The first six months in the U.S., Regina spent her afternoons at a single Manhattan café, and it was there that her accent hooked him. “I overheard you ordering your coffee,” he said, seating himself at her round table. He wore earth-colored shades: tan slacks, a brown jersey. His fingernails were carefully trimmed. Pieces of wavy hair wound themselves around his earlobes.
It was a fall still bloated with the heat of summer. Outside the café window, the streets were splashed with runners, dog walkers, workers on their lunch breaks, college kids forcing pamphlets unto the resisting. She had seen him enter the cafe, watched as he hovered by the oatmeal raisins, the sugar cookies, the black-and-whites. He cradled his container of coffee between both palms, and an indecisive swaying tipped her off that he would make his way to her. In contrast, Russian men lunged or pounced, she thought, they never second-guessed their actions.
He introduced himself. He was called Aaron, and the way he said his own name was careful, as if aware that once uttered, it would be exposed to scrutiny. He said he adored her consonants, the long drawl of vowels. Her English was excellent but she was clearly from a distant place. Where was she from? He offered to supplement her tea with a poppyseed muffin, cinnamon raisin bagel, whatever she wanted.
There was nowhere she needed to be; she and her parents were still crashing with increasingly impatient relatives in Borough Park, and it was her turn that night to sleep on the living room floor. She put aside her Chekhov, “The Seagull.” The bagel would be fine. She would take the bagel.
His apartment on 14th Street was a white boxy space filled with innocuous props: orange sheets with the face of a tiger printed in its middle, an entire row of Phil Collins albums, neat stacks of a magazine called Sports Illustrated. He disappeared in the kitchen and emerged with a full glass of wine. It was not sweet or plummy enough; to her it tasted sour.
The late afternoon sun cast a glow on surfaces, turning them fuzzy, reddish. Other than the bed, there was nowhere to sit, and they sipped their wine from opposite corners. He asked about this new Russia, whether it was a good idea. It would mean democracy, right? She clipped her answers, warily, of any political substance.
Eventually, she slipped out of her cheap fall trenchcoat, and the happiness scrawled across his face was too easy to read: until now, someone like her had no business in his life.
He undressed her, his thumbs too thick and lumbering to make sense of the tiny buttons running down her shirt. “Is this alright?” he breathed in her ear. He pulled open the covers, and helped her ease out of her boots. The sheets were a plaid flannel, but cool against her skin.
Then again, “Does this hurt?”
“Yes,” she wanted to lie. But his fingers tripped so lightly that she could barely sense them on her skin. For the first time, it occurred to her that she had truly left home, that once she had convinced her parents to get out of the country, she had begun harboring slippery, stained fantasies, mashed into a ball and crammed into the very bottom of a laundry hamper. Kidnappings, knife point, Dzerzhinsky, you name it.
“Hurt me,” she whispered, but he was so startled, his face clouded with panic that she forced a mysterious smile on her face, pretended to fumble with scrambled English words. “Touch me, yes?” The relief on his face was immediate, and it roiled her stomach.
Lingering purple kisses were stamped on her and on the way out, she folded the Borough Park number into the pocket of his robe. The elevator ride was swift, uninterrupted, and released from the limitations of his apartment, she could finally breathe. Out on the street, the early evening felt expansive, and she imagined she could walk miles, the way she used to in Moscow — from Pushkin Place to the Arbat, purse swinging against her hips, heels clicking against cobblestone. It was on one of those walks that the idea had occurred to her: Why couldn’t they leave too?
She decided to head downtown; guided by a smudged subway map. Early evening in October — her favorite time, the Chekhovian time when an entire season of melancholy stretched before her. Couples passed her, hand-in-hand, and girls stomped by, shining with lipstick. Comparing herself to these American girls was easy, their public manner lacked mystery, their bowl cuts, jean jackets and clunky military shoes compressed their sensuality. Her own beauty — radiated, never muted — would do well here, and the rest would settle itself into place.
Night fell and the Brooklyn streets were foreign. None of the markers — the tree slumped over at the waist, the bodega Jimm ‘s with a letter missing, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the fire hydrant painted red, white and blue — materialized. When she found the right apartment, the correct black buzzer, she saw fear in the eyes of her parents. The usual string of questions was aimed at her. Why were you gone so long? Where have you been? Why?
Her distant cousin, frowning in a nurse’s aide uniform, put the kettle to boil and they sat down to tea. As she cleared the table, Regina noticed that her mother packed all their belongings, tucked their clothes, a few books and toiletries beneath the window sill. All their possessions — thanks to her successful bullying, her insistence that they abandon their home — were distilled to this simple heap.
In Moscow, her friends affectionately dubbed her The Spoiler. When she purposely flunked her Marx/Lenin exams, hurled a rock into the eye of a classmate who called her “Regina the Zhid,” or appeared at parties after which its revelers were questioned by the police, her friends said she was a person in dialogue with evil spirits who couldn’t resist inflicting bad luck. The name, they explained to the Jewish girl, harks back to ancient Rus’. In the old days, when a spoiler showed up at a farm, the crops failed, the livestock died. Who else could a peasant blame for his bad luck, for his wife’s indifference, his children’s disobedience, if not the spoiler? After all, it was an invisible souring; the evil was believed to be transmitted through food or clothing, through touch or kiss.
The girlfriends said, “Don’t get us wrong, Regina. You’re a doll. You mean no harm.”
What did they mean, then? She wanted to know. They were drunk, dizzy with nicotine, and Regina pretended at anger. Not the most flattering nickname, my dears, she chided. Are you saying I’ve brought all of you bad luck?
But why was she leaving at the vortex of change? Someone asked. Why did she think she would be happy in the United States when there was no precedent for such an emotion?
It was New Year’s Eve, a time for truth-telling. In the living room, the tree glowed with turquoise tinsel, wrapped caramels wedged between the firs. They sat among the crumbs of dessert, a half-empty bottle of cognac. Sabina was the most beautiful of the girls, with her flawless paleness, her cinched waist, but it had always been a fact that scared her. In Russia, she always said, beauty tends to bring misery.
It was a going-away party but no one called it by its name. Instead, it was a spoiling.
On television, there was a new president, his cheeks ruddy, his gray hair wild and tousled — he wished them a Happy New Year. Just six days before, they had huddled in Red Square, watching the soldiers’ dismantling of the Soviet flag. The familiar red disappeared and the other began its flutter. In Regina’s view, this new flag was an ugly flag, lacking any grace with its blocky stripes stacked on top of one another. What had been sturdy and certain –and yes, even beautiful — had now been yanked away. Trembling, she foresaw a new, coarse era.
It was almost midnight, and in the hallway, they heard the murmuring of drunken men, their screeching wives calling them back. Sabina said, “Seriously girls, why do we kid Regina? Aren’t we a little jealous? Maybe she’ll be happy after all.”
Part Two
When she arrived at Aaron’s place, he greeted her naked at the door, shed her clothes in the narrow, windowless vestibule, repeating, “You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful.” He swept her in his arms, delivered her on top of the bed like expensive luggage. They tried it that way, all that lavishing of affection, all those tender embraces, but she found her body went slack in his arms after a while. One day she told him that this time it would happen only after she said, “No.”
Aaron nodded. He was a man who lived his life by rules, who awaited dictation. His apartment required a woman’s touch, he used to say, but his mind, too, was ready for molding, made available to change. Do with me what you will, he proudly announced to her.
A law student with no real passion for the law, he had a rigorous sense of duty, of completion. Her own vague goals for life and contempt for his own seemed to amuse him. He was in awe of her, and why not? Imagine his own upbringing: two school psychologists for parents, a sister in medical school, a pair of grandparents in Miami; in a suburb of Cincinnati, a split level with his teenage bedroom entirely intact. When she fell asleep, she was aware of him dimming the lights, tucking a plaid blanket about her shoulders. It was warm with him, simple and cozy.
At her direction, he would eventually purchase expensive silk sheets, tie her wrists together with kitchen twine. When the preparation turned too elaborate, he set the stage before her arrival. If she raised the bed cover, she would find knots already attached to posts, wrinkled silk stretched over the mattress. Stretching herself taut, she was prepared for the unleashing, the liberation. Yet the sheets, crackling with static, clung to her calves. The twine was fastened so loosely that her hands kept slipping out of the noose. But for his sake, she pretended it held.
“How’s that?”
“Very good,” she said, unsatisfied. She was aware of a lack of sensation, and it troubled her. Since stepping foot at JFK, she hadn’t felt a thing.
“I’m going to rape you now,” Aaron said, and giggled. “I’m sorry I’ll be serious.”
“Why don’t you think it’s serious?” The flatness of her voice didn’t merely startle him.
Sometimes, in the middle of a caress, her parents would phone. Aaron, smiling, would pass the receiver to her.
She could hear it in their voice, a quaking vulnerability. “Where are you?” they wondered.
New York was still dangerous in the way a sexy man reading a novel alone at a bar was dangerous, which was to say, just a little. There were still shadowy pockets, subway stations you didn’t dare descend into, blocks where you stared straight ahead. At least once a day, there was a scene to turn away from — of violence, decomposition — before one’s grasp on peace crumbled away. But she liked it among grime; how lovely she looked, how much promise burst forth; as she stalked New York’s streets, she felt a dandelion among the ruins of Chernobyl.
The first step was to get out of that Borough Park apartment, to remove herself from that limp and typical story. That was how she arrived at his door, hoisting a backpack, a mass of supermarket bags. Most of the Russian stuff she had already discarded, keeping only the nonsensical things: a swatch of tinsel, a lipstick whose scent conjured up her old Moscow room, a small album rushed together by Sabina, the pictures jumbled, some yellowing and upside down, in no chronological order.
He swung open the closet, ejected dresser drawers. Inside them she saw deep emptiness, hollow caverns to be filled. It was more space than she would ever require.
“What do you think about?” He asked this often, usually immediately after sex. He said he told her everything. He was falling behind in his study group. One of his professors, a prosecutor at a recent celebrity murder trial, the reason Aaron selected this school from all the others, picked on him mercilessly. He thought too much about money, the tuition his father was paying, the exorbitant rent.
They lay on top of the covers, the radiator puffed dry heat into the room. The windowsills, still framed by snow, were translucent with steam.
“I think about my Greencard. I worry about my parents.” She said. But she was mimicking. What she worried about was far darker; no words — either English or Russian — could wrap around its chasm.
Part Three
At one point, it seemed as if all the Jews had already gone. It was 1990; by the thousands, they had started disappearing to America or Israel in 1979. Letters from friends and relatives, first censored, then less so, trickled in. They were in raptures about their new life but it was measured in possessions: a new car (well, used), groceries, foreign-made clothes (in China), the culture (museums free on Tuesday nights). The existence being led by the readers of these letters had clearly become incomprehensible to the émigrés. They had become accustomed to sizeable things, items you need two hands to carry.
Regina’s parents saved all the letters in a kitchen drawer. Brooklyn, San Diego, Pittsburgh return addresses. Evenings, they welcomed friends for tea — her parents were always at the center of their social group; her mother, always first in line when shipments of imported clothes were sold, held court over her group of friends — and took turns reading from one another’s letters.
“I pity them,” they clucked. “Just read between the lines.”
From behind the bookshelf that separated her space from that of her parents, Regina was stewing. She was a virgin, still half-convinced that lemon juice could act as spermicide. What were her future options? An aging sexpot a la Alla Pugacheva, breast spilling over, or the drab academic Raisa Gorbachev? The images of other women shimmered beneath her eyelids, but she pushed them out.
She would show them freedom, she thought. All she felt here was pent-up shame.
Her Borough Park cousin began by cleaning apartments. Her mother started in this direction too, but Regina balked. She pictured herself bent over the tub with a scrub brush, flicking away body hair. Worse, she imagined the messy envelope of dollars with her name on it, the pitying condescension.
She could cut hair. She had completed a few haircuts in Russia, albeit inebriated, and her friends were pleased with the result. Yet despite appearances to the contrary, Aaron was vain about his wavy hair, not easily trapped in that chair. Prosecution was about making airtight cases, which would be less convincing with a bad haircut. She had few bodies on which to practice so he counted: four months until the summer associate’s job. It would grow out, whatever mistake she made. She wound a towel under his chin, picked up the scissors.
At first she barely sliced off a thing, making small incisions at the back. After each row, she wanted to stop. It was enough, the split ends were cleaned up, and the effect was even and clean. But the old instinct returned, a relentless gnawing, the desire to press beyond borders. She grew bolder, moved around the ears, moistened bangs and cut at them roughly. Aaron clutched at the armrest, the steam of perspiration emanated from his head. Power felt strange, not as pleasant as she had imagined.
He loved it, he insisted, when he dared open his eyes to look. Well it made him look bad, didn’t it? In a dangerous sense, he added quickly. A man at the margins.
With so much shaved away, his face looked oversized. Like a plaintive cartoon animal, his eyes beamed large, ears, folded back against the skull, were pale and exposed, like raw chicken wings. Her fingers ran through the gristle. Why hadn’t he stopped her? Why hadn’t he grabbed her wrist, thrust away the scissors, insisted she was going too far, too damn far as usual? His hands should have squeezed at her, leaving the area white for a while, drained of all blood.
How fragile was a badly shorn head and how she despised fragility in a man. She hated him then for he made things easy, the way he handed over his flourishing land, his livestock, without guile, without a wisp of suspicion.
By the time he asked her to marry him, she found herself thinking, “Why you? Why should it merely be you?” It was the end of 1993 and there was a smooth-talking, handsome president in power. It was the ideal moment for change.
Still dizzy from champagne, she watched him fumble with the ring, stab it back into its velvet cave. It had been a sweet ring: a delicate band, a modest solitaire.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked. Snowflakes ricocheted off the window, pummeled by each gust of wind.
She considered telling him she was a Spoiler, gauging his reaction. But Aaron smoothed away peaks and ruffles, flung about terms like “overcoming challenges” and “staying positive” unironically.
“I’m sorry,” she said. That is what heroines said on soap operas before they delivered the final blow. Here, people hurt one another just as often as they did in Russia but instead, they blamed themselves, not others, for inflicting the pain. It was a savvy maneuver.
“Change your mind. Right now,” he begged. She put on her coat, wrapped a scarf around her head. She hesitated. It was warm here, she was jobless. Her parents had not unpacked all of their boxes in that Jackson Heights studio, and that apartment was yellow and brown with age, so old that no matter how her mother scoured it, the dirt was impossible to remove, ingrained as it was between the tiles, encircling the drains, pooled in every corner. Still, she opened the door. The hallway was empty; it was the kind of night where people hovered behind locked doors.
Aaron, still in his suit, lapels wrinkled, stood at the door. He did not follow her down the hallway. The shirt was Thomas Pink, he had proudly told her. No more Banana Republic for him; it was his first purchase of manhood. The shirt also happened to be pink, and how pink it looked from where she stood, pink and defeated. From the elevator in her new coat and galoshes, holding two garbage bags stuffed with clothes, she watched him dolefully shut the door.
She was Russian, she was Jewish, she had a charming accent, she was tall and feline — it would be more than enough.
Part Four
She rented an apartment in Murray Hill with a grim Russian immigrant girl, one who toiled toward the usual aspirations: lucrative marriage, a career in dermatology. Medical textbooks, open to disfiguring skin conditions, crowded the breakfast nook. There were nights when her Russian life flooded back to her, the roasted chestnut smell of its snow, that blue-green tinsel she and her girlfriends would wrap around the New Year’s tree. Before the memories evaporated, she would list through the textbooks: a face covered in blistering pustules, a neck swollen to barrel size, toes like sausages, puffy and nipped at the ends. Some photographs made her feel it, the embers of fear, a profound sense of loss, but then the sensation dissipated.
She and the girl rarely socialized. Once in a while Chinese delivery were stretched over two plates and on those nights they rented old romances together–naïve girl arrives in the city, girl wises up, finds rich husband.
But usually they were two ghosts, flitting around one another in high heels.
The phone rang, night after night. The callers invited her on dates and mispronounced her name. They couldn’t grasp that the “g” in her name was a hard “g:” “Rejeena,” they cooed. Was she free next Friday? Next month? On the telephone, she could already tell they were preoccupied, entangled inside the complicated sinews of their own lives. They hadn’t the honesty, the vigor to make her face the extent of her stubbornness, her inability to admit to herself that what she had so desperately craved simply didn’t exist.
After dinner out with a particularly world-weary man, one who was unimpressed by any of the items on his plate, she walked home through Central Park in short leather skirts, in boots that reached the bottom of her knees. She walked alone under graffitied bridges, lit by flickering streetlamps. Squirrels and overweight rats darted out of bushes. Sometimes she heard the distant tread of human footstep, crackling on branches. If someone were to pop out of the shadows and grab her, she would be unable to fight him off (with what? Her soggy Styrofoam of leftovers? The serrated edge of a plastic knife?). She imagined her parents grieving in their Sunnyside studio: A nice end after what we’ve turned away from.
The image made her smile; it was something, anyway.
She brought her parents money every Friday. Her mother held a decent database job at a travel agency, but her father said he was too old for all this. It wasn’t the English, he insisted, it was his arms; in this country they didn’t move the way they had back home. He used to be an energetic man, he told anyone who listened. With bare hands, he even set down train tracks many years ago.
Her parents’ apartment was strangled by clutter: orange paisley curtains left over from previous tenants, bookshelves crammed with mismatched candlesticks and porcelain elephants. Their Russian place recreated from memory. Still, they brightened when she walked through the door, as if a princess had materialized in the commoners’ hut. Such beauty will reap riches, they clucked, intimidated by her perfume, by her stylish tweed pants, her low-cut sweater. You wait and see.
Her mother bustled in a buttoned-up housecoat heating up her famous borscht, slivers of fatty beef bobbing in thick sour cream. The china was from Conway, the mismatched silverware a donation from the local synagogue. They wiped their mouths on a paper towel, torn into three sections.
After dinner, they sipped tea and gathered around Russian television broadcasts — game shows and talk shows, concerts and art openings — amazed, though they never admitted it, that the country continued to function without them.
She consoled them. “You can’t say it’s not better here.”
But they were unhappy, she knew, and she was to blame. Her impulsive ideas had always tended to backfire; she threw herself into them with no strategy as to how they should be implemented. Only later, when left with the tatters of outcome — a disappeared investment, a broken heart, and now, something far more long-lasting — she would marvel at her initial confidence.
“All the Jews have gone already,” she remembered needling when her parents told her that they, for one, planned to stay put. “Do we want to give up a new life simply because we’re afraid?”
As she got ready to go, her father pressed a packet of envelopes — bills and doctors’ forms — on her. He whispered, out of her mother’s earshot, “Just tell me what they want from us now, the vultures.”
Always a thin, wiry man, he was now filling out in the middle; he looked helpless in this added weight, from behind chunky bifocals. She noticed that his dress shirt, starched and pressed for these Friday night dinners, was spotted with beet juice.
Jobs in fashion administration and hotel hospitality were given to her, then quickly wrenched away. In the first few weeks of her employment, she radiated energy, a rosy-faced enthusiasm. In the office, she would sing some Russian tune under her breath, and her smile, a bowl of Hershey’s kisses on her desk, meant her cubicle was always surrounded by people. Because of her accent, she would make calls on behalf of the company, which gave the firm an air of genteel European sophistication.
But she lacked focus, her employers said when they let her go, she was simply not detail-oriented. She would leave a task half-done then begin on a new one. One of her bosses said that her customer service skills were wanting, and after a while, an expression of sleepy indifference would creep onto her face.
Still she waited, though the objective became less clear. After all, loss was becoming normal, that newness, the contrast was starting to wear away.
Part Five
There was James, then Matt, then James again, a half-Mexican guy — Diego. All of them eager to try bondage, intrigued when she tentatively broached the topic. “Which do you prefer,” James would ask, a shopping bag at his feet. “Ripped up sheets? Coiled rope?”
“Whatever,” she said. “Whatever hurts the most.”
They admitted that there came the point when it stopped being fun. Matt, for example, had been dubious from the start. It was the way she gazed past him, at some invisible point on the ceiling, the ways she failed to respond to his touch. Suddenly, he felt at the periphery of the action. Was this how a nice Jewish girl made love?
In the meantime, there were more dinners in restaurants: communal tables, “new” Italian food, celebrity chefs, tapas bars, waits for more than an hour. Breasts of duck, splayed every which way on a bed of whatever.
There was a new president over there, Regina learned from the evening news. Russian women were gushing: He was “handsome” and “strong,” would finally make the world forget the weak, drunk one that came before. Something erotic about that set jaw, the leaden expression, flashes of KGB in his eye.
After September 11th, her roommate graduated and bought a small house in North Jersey. A burly cousin from Brighton, lit cigarette dangling from his lips, loaded the television, textbooks and crock pots into a scuffed white van. On the front steps, in the first chill of fall, the girls kissed each other goodbye on both cheeks.
“Good luck.” This was delivered to her somberly. “Please take good care of yourself.”
Once the roommate drove away, hand flashing, she found herself crying. The pizzeria guys next door urged her inside for a slice, but she waved them away. The lobby was damp cold marble, those three flights of stairs so difficult to scale. In the apartment, furniture outlines remained on the floor, dusty traces like evidence in a murder case.
When she began interviewing new roommates, who scanned her makeshift closet concealed by a shower curtain, her pink Conway dishes with a skeptical eye, Regina realized that New York had changed. It was no longer forgiving, willing to take risks; it was becoming sleek and chrome, impatient with mistakes, with shabbiness.
The Russian guy was Dima. Though he was no taller than five foot five, his body formed the smooth contours of an ice sculpture. A tattoo, faded red and green, snaked down his back. In the passenger seat of his used BMW, Regina gripped the seat for support; he prided himself on skimming red lights.
When she introduced him to her parents, she had watched, with relief, as they spoke to him as to a son. This time, no translation was needed.
“What a joy,” her father had told Dima, “to speak my own language.” The two of them made inroads into the vodka Dima had brought, their arms wound around each others’ chairs.
If she invested in his import business, he would make her partner, he said as they drove upstate. His hand, fleshy, thick, rested on her thigh. She rarely left the city, and as they passed farms along with fanned, grazing animals, she rolled down the window so her face could better absorb the sun.
That night, in the bed and breakfast, amid floral wallpaper and scalloped pillowcases, the naked, smooth-chested Dima appeared larger than he really was. He stripped to his boxers with one hand, text messaged on his BlackBerry with the other. A gold medallion, on the end of a long gold chain, swayed as he typed.
No, Regina decided. Leaping off the bed, she found her bra on the floor, managed to fasten its hooks. She slid into her jeans and was halfway into her sweater, when she felt Dima gripping her by the neck.
“What are you doing?” he said in Russian. Their conjoined shadows splashed shapes against the wall. “I know what girls like you want.”
For the first time, there was pain, the kind that popped blood vessels, induced sounds from the depths of her throat. She pushed back at him with all her strength, driving nails into his skin. The marks her bites left behind were small, oval-shaped. In the middle of the scream, just before the knocks on the door, the proprietor’s panicked “Are you alright in there?,” the hollowness returned, a gaping nothing on the other side.
“Thank you,” she told him, numbly, in front of her home, before she slammed shut his dented car door.
It was a few years later that she saw Aaron again. In the Century 21 department store, there he was, deciding between two dress shirts. More burnished than she remembered, he had a deep tan, a polished haircut, a gray wool coat of good quality. If she walked across the floor and tapped him on the shoulder, he would see that over her acrylic sweater she wore a Century 21 vest the pink shade of tongue. She was stacking boxers into the shape of a pyramid but she kept one eye on his back, which was hunched over in indecision. He stood there for some time, pressing one shirt, then the other against his chest in front of the mirror.
An unloved president was recently reelected, and the mood veered between purpose and despair. The city was loneliest in those weeks when winter refused to be budged. It was a time when no one asked her where she hailed from, despite the fact that she pruned her accent for singularity, for spark. It was a time when she felt there were too many like her now, pale, angry, round-faced women, quite a few of them working at Century 21 for discounted Missoni.
When she next looked up, she saw Aaron disappear behind the tie rack both shirts in hand. She signaled that she was going on break, and ran to every cashier in the store, scanning all the men on line in search of wavy hair, for his fine, open face. Why had she rejected him, her first, her guileless American boyfriend? Would it have been so wrong to be taken care of like that? Twice a year they would have had to visit the grandparents in Miami; so, it would be uncomfortably muggy, the apartment carpeted, so let them bake latkes, a carrot tsimmes, whom would that have harmed?
He would love her again, and why not? She was still beautiful, still Russian with that same accent. It would mean a few soothing words, the caress he preferred. The store was so crowded, she could barely elbow her way past grim families heaving red baskets.
She remembered screaming, “No!” in bed with Aaron, thrashing against the knot, so loose, so tender, around her wrists. A young woman, a new country, she had needed to be terrified. But she was beginning to sense it now as she combed every floor for the sight of him: the long years of famine, the ravishing of the fields.
