Irma Voth by Miriam Toews Read Free Book Online

unintelligible and so … no.
    She just wants some time to herself to organize her thoughts, I told Diego.
    What thoughts? he said. Is she unhappy again?
    I drove for a long time past various campos, clusters of barns and houses here and there, and down dirt roads and through cornfields and little streams and mud and desert. Elias and Sebastian, the sound guy, were sleeping in the back seat and Wilson sat in between them writing in his notebook.
    What’s he writing? Marijke asked me.
    What are you writing? I asked Wilson, in Spanish, and he said stories, small stories. He said he’d like to read them at a festival in Guadalajara but he can’t now because he’s been commandeered to work for Diego and he needs the job.
    Marijke, I said, does your husband mind that you’re here in Mexico working on a movie?
    No, she said, not at all. I don’t think he does. Do I mind if he goes to work? Do I mind if he shits and breathes?
    I thought, that’s what I should have told Alfredo when he asked me about Jorge.
    Elias woke up and lit a cigarette. I forgot my light meter, he said. I’m a dead man. Wilson looked up briefly from his writing.
    We drove through clouds of dust in silence. We passed a few Tarahumara Indians on the road, a mother and her daughters clad in beautiful colours. They didn’t seem to be walking anywhere. They were just there, standing brightly. I turned around to look a few times to see if they would move. I did it quickly, trying to catch them moving, but they had my number.
    Marijke and I sat in an empty shed on upside-down feed buckets talking about the script and sex and the nervous system. She asked me if Jorge had wanted to have a baby with me.
    I’m not sure, I said.
    You didn’t talk about it?
    I don’t think so, I said.
    Would he make a good father, do you think? she said.
    Well, I said, I’m not sure. What do you mean?
    I mean would he be helpful with the baby and love it more than himself.
    I was quiet, thinking of fathers, of my own and of Jorge’s, who had watched his small shoes bubble over and then disappeared.
    Well, what do you think? said Marijke. Are you crying?
    Diego had asked me to do Marijke’s hair like mine. I started combing it and a few chunks of it, long strands, fell onto the dirt floor. Those are my extensions, she told me. She told me they had been welded to her head with a heat gun and glue. She told me that mostly her hair would have to be braided and stuffed under her doak when she was acting but she thought there was one scene where it was required to tumble out of her kerchief and that’s when she’d need the extensions.
    I had that dreamy feeling of falling, for a split second, and then losing my footing again. To regain it, I tried quickly to remember the meaning of the word samizdat . And then I heard screams. A kid came running into the shed and grabbed my hand and dragged me outside into the yard where a bunch of other little kids were standing around a four-foot tiger snake. I grabbed a rake from the shed and neatly (not to brag, but you know) sliced the thing in two and the kids stared for a while, a couple of the boys kicked at it, and then went back to their game. Marijke came outside and asked me what was going on. Well, this thing is dead now, I said.
    We stood with our hands on our hips and looked at it. Marijke’s hair was half done and billowing out from one side of her head like the flag of some beautiful and indefinable region. She moved her fingers gently over the tight braids on the other side. Good job, she said.
    Check this out, I said. I picked up a piece of the snake and peeled off its skin. I crushed the hard shell in my hand and showed Marijke the powder. You can sprinkle this over your food like salt, I said.
    She licked her finger and dabbed at the crushed bits in my hand.
    Hmmm, she said. Are you sure?
    Diego called to say he needed Marijke then, to just shove the rest of her hair under the kerchief and come right now because the light