Are you hot, one of the women asked as I looked around, still not realising that he had disappeared, or what was happening, two of them had already taken you off to one of the huts for a bath and dinner, he said, as if he’d been there, though he hadn’t; firmly holding me under each arm, one on either side, they cuddled me, as if rocking me to sleep. The heat and voices made me feel languid; you gave in, he said, though you fought it; and then I was in the hut, it was plain, no decoration, like the one we saw in the village at Auntie Olga’s, my mother’s friend, at her neighbours up on the hill. In the hut was a black, carved, almost royal chest, and tossed over it was a white silk, extremely regal dress encrusted with pearls.
I couldn’t resist stepping closer and closer to the dress, until I could touch it, I wanted to feel it, and just as I was tentatively reaching out my hand, a woman said: don’t think twice about it, take it. The dress is yours!
What do you mean mine, I asked, both happy and scared.
It’s yours, the woman assured me. You are the Wax Queen!
And before I knew it, they took hold of me, undressed me, bathed me, dressed me in the royal gown, while I tried to explain that I was just passing through, that I had come with my husband, that they were wrong, they had made a mistake, and what do you want with me anyway, I asked them, will you melt me like a candle?
And then I saw him at the head of the crowd of peasants, him, my husband, and the women stepped back so that he could come to the front, to me, to the pyre, to say goodbye, he said.
Tell them who I am, and then let’s get out of here, I shouted, trying to grab hold of him, but it was no use, he ducked away.
He ducked away and I stood there stunned, I couldn’t believe it.
You’re with them, I said, as if the penny had suddenly dropped, and he nodded yes. Then I grasped at a straw, at that dream he had told me about that morning, well he hadn’t really, because I wouldn’t let him...
You were in your pyjamas when you mentioned the dream, I reminded him, and I said we didn’t have time for dreams, you’d tell me about it later... I had to pack our toothbrushes...
And at that moment, two executioners stepped out of the crowd and grabbed me, they were faceless, as if somebody had erased their faces; as if they were robots, not humans, he said.
The dream, I screamed as they dragged me towards the pyre, tell me about the dream!
That was the dream I wanted to tell you about, he said, surprised that it had taken me so long to understand, and then he raised his right arm, as if to signal that they could bring the ritual to an end...
And then I woke up, he said.
***
I dream of a heavenly forest, and you tell me about a pyre, I say after he’s recounted his dream to me, and I’m laughing and kissing him on the eyes, on the nose, on the mouth, on the ear to make everything ring, and I think how handsome he is, how good and intelligent, how he is everything that I want from life, everything I will ever want, how lucky I am. And how we will never part again.
XI.
Where are we going to live when we get married, at his parents’, at mine, the discussion goes back and forth; no, no, no, at Auntie Olga’s in the countryside!
What an idea! Twelve miles outside of town, no car, only the bus to rely on, no money, a house where the only heating you get is from the kitchen stove, where the water in your glass is frozen solid when you wake up in the morning, so what’s the problem? Our love will keep us warm, we’ll keep each other warm, I dream on, pushing this insane idea all the way to Auntie Olga’s in the countryside, and she agrees to it, because she knows that it’s insane and that nothing will come of it, so why say no, why not keep on my good side. Sure, she says, come, you’ll live in the library, and we’re already packing our bags; my mother stares at me and comments by grimacing, because I had already turned a deaf ear to her doubts before, and I suppose she knows that the idea is crazy, it’s unrealistic, so she leaves me be. And then the phone rings, Auntie Olga, of course, I’m sorry, can’t be done, she says, Koraljka is threatening to hang herself if I take you in, we’re told, but we’re already at the door, our suitcases in hand, images of our new life suddenly aborted.
That crazy Koraljka, we say miserably, dropping our suitcases onto the floor, she’s been crazy since the day she was born, crazy like her whore of a mother who drank like a fish and caught syphilis, and left her and her twin brother Juro in the hands of social services, because even their father didn’t want them, just as he didn’t want their mother, he wanted to enjoy life, and then that drunk of a woman shafted him with the kids, but since he didn’t want to be bled dry, he decided to send them both off to an orphanage, where Auntie Olga, unlucky woman, found them.
This crazy story goes through my mind while I’m sitting, paralysed, at the dining-room table in my washed-out track suit, full even though I’m starving, sober even though I’m drunk, with the dog curled up on the other side of the table for company, a story to which I had wanted to add my own at the beginning of this marriage: I didn’t want to be married in the house where my father was dying, so I invented somewhere else to go, to Olga’s, to her freezing cold library, full of books that no longer existed, books that her husband had collected when they did exist, can it be, I asked myself the first time I saw them, these no longer existing books and no longer existing writers have been rendered senseless by time, that great unforgiving judge no one takes into account.
That was the end of the ideal life I’d imagined in Olga’s black library of non-existent books, a warm life under a duvet in the freezing cold wintry room, because we’d married in November, a life of tramping through the snow to reach the bus station early in the morning in order to make it to our first class at uni; I didn’t even think about what or where we would eat if we didn’t go to our parents’, I didn’t ask myself what we would do; we were like birds who pecked at what they found and had no problem migrating, without a bus or a tram... What on earth was I thinking, I wonder today when everything is finally over, when I’m beside myself as to how that idea of mine ended, an ending I had worked on and prepared.
Because the end was the beginning.
Except it didn’t finish even when it finished, it’s still going on, that old life of mine still won’t let me go, like an amputated limb that still hurts, as if it were there, but it isn’t. What hurts is what you don’t have. And it hurts, say the experts, because the brain won’t accept that you no longer have what you once did, what it still remembers, and so it turns its absence into the pain of loss, which keeps going back to the beginning. That’s my story, I guess. Because if it weren’t, then I wouldn’t be sitting here for three days now, incapable of extricating myself from it.
XII.
My mother offered us the smaller room next to theirs, my old bedroom, but I didn’t want it, we’ll stay in the little room, I said. It was a tight squeeze, though: it wasn’t that cramped when he used to just drop by occasionally, but for two people to live in it was a nightmare, I realised it right away, but I didn’t say anything, after all, to whom was I going to complain? In the room was a shelf and two storage compartments that were part of the three-seater sponge sofa bed, upholstered with a yellowish-green bouclé fabric. When you pulled it out, the back slid down into the seat, and you could keep your bed linen in the compartment behind. On the shelves were books and trinkets, once mine, and now also his. Everything fitted into the room, we saw that when we emptied the bag full of our things – books, silly presents from past birthdays and New Year’s presents, which you couldn’t toss out, a gilded four-inch-tall Eiffel Tower, a spoon with Big Ben painted on the handle, a long-stemmed coral red glass shaped like a flower, a thick glass globe with a fir-tree scene inside, which would snow when you turned it upside down and, most important of all, a silver model of a Lincoln Continental, a present from the cousin in Rome, which he put prominently in front, so that he could always see it.
There was no room for our clothes, so they were in the wardr
obes in the other room, along with our underwear, our shoes were jammed into the little cupboard in the hallway and everything was crammed full. To dress, we either had to go to the room with the wardrobes or bring our clothes here, where we first had to fold the bed back into a sofa because when you pulled it out it reached the desk by the opposite wall, taking up all the space. We watched television in the hall, so it turned out that we used the whole apartment, but mostly we were in the kitchen. The kitchen hadn’t changed since the middle of the war, when the house was built; the walls were covered in ancient white tiles, the stone floor was black, white and grey, as if somebody had scattered pebbles on it, there was the grey-green kitchen cupboard, a table and chairs, the table was old but sturdy, it had been through a lot but was still in one piece, the only thing that was new was the water pipe and the boiler that replaced the old iron one, the wasserleiten as we used to call it, and the built-in gas stove in lieu of the old wood stove, it was huge and white-tiled, like the walls. But at least we were on the southern side of the world, I told myself; when the sun was out it was nice even in the winter, whereas the other, northern, side, where my father was dying, was always dark.
He was still able to walk when we got married, the ceremony was at the town hall, with only the immediate family present, along with Kostja as best man, Flora as maid of honour, a few friends from uni, Adam, Filip, Petra, my high school friend Irena, and Leon; then, at our flat, a modest dinner, commensurate with our income. I wore a plain, light blue dress in which I looked terrible; I looked good in black, light blue was a killer, it turned me into somebody else, but I couldn’t get married in black, everybody told me. Danica used a pattern from the German magazine Burda to make the dress and as soon as I saw it I knew I would wear it for the wedding and then never again, it would die a natural death in the wardrobe. Danica shoved a bouquet of white roses into my hands at the last minute, when she realised that we had forgotten to buy flowers at the market. Instead, we had bought some books from a second-hand dealer, the price was so reasonable we just couldn’t resist; one of the books was Karl Marx’s Early Writings, and we sang and jumped with joy because you couldn’t find it anywhere anymore.
You can’t get married without a bouquet of flowers, Danica said in horror when she saw us carrying only books, so she ran off to get the roses – I’m thinking back to those times that brought me to where I am today, to these three days of starving in a flat teeming with insects, with only my poor dog for company, three days of spacing out on toasted bread cubes, dripping, heavy wine and filter cigarettes, which I’m converting to disgusting butts in the ashtray, into a cemetery of smoked cigarettes, and I keep staring at it in the hope that it will make me feel even more disgusted, make me finish off that drink with a sting in its tail, as they used to say, and I empty the ashtray only when the ashes start flying all over the table, where I leave them. Let the mess spread, let it cover me all over, let it surround me, God forbid I should try to bring some order into the world and then decide that I’m OK, too, that I’d clean myself off if I sweep, wipe and wash, if I put things back in their place, as I did six years ago when my father was dying, and I went to scrub the kitchen cupboard, which tended to get unbelievably dirty, with yellow greasy dirt sticking to its greyish green paint, making it hard to clean, so I avoided washing it.
Facing the cupboard from his seat in the kitchen – where the dog was now curled up – my father always seemed to be just waiting to say: When are you going to scrub down that cupboard? He was prepared to keep saying it until it drove me crazy, so I’d throw down the dish towel or the ladle, or whatever it was I was holding – because my father and I took care of the shopping and cooking, due to the fact that my mother was working – and run to my room and scream into my pillow. But then I had to look at my mother’s exhausted face when she came home from work and asked in a trembling voice: What’s happened now? Because father and daughter couldn’t live together without squabbling.
But that evening, when illness was making itself at home as if it had taken over, saturating the whole place with the smell of decay, so that it didn’t even help to go out on the balcony for fresh air, although the cold outside was the kind that killed off smells, that evening, when my father was in his room, saying his farewells to his brothers, I was in the kitchen scrubbing down that bloody cupboard like a broken machine that had gone crazy. I used Vim and it ate away at my fingers, but I kept on scrubbing, the cupboard was enormous and complicated, with big and small drawers, a space for two shelves behind the two panes of glass, which had to be cleaned too, and so did the niche in the middle for bread, the bottom shelf, the legs and who knows what else, all of it neglected and greasier than it had ever been, because I was being battered by life and who could think of cupboards in such a situation, and death had been prowling around the house for weeks, waiting for a sign from heaven to say that his time was up – so I kept on scrubbing until dawn, until day broke, leaden and icy, which was when my father died.
My husband walked around the house like a ghost, trying to stay out of the way, because the house was full of mostly unfamiliar faces, who looked at him like an intruder, while they smoked and drank, waiting for the end when he would be the only man left, and that was not to be sneezed at, I know now, but all I saw then, as I was bending and stooping to clean the cupboard, was the sympathy and concerned looks wafting above me, that’s assuming I could see anything at all from the damned cupboard that I was trying to scrape clean of my hatred for my father before he died, as if it were a place of reconciliation.
He did not die in the flat, he died in the hospital, where he was taken by ambulance, which had been called so that we would not be left with a corpse in the house and go crazy. But before that, while he was in the hallway, on the stretcher, my father asked for a shave, he wanted to spruce himself up for the hospital; he was yellow, black, desiccated like a mummy, a pile of ashes, reeking, soon he would flutter away from his body, but for the moment he was still holding on to it, still believing in it, still wanting some camouflage, to win people over, to have them confirm he existed, still frantically holding on to the transient, leaving the non-transient to its fate, as something of lesser importance...
Who was going to shave my dying father, who, who; two of the brothers had left, the third hung back, he would go with him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t shave him, his expression and gestures made that clear, presumably he was afraid to, he literally rolled his bulging eyes, which had always been lifeless, and the orderlies wouldn’t do it either, that was for sure, they were here to carry patients, not to shave them, especially not somebody who was falling apart, they didn’t say so, they just their crossed arms on their chest and stood there like tombstones.
My mother? I looked at her but she couldn’t do it either, I realised, she wasn’t sleeping well, she was worn out, and her hands were shaking, she might cut him, and I couldn’t do it either, he wasn’t a kitchen cupboard, he was a living human being, and he was my father, and he was also horrible, and anyway I didn’t know how to shave someone, I’d never done it before.
And so the only person left was my husband, who shaved every morning; we surrounded him and sent him to the bathroom to get my father’s shaving kit, soap, a soap bowl and brush, and razor; he had it in him to shave a dying man, I realised later when I thought about it, when I deconstructed the scene in my mind, that scene and many others, like the one of him copulating with a body that had a tail, just because of the tail; he was a destructive person.
But not at the time, at the time I was just surprised that he agreed to it so quickly, yes he blushed, but with a smile, an ironic one but a smile, when he knelt down to lather my dying father’s face, he kept nodding, as if talking to himself, I remember thinking. When he finished with the lathering, he placed the bowl on the floor, picked up the razor and started shaving, first his cheeks, then his chin, concentrating, clearing away the soap, without a nick. He didn’t have to shave under his nose because my father had a
moustache. Lastly, he wiped my father’s face clean with a towel. My father thanked him in a barely audible whisper, and even tried to lift his arm, I still wonder what he meant to do with it, but his arm flopped back onto the bed. He closed his eyes.
Later my mother told me that a week earlier, realising that it was the end, that he was past saving, that he was falling apart, my father had told her he felt bad about having to leave her, because the two of us would destroy her.
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