Oneiron

  On the day she arrived at hospital, Wlibgis folded her jeans, sweater, and socks into a nice pile, which was placed in a cabinet with her purse, wallet, and house keys, along with her pocket calendar that contained a picture of her good-for-nothing son’s charming daughter, Melinda, age five. Once the flowers stopped coming, she asked for that picture to be placed on her table. (Have the rest of you noticed this? People bring you flowers if you’re just visiting, if you’re on the mend and returning to the land of the living. And they bring flowers to graves and for caskets. But never for the dying. Whenever a person is dying, as we all are when it comes right down to it, and ceases simply to convalesce, when she begins actively, sometimes even hurriedly, to die, she stops receiving flowers. Flowers suddenly become obscene. Memento mori—that is their nature, being of the same withering substance as the loved one who has now become, to use one popular euphemism, a fighter to the end.) “Would you like to go home?” came the cautious question. Do you want to go home to die? But Wlibgis didn’t; she didn’t want to die alone. She didn’t want to die at all! But she had to die. The cancer was everywhere.

  At that point the green hospital pajamas stopped bothering her. They just were, like things just are: the moon and the sun in the sky, worms in the ground, and birds in the air or on the branches of trees or attacking a meat pasty dropped on the ground. The pajamas were swapped for identical, clean ones as needed. The nurses did the buttons, because Wlibgis couldn’t any more, and they always fastened the middle one first. It was the hub, positioned into its stitched, oval hole before tackling the others. It was the central switch, a touch of which closed the patient into her shirt, just so, and then the two below and the two above.

  There was Wlibgis with her cancer, properly buttoned and enclosed and well off in every way. Secretly the nurses hoped that the juice splashing would stop, that Ms. Wlibgis would carefully sip her drink with a straw and swallow everything she sipped, that trails of juice wouldn’t run down her chin onto her shirt, that Ms. Wlibgis would urinate in her diaper, that Ms. Wlibgis would have as little diarrhea as possible. They hoped she would sleep. That the morphine would help. That death would take her away. Because at this point, life was only suffering! And that cute little child, Melinda. She came with her blue-ish mother to visit her grandmama. In her reedy voice the girl sang “Aan d’oever van de snelle vliet” to her grandmother, and why not? Singing is never wasted in the terminal ward.

  But Wlibgis doesn’t have pockets in her hospital pajamas. Everything, absolutely everything she had once owned had been left in that other world, in the cabinet at the hospital, in her home, or her useless son’s home—some of her things were there too. Although truthfully they usually only spent a short time there before continuing their journey. One rather valuable pocket watch did just such a disappearing trick. Her son had threatened to take it to a pawn shop if she didn’t give him a “loan”. And so she had given him a “loan”. If some memory of her father remained, just one, it could be this beautiful pocket watch with its patina of time, which her father had always taken from his suit pocket to check the time, to ensure that the watch was running, that he himself was on time. That masterwork of antique craftsmanship was, let it be said, a complete contrast to Jean-Philippe’s idiotic Brighella watch, which remained, quite understandably, in its leather box (put simply, Jean-Philippe was ashamed of it). Wlibgis’s father’s watch was old enough, however, that each day it lost about fifteen minutes. Her father was perfectly capable of living with this fact, though. In all aspects of his life he took it into account, standing with his shoes on when others were still eating breakfast.

  Wlibgis never saw the watch again.

  In her own opinion, Wlibgis has given all she is going to give for the construction of the house. She has given her orange fire-wig, which will of course also become the heart of the new home. That is enough. And the dying games can end now too! Wlibgis is utterly fed up with them. Certainly she participated, listening and nodding, pretending to be interested, but really the whole thing disgusted her. What sense was there in making that sullen teenager gloat over her own end? Was it a big surprise that the girl wanted to believe she was killed out of jealousy? Me, I alone, me, the center of the world. Men mad with passion around every finger!

  Wlibgis had never been in a relationship. A man’s stiff cock had entered her a total of three times. Each time it had happened with a different piece of equipment, and none of them had been an experience she would have felt like boasting about afterwards. By accident the last one led to a son, and that was where the game ended, the role play in which she was encouraged to engage by a certain feminist group that proclaimed carnivalistic love. She had participated in some lectures a few times in the early 1980s at the urging of one of her friends at the time. The game proceeded according to a specific pattern. Wlibgis got mildly drunk, alone, and then put on clothes that would make her own mother not recognize her, or, as Wlibgis said to her reflection in the mirror, “If Mom saw me now, she’d roll over in her grave.” Wlibgis was embarrassed. She felt like a transvestite, a lump that had fallen to earth from outer space, with flirty lips and fluttery eyelashes painted on it. She put polish on the squarish nails of her fingers with their swollen joints, and after each smeared, roughly nail-shaped blood-red stroke she took a swig of cognac and allowed the color to dry, until all ten fingers glittered like the flames of hell, and then she was ready to go.

  Wlibgis’s lugubrious mien, leaning against the bar sipping a dry martini, miraculously enough aroused a few representatives of the opposite sex. The melancholy emanating from her, the garish clown make-up and appropriately muzzy, uncritical gaze actually drew several contestants. Perhaps it is not completely wrong to say that on these three occasions, when Wlibgis forced herself to go on the hunt, she had her pick of men.

  The role play ended, and then came the punishment, the worst possible: a son who hated his mother and a mother who hated her son. And as if Wlibgis had angered all the powers of the cosmos and upset the balance of the entire universe—to top it all off, a cancer grew in her throat.

  And what was she left with? An orange-red wig that she doesn’t even get to use any more because these women need a campfire, god damn it, these women need a “heart” for their home. Without a wig, with her pickle-shaped head, her lashless eyes, and her hairless brows, she looks so depressing that it is a veritable miracle that only Rosa Imaculada has thought to dissolve away.

  When Wlibgis chose her wig, she truly had no idea what it would end up being used for. But had the wig salesperson sensed it? When Wlibgis lost her own thick, auburn hair (it fell out soon after the chemotherapy began), with a scarf on her head she slipped into a shop whose address she had received from a nurse. The shop had a unique feel. It wasn’t on account of the numerous plastic heads or the false hair on them, and it wasn’t because of the slightly musty, herbal scent (sage? thyme?)—it was due solely to the owner of the shop, who was an altogether extraordinary lady. First of all she was the kind of woman whose age was nearly impossible to guess. Forty or sixty, it was hard to say. Her skin was smooth and clear but simultaneously ancient in some way that was difficult to define. Her black hair looked plastic, her bangs were short, and she had no eyebrows, or they had been completely plucked away; thin violet lines had been drawn in their place. Her eyes were large, and the Cupid’s bow of her lips was painted with exaggerated sharpness; it matched the sharp, narrow line of her jaw and the violet eyebrows. A face like that should have had a plumb frame beneath it, a body with military bearing, but no, the thin (of course thin!), nearly gaunt woman was not at all august. Her body was not particularly worthy of her unique face. She stood slouching before her counter, or, if you considered it from another angle, that slouching demeanor completed her face, strained and ready to bolt, providing it with an appropriate counterweight. Maybe one of her legs was shorter than the other. When she walked up to Wlibgis from behind the counter, she walked unevenly, limping, slightly dragging one leg.r />
  Let us call her “Owner K”. Owner K. looked Wlibgis straight in the eyes, which darted nervously under the scarf that surrounded her pale face, and said, “Did you come for this?” Then she pointed back and up to the left, where the orange-red hair sat coquettishly on a mannequin head with heavy make-up. “No-o,” Wlibgis managed to say. She had just had her first throat operation, and the radiation had destroyed her salivary glands, but she still had her vocal chords and was able to utter that dry, gravelly “no-o”; actually a very distressed “no-o”. No orange wig! Did she, a fifty-eight-year-old woman, look like she was going to run down the street with an orange wig billowing in the wind?

  Wlibgis irritably, almost demonstratively, began trying on other wigs. First her own color, an auburn bob cut. Strangely, it didn’t suit her at all. She looked like she had a bowl cut. Blond curls made her look like an old wino, black hair like a witch, the various shades of brown: all just as unnatural and ugly. The hair was high quality, Owner K. assured her, skillfully handmade, which was why the prices were so high, but there was a wig for each head, and she could see that now was a time for setting aside prejudices and trying that orange. Holding back her tears, Wlibgis took the wig being offered and put it on her pickle-shaped head.

  And behold: it fitted as if it were made for her. And it even made her gray skin glow! Her lashless eyes were no longer pale, they were steely; they had a depth they’d never had before, and Wlibgis knew: this wig was hers. She took ten seconds to poll her attitude. Should she allow those three incidents of fornication and the shameful details surrounding them to spill out into the open: the smudged mascara, the smeared lipstick, and the scratchy stubble? Should she allow those shoving penises to come and shove into her, in her memories, again and again . . . ? Or was this wig something different? Was it just a beautiful red, well-fitting wig, and nothing more?

  Wlibgis gave in. Joy filled her when she turned in front of the large mirror with a smaller mirror in her hand, looking from the side and back and every angle. She smiled. She simply couldn’t help smiling. “I knew it instantly,” Owner K. exclaimed but not at all in a scolding way. She was overjoyed too. She had a professional eye for this sort of thing, and she saw as soon as this woman stepped through the door that she needed a wig for her sorrows. The agony that lay in her face was the sort that one could only survive with a healthy dose of bright orange.

  Owner K. was satisfied. For once, a customer consented to see the truth about herself! It was a good sign. A sign of life. Some, you see, couldn’t give up their illusions even with advanced cancer. They had decided that a white cloud of curls suited them, even though they weren’t rosy-cheeked princesses any more; they were pale, too thin, or too swollen mortals. They spent a fortune on the wrong hair and vowed to themselves that they would get used to it and were almost hurt when Owner K. told them that the hair should feel like their own instantly. They didn’t believe it. Injured pride shone in their eyes as they asked Owner K. in cold, tense tones to box up the wrong wig for them. They would pull their hat or scarf or hood tight on their bald or almost hairless head and slip out—KLING!—and decide not to practice with their new hair until they got home. But some of them came again. And Owner K. was kind enough to allow them to trade the wrong wig for the right one.

  Owner K. congratulated Wlibgis heartily for her correct choice: “It’s like it was made for you, even if you didn’t believe it at first. You know, a person’s face really does change when they experience a tragedy. It leaves marks that anyone who looks carefully can see. I saw them immediately on you. I could see that you need color. Color won’t hurt you; it’ll make you a woman again. If you’ll allow me to say so, you sparkled. Ten hard years fell away all at once.”

  Wlibgis paid and wasn’t the slightest bit offended by Owner K.’s words, which in some other situation might have sounded intrusive, and so they were. But Owner K. knew she spoke the truth, as always, and she also knew that her customer understood this time. So Wlibgis tripped lightly out of the shop—KLING!—and couldn’t help but twirl her new orange hair one more time in front of the window—goodbye!

  Wlibgis’s fire wig becomes the heart of the kitchen. A wordless decision, Shlomith’s gentle nod: This is our kitchen. Polina dramatically removes her sable fur: Let this be the couch. After this each woman dumps out the contents of her pockets. Total: two crumpled tissues, a silver ring that Hanno had bought for Ulrike, a ring that didn’t quite fit (Hanno imagined Ulrike’s fingers were more slender than they are—they are slender, but not that slender; her ring finger diameter is seventeen and a half millimeters), a frayed piece of string, a two-euro coin, three ten-cent coins, one fifty cent, one dollar, one greatcoat button, a lighter and some shreds of tobacco (Ulrike tries to strike the lighter wheel, but it only scrapes without sparking, and no flame appears even though the reservoir is still halfway full); a mobile phone (also Ulrike’s, from the large back pocket of her corduroy trousers)—“1 missed call”, but the buttons don’t work, the phone won’t do anything no matter what she pushes, and the phone clock has also stopped at the same mysterious moment as Ulrike’s watch: 21:03—a wine cork that is red on one side, which is Polina’s, along with lip balm, a slightly rusted flat snake forged of iron, which is Maimuna’s totem animal, and a colorful superball you can fit in your fist, which is Shlomith’s. The pockets of Shlomith’s long black caftan are like the pouch of a Tasmanian tiger or the beak of a pelican: you can find all sorts of things in them; in theory, half the world could have fitted in there, but now all they find are the super ball, a measuring tape, and a small pipette bottle. Was that what poor Shlomith had used to eat her daily meal, one drip into her mouth at a time? And what would it have been, tepid broth or only water?

  The women donate their possessions to the common pile next to the wig and the sable fur sofa. Do I need to give away my gold teeth? Shlomith mutters, but only Polina understands the joke, and it doesn’t amuse her in the slightest. Wlibgis smiles in satisfaction and waits for even bigger sacrifices: disrobing. Soon she won’t be the only one who has been forced to give up something too personal, something that has functioned as a cover for something esthetically indecorous. Few women pranced around in society with their heads shaved completely bald. There was that beautiful Irish singer, who had a symmetrical face, doe eyes, and a perfectly shaped skull, and there was that athletic actor who killed space creatures. But most of them needed hair much more than breasts. Without their hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows, they looked like death’s own. People averted their gazes and wished they didn’t exist. And soon they wouldn’t. Soon they would all die. All except her, Wlibgis. She hadn’t died. Of all the miserable denizens of the terminal ward, she alone had avoided death. She had been promised a deep, blue sleep and eternal peace, and what had she received? A bright, white endlessness, constant arguing and hullabaloo. Where was her death?

  Wlibgis’s downturned lower lip, the smothering of her initial good mood under a somber blanket of disappointment, goes unnoticed by everyone. Nina is caught up in her work, and everyone else is enjoying watching her. She places all the objects in a half circle in front of the wig like a fireguard. Even the used tissues she sets out with care, because everything has value. Then it is time for the base layer. Clothing off! Nina cries. The clothes are to become the walls, the boundaries of the rooms, and boundaries are what they need now, because without boundaries a person becomes a panoply of pirouetting panic. Like a child who gets everything she wants. For whom no verbal edifice of opposition is erected.

  Wlibgis, who now stares at Nina’s belly as she kneels, had known even before her son was born how not to act with children. The lines have to be drawn clearly. She raised her son with this knowledge as her guide, although Wlibgis found it was difficult on her own. Without a companion she had to say NO with the force of two people. She had to set herself (sometimes quite literally) crosswise to the little hoodlum. You do not go there. You do not touch this. You do not do that. The prohibitions never had any
effect. Wlibgis screamed herself hoarse yelling NO NO NO, and her son just threw himself against her with all the force of a little boy, then of a larger, sixty-kilo youth, and then a young, gangly adult. What had gone wrong? Her ancient, now rather hoarse NO worked even more poorly in the final years than when the boy had been two, three, five, seven, eleven, fifteen, and twenty years old. Wlibgis didn’t know how to say a “no” as a suggestion to another adult who was as stupid as could be and utterly at the mercy of evil. He just continued crossing all the lines, and she got the bruises. His requests for money were accompanied by a twist of her arm. When he went to prison, all she felt was an astonishingly deep sense of relief.

  But because Wlibgis was from an upstanding family, the boy must have taken after his father. Whom Wlibgis didn’t know at all. What kind of profile could she draw of a man who had wanted to lick the soles of her feet? Who had wanted to take her in the bath after being urinated on?