Book of Yasmela

Before Khoraja became a refuge, before its corridors learned the sound of women walking without asking permission, before the narrow beds were made and remade for strangers who slept with their shoes beneath their pillows, there was Mitra.

Before Yasmela Khossus learned to sit beside a woman through the long hours of her trembling, before she understood that terror could survive the hand that inflicted it, before she discovered how much courage it sometimes took merely to open a door, her mother crossed the water.

She came in winter.

The Gulf of St. Lawrence had risen black beneath a low and iron-colored sky. Wind worried the ferry like a dog worrying a bone. Beyond the rail, ice turned slowly in the swells—white slabs grinding against one another, their edges lifting and breaking with a sound like teeth crushed in a great mouth. There was no horizon, only the dark water passing into darker weather, and somewhere beyond it an island she had never seen.

Mitra stood outside until a deckhand brought her in.

She had one duffel bag. Its handles were bound together with a strip of cloth, and she kept both hands around them even after she sat down. Meltwater gathered beneath her boots. Along her jaw, a bruise had darkened from violet to the deep, spoiled yellow of fruit left too long in a closed room.

The captain remembered that bruise.

He remembered, too, that when he asked whether someone would be meeting her, she looked first toward the door.

Not at him.

At the door.

“No,” she said.

He waited, perhaps expecting a name, an explanation, some small account of the business that had brought a young woman alone across such water.

None came.

So he poured her tea into a heavy cup and set it on the table where she would not have to reach past him to take it. When they docked, he carried her bag as far as the gangway and gave it back before she could ask.

Years afterward, he would remember how little it weighed.

He would wonder what a person had to leave behind to arrive with so little.

Khoraja lay beneath its winter coverings, low roofs bent under snow, fishing boats drawn up and shrouded, the red beaches hidden beneath dirty shelves of ice. Only where the wind had scoured the shoreline did the earth show through: a narrow wound of rust-colored sand between the frozen dunes and the sea.

There were few lights.

A church bell sounded somewhere inland, its voice thinned by distance. Smoke climbed from chimneys only to be torn apart above the roofs. At the harbor, ropes knocked against empty masts, and beneath the wharf the tide moved unseen, lifting the ice with slow, enormous breaths.

Mitra stood on the landing with her bag against her knees.

No one called her name.

For the first time in years, this was a mercy.

She never told anyone what had happened on the night she left. She did not describe the room, or the hour, or whether her husband had been sleeping when she gathered her things. Whatever sound had finally driven her through the door remained hers. So did whatever she had been forced to abandon.

When people asked where she had come from, she named the mainland.

When they asked whether she had family there, she said, “Not here.”

On Khoraja, this was usually enough.

The islanders knew something of absences. They had watched the sea take men whose boots were still drying beside the stove. They knew houses in which a second place was laid at supper long after there was any reason to lay it. A person could live among them with a missing part and not be required to display the wound.

Mitra rented a room above a bait shop that had closed for the season.

The stairs climbed the outside wall, steep and silver with frost. The room held an iron bed, a washbasin, a stove that smoked when the wind came east, and a window overlooking the harbor. The smell of old fish had entered the floorboards years before and could not be scrubbed away.

She scrubbed them anyway.

On her first night, she pushed a chair beneath the door handle.

On her second, she woke because a length of loose guttering struck the wall.

On her third, she slept until dawn and opened her eyes in terror, certain she had failed to hear someone coming.

There was no one.

Only gulls. Only the stove settling in its ashes. Only the pale square of the window and, beyond it, water.

She sat on the edge of the bed for a long time before she believed it.

That winter she cleaned empty cabins with her coat still on. She scraped cold grease from stoves, shook mouse droppings from blankets, and washed windows that looked out upon cottages locked and blind until summer. She mended nets beneath a hanging lamp, drawing twine through rents with fingers split by detergent and salt.

When the boats came in, she cooked.

Fish stew. Potatoes. Bread with a crust thick enough to knock against the table.

The fishermen entered stamping snow from their boots, bringing the weather in with them. Their faces were raw, their hands swollen and stiff. Sometimes one laughed too loudly or brought a fist down on the table to finish a story.

Mitra would go still.

Only for a moment.

Then she would turn toward the stove, or reach for another plate, and the work would continue.

After a while, some of the men learned to lower their voices. Others never noticed. She remembered the difference.

She was gentle, but there was vigilance beneath the gentleness. She chose the chair nearest the exit. She kept track of footsteps on the stairs. If someone stood between her and a doorway, her eyes would move past his shoulder and remain there until he stepped aside.

People called her shy.

It was an easier word than frightened, and it asked less of them.

Wayne Orr was a boy then.

Already he had the solitary ways people would later speak of as though they had always understood them. He wandered the harbor alone, stood listening beneath the wharf, and watched the tide with an attention other boys reserved for games. Adults called him strange when they thought he could not hear.

Mitra never did.

One morning, she opened her door and found two fish wrapped in newspaper on the landing.

She looked down the stairs.

Wayne was already crossing the road, his shoulders drawn up against the cold.

That evening she left a loaf on his doorstep, wrapped in a clean cloth.

Three days later, there were more fish.

Then bread again.

Their small exchange continued through the winter, neither of them demanding the ceremony of gratitude. Sometimes she saw him at the harbor and lifted her hand. Sometimes he nodded.

Once, when sleet had frozen the steps outside her room, she woke to the scrape of a shovel.

By the time she opened the door, Wayne had gone.

The stairs were clear.

She stood barefoot on the threshold, looking at the dark, wet wood.

Then she went inside and began another loaf.

Spring returned reluctantly.

Water ran beneath the snow. The harbor ice loosened and broke apart, carrying winter out in pieces. Red earth emerged along the roadsides, and the dunes shook themselves free of their white covering. Fishing boats went down to the water. Windows opened. The island began making the noises of work.

Later came the tourists, with their bright coats and cameras, their questions about the weather, their delight at the color of the sand.

Mitra found that she could walk through the village without looking behind her at every turn.

She found that a dropped pan could be only a dropped pan.

Some mornings she woke and lay still, listening, not because she feared what she might hear, but because the window was open and the birds had returned.

It was during that first spring that she met Khossus.

He had come from the mainland to repair cabins damaged by the winter storms. He was a carpenter, broad-handed and quiet, with pale scars across his knuckles and sawdust caught in the seams of his coat. He worked carefully. When he removed a rotten board, he examined what lay beneath before fitting another in its place.

Mitra noticed this before she noticed his face.

Their first conversation concerned a window that would not close.

He came to her room carrying a box of tools, and when she opened the door, he remained on the landing.

“May I come in?”

The question unsettled her.

He seemed to understand that it did. He waited without smiling, without making her hesitation into something she had to excuse.

At last, she stepped aside.

He repaired the window. He showed her how the catch worked. When she offered him tea, he accepted, and when he left, he did not find a reason to stay.

Afterward she stood at the window, opening and closing it.

There was something almost unbearable about a thing that could be shut without trapping her.

Months passed before he asked her to dinner.

She refused the first time.

“All right,” he said.

He spoke to her the following morning exactly as he had before.

No coldness. No wounded performance. No price quietly added to the debt she had not known she was incurring.

The next time he asked, she said yes.

Their courtship moved at the pace she could endure. Some days she welcomed him beside her. On others she could scarcely bear the sound of another person breathing in the same room. He learned to ask before touching her, and to accept an answer without searching her face for a different one.

Once, reaching past her for a cup, he saw her throw an arm over her head.

He stopped.

For a moment neither spoke.

Then he stepped back and told her where he was going to stand.

She wept after he left—not because he had frightened her, but because he had stopped.

He built their house near the dunes.

It was small, with a steep roof, deep windows, and a kitchen facing the water. Marram grass grew around it, bowing before the wind and rising again when the gusts passed. In winter, sand gathered against the steps beneath the snow. At night the sea could be heard from every room.

Mitra chose the position of the doors.

She wanted to see outside from the kitchen. She wanted a back entrance opening toward the grass. She wanted no narrow passage in which two people could not pass without touching.

Khossus drew the plans again.

He did not ask why.

They married quietly, with rain ticking against the windows and a handful of islanders standing close enough to hear their vows. Wayne Orr left fish at the house that morning. Someone brought flowers that had begun to shed their petals before the meal was finished.

For once, Mitra did not watch the door.

They had two children.

Yasmela first, grave-eyed and watchful, a child who seemed to listen with her whole body.

Then Koth, fierce in his affections, quick to anger when something smaller than himself was hurt.

Mitra loved them with a tenderness that sometimes frightened her. She would stand over their beds at night and feel the old terror searching for a new shape: illness, accident, the sea, a stranger at the door. Happiness had given her more to lose than she knew how to bear.

Still, she learned.

She learned the weight of a sleeping child against her shoulder. She learned that footsteps approaching the house might belong to someone coming home. She learned to hear Khossus call her name from another room without measuring his voice for danger.

Her children knew that their mother had sorrows.

Children know the boundaries of grief before they know its name. They learn which questions change a face, which sounds silence a room, which objects must not be moved.

Yasmela knew that her mother disliked shouting.

Koth knew never to seize her wrist.

Both knew that when a woman stepped off the ferry alone, carrying a small bag, Mitra sometimes grew very quiet.

At home she preferred the doors unlocked while the family was awake. She checked the catches herself at night, then checked that they opened freely.

“Locks are for prisons,” she said once.

Years later, Yasmela would understand that her mother had not been speaking of every lock. She had been speaking of the ones she had not been permitted to turn.

Eventually, Mitra told them enough.

Not all of it.

She did not owe her children every room of that house.

But she told them there had been a husband before their father. She told them he had hurt her. She told them leaving had frightened her almost as much as staying, and that for a long time she had believed this meant she was weak.

“I was an abused wife,” she said.

Her voice trembled over the plainness of the words.

Yasmela sat very still.

Koth’s hands closed upon his knees.

“Where is he?” he asked.

Mitra looked at her son, at the anger already offering itself as a weapon.

Then she reached across the table and laid her hand over his fist.

“I don’t know.”

He stared at her.

“I don’t want you to find him,” she said.

It took him years to understand the whole of that request.

Time passed over Khoraja.

Storms stripped paint from the houses. Boats changed hands. Children grew tall enough to look their parents in the eye. The bait shop reopened beneath another name, and the room above it became a place where summer visitors slept without knowing who had once lain awake there.

Mitra grew older.

There were lines around her mouth from laughter now, though the old habits never wholly left her. She still disliked being approached from behind. She still needed to know where the keys were. Some nights she woke with a cry that seemed torn out of a younger woman.

Khossus would speak from his side of the bed.

Her name first.

Then where she was.

Then, if she wanted it, his hand.

She died years later in the house he had built, with the sea beyond the windows and her children near.

The end was quiet.

Yasmela had feared that death would expose some final terror in her mother, that the past would rise at the last moment and claim what it had failed to keep.

Instead, Mitra rested.

Her hand lay open on the coverlet.

Outside, the wind moved through the dune grass, and somewhere in the kitchen a loose window catch tapped gently against the frame.

They found the duffel bag beneath her bed.

It had been pushed far back, beyond a box of winter clothes, where the floorboards held the cold. Dust whitened its folds. The strip of cloth around the handles had frayed almost through.

Koth carried it to the table.

For a long time, neither of them opened it.

They had seen it before. Every household has its objects that become invisible through familiarity: a bag kept beneath a bed, a box no one opens, something carried from one room to another without explanation.

Yasmela loosened the cloth.

Inside were letters that were never mailed.

Some had been folded into envelopes. Others were loose sheets covered on both sides, the writing crowded into margins as though paper had been scarce, or privacy scarcer. Several had been started and abandoned. A few bore dates. Many did not.

There were letters addressed to people they had never heard of.

Letters beginning politely, almost apologetically.

Letters in which Mitra explained why she needed help, then explained it again, as though somewhere there must be a correct arrangement of words that would make her suffering credible.

One asked for a place to stay.

Another asked whether someone could come for her.

One began, Please don’t tell him I wrote.

Yasmela put that page down and went to the window.

Koth remained at the table.

As they read, a woman emerged whom neither had fully known: younger than the mother they remembered, frightened, ashamed of her fear, trying again and again to imagine an exit.

Some letters were addressed to no one at all.

In those, she stopped being courteous.

She wrote about the sound of his key. About watching his face during meals. About the exhaustion of trying to prevent a thing whose cause changed every day.

On one sheet, in a hand pressed so hard the paper had nearly torn, she had written:

I am afraid I will die here, and everyone will say they did not know.

Yasmela read the sentence until the words ceased to look like words.

Then she turned the page.

They read every letter.

They read until the kitchen darkened and Koth rose to switch on the light. They read while the tide withdrew beyond the dunes. They read through the small hours, seated across from one another at the table where their mother had kneaded bread, peeled apples, corrected homework, and taught them how to mend what could still be mended.

Near dawn, Yasmela gathered the pages into a careful stack.

“There should have been somewhere,” she said.

Koth looked at the bag.

“Yes.”

They remained there as the windows paled.

By the time the first ferry sounded across the water, the shape of their vow had begun to emerge.

They would build a place on Khoraja.

A house a woman could enter without proving that she had suffered enough.

A place where she could bring her children, or come alone, or arrive with nothing but the clothes in which she had escaped. Where a missing document would not become another locked door. Where she could sleep before she explained. Where the telling of her story would belong to her.

Koth wanted walls, strong doors, lights overlooking the approaches.

Yasmela wanted rooms that did not feel like cells.

They argued over both, and built with both in mind.

There would be locks, but the women inside would have keys.

There would be a kitchen kept warm through the night. Clean clothes. Spare boots. Beds with room beneath them for bags that no one would touch without permission. A chair beside each bed for the nights when being left alone was worse than being watched.

They learned that goodwill did not lay foundations or keep a boiler running. They raised money. They filled out forms. They listened to objections from people who praised Mitra’s memory and disliked the practical consequences of honoring it.

They continued.

Khossus helped where he could. Wayne Orr arrived with tools, worked without announcement, and left before anyone thought to thank him. Islanders brought blankets, crockery, sacks of potatoes, things they could spare and things they could not.

The building rose slowly.

Through one winter its windows remained dark, the unfinished rooms full of the smell of timber and plaster. Snow sifted beneath a temporary door. Yasmela walked the corridors with a lamp, counting what still needed doing.

Sometimes she felt overwhelmed by the scale of it.

Then she remembered the letters.

Not the worst passages.

The beginnings.

I am sorry to trouble you.

I don’t know who else to ask.

Please.

They named it Mitra Women’s Shelter.

The name went above the entrance in plain letters.

Yasmela stood beneath it after the sign was fixed in place, looking upward until Koth came out and stood beside her.

Neither spoke.

Beyond the dunes, the gulf moved under a darkening sky.

The first woman arrived toward evening.

The ferry had been delayed by weather. Sleet blew across the harbor, whitening the ropes and collecting in the seams of the landing. Yasmela waited beside her car with her collar turned up, watching the passengers come ashore.

Then she saw her.

A woman carrying a bag too small for a life.

She stopped at the foot of the gangway and looked around. One side of her face was swollen. Her coat was missing a button. She held the bag high against her ribs, her fingers buried in its handles.

Yasmela approached slowly.

She said the woman’s name.

The woman’s eyes moved past her, searching the harbor road.

“No one came with me,” she said.

It sounded less like information than something she needed to establish.

“All right,” Yasmela answered.

“Does anyone know I’m here?”

“Only the people who need to help you.”

The woman looked toward the ferry again.

Yasmela waited.

She did not reach for the bag.

At last, the woman followed her to the car.

Later, at the shelter, she stood just inside the entrance while warmth moved around her. Somewhere down the corridor a kettle began to boil. There was lamplight, the smell of soup, a pair of dry slippers set beside the wall.

Yasmela showed her the room.

She showed her the window, the bathroom, the lock.

“This key is yours.”

The woman took it but did not move farther inside.

“How long can I stay?”

Yasmela felt the question pass through her with the terrible familiarity of an inherited wound.

Long enough to sleep, she thought. Long enough to stop listening for an engine outside. Long enough to discover what you want when wanting no longer carries a punishment.

“We’ll talk about that tomorrow,” she said. “You don’t have to decide anything tonight.”

The woman sat on the edge of the bed.

Only then did she begin to shake.

Yasmela pulled up the chair and asked whether she should stay.

A small nod.

So she stayed.

Outside, the wind crossed the red sands and pressed against the walls. It moved through the dune grass with the same dry whisper that had surrounded her mother’s house, carrying salt, cold, and the far-off thunder of the gulf.

Yasmela listened.

For an instant she remembered Mitra at the kitchen table, flour along one wrist, turning toward the sound of children at the door.

Not the bruise. Not the letters.

Her mother, alive in the house she had chosen.

Yasmela settled back into the chair.

The woman on the bed still held her bag. In time, perhaps, she would set it down.

Until then, the room was warm, the door belonged to her, and someone would remain beside her through the dark.