Marriage: A crossword
Winner: Editor’s Choice Award
Nadia Born
Across (Wife):
9. Forced to flee home
When Daria was forced to run away at fifteen, she walked west along the railroad tracks and imagined her skin had turned
Down (Husband):
4. Soldier held captive by an enemy force
Yuri had been a night watchman once. The darkness hadn’t bothered him, not before. He
to glass. Such a convenience, having transparent organs. Glass stomachs didn't need to be fed. Glass feet couldn’t blister. Glass hymens, if broken, would draw somebody else’s blood. And if it came to that, if she didn’t make it, if she didn’t find a ship to take her, death would be painless, easy as knocking over a lamp.
15. A bad habit
Somewhere along the way, Daria started smoking. She made a habit of turning out the pockets of the dead. Many kept one or two loose cigarettes, which she smoked immediately before they could be stolen. Mostly their pockets held junk—a photo of a sweetheart, or a fool’s gold cross. Once she found a crossword puzzle cut out from an American newspaper, the grid half-empty. She kept it and studied the words when she couldn’t sleep at night. Across, down, she would whisper, counting the squares.
5. _____ signals
Somehow, she crossed the continent—across, down—and
liked his flashlight, the way it cut perfect cones into the black. But when the camp was liberated, Yuri had to be carried out of the darkness of his hiding spot and wheeled half-blind to the makeshift hospital. His limbs had thinned, his skin flushed with fever, his rib cage swollen like a butterfly thorax. When they found him, he had soil cupped in his hands, sucking on sour mud the way he used to with snow. In his feverish mind, it was winter again and he was patting together spheres of snow for his baba to add a dollop of jam.
14. ____ noon
After he was discharged from the hospital, Yuri took a ship. He got lucky, his passage paid by Americans he never met, who had done a Sunday collection to sponsor him. But west wasn’t east and only high noon could still his nerves. At that hour, the horizons weren’t distinguishable and he could be going anyplace at all. He would sit on the deck in the white of the sun and enjoy the stink of salt that cured the wind.
found a ship to take her. She saved a smoke for that first moment on the deck to celebrate that she was putting an ocean between her and the war. She didn’t have a light, but scanned the crowd and went up to the first fellow she found, who was sitting with his arms and legs pronged between the rails. She approached him at an inconvenient moment. In his anxiety of being suspended over those seas, he had undone his belt and buckled it over the rail so he couldn’t fall overboard. She laughed when she noticed his belt looped over the steel rod, anchoring him to the ship.
“Got a light?” she asked in English, then German, then French, then Russian. At the last attempt, the man Yuri pulled a match box from his front shirt pocket. She took a long drag of her cigarette, then took out the crossword puzzle and asked him if he knew any of the English words. He looked at her oddly then, watching the smoke rising from the bellows of her coat, stoking a fire at her breast. He cleared his throat and returned
That’s when he saw Daria. He first noticed her because of her coat. Frankly, it was a hideous thing—clearly a men’s cut, not to mention two sizes too big and made of black wool unfitting for March. On the deck, she had a feverish look in it that made him wary—he had just gotten better himself—and he was sure she must have been sweating as she stood by the rail in the breeze. There was nothing extraordinary about her, except the shabbiness of her coat, and if another passenger had pointed her out and told Yuri she would be his future wife, he would have turned back without a second thought, convinced of a cosmic error.
6. Short story by Nikolai Gogol, The ________
Over the course of the next few days, he studied her coat. It was a kind of repository for her things: one pocket was stuffed with a crossword puzzle that during the journey, she would iron out with her palm and try to work out. In the other, she kept a hunk of
his glance to the grid, but couldn’t help her with a single word.
2. Opposite of mystify
Ships are dull places, turns out, and they had nothing better to do than talk. Daria had ambitions for her new life, which she told Yuri point-blank: to have a daughter, to complete a crossword puzzle in English and to study at a university. Unlike him, she had long accepted that she would never understand the mysteries of war, of what had happened to them. So she devoted herself to a whole different set of things that were clear, could be solved: new words and crossword clues, the spine of her dictionary on her thigh and the sound of a new word over her tongue.
8. Swept off your ____
A week later, she rolled down her socks and showed him her feet from her continental trek. She imagined he had never seen such ugly feet: blisters across her skin like scales, with gray and green discoloring, swollen beyond
bread that he never saw her eat, not even stateside when they had a full cupboard. At some point as they spoke, Yuri also saw a dictionary tucked inside the coat’s breast pocket. The book was all swollen as if it had gotten wet, and the pages frazzled out in odd directions. This was the detail that did him in. He remembered thinking that perhaps she, like so many, hadn’t yet realized that the war was over. If he were her, he would start this new life by tossing that damn coat overboard.
13. All’s fair in ____ and war
Yet, yet. Yuri found himself drawn to her. He watched her green and red kerchief come loose under her chin and felt a swooping between his legs. His desire for her was unexpected, embarrassing. War stories were all different, Yuri thought, but they ended the same: with the urgency to keep on living. Every morning, they met on the deck and Yuri felt something changing in him. The revolution was tiny and fragile, like the crack in the
a standard pair of shoes. As though all her sorrow had fallen to her feet by way of gravity. She expected him to be disgusted. Instead, he studied the blisters and bruises. And then for some reason she didn’t understand, he brought his mouth to her feet and began to suck her toes. He dove into the aquarium of her body, wanted to know where every scar came from. “How?” he asked, “Who?” but she hushed him, said it wasn’t important. And so they agreed that the past tense would not be part of their relationship—only the present and the future before them.
12. Famous Ukrainian soup
Later, Daria wondered if they had conceived their child on sea or on land. It felt important to her, as if this would predict the child’s personality—a wanderer or a nester. All she knew was that the child was due on New Year’s Eve. The local radio in Gravity, New Jersey always did a feature on the first baby born in January, she was told, so everybody teased her to hold out until the
ceiling he traced at night. He felt it like a sea breeze on his skin that left him shivering and cheerful. There must be a slight tilt in the deck, he thought, or across the earth’s axis. Something to explain the change. He tried to name it as he spent time with her. Her voice was licorice, equal parts sweet and sharp. Listening to her, Yuri’s bones ached and he discovered that he was in no rush to be anywhere else. He was falling in love.
1. Graveyard shift time
The church that had sponsored him was in rural New Jersey, in a town called Gravity. To get there, Yuri and Daria had to take two Amtrak trains. They spent the first night in the priest’s office, which had a stained glass window that dappled their clothes with ruby stains. The next evening, Yuri began work as a guard, a job one of the elders had arranged for him. He would work nights at a private cemetery, which he had been assigned because it gave other men the “heebiejeebies.” He was puzzled by how
1st. She hoped she could make it, for she liked the idea of her child being broadcast on the radio in America.
But in truth, she only cared that the child survived. She had a miscarriage during the war, though Yuri didn’t know. (That was in the past, after all, when her skin was made of glass.) That time, the baby had only lasted a few weeks. When she lost it, she rushed to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, the bowl turning red with a mass. She couldn’t bring herself to flush it with the bucket—the idea of that little mass going down the pipes horrified her—so she took out a soup ladle instead and scooped the mass out and put it in a clear bowl, as though she were going to make a pot of borscht. She flushed the toilet, but didn’t know what to do with the bowl. She looked up at the bottom and decided after some time to bury it outside in a plot of weeds.
7. Superstitions, or _____ tales
Preparations began. Yuri repainted their one-room unit a
jealously Americans guarded their dead, with a tall black gate and a guard booth where Yuri sat until dawn. But he liked the job. It even came with a discount for funeral services and customsized coffins, which Yuri hoped he would never use. Americans, he learned, had a coupon for everything—even death.
3. Russia’s lost princess
When he discovered Daria was pregnant with a girl, he spent his whole shift at the graveyard thinking up names. He wrote them down on the back of a receipt and handed it to Daria in the morning. “Anya,” she said, pointing to the last one. “That’s her name.” They started saving up for the baby with his salary and Daria’s side jobs. She did a little of everything: sold her own bread, tailored clothes for the church ladies, translated for immigrants at the lawyer’s office down the block. Fortune carried them away, he would think later, made them forget what they had learned long ago: that everything in this life is borrowed.
bright yellow. Daria came home with swatches and put the deck against the wall, testing out colors like she was taking the apartment’s temperature. Sun colors, she said finally, for luck. Since they arrived in this small town, she had been making odd requests to bring good fortune. She was such a logical woman, skilled at finding the exact word for a translation, at solving puzzles in languages not her own. Yet, in this matter, she fashioned signs out of everything, anything: bay leaves in their soup, beats of lightning during a storm, hiccups in the early morning. Her logic, once so well defined and disciplined, had made one wild exception: anything for a child, anything for little Anya.
16. A mind-______
During the war, Daria had no choice but to carry uncertainty with her and surrender herself to it. But now she made a list of things they had to do, sure things. “We have to buy her a few dresses. And fix the leg of
10. Mis________
August arrived, hot, unapologetic. Dark armpits of mold creeped across the yellow walls. Everything swelled up: doors and windows didn’t shut properly in their frames. Old sheets of glass warbled from the humidity and put their streetview out of focus. The only thing on their minds was orange icepops, which came on twin sticks that Yuri broke off to share with Daria. In the heat, Daria became irritated. Sweat darkened the hair around her ears.
“Can’t we open the window?” she complained. Yuri already knew the answer and cringed: with the new coat of paint the window frame had swollen up and fused with the jamb. After all this time, he still hadn’t unstuck it. She went to the latch and inspected it. “You painted the window shut,” she said. “Nah,” he said, sighing. “I’ll unstick it.”
Frankly, Yuri wasn’t in the mood to unstick the window. The heat, plus Daria’s demands, made him about ready to throw himself from the window, stuck or not.
the crib. And pack our bags for the hospital.” She loved this todo list, as if it were insurance against loss.
When Daria lost Anya that August, she felt like the most arrogant woman on earth for believing that her quota of suffering had been used up. The doctors said there would be no more babies, so Daria decided a crossword could be a child. In the nights that followed, she set the grid on her knees and filled in the blanks. Yuri sometimes watched her until his eyes flickered shut and he kissed her goodnight. A kiss could be a crossword clue too, she thought. She stayed up, trying to complete it, but there were too many blanks, too many possibilities now that her baby girl was gone.
13. At a ____
Daria realized only one ambition was left to her: to study for the university entrance exam. She checked out language books from the library and began to study in the square by their apartment. She had always loved it here:
Yuri dawdled over to the kitchen and found a spatula. That’ll work, he thought, turning back to pry open the window. When he turned back, Daria had somehow collapsed onto the floor, her hand clapped on that lucky yellow wall.
11. Push up _______
Later, Daria handed him the burial box with little Anya and told him he was in charge of it.
Yuri crossed the footbridge to the cemetery where he worked at night. He fussed the spade into the soil, making a nice hole. Just when he placed her in it, the groundskeeper came strolling by. “Hey!” he said. “You can’t bury pets here.” He put his hands on the small of his back.
“I didn’t know,” Yuri said, though he did—this cemetery was an expensive plot. He looked at the groundskeeper warily, not wanting any trouble. “Shucks, that’s ok,” the man said. “I remember my family’s calico. Such a sweet thing.”
He went on to describe the cat and the colors of her coat,
the walkways were cobblestone and in the rain, the bricks shone out flecks of red from under the deluge. There were benches and newly planted trees at half-height and streetlights that turned on at eight o’clock. At dusk, the popcorn vendor wheeled his cart and overwhelmed the sidewalk with the smell of hot butter. Sometimes, Daria walked to the end of the square, where she could see the footbridge that led to the university campus. When it grew cold, she tightened her kerchief around her hair and held her books closely, as though they were her shields.
The night before the exam, Daria put her books away. Yuri sat down beside her and took her hand. These days, Daria and Yuri usually kissed once in the morning and once at night—with the same frequency they brushed their teeth. Now they collided, cradled each other on the couch. Daria had the sensation that everything could be fixed if they stayed in the same place for long enough. She wondered if the world were just one room, with
while Yuri crouched by the hole he had dug. In the middle of his speech, Yuri began to get nervous. What if he wanted to look inside the box? And saw that it was a baby, not a cat? His fingertips bore into his palms until the man finally left. “Stupid Yuri,” he muttered to himself as he finished patting soil on top. He should have waited until nightfall, or paid for a plot. At once, he remembered his coupon for burial services—but it was only a $20 discount after all.
9. A costume
October was the worst month for guarding the cemetery. As he switched on the flashlight, Yuri saw it was the east fence line again. During the week of Halloween, kids slipped under the spade-points to egg gravestones and dare each other to walk over the plots of the dead. He made sure they didn’t go near Anya’s spot. A few blinks of his flashlight and they usually raced off, dressed as ghosts and zombies and monsters. Perhaps that was the only way, Yuri thought: to
no walls or corners in it, would they know each other better? She wanted to shrink it to find out, but knew even the smallest world—of two people, of a marriage—could be parceled out like chambers of a heart. Daria held Yuri close, trying against all odds to narrow the loss they held between them.
laugh at death. To dress it up and make it silly. Perhaps, he thought as the children screeched away from him all night long, perhaps the Americans had gotten that part right.