LITMIR.BIZ

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of my hands and pulled them up like magic ropes and twisted them around each other. Then in one swift gesture, he released his hands and I marveled at the perfect bunny-eared bow on my shoe.

      *

      There were two rules to my childhood. Don’t get stolen and don’t get molested.

      *

      There was a girl I knew who had disappeared. She used to live in the building across from me. Milena. A year or so older than us. I would see her, walking through our courtyard, the one we shared, my building, her building and the other one in front. Our parents just sent us children out—“Go play”—so they could get a little quiet in their small shared living quarters. So each banished child would kick their feet around in that courtyard until someone else was sent to “Go play,” then we’d join together in our exile and do something with a rock or the spaces between the trees or the cracks between the bricks or, if we were really in the pit of an insurmountable boredom, someone would resort to the hand-in-the-gutter trick.

      But Milena, she only walked through, holding her daddy’s hand, and looked at us with a still, floating presence like she was a czarina being led to her carriage. Even if we were in the heat of it, whatever game it was we had scraped together that day, we would stop and stare at her as she crossed the yard. She was never sent to “Go play.” She never let go of her daddy’s hand.

      *

      Milena was a doll. Or the closest thing any of us had seen to a doll—since there were no toys really, except for the rag-dolls our grannies would sew for us if we really pleaded. But there she was, blond pig-tails and candy eyes, in her neat clothes, the hem of her rose-and-yellow dress smooth, unlike our wrinkled cotton prints, always pinched into our underwear or twisted at the side, where you could see the stitched tears our mothers had scolded us for getting and our grannies had sewn up for us.

      Milena’s eyelashes fluttered in a quick gesture when she blinked, like those paper-thin hand fans. Her skin was always sun-kissed, even when it was gray for weeks, I’m telling you, and, although her body was small like ours, her arms and legs and neck all had something quite refined, unlike our kiddish, knotted limbs, blotted with bruises and scrapes and itched-off mosquito bites.

      Every part of her was a doll. Even her knees were mesmerizing. Like wax molds. Mine were always grated from sitting on the carpet for so long, or crouching on the cement to count the weeds, or kneeling on the wooden stairway to look through the small window at my neighbors (especially Ms Květa on the second floor, who painted her lips red “as if she had nothing to be ashamed of,” according to Mamka, and who was always fixing her breasts through the front opening of her dress).

      *

      I had veiny white skin, puddle-colored hair, and flat gray eyes. Milena’s eyes always sparkled—always; even from the distance of her crossing the yard, they glimmered above her fresh round cheeks, which flushed and framed those lips, so pink and perfectly drawn.

      *

      I had assumed that molestation was inevitable for all little girls, like getting your period—it may include some mystical pains, but you get over it, and you learn bodily maintenance.

      When my cousin, my father’s bad-seed brother’s son, came back from prison, my dad kept standing in front of me—he wouldn’t let Jiří lay his eyes on me. I was fascinated by this buzz-cut, pug-featured kid with a tattoo on his neck. I kept trying to squirm around my father, to catch Jiří’s eyes—just then, he looked over and I looked up and there it was, my eyes sparkled like Milena’s perhaps, and I thought, finally!

      *

      I spent much of my childhood waiting to be molested, like waiting for womanhood. Try as I might to make myself molestable, it never came.

      *

      I heard Milena got molested.

      *

      Oh, Milena made me terribly jealous those days.

      *

      My cousin Jiří did have a predatory feel about him. But he was a kid. He was 17. And he couldn’t keep himself out of prison. Also, someone once told me I looked a bit like his older sister, rest in peace. She was the one who had raised him, but then ran off in a young-love marriage, and Jiří joined a pack of boys who all had the same scar. So maybe seeing me was a case of being haunted, as happens when people die, but the anger stays. I think Jiří’s squinty eyes were on me in that way, twisting oddly like damaged fingers, trying to peel the layers of the package before him to get to what he truly saw in front of him: his late sister Frida. He must have been staring at me, the frame of a child holding the shadow of that young woman, with his eyelids quivering—why didn’t you stick around for me … I was so scared.

      Or maybe he did want to touch my young formless body, just because he was bigger and stronger than me. Or maybe he wasn’t even into the struggle. Maybe he wanted to use some of his drugs on me, until I was passed out, just so he could hold a warm limp body, like a rabbit freshly passed away, long and flimsy, so he could say the words that would inexplicably come to his mind: “Now you’re safe.”

      *

      Poor Jiří. But everyone back then was a bit damaged or violated or hungry or bored. Marcel Proust was banned for our parents, and our national anthem is still “Kde Domov Můj?”—“Where Is My Home?”

      *

      They eventually found Milena’s body. It was laid out on the dirt beneath the square shrubs at the side gate of Saint George’s Basilica. She had been dug up and dropped off there, half-decomposed. After all those years, she was still seven. It all remained a mystery. Since we are telling the truth, the first feeling I had was, well, at least Milena will never get her period. Now we are even, I suppose. I forgive you, Milena, for being beautiful, for being molested, for being my first love.

       The new girl

      Milena’s family moved out, and in came a new one. A bird-eyed mamka in a heavy fox-fur coat, a stubble-faced papka with a hernia-type stride, and a little raven-girl.

      *

      It was almost December. I was six and the new girl was six too. I saw her in the courtyard from my window, holding her winter hat in a small mittened fist, the top of her head sleek with dark hair. She turned to look at the buildings and I saw her left eye was slightly puffed up, and below it a streak of violet-blue. Then she looked up, straight at my window. Her pupils pointed into mine.

      New Year and my birthday came around and a couple of the families in the building celebrated together as usual, except that year, the new one was invited too. All of us children knew each other except for the little raven-girl, so we all just stood around and stared at her, and she crouched against the wall and leaned her spine into the light socket, glaring back at us. Slavek’s mamka said, “What’s the matter with you all standing like stones? Go play.” She meant inside, it was a holiday, she wasn’t kicking us out into the courtyard. Plus it was snowing. Anyway, the adults quickly forgot about us and got drunk and opened and closed the window to smoke or coat the tops of their glasses of liquor with snowflakes. Since the Communist takeover in 1948, the Czechoslovak people had grown less and less interested in politics or having opinions about anything bigger than their neighborhood or family. They planned their countryside summer holidays, they drank, they bickered, they recited poetry, they went to bed.

      Some of the kids snuck in sips. Slavek was already getting drunk, and his little cheeks flushed as he ran around his father’s legs, saying, “Papka, Papka, show us the knife!” It was the famed knife, with a thin snake coiled on the metal handle, that Slavek’s father’s father had apparently killed a Nazi soldier with—slicing him right across the throat below the Adam’s apple—but Slavek’s father just used it to shear a chicken’s skin in the kitchen sink or sharpen the ends of electrical wires. “Not now,” Slavek’s papka said and he pushed the boy out of the way. Slavek twirled a bit, then played swords with my brother, then vomited by the couch. After the women cleaned it up, his father put a hand

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