Free Unspeakable Things by Kathleen Spivack Page A

was to find comfort in the frilled nightgown of the Rat, the sweet, faint smell of the Rat’s cologne, and, of course, the Rat’s low, thrilling voice. No longer did Maria have terrible dreams; no longer did she feel herself alone. Terror abated when the Rat came into her bed. They lay together through the long nights, when, with no heat and no dawn in sight, the Rat warmed them both with her stories. The Rat talked throughout Maria’s childhood. She talked while the others slept, while the thin snores rose in the silence of the room. Anna whispered to Maria in bed, her words inevitable and continuous as the flakes of first snow, falling upon the Rat’s adopted Russia.
    “I was only sixteen, just a little older than you are now,” the Rat began, fondly stroking Maria’s hair back from her forehead. “But I was already married. My father had sold me, or perhaps I should say he had bought me a husband. A fine husband, handsome, well connected. But a poor husband. Oh, I did not know it at the time. But he was poor. And weak, too.” The Rat paused, her voice trailing off into the shadows.
    “And I went away with him—oh, I did not want to go. But I went nevertheless.
    “They sent me away, to Russia. To Saint Petersburg, where I lived with my husband. And his mother. And, of course, the whole household. And I had to learn their ways.”
    From the first, the Count did not touch the Rat. He liked her dowry. Anna was a meal ticket for this impoverished branch of the noble family. But he found women ugly, and the marriage had been only an agreed-upon front for his other, darker desires. Her intelligence repelled him further. He did not care about her deformity, since he never intended to have anything to do with her other than to mollify his mother. “We had no wedding night,” the Rat told Maria. Night after night, Anna lay alone in her room while the Count amused himself elsewhere. Anna accepted this, and did not expect otherwise. “Perhaps he had a mistress. Perhaps he was at cards….”
    Maria knew better than to interrupt. She lay beside the Rat, staring into the dark. “He went to the theater; sometimes I went with him.” Anna was silent then at the memory of it. “He was repelled by me. And so,” she continued, “I lived with his family. It was wild and savage; I enjoyed it. And then finally I had the children. His mother had spoken to him, you see.”
    “You must try to do something with the girl,” his mother had protested as the debts mounted. “We want the family name to continue.”
    The Count went out and got drunk, came home, and mounted the Rat from behind. A few gestures, a stifled cry, a booted leg hastily thrown over her hyphenated body. Two or three plunges in the dark; there, it was finished. This much he would do for his mother. And when it was finished, tears—his. “Forgive me, my little Anna,” the Count sobbed. “Can you forgive me?” But it was his fellow officers from whom he was asking forgiveness. One in particular—his immediate subordinate, who had instructed him how to do it in the first place. He bit his lip. He would do this for three nights, approaching her in the dark, thinking of Vanek, and then, when he had thought enough, mounting her in a violent fury until he had spent his seed. Anna knew enough to cooperate, never to cry out, never to feel anything. To respond in any way would have seemed to her the ultimate treachery. Each time, when it was over, her husband collapsed and sobbed on her hunchbacked body in disgust. He pulled out of her without a word and left immediately, going to the barracks at once to drink himself further into a stupor. Was this how men behaved with their wives? Anna was disgusted, but she stroked his hair as he bent and kissed her hand before going. “Of course. Yes. Shh. Go; don’t worry.”
    This happened exactly three times. Three children. Anna, embarrassed by her pain, stifled her cries. It was humiliating, the whole procedure. But the