Savit-e
My host mother is a woman with long twirling hair and more floral-patterned sundresses than I’ve seen in my entire life. She throws open the closet each morning to flick each dress along its hanging rail, sharp squeaks. “What can I even wear?” The dresses sway like summer willows. I sneak in behind her and grab a t-shirt and jeans from my tiny pile at the bottom.
She loves earrings that swing and she loves stain-glass windchimes which clink and muse while she pours me the bitterest cup of tea I’ve ever had in my life. I fill it with sugar and she chides me. I remind her of all the spicy dishes I make that she cannot eat, and she says, “Okay, I’ll let it go this one time.” She sips her tea black. The birds titter at her joke. We’ll have the same conversation tomorrow.
My host mother is Jira and I wonder how closely we might be related every time I catch that glimmer in her eyes like my mothers’. Jira is too tall to be my mother and her hair is not quite dark enough, but I like to believe I see it. I like to believe Jira’s country and mine are related, that maybe her great-great-grandparents and mine were friends before the records were scorched and the lines were redrawn. Or maybe our countries bore no relation to each other. Maybe they were friends anyway. Maybe they were enemies. I’ve heard every opinion.
Jira has a worry-face like my mother, but she uses it for different things, like plum prices at the market and rain clouds blundering through like clumsy creatures. It used to surprise me, since my mother reserved her worry-face for only the dourest things in her mind. I saw more and more of it from my mother before I left. “Baby maybe you should spend the summer home. Maybe you can get your money back.” She said she’d been reading things in the news. I told her not to worry. I would be safe in my travels. I feel stares pressing into my back while Jira leans over the plums. I notice Jira receives the stares too.
She hums a tune and busies herself in the kitchen in a dress I’ve never seen. She’s been in a great mood since her daughter came home this morning. I didn’t get a good look at her daughter at first because Jira swallowed her right up in her arms. But I got to see her better when I helped bring her bags in. Savine is lithe, baby-faced and a head shorter than Jira, and her eyes carry the same arch and slope as Jira’s. She has the same dimples and she moves in the same way, tilted forward, as if to let gravity do the work of carrying her momentum.
Savine is napping from her trip, and Jira seems to have forgotten all the slow and patient syllables she usually saves for me. She speaks in her rapid pace and I jog to keep up. Too many words slip through my grasp. One in particular I hear too many times. Savit-e.
“Savit-e?” I ask.
Jira puckers her lips as if to think. Her eyes rove. Footsteps tap gently closer behind me, and Jira’s eyes light up as she looks past me.
“Savit-e!” she says, motioning forward as Savine rounds the counter and pulls her mom into another hug. Savine is only 10. She’s been away almost 6 months for school, according to Jira.
A nickname, I note. Savine wears earrings like windchimes as well.
…
Jira has offered to charge me no rent if I babysit Savine for the summer and cook dinner in the evenings. Savine’s summer classes are early and short, as are mine, so I pick Savine up every day at noon. “This is Reb. She’s my mom’s friend this summer,” Savine tells her school friends. I gather that Jira does something similar every year, taking in an au pair while she works the summer.
There is a park Savine likes in particular, with the tall slides and the cold water fountains and all her friends. It takes me a few days to realize her friends are new to even her. Any child at the park becomes her friend by nature of needing two to play the teeter-totter. I meet parents and I practice my clumsy language with them. They don’t stare strangely at me like the man in the plum aisle.
Three times over the summer, I hear a parent at the park ask me. “Who is Savit-e?” I point to Savine every time. I don’t think too much about it, because they always like the answer, nodding along. Savine’s friends do not use the nickname, but I experiment with it here and there. Savine lights up when I do. “Savit-e,” I call to her from the school lawn, and she squeals and bounds forward to wrap me in the kind of hug she gives her mother.
I pick up a copy of the newspaper from the corner store every day on my way to pick up Savine, and I read what I can of it at the park. The newspaper is not a person, and it does not stilt its vocabulary to be simple and clear the way people do when they notice me struggling with the tongue, so oftentimes I gather just the concepts from articles. It is my fourth week of doing this when one article stops me. I see the spelling of what Jira says out loud so often.
Savit-e.
The article is hard, but I recognize the word for murder, and the words for three men. Three men murdered, and Savit-e. I would ask Savine, but I’m afraid the article may be something upsetting.
I ask Jira that night, after Savine has gone to bed.
“A man killed three others,” Jira says, brow slightly scrunched as she skims the paper and distills its contents to simpler words I know. Her eye creases are deep by the evening lamplight. “He is not charged with a crime, because he was protecting his Savit-e.”
This sinks in slowly, and a red flush of embarrassment makes itself known on my cheeks.
“Savit-e… as in ‘daughter’?”
I use my own word for it, since I don’t know Jira’s word for daughter. Or at least, I did not know, until now.
Jira’s brow scrunch tightens, which she does whenever I’ve used one of my words she doesn’t know.
“Like Savine is to you. Savine is your daughter.”
At this, Jira nods slowly, then more quickly as she lets the meaning sink in. “Yes… Savine is my Savit-e… my daughter.”
I thank Jira for the explanation. I lie awake that night thinking too much about the parents at the park who think Savine is my Savit-e.
…
I start to dislike the newspaper. I’m not sure if it’s the summer heat sewing aggravation, or some deeper unrest, or maybe my own growing vocabulary, but more and more I notice articles that leave me unsettled. I read about the arrest of a man who looks like the man in the plum aisle. Maybe there’s no resemblance at all. Maybe any man with those piercing eyes in a mug shot feels like the man in the plum aisle. There are still many words I don’t know, but country and nation come up often. And Savit-e. More articles of someone acting in protection of their Savit-e.
My mother isn’t here to protect me. I walk more cautiously when I’m alone at night, as a woman, as a Savit-e with no parents here to protect me.
I’m in the kitchen with a knife shunking through the angled cuts of scallion. The pot for the noodles is boiling and I’ve halved the spices as I do every night for Jira and Savine. I don’t even hear the front door kick open.
I do hear Savine scream.
My heart is in my throat and my blood is cold, and I move, because in the moment I have forgotten I am a Savit-e far away from home. All that matters is Savine’s scream.
And my sockless feet are light as I snake through the dining room and round the corner to the living room, entering from the same door as the two men who now stand there, backs to me, both eagerly teasing the handles of a gun. One has Savine in a chokehold, and the men stare at Jira, pressed flat against the wall. I realize Jira does have a worry-face she reserves for the truly awful things.
And the men with their backs to me are plum-men, in ways I understand without knowing what fast and clipped words they’re shouting at Jira. The one holding Savine presses the barrel of his gun against her ear, and the windchime titter of her earrings is drowned under her scream of fear. The plum man barks a demand at Jira, and she watches with moon-plate eyes.
He barks it again.
Jira raises a trembling hand. And her digits curl, and her palm pulls inward, and her earrings clink with the slow stuttering shake of her head. She points her index finger firmly against her own heart, and she declares ‘Savit-e’.
Jira runs out through the second living room door.
“Mooooom! Savit-e!!” Savine screams, and her words choke, and she wriggles under the hold of the man. And suddenly sense returns to my body at the sound of Savine’s screams.
I am still holding the scallion knife.
I don’t remember what I do next, but the knife does.
…
There is a drawl of radio static that seems to dominate my ears. The sirens and flashing lights are background noise to me now. They’ve taken Savine away with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. They’ve assured me I’ll be able to see her, but later, once she’s been looked at, once she’s calmed down, once I’ve been spoken to.
“You are not in trouble,” the detective tells me in my own tongue with a slight accent rounding her words. She’s the only one who speaks my language. They called her in when it became clear I didn’t know enough of theirs to give a report. “You were protecting your Savit-e.”
I flinch, a little bit, somehow still capable of embarrassment with a mind that’s gone completely numb. “Savine isn’t my Savit-e.”
The woman detective frowns. I remember we’re in my own tongue.
“I mean, she’s not my daughter. She’s Jira’s daughter. She’s Jira’s Savit-e.”
The woman’s frown lessens some. “Your daughter, no. Your Savit-e, yes.”
I hold my hands near my face. They still smell of garlic and scallions. “The pot’s gonna boil over. I have to go turn off the stove,” I say, urgently, and unhelpfully, as the thought suddenly strikes and I push myself standing.
The woman’s hand is on my shoulder, and she presses me down. “The pot is not boil. The stove is off. It is okay. Who is Savit-e?”
And the question sits weird. I realize she asks it like those parents at the park.
I don’t answer. The detective chews her lip, and I see her eyes searching for a word she can’t find. “Who is your… The Most? Who is your The Above? Who is your The Most of All?”
“My most what?”
“Who is your Protect Over Everything?”
And from her face I can tell she is frustrated with her own words. There is more she is saying that I cannot know in my own language.
Protect Over Everything. I think about the scream that pulled me from the kitchen.
“I think… Savine… is my Protect Over Everything.”
And this satisfies the woman. And she nods the way the parents at the park do. “You are not in trouble. You always protect Savit-e. You must always. There is no trouble for what you did. Good job, that you protect your Savit-e. You will have her back soon.”
I go stiff.
“Jira needs her back, not me. I go home in a few weeks. I only started—” I falter. “Savine is Jira’s Savit-e.”
The detective shakes her head. “Jira is Jira’s Savit-e. Jira does not come back.”
…
I postpone my flight home. I tell my mother it’s because my studies are going long. I’ll tell her more, later, when I’m ready.
I pick up Savine every day from school as always. She doesn’t smile, and she pulls me into a hug that is too tight and lasts too long. She doesn’t want to go to the park. She comes grocery shopping with me, because it’s better than being left home alone. I look over my shoulder whenever I grab the plums.
I cook dinner and I eat with Savine, and we do this at the counter because when I sit us at the kitchen table, Savine looks too long at Jira’s empty place. I tried calling Jira once, after Savine went to bed. Her phone rang from the next room. I watched it ring until it cut to voicemail.
There’s an article about me in the paper. I can’t read most of it. Or maybe I just don’t try to. I see Jira’s name. I see the plum man words. I see Savit-e written 14 times.
I don’t know what happens to Savine if I leave. I’ve tried asking and I get too many words I do not know, and no one who can explain them better to me. But their expressions stay with me. Like the looks of plum-men and worry-faces and now this new look, which is rooted in something deeper about a country which I know too little about. It’s a sad look. It’s something I can maybe understand without the words attached. I tell my mom I might like to extend my study through the fall.
Savine has started calling me “Savit-e.”
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