Chapter 22 Touch Her and Die #2
He was carrying a phone. His. The screen lit. He turned it toward me. A photograph. Me. At the Council dinner. In the McQueen. On Viktor's arm. My chin level. My hand on his forearm. The woman who renegotiated the clause. The woman who made five kings stop talking.
"Tu te souviens de ?a?" Remember this? He held the phone close to my face. "C'est la femme que tu pensais être. La reine. La traductrice importante. Celle qui s'assoit à c?té du roi." That's the woman you thought you were. The queen. The important translator. The one who sits next to the king.
He lowered the phone. Looked at me. At the oatmeal. At my bare feet. At the bruise spreading across my face, the swelling closing my left eye, the blood dried on my chin.
"Regarde-toi maintenant," he said. Soft.
Almost tender. The tenderness that precedes the worst things.
"Tu vois la différence? La robe était un costume.
Le rouge à lèvres était un masque. La posture était un dressage.
Tout ?a, c'était Viktor qui jouait avec une poupée.
" Look at you now. See the difference? The dress was a costume.
The lipstick was a mask. The posture was training.
All of it was Viktor playing with a doll.
He leaned in. Close. The bergamot filling my nose like a toxin.
"En dessous, tu es toujours la même. Mon petit gros.
Ma petite chose cassée." Underneath, you're still the same.
My little fat one. My little broken thing.
He slapped me. Open palm. Right side of my face.
The cheekbone. My head snapped left. The pain a flat, hot explosion across the entire right side of my skull.
My vision went white, then grey, then the swimming, strobing mess of a brain trying to reboot while the body it lives in is being hit from a new direction.
My right eye started swelling. I felt it.
The tissue around the eye socket puffing, the blood rushing to the surface, the capillaries bursting one by one, the eyelid thickening until the world through that eye narrowed to a slit.
The left eye already swollen from the first hit in the chair.
The right eye joining it now. My vision closing like curtains being drawn from both sides.
He hit me again. Same side. My lip split. The bottom one. The skin parting against my teeth, the blood flowing immediately, hot, running down my chin, dripping onto the oatmeal cardigan, small red spots on beige fabric. The taste of copper. Permanent now. A resident in my mouth.
I didn't scream.
I didn't speak.
Something had started shutting down. The part of me that produced words.
The engine that ran on three languages, that switched between French and Gaeilge and English the way a bird switches between currents.
The engine had run out of fuel. What was left was the body.
Just the body. The bruised, cracked, thirsty, split body, sitting in a chair in a warehouse, wearing an oatmeal cardigan with blood spots on the collar.
More time. More pooling. The fluorescent light identical to itself.
Always. The buzz never changing pitch. The six men never moving.
The concrete floor never warming. The cold in my feet climbing my legs, settling into my bones, the slow hypothermia of a woman who has been barefoot on concrete for long enough that the cold stops feeling like cold and starts feeling like nothing.
My stomach cramped. Hunger. The pain of an empty stomach clenching around itself, the body digesting its own lining because there's nothing else to digest. I hadn't eaten since the sandwich I was going to buy at Nora's bakery. The sandwich I never got. The bakery I never reached. Three steps.
The prayers stopped.
I didn't decide to stop. The Gaeilge just dried up. The words my grandmother taught me, the music of the language that lived in the room no man had entered. Silent. The room empty. The door closed from the inside. The last shelter locked, dark, no one home.
The French stopped next. The language of distance. The border I put between myself and pain. Gone. The border erased. Pain on both sides now. Inside and out. French requires a speaker who believes speaking matters. I'd stopped believing.
English went last. The language I used when I had no other choice.
I had no choice now. No language. No words.
No sound. Just the buzz of the fluorescent light and the drip of blood from my lip onto the cardigan and my own breathing, shallow, careful, each breath a transaction with my cracked ribs, each inhale paid for in pain.
I was silent.
Dmitri came back. Crouched. Looked at my face. I saw him through the slit of my right eye. The left had sealed shut. He studied the damage the way a man studies a painting he'd ruined. Finding the ruin more satisfying than the original.
"Plus de mots? Plus de fran?ais? Plus de petites insultes courageuses?" No more words? No more French? No more brave little insults?
I looked at him. Through the one eye. Said nothing.
"C'est comme ?a que je te préfère," he whispered. This is how I prefer you. He touched my cheek. The bruised one. I didn't flinch. Didn't bite. Didn't move. "Silencieuse. Petite. Obéissante." Silent. Small. Obedient.