Work Text:
Irina Robinavitch dies at thirty-one.
She is some child’s mother, gaping as her heart gives out. Her fifteen year old son is not there. He has never been there, but neither has she. The harsh glare of hospital lights cast her porcelain skin a putrid yellow. Amidst the sounds of the hospital, rubber wheels on linoleum floor, she dies a Jane Doe.
There was a mother somewhere, Nurse Denvers thinks, a child too, her gloved hand tracing a white inflamed scar stretching the length of her stomach. Poor thing, she thinks, so young. She can see the beginnings of something beautiful or perhaps, the ending of something that was.
She sees the sites, bruises of purple and red, and wonders idly about the child.
Michael Robinavitch is Mikey in elementary school then middle school then high school and then undergrad.
His mother did not give him that name. His mother, Irina, some faraway visage trapped in gold frames and flowery photo books, packed behind cellophane, all wide-eyed, bucktooth smiles and dungarees and braids, called him Ben, for her father. She named him, the boy birthed on the tiles of a bathroom floor, black and white bathed in viscera and afterbirth and placenta. Shit, too, he reminds himself, remembers the way it stains and smears hospital beds as mothers push and heave.
His grandmother didn’t like the name. It was not the name of a strong boy, she always says and he has never understood her meaning. Her mind is garbled, sometimes, the way all their minds’ are garbled, logic of death and destruction world-breaking. There was no world for her, he thinks, not like this, not in those camps.
I gave you Michael, she cries when he tells her of Robby, the name his resident gave him the first day of his rotation.
I wanted you to be strong, over the sound of the samovar, and he thinks, there’s the logic. I wanted a name for you that is not dead.
There is another Ben.
He is dead, ashes, bones in some graveyard perhaps. Mikey did not know he had a brother until he is dead. His mother calls him at midnight, crying. He was just a baby, she says. Wire twists around her fingers, coins jangle. I was too, he thinks. I am not your mother and I do not want to know you, he wants to say.