, maybe a few women—spouses, girlfriends, mistresses—among them. She conjures the blue curl of cigarette smoke like the ghosts of the sail-makers hovering above the crowd, silver dust particles dancing in the projector’s stream of light. Imagines the screen flickering, the crowd leaning back, relaxing, oblivious to all but the story unfolding before them.
“Just think of what this room was like,” Jerry says, stepping away from her and extending his arms wide at his sides. “Sails stretched out. People stitching seams that would defy the winds from ripping them apart.”
Lexi stares at Jerry, nodding.
“Kind of strange how the ships were built by slaves, then were used by the Royal Navy as anti-slaving ships.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Lexi says thinking how often ships were named and renamed during their years of service, much like land claimed and reclaimed by countries, fought over for proprietorship.
“Are you okay?” Jerry asks.
Lexi nods, stares out the window at the blinding parking lot and building across the way. Lexicon Rubric. For a long time after the attack, she couldn’t think of herself as having a name, an identity, as if they had bled out of her that afternoon in the Alekseevs’ yard. She’d write L. R. on all correspondence with the publishers, unable to claim more than initials. The day she returned home to find her brownstone ransacked, odd items like yogurt and milk, a book on Nietzsche, an aloe vera plant, her Bladerunner Director’s Cut DVD, and her running shoes, stolen, she stood in her kitchen amongst the clutter and realized how nothing taken, nothing remaining defined who she was. All were replaceable.
The next time she sent a manuscript back to the publisher, she wrote her full name: Lexicon Arrow Rubric under translated by. No one could ever give her back who she’d been before the garden attack, she thought, only she knew where that girl was hiding.
Last Saturday, she hadn’t changed her name, taken Tophe’s family name in marriage, not only because Quebec law forbids it, but because she didn’t want to alter her identity, press a veneer of someone else’s heritage and ancestry over her own. Her father’s name had already been changed, anglocized, when his father arrived in Canada from Russia in the early nineteen hundreds. He’d opened a barber shop soon after settling in Montreal, and when he saw the sign saying Rubric, the sign maker simply shrugged and told him he was in Canada now, he had better fit in.
She imagined whole cultures lost, appropriated, crushed beneath the weight of a husband’s name, but, marrying in Kingston, Ontario, Tophe had taken her last name. His official name change will require a new birth certificate and will take between a year to a year and a half, they’ve been warned by government officials. Men just don’t do this. No simple signing of their next cheque or driver’s licence renewal in their married name, the way women did after their wedding day. Men weren’t supposed to fill in the box for maiden name on official documents—nowhere did bachelor name ever appear.
Tophe had been the one to suggest taking Lexi’s name, wanting to forget his family, and she’d accepted him into hers. Somehow, his willingness to have part of her identity stamped onto his, has made her feel more confident, more sure of his commitment to being with her.
Feeling her way along the wall, Lexi touches one of the large iron rings secured to the stone. The metal is warm, as if someone has just been holding it. She imagines the smell of cloth, linen perhaps, woven into durable canvas, the sound of stitching, like wind caressing new leaves, the heat of the room unbearable, the wooden floor watermarked with sweat, pooling in unreadable genetic codes, in salt outlines leaching from bodies, until beneath the workers an archipelago of their efforts formed.
“You staying here long?” Jerry calls over to her. He’s back at the door. He’s going to close it, Lexi thinks, hurrying over to him.
“Two weeks. Thanks, Jerry,” she says, squeezing past him to the landing. “I really should go. My husband—”
“Is waiting. Yes, of course, go. I’ll lock up. It was my pleasure.” He extends his hand and they stand for a moment staring at each other. “Enjoy your stay,” he says cheerfully, raising her hand and kissing it.
“Thank you. You’ve been very kind—this,” she waves at the room behind her, “means a lot to me.” She looks back at the room, wishes she could stay longer, linger over the floorboards, close her eyes and listen to the memories of the sail-makers. Sense their desire to be free from enslavement, wind against their bodies, skimming over water so wide no land, no other human being, could trap them again.
