Infestation

The Warsaw flat Liliya rented at age 19 had bats living in the walls. In the daylight hours she sometimes heard them wriggle and squeak behind the plaster, and at sundown, if she pulled a chair to the west-facing window, she could see them drop from the eaves into the darkening sky. She watched them swing and arc through the dusk, then went to her little stove that always smelled faintly of gas and heated some soup for dinner.

The bats were destroying the walls from the inside out, of course, filling them with guano and shed fur and their own little skeletons, but she would not tell the landlord. She knew he’d send someone to poison them, or do it himself. He was too cheap to find any kind of humane solution. She’d complained three times already about the gas leak from the stove; if he didn’t care enough to save her, what would he care for some bats? She knew he thought he was doing her a favor by renting to her at all.

Artem, her boyfriend back in Popasna, had hunted bats, flinging a ball of crumpled paper into the evening sky to provoke their interest and shooting at them with a pellet gun when they swooped to investigate. It made her sick to watch, the soft flutter of their bodies going still and falling to the ground. It wasn’t as though you could eat them, or do anything with them once they were dead, and Artem didn’t. He just liked the sport. They were so fast, he said, a real challenge. Then he got conscripted and had the chance to shoot his gun as much as he pleased, and by now he was probably dead himself, or rotting in a military prison somewhere. If she went home she’d cross paths with somebody who would know what had become of him, but she wasn’t going home, and anyway she didn’t care. By now she’d lost count of all the people she knew who’d died, most of them more worthy of her grief than he was.

***

By 27 she was living in an apartment building in Grand Rapids, Michigan, alongside refugees from Gaza and Sudan. The building across the street was filled with her countrymen, but Liliya had made the mistake during her first month in America of taking home with her a man who had smiled at her slyly in the corner bar, and had only learned he was married the following morning when his wife found him smoking a cigarette on Liliya’s stoop. Rather than blaming her husband, the woman had complained loudly to all her friends about what a good-for-nothing повія Liliya was, and even those who didn’t believe it didn’t dare be friendly after that. They had forfeited so much already, those women: jobs, homes, children, their great-grandmothers’ good china. Men of marriageable age, especially, were in short supply. They couldn’t let themselves lose a boyfriend or husband to some shameless slut, even if they would have been better off without him. This left her with few options for friends, as Americans rarely wanted anything to do with her. The refugee housing had been the cause of a large protest when it was built, even though it was in a remote and run-down neighborhood where she imagined few locals would choose to live if they had other options, and she was always wary of the potential anger that could resurface if she was clocked as an immigrant. Her Television English had served her well enough to get her a job at the corner grocery and keep her safe—she could say “Hey, how’s it going?” and “That’ll be $4.57,” and “Thanks,” with the casually entitled accent of a Disney Channel teenager—but anything more complicated than that risked revealing her foreignness.

So now, Liliya watched her compatriots and their children swarm the sad little playground with graying woodchips from a distance, and smiled shyly at the hijab-swaddled wives who passed her in the hallways of her own building. Their homes leaked cooking steam and prayers and the sounds of crying children, football games and men’s laughter some nights, gossip in languages she didn’t speak. Sometimes, she felt as though she knew them from this collection of sensory clues. But few of them had enough English to converse with her, and a smile could only say so much. They nodded and hurried past her on the way to their real lives.

Everyone knew the housing projects had rats, but when Liliya first saw one she was lying on her mattress on the floor, looking at her phone until a sudden, furtive movement caught her eye. The rat was only a few feet from her face. It froze when they locked gazes, but didn’t retreat.

Liliya thought of a book she’d read in the processing center, about a little girl whose rich father bought her a pony and a porcelain doll and paid her tuition to a fancy boarding school and then promptly died, leaving her penniless and orphaned. She’d had to work as a maid at the boarding school to earn her keep, and had become friends with a rat. The book seemed to be very impressed by the little girl’s resilience, that she was able to tolerate being a maid after being so wealthy, which Liliya had not understood. What about all the little girls who had to be maids and had never been rich? Were they not to be congratulated? Didn’t they have it harder, really, with no memories of sweet, indulgent papas and spirited ponies to sustain them? She pulled a granola bar from her purse, flicked a bit of it toward the rat, and watched. The rat’s whole body quivered before it grabbed the food and ran. “Godspeed, little one,” Liliya said, and fed herself the rest of the bar.

She patched all the holes in the walls after that, but fed the rats she saw from the tiny concrete square of her stoop in the evenings. She knew the other tenants set traps for them and would be appalled if they found out. Easy enough for them; they had each other. They probably wished, at times, that there were fewer bodies to wash and feed and cram onto sagging mattresses, when in fact each apartment was its own little homeland.

***

At 43 she managed to buy a house, a small, ugly thing at the end of a street full of small, ugly houses, part of some American dream gone rancid. Nonetheless, it was hers: a kitchen, a bath, a living room with a sagging ceiling, and two small bedrooms. Liliya had accepted that she would not have children at her age—she had passed time with a number of men over the years, but none she cared to link her life with permanently—and so the second bedroom was, for the time being, a makeshift library that she lined with stacks of water-stained paperbacks.

As soon as she moved in she began painting the walls, bold colors to make up for the dim lighting. When she finished she opened the windows and set a pan of cloves and vanilla simmering on the stove in her newly-red kitchen, until she drove out the scent of fresh paint, the older smells of mold and tears.

After that the ghosts came quickly, drifting in from the streets and the abandoned stores across the way, limping over from neighboring houses and the remains of crumbling foundations. Old women dead of loneliness, teenagers shot for being mouthy with other teenagers, middle-aged fathers with torn rotator cuffs who had taken one more pain pill and one more until it was one too many.

Liliya knew the charms the old people back home had claimed would keep spirits at bay, salt and iron and prayers. But she also knew her empty guest room was likely to remain empty. That coming from a country consumed by war could be a stumbling block you might never totally surmount, resilience notwithstanding. Compared to Americans, ghosts were easy to please. So she welcomed them, lit candles for their warmth, left them slices of bread soaked in milk and sugar and sang them the songs her babusya had sung to her when she was a child. Her floors were perpetually dotted with drippings of sweet milk and melted wax, the hallways filled with a whispery chorus only she could hear. She mopped and dusted and heated her soup on a stove that never leaked gas, and counted herself not unhappy.

***

When she was 50, her foster son, Dane, was a junior in high school, old enough to prefer his friends’ company to hers and leave her with some evenings free. She had worried, when the social worker first brought him to live with her, a ten-year-old with large, searching eyes and a face that betrayed no emotion, that he would be frightened by her house. But it turned out that every place Dane had ever lived had been filled with ghosts, most of them less friendly than hers.

In those first weeks, as he moved silently through her rooms, she told herself she could guide him; hadn’t she, after all, survived the worst life had to offer, while he had been growing up in this land of abundance? But all her lonely years had made her a sharp observer of people, and though he didn’t speak much, she learned plenty from him. He would ask her, quietly, for cash to buy some treat or toy, in a tone that told her he expected to be denied, and then when she took him shopping she would see him stop, mere steps from the door of the comic book store or the corner shop, to slip half the money into the cup of some beggar on the sidewalk. Once, when she went into his room to search for a missing library book, she found a hoard of candy in an old lunch box beneath his bed, perhaps every piece of candy he had ever asked her to buy him, as though he didn’t dare indulge in such sweetness. Quickly enough she realized that you could grow up in a warzone even if your country was not at war. That even children with living parents could be orphans. She stopped trying to be falsely cheerful with him, or pretend she could mend all the broken places in his life, and from there they had reached a state of mutual respect that shaded, slowly, into love. It was hard to believe that Dane might soon be in college, or working in another city, living somewhere away from her, as he had for the first decade of his life. She knew she would miss him, but she was not afraid of being alone again. Being afraid never stopped the worst from happening anyway.

On Wednesday nights she volunteered at a soup kitchen, something she and Dane used to do together. There were sometimes women, even children, in the food line, but many weeks the line was filled with former soldiers left to wander the streets, begging for money with their heads full of explosions and screams, rough men with rougher voices. Liliya did not report them if they swore or spat or yelled at her, though she knew it was against the rules for them to do these things. She understood the burden they walked under. She knew phone numbers that rang only ghost phones in homes that had been bombed to rubble, ghost addresses for apartment buildings whose inhabitants were scattered or dead. The ghost dreams of an entire city, all the marriages and careers and babies and gardens its citizens had planned back when those things still seemed possible, filled the pockets of her mind. Who was she to sneer at anyone who stumbled under the weight of the past?

When Artem walked up to her line and held his hand out for his dinner, she did not recognize him at first. He did not meet her eyes—many of the men did not—and she was looking mostly at the ghosts that flocked around him: a cluster of soldiers, a few children, and a great number of bats. It was only when he mumbled something and a ghost soldier answered in Russian that she looked more closely. The other volunteers working the food line froze as Artem narrowed his eyes at the soldier and raised his voice, shouting at the air in words they could not understand. Liliya stood paralyzed for a different reason, caught in utter disbelief at the reappearance of this person from her past. Popasna felt like another life, and Artem some misplaced artifact from it; was this really the man she had kissed by the reservoir off Pershotravneva St. one rainy afternoon, or followed down the cool, stinking aisles of the fish market as he selected fillets for their dinner? How could he still be alive when everyone else was gone, when the city itself was gone? He was only two years older than she was, but he could have passed for 70 now, windburned and sun-creased, caked with grime and smelling of piss and gasoline. One of the Russian soldier ghosts hissed accusations at him, and Artem shouted back, calling him a rapist, a murderer, telling him to rot in hell. Artem swatted at the ghosts as though they were flies, grasped at his waistband for a gun he thankfully did not have. Liliya could see the shelter staff approaching from the back of the room, speaking into their walkie-talkies and calling for assistance.

She set down the plate of food and put her hand on his shoulder. “Artem,” she said, very clearly, and repeated it when he staggered back from her. She could not say whether he knew who she was, or merely heard a voice of calm and authority calling his name and pronouncing it properly, which perhaps no one had done in decades. She looked at the soldier ghosts, the dozens of little bat ghosts, the sad-eyed child-ghosts staring back at her.

“You can’t get rid of them,” she said, speaking to him in their mother tongue, with the accent that was all she still had of their hometown. “They’re yours, Artem. Let them in.”