Until the Violence Stops

Looking for the Body Music Michael Klein My friend Frank calls it looking for the body musicthe music my mother heard. At the end of looking for the body music, one stumbles upon a woman's body with the whole world taken out of herbut before that scene, a foreshadow: my mother at the boarding school. She's twelve, child of two alcoholics, vaudevillians, shadows on a stage. She's overweight and sees beyond herself even then, so the girls are mean in their pressed dresses and routinely hang my mother out the window by her feet for a long time waiting for the exactly right cadence of please before they pull her back into her life. That was in 1940-somethingthe year my mother began the book her mind was writing called this is what happened to me the book she read to uspill-language to cushion the abyss of two marriages one husband beat her up, one husband took her money and broke her off with the world until she got written as the failed suicide after hanging by a thread by a hair, by her feet, borne of her fierce suspension over something called a youth. 7 Variations on Margarita Weinberg Moises Kaufman Dedicated to the memory of Rebeca Clisci Akerman 1. My grandmother was born in the Ukraine but immigrated to Venezuela before the Second World War. She told me this story: A young Jewish woman was kidnapped by a group of Cossacks during a pogrom. They brought her into a room and held her down, deciding who would have her first. "If you touch me I will put a curse on you," the woman said. "I am a witch." The Cossacks laughed. "I can prove it!" she shouted. "I can prove to you that I'm a witch." Their leader smiled and said, "Very well. Prove it, then." "I am immortal," she said, "and you cannot kill me." They laughed some more. "You cannot kill me. Not even if you shoot me. Try it." They stopped laughing and looked at her. "Here. Try it." She pointed to her chest. "Shoot me right here. You will see that I'm immortal." The Cossacks looked at one another but didn't move. "Shoot me in the heart. You will see I won't die. And then you'll have your proof that I'm a witch." The leader thought for a moment, then quickly took out his pistol and shot her in the heart. The young woman fell to the floor bleeding, looked at the man who had shot her, and said, "Thank you, you imbecile." My grandmother liked stories of heroic suicides. 2. My grandmother wanted to be a doctor when she was young. But in the Ukraine in 1935, there were only a few seats at the university allotted to Jews, and all of them went to men. So she became a nurse. When she told her family in 1937 that she wanted to go to Venezuela, everyone was against it. They hardly knew where Venezuela was on the map. But her fiance, Boris (my grandfather), had moved here two years earlier to make his fortune, and he wanted her to come join him; business was going well for him and he was worried about rumors of a war in Europe. I don't know if it was the imminent war or the invitation of a lover in the tropics, or both, but she came here. She was twenty-two years old. The story goes that when she arrived in Caracas, she was a woman of such delicate beauty, every immigrant wanted to marry her. (I've seen pictures, and she was stunning.) And my grandfather said, "Although I brought you here, you have no obligationEnsler, Eve is the author of 'Until the Violence Stops ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780345497918 and ISBN 0345497910.