KIMBERLITE
by COURTNEY BILL
I returned to the city after two weeks in the diamond mines. Sveta, the woman I was seeing, met me at the airport and we took the bus together. She was twenty-seven. Dark, irregular eyelashes. She was pregnant. Past the bus windows, snow dragged down buildings and hung heavy on power lines. Light fell slack against the dirty glass, and I thought, Even the light looks tired.
We stepped through the snow to Sveta’s apartment complex, built several feet above the ground to separate it from the permafrost.
Inside Sveta’s unit, she moved to the kitchen. I sat on her couch and looked at the blinds that covered her windows, thin and glossy. A calendar on the wall read today’s date as January 14. It marked three months since my brother had died.
“How was the work?” Sveta stepped into the room with a glass of Armenian wine.
I felt grief in my arms, cold and hard. “Oh,” I said.
She sat next to me and I said: “Good.” She kissed my neck and I closed my eyes. Again, I said, “Good.”
Thirty-two, and I moved to a city in the north with an eight-month contract at a diamond mine. The company I worked for was one of the world’s largest diamond mining companies. They chartered us from the city to the mines for two-week shifts. Two weeks on, two weeks off. There were fifty of us, geologists and engineers, operating drilling rigs, extracting kimberlite, recording data. We started at 350 meters and aimed for 420 by end-of-shift. We stayed on schedule and got our samples and took breaks in heated shelters where co-workers gossiped and napped and took blurry iPhone selfies for their children. Occasionally, we saw in the solid mass of kimberlite a glimmer, dull and cloudy. Such unbeautiful things, diamonds.
I met Sveta three weeks ago, shortly after I had arrived in the city. She wore a large fur coat with the hood pulled up so that her face emerged like an animal’s deep in its burrow. I didn’t know anything about pregnancy but I could tell she was far along. She looked like a woman who would have ten children and be equally unpleased with each of them.
We stood at the bus stop together. I was heading back to my apartment with groceries I had picked up from a supermarket: fermented horse milk, reindeer sausage, butter and oil. A box of overpriced tampons.
I scrolled through online news articles from my paper back home.
“I wouldn’t do that,” she said.
I looked up at her.
“The cold kills the battery,” she said. “It will shut down in a few minutes. And then what? Who are you going to call when you break your leg?”
Her sudden paranoia made me laugh. Its intensity was inviting.
“I’d call out to you,” I said.
She blinked at me a few times, then said, “Hah.”
When the bus pulled up, she stepped on before me. We rode in silence, our bodies pressed together in the sudden heat, holding onto rails. A stranger offered their seat to her and she took it. I stood in front of her like a bulwark.
We got off at the same stop and looked at each other. She glistered under the noonday winter light. I imitated falling in the snow, breaking my leg, and she laughed.
Sveta had sex like she wanted to win. She used her elbows, her knuckles, my stomach. Her hair felt slick in my fingers as if wet but it was only cold. When we were finished, I lay against the pillows, defeated and luxurious, bruised, and watched Sveta light a cigarette. She filled the room with smoke until everything was covered in a grey sheen.
On the third day back in the city, a co-worker named Luke called. I hadn’t seen him since we had returned from the mines and I had no intention to. However, he invited me to a nearby café and I accepted.
Luke was in his early forties with a buzzcut. He was Turkish, and took our mutual foreignness as indication that we were tied in some way, when in reality we often misunderstood each other.
“How is the city treating you?” he asked over coffee.
I hated this question, not because I was ill-equipped to answer, but for its personification of the city as if it was alive. The city was many things,but the most visible to me was its deadness.
“I’m well,” I said. Then: “I’ve met someone.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “So fast.”
“Yes, well,” I said. I felt that there was something I was trying to express to him: but what? The incohesion of my life, the separate pieces I was trying to hold at the same time. This love, this loss.
Luke took a long swallow from his coffee. “I’m glad you are happy,” he said.
So, he misunderstood. I felt like I was facing a futile and impenetrable border between us, and that I was giving a very incongruous picture of myself, that whatever social fronts I had were keeping me from properly relaying myself to him, and perhaps understanding him as well. That when Luke spoke to me, he was responding to a version of me that didn’t exist. I said, “Yeah.”
Luke spoke about his wife and two young children who were still living in Turkey. He planned to visit them in two months, but in the meantime was drawing pictures of them to put on his apartment walls. “It’s hard when they’re far away,” he said. “It’s different.”
“What is?”
“The way I love them.” He touched his throat. “Distance sharpens things. The heart is fonder.”
I thought of the days shortly after my brother died when I didn’t know how to love anybody else. The singular, piercing nature of grief, how it sucks everything else into it, becomes fat with every other emotion, and spits out only absence. Grief had dulled my love into a heavy, blunt object.
That night in bed, Sveta talked about her childhood. How she would wait for the bus to school in the morning and cry at the cutting wind, the minus fifty degree temperatures. Her tears would freeze to icicles on her cheeks and this was how she knew she could not cry. As a teenager, she wrote sentences in her dreams and woke up with loose fragments that sounded like they should mean something but didn’t. “To prolong one’s sorrows is to cut one’s losses,” she said, and I laughed, gently and tenderly, and held her knee in my palm like the sweet bent knee of a fawn.
Sveta talked about motherhood like it was a mineral. Its properties, magnetism and density. She did not tell me if she wanted it. I did not ask about its father.
When I woke up, it was still night, and Sveta was playing the violin in the corner of the room.Her elbow rose and fell with her playing. I watched her from the bed. And there, a quiet grief. Sort of a tired feeling. His image drilled itself in me. When I fell asleep again, I dreamed that I held my brother’s face in my hands, knowing that he would die soon, and told him “It’s okay.” I woke up with a sad, deep peace, the aftermath of permission.
For breakfast, Sveta and I ate thin slices of raw, frozen fish.
On nights I spent alone, I watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, curled into a ball, and admired the dwarfs’ droopy bodies, big red noses, and felt remarkably identified with them, pickaxes in chubby fists.
Sveta worked at the Kingdom of Permafrost during the day, a tourist complex located within a glacier. Inside, it was always below ten degrees. I had never visited but I looked up pictures on Google images and saw neon-lit tunnels, ice sculptures of mammoths and Buddha, pagan gods. I was disturbed by these replicas of long-gone lives; that their frozen presence was predicated on the real thing’s absence. I called the reception desk to ask for Sveta on her lunch break but otherwise I stayed far away.
When the temperatures had warmed to minus thirty-five, I went on long walks through the city. I wanted the cold to deplete any remaining energy from my bones so that when I re-entered my apartment, I would fall on the bedsheets and pass out as if a hammer had been struck to my head.
Light quickened here. I plodded past government buildings and shopping centers where I tried on ten different moisturizers and walked back out into the snow, slathered. I listened to drone music on an old iPod that kept powering off when I stepped outside. My forehead itched from the cold.
I had the strong sense that life had to be chiseled, built down into meaning, defined only by what was taken away. And yet I didn’t know how to direct my life into form; to find, at last, what its real shape was.
Back in my apartment, I played games on my phone, diamond mining and games with shooter perspectives, pixelated explosions. I burned my eyes on these animations and then fell back asleep, restless with the phantom sound of craters being formed.
On the twelfth day back in the city, Sveta said, “The baby will come when you are gone.”
“How do you know?” I felt panicked by the suggestion, though I didn’t know what I wanted the alternative to be: standing in a hospital waiting room, or holding her sweaty hand on my apartment floor, watching life gush violent and dirty out of her.
“It’s been long enough.” She smiled, her body swollen against me. I held a strand of her hair between my fingers and felt a crushing easiness, that I could do this each night, and every night, and feel little pain. I pressed my mouth against the hard bone of her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
More than anything, I missed the terrible mundanity of his life: the sudden smack of water in the shower. His shoes by the door.
“I don’t want it to be easy,” I said, “to live without him.” She touched the back of my head, and I said, “I wish that it was never easy.”
She touched my earlobe, traced a line to my shoulder. “It’s not,” she said.
The last text I had sent him was “aww bummer.” This detail failed me. As in, each time I remembered it, and reprocessed the specifics (last text, aww bummer, dead brother) it failed to perform what I thought it should. Remorse, guilt, shame. Longing. None of that. Instead, I held this detail in the palm of my hand and felt a slow pain build in my body. That he had never replied to it meant nothing to me somehow. Aww bummer. I closed my eyes.
On the last day before I returned to the mines, Sveta roused me in the early morning. The sky was still mineral black, sharp around the edges.
“I want to show you where I grew up.”
We took a bus to the farthest stretches of town and watched as morning stripped unceremoniously into day. Apartment complexes scraped away, replaced with wooden houses. Shacks in the backyards served as toilets. We had purchased grapes that morning and ate them side by side on the bus, fingertips wet. There was a brutal cheapness to the streets now; everything looked naked, collarboned, crisp.
At the outskirts of the city, we stepped off the bus into knee-deep snow. Sveta gripped my arm for balance. “Come,” she said. “Look,” she said. I loved these words when they came from her.
The streets were bare except for us. We pushed ourselves forwards, followed the tilt of the road. After several minutes, we turned and the street opened, flattened into a large valley which swelled into rolling hills of snow. On the right side, a house, unremarkable and unidentifiable from the rest except that I knew with a singular clarity that it had been hers.
Sveta tipped her head onto my shoulder.
“What do you miss the most?” I asked, and my breath crystalled. “About being a child.”
Sveta touched her stomach through her fur coat. “Kissing everything,” she said.
Her eyelashes were thick with frost. Sunlight whitened her face. I smiled, uncontrolled. I had been asking myself, in articulate and inarticulate ways, how does one grieve and love at the same time? Here, Sveta, her bottom lip, its luster.
Behind the rotten housing complexes, I leaned towards her and kissed her. She opened her mouth to me and we stood there until our mouths froze together.
In the morning, I would return to the mines. Luke would sit next to me on the plane. I would look out the window at the city, its sharp, derelict brilliance from above, clouds that pulled themselves across the sky. And when we slid further away, in those final moments with the city in view, I would think of Sveta. I’d imagine her giving birth to a baby made of rock. In its first moments, it would slide from her, small and hard and punishing. A living geode. I could imagine it happening in that very moment—hips widening, mouth split open, a rush of life so vivid and victorious it screamed into existence, life that could not control itself, a sharp and beautiful entrance.
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