Secretly I know my name is Nadya, but no one here calls me that. Where is here, you ask? It wouldn’t really matter if I told you. It’s nowhere to you, so long as you are the kind of person who lives in a home with the things that a home normally has – a kitchen in which to eat, a bed in which to sleep, and if you are lucky, that thing called a family with whom you share these mundane things. You take them for granted because they have never been taken away. I did once, too. There was a village with a name attached to it, in a country that I don’t remember. Or, I do recall, but I pretend not to because it hurts less that way, if I close my eyes and say that this memory is only of a dream I had the other night, and there has never been any other place than where I am now. In the dream, there was green, there was a steeple silhouetted against a hill. De Silhouette, someone told me once, was a penny pincher who was so cheap that he made faceless portraits for his clients instead of the fleshed-out, identifying kind, but I don’t know if I believe this anecdote. Fancy stories are fine for children but eventually the real world catches up. So there; a pretty village in a pretty, fairy tale country and you don’t need to know its name.
The problem with the village is that there was not much more to it than that green and that steeple, and a whole mess of rotting sheep that were dying of some disease. They might have called in hoof-in-mouth or foot-in-mouth, the same term they use when someone makes a mistake and you yell back at them, “You really put your foot in your mouth that time!” There, yes that was it. Our sheep were dying of a mistake. Papa was dying of something more tangible but no less easy to capture in words. They could have called it cancer, but the only real doctor in the area lived a good twenty miles away and he came every once in a while, but when he did, Papa didn’t have enough money to pay him, so turned instead to the woman who peddled in herbs. After all, that was the way it had been done for centuries, by his father, and his father’s father, and his father’s father before that. The woman with the herbs could work miracles, they said – cure the big black lumps that formed along the skin or take the burn away from flesh charred in an accident over a stove, or take the quickening out of woman’s stomach when she didn’t want it there (but we had no name for this procedure; some things shall remain nameless).
Whether or not any particular nameless cure of hers worked on women, Papa didn’t have any choice but to trust her because he had no money for the other. Which was why when they offered money, I said yes. Who were they, you ask? I will spare you the names of the guilty. What you need to know is that, in my altruism, I said yes. Altruistically, the eldest daughter, because Mother by that point was spending most of her day vomiting up alcohol in the back room of the house, and my brothers had already gone off to the city where they could meet prettier women and sell their arms and shoulders (the men in my family had broad shoulders) while also selling their souls for a higher asking price. As long as manual labor was involved, they didn’t have to think about the other, higher price: it was a mask, a moniker adopted. People can wear different names and still be the same person.
A waitress, they said, and I had served food at home to my younger siblings for fifteen years, so a waitress, that was what I already was. A waiter. Yes, I waited, waited for life to become bigger than a village of steeples and green, and waited for love, and waited for fairy tales, so it would be proper to call me a waitress. But we shouldn’t put too fine a point on these things.
I don’t remember much of the journey. Long, tired, hungry. I may be confusing this leg of the story with all of my days since.
They took me to a house. I won’t tell you what they did to me there, because my story would make you cry. It doesn’t really matter where this place is to you, does it? This great country of yours, America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Such pretty names you can apply to such ugly things, and I wonder, these men who walk through the front door of this shabby house that could exist on any suburban street (it could be next door to your house. Is it? Are you sure?) these men who walk through this door are able to swagger because surely they know that they are Free. I close my eyes because I am the one who is Brave. Cowards, cowards, I think, but I would never call them this name to their face.
So does it matter what they call me, in this place? If no one knows that I am here, and no one where I come from remembers that I have gone, then I am probably not even in existence anymore. Things that do not exist are not named. Secretly, I know my name is Nadya, which means Hope. Here I am called Ella, which I am told means Girl. You are only ‘girl’ in so much as you turn around when someone yells out the word on the street. So I am reduced to Girl which is the opening between my legs, and the Free and the Brave forget that I came from a small village in a small country where Papa waited for the money because I was Hope.
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