They’re not good people, he told her. Be careful.
They! – I exploded at the insolence of it, he wanted to destroy me as a daughter who adored her mother, not her father, whom she hated, a daughter who had always been her mother’s child, who would sometimes toss and turn in bed at night, afraid that her mother would fall sick first and that her father would survive her, who would not let anyone touch her mother and who watched that slanderer destroy her mother with his drinking, illness and idling, day in and day out, for years.
That’s what he said, my mother repeated, shrugging her shoulders and firmly closing her mouth, not showing whether she agreed or disagreed, but flickering somewhere deep underground was the sentence that something was wrong with that boy, a sentence uttered at the beginning of our relationship two years earlier, and that it was now pointless to repeat, because we were already married.
XIII.
My tooth hurts, my tooth hurts, the moan drags itself through the house, it hurts, it hurts; it’s the third day of the new year, which fell on a Friday, making it a long weekend, and this is Saturday when the dentist doesn’t work, but the tooth hurts so badly it’s driving him crazy. And he has a headache as well. Actually, he isn’t sure exactly what hurts him, his tooth or his head, he decides it’s the tooth, because aspirin doesn’t help, and you can pull out a tooth, but not your head, I say to make him laugh, to ease the pain.
We got through the funeral, it was just the immediate family, my mother and the two of us, plus Adam who appeared, unannounced, around ten o’clock in the evening, he had no place else to go, he said, stamping his feet in front of the front door, without a bottle because he never brings anything, he drinks alone. Of course, come in, I said, you couldn’t turn away somebody who said he has no place to go, even if you were in mourning.
Adam is a man with a beard, and my beloved is a man with a beard – he started growing it after my father’s funeral. Whether because of that pre-death shave or for some other reason, I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. Like Adam, he also has a moustache, except Adam’s is shaggy and his is wispy, and in tandem with his beard it provides a kind of facial adornment, as in the days of the French nobility (like in those historical movies). He no longer has to shave every day, but the beard has its own requirements, it has to be trimmed. Otherwise it might grow down to his navel and make him look like an oddball, which is not how he sees himself. He sees himself as good-looking and elegant, and a trimmed beard is a poetic touch. Maybe he grew his beard because he had started working part-time at the radio, it occurs to me when I think about it. Leon got him the job at the radio so that he could earn some money, because we don’t have much. Being still a student, I am entitled to my father’s pension, but it will take months for the paperwork to go through, so I’ll just have to wait. His parents give him some money, but not enough, because they don’t have much themselves, so we live off of my mother’s salary, and she is about to retire. And as soon as she does, she plans to work part-time somewhere as an accountant, which is what she is, because she wants to build a headstone for my father’s grave. The only thing there now is a brown varnished wooden board, with a five-pointed red star, his full name, years of birth and death, all in black letters, and embedded in a clay pot. The board with the five-pointed star declares that he was an atheist and a communist, although he was never a communist. He messed up somewhere, opened his big mouth, drank too much – they wouldn’t let him join, and after that he always lived in fear. And that fear lasted right through to his death, because even though he burned all of my mother’s religious books, prayer-books and brochures when he returned from the war, and wouldn’t let her baptise me (so she had to do it in secret), and even though he never put a foot inside a church after they married, he told my mother before he died, just in case, that she could bring a priest to his grave, to send him off to the next world – with the Bible, its stories, a recommendation and absolution, and with a few hymns. You never know what’s waiting for you over there, if anything, so why risk retribution from that side now that everything is finished on this side, because they can’t catch you anymore, he probably thought, clearly considering that he might be moving on to a place where there would be more questions, though of a different kind, and where there could be trouble if you came unprepared.
My mother gave him a send-off worthy of a man of importance (which is how he felt when he was drunk), though she had to borrow a black winter coat for the funeral because hers was black-and-grey check, and she couldn’t afford a new one, and she gave him an equally worthy wake, using up every cent she had saved for such an occasion.
My father was left in his grave, and we were left in dire straits; our income was now minus his small but regular pension, and our expenses had increased because now we had my husband living with us, and he was used to his little treats, he couldn’t imagine breakfast without cheese and ham, surely he wasn’t expected to eat bread with jam, he said, and there had to be wine with lunch, and cigarettes, and he was not about to stop going out, so when he mentioned Leon and the chance of working at the radio, I said, well then go and earn some money, although he was also supposed to study. And attend classes. The woman with the tail also worked at the radio, which made me fume, because I didn’t believe him anymore, not really. I did, and I didn’t, depending on the moment, but I realised that I couldn’t even believe myself too much anymore either; you had to accept life, you didn’t have to believe it, especially not if your emotions were running amok.
Our wedding, my father’s death, the funeral, and now seeing out the old year – all we can do is get drunk.
We all drink, it’s practically a must, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t drink, except for my mother. His parents don’t drink either, except for a glass of watered down wine at lunch, but my mother doesn’t drink at all. She was at a tasting when she was young and got drunk on a liqueur, it was sweet and tasty, and it made her laugh and forget her shyness, it made her less shy, and allowed her to flirt a little, and then she vomited her guts out, was sick for three days, couldn’t work and swore that she would never touch alcohol again, no matter what it was and no matter what the occasion. And she kept her promise, which I do and don’t admire, because holding firm can also be bloody-mindedness, it can mean giving yourself too many rights and being unhealthily judgemental and cruel, as a reward for holding firm, in which case it is not worth a thing. But drinking is not the same thing as getting drunk, the two of us drink to feel better, to lift ourselves a little above the world and its burdens, but Adam gets drunk the way my father did, he is only alive when he is drunk; he is dead when he is sober. He doesn’t leave until he has drunk every last drop in the house or passed out, calling it sleeping, but in truth he’s unconscious.
Seeing in the New Year – with roast ham in a crust of bread and a piglet with crackling, the best part of the roast, as the kings of France knew, caring only about the outer crust and leaving the meat to the servants, along with a colourful Russian salad with home-made mayonnaise using only one egg, mustard and oil, Flora’s grandmother’s recipe, which was the best and never disappointed, and then ajvar, pickles and peppers stuffed with vegetables, all home-made as well, followed by the cakes Danica made, because we rarely did any baking, a tender layer cake with layers of cream, crisp vanilla crescents and crunchy walnut and jam bars, and even a wonder cake, the wonder being that it was delicious, that it melted in your mouth, with just a few walnuts and a bit of chocolate, and it hardly cost a thing – was a chance to laze around for a few days before the advent of the dark future that was about to knock at the door.
Adam stopped pushing his Sanitation wheelie because his father threatened to kick him out if he continued to park it in front of the house and embarrass him before the neighbours. He found him a job at a petrol station; since that’s all you’re good for, go and fill up petrol tanks, he decided. He was to start work on Monday. Until then he’ll stay with us, he says, if we’ll have him, he says, and having risen
from the dead he immediately asks for a brandy to clear his head.
Not brandy, coffee, and then a beer to sober up, I announce, but I’m glad he’s here, it‘s more fun. My father liked him, too, he doesn’t like my one and only, but he does like him, he told my mother, who also likes him, because he’s a poor thing, like her late husband, and because she sees that he is in love with her daughter and is unhappy. He stares at me all day, peering over his thick-lensed glasses, which make his eyes invisible somehow, but without which he is as blind as a bat, he sniffles and wipes his constantly wet moustache, and when my beloved leaves the room for a moment, he unassumingly puts his hand on my knee, and I remove it or he removes it himself when he hears the door open.
But he’s not here to attack my knee, he is here to talk. Because we are people who discuss, who read books, who ask questions of life that have no answers but we hope to find them, we hope that life will give voice to itself, that it will speak, that it will explain. And we will be prepared when these answers come. So we sit and wait, piles of answers coming from books, answers collected over the centuries, more than we can absorb, some similar, some different, of one sort or another, it is hard to choose the right one, because as soon as you choose one, another appears, which is different but also right, but how can two answers that rule each other out be right, we bang our heads against the question; fortunately these heads aren’t made of stone so they don’t crack. The discussions go on and on, you’re thrilled when you think you’ve finally got somewhere, like a mountain-climber reaching the top of the world, and then just when you think: look at me, I’ve made it, you’re back down in the abyss again, like a mountain-climber who has fallen without conquering anything. At the end of it all, we’re drunk on a life that has hidden its meaning, but so what, we don’t care, we’ll find, or at least get close to its meaning, and that in itself is something to celebrate, we have time.
Filip and Petra come by to congratulate us, to philosophise a little over a meal and a glass of wine, to sleep a little, and then repeat the whole thing all over again, but then my beloved gets a toothache, or a headache, or both, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, the words echo through the house that afternoon, so at first it’s aspirins, a cold compress, a hand cupping his left cheek where it hurts, a grimace and clenched teeth, my mother boils some sage for him to gargle with, but nothing helps and by evening he can’t take it anymore and says, I’m going to the clinic to have it pulled out.
We were supposed to go to his parents’ that evening, we had just spoken on the phone, and Adam was supposed to go home, but because of the toothache he stays. He stays as if he can be of help, though I don’t see how; he sits with his clasped hands resting on the table, acting as if we’d be lost without him. Finally, he offers to go with my beloved to the A&E, because it’s cold outside, and I am sensitive to the cold, so my beloved agrees and the two of them leave, my mother and I will wait at home, otherwise I’d just be in the way.
They’re not gentle at the A&E but they do have injections, it’s done in a jiffy, you feel a prick, you wait a minute, then the pliers, and two teeth, molars, come out of your mouth, and go into a white, blue-rimmed tin bowl, that’s how I imagine it as I listen to him tell his story, because he’s already back, with moist eyes (did he cry? I wonder) and a crumpled, blood-stained hanky over his mouth, and when he removes it I can see dry blood crusted in the corner of his mouth, he is still wincing, but the terrible pain has gone and been replaced by a lesser one. Adam looks worried behind his thick lenses, his long nose twitching, as if, like me, he finds something odd about those pulled teeth, that they pulled two teeth not one, I’m angry, I can’t believe that they yanked out two of his teeth, they couldn’t have both been rotten, the rotten one reflected on the healthy one, they should have realised that, I say to myself.
Did they X-ray them, I ask, no, of course not, it was just take the pliers, jam them into the mouth and pull, they were your teeth not theirs. I should have gone with you and stopped it, I say, looking reproachfully at Adam as if that’s what he should have done. He realises what I mean and shrugs, I couldn’t do anything, his shoulders tell me, and my beloved says he doesn’t care about the teeth, the main thing is that the pain has gone.
And so we return to our old routine of food, drink, talk; he doesn’t eat on the side that’s sore, but he does drink; we stay up until three in the morning and wake up at ten, it’s Sunday and snow has blanketed the city. A thick layer of powdery snow fell during the night, everything is still and in a strange way the snow protects you, it’s cosier and you feel as if you are in that glass globe with the fir tree that my beloved brought into the house, which snows when you turn the globe upside down, it’s like being in a magical wonderland. If only he didn’t have to spend this last day of the holidays working on some programme at the radio, replacing Leon who is snowbound up in the Slovenian mountains. Of course he’s going to step in for him, he owes him, sooner or later debts have to be paid, and he has to secure his position at the radio.
Adam is still with us, we still have enough drinks and food and good humour, and stories and my knees, he’ll go straight to work from here. As for his father (who is waiting for him), he can think what he wants, he says, let him stew, he says, he doesn’t know where he is and he isn’t about to tell him, because he can’t listen to him anymore. His constant sermons about keeping his head down, being patient, hard-working, persistent, because that’s what makes for success, which is why he had brought him to the city, for him to get a degree and not be a tailor like him. Although he himself could have been an opera singer had the circumstances been different, had he had some support, he constantly grumbles, says Adam.
Adam sleeps in our old little room next to the kitchen; at my mother’s insistence we’ve moved to the biggest room on the other side of the flat, where my father died, and she’s moved to the smaller room, which used to be mine. Just as well that Adam is sleeping there and not, say, on the big sofa in the hall, I muse, though I don’t say anything – because he snores so loudly it shakes the house, and when he gets up he is so disgusting you can’t bear to look at him, he slobbers, farts, picks his nose, and when he removes his glasses to clean them, his eyes rolls as if he has escaped from a madhouse.
My beloved left the house at seven in the evening and by eight Adam and I are already discussing Gogol and Dostoevsky, how Dostoevsky said that all Russian writers came out of Gogol’s The Overcoat, all those geniuses who hadn’t existed before, and how wonderful that is, then the phone rings, a call from the radio saying that he’s fallen ill, his face is green, he’s throwing up, he isn’t not strong enough to get up, we have to come and get him, urgently. Adam and I rush off in a taxi to the radio station, wondering if it isn’t something to do with the teeth he’s had pulled, my heart is in my mouth, it’ll all be fine, Adam says soothingly, putting his hand on my back, bringing his worried face a bit too close to mine, so that I can smell his breath, which is annoying. And then a scene I can’t even imagine, my beloved slumped in an armchair by the front desk, on a small table in front of him a plastic cup of coffee from the coffee machine, he is green but also as white as a sheet, as white as dead flesh, beads of sweat on his brow, his head stiff, his face contorted like when you’re nauseous, he doesn’t say anything, he is confused, as if he doesn’t know where he is, he mumbles inarticulately, but lets us take him to the taxi, then it’s home and to bed, where he throws up. And develops a temperature, a high one, thirty-nine C., so he’s in bed for two days, sometimes conscious, when he even cracks jokes, and sometimes semi-conscious, when he sleeps the sleep of the dead, every so often vomiting bile if he has anything to drink, water or tea, because he is off his food, so I make sure he has a basin by his bed and I empty it. He also tells me not to turn on the light, it bothers him. But he won’t let me call the doctor, he says it’s the flu, the aspirin has brought his temperature down to thirty-seven point five, which is next to nothing.
It’s not the flu, not the flu, I tel
l myself the third day that he’s sick, leafing through the worn, brown, post-war Medical Lexicon that my mother had probably bought for my father, and which we consult whenever we’re in pain and want to see what it is. On Monday, Adam, of course, goes to work the pump at his petrol station. But he drops by after work, reeking. Danica and Frane come to see their son and bring him a cheese pie, only to learn that their son can’t hold any food down, everything makes him vomit, so, after dispensing a load of useful advice, they leave worried, with Danica crying, but she leaves, nevertheless. She doesn’t offer to stay by her son’s side, or empty the basin with his vomit. I look up his symptoms in the book, a book that will never be out of date because it is about us, and we never change, we are made out of flesh, blood, bones and who knows what else, and we’re constantly in danger of everything breaking down, in part or all of it, because our armour is fragile.
A fever, vomiting, stiff neck, headache, confusion, what can it be, what can it be if it isn’t the flu – meningitis, I discover under M in the post-war Medical Lexicon, published for the people to help them help themselves; I run over to Dr. Popijanč’s office in the next street, we all like him because he is one of those good-natured drunks who’ll give you whatever you need, he’ll write you an excuse note for school or work, and he’s always kind. The other reason we like him is that he looks like a toy, like a spinning top, with a wide, wide middle like a hula hoop, but narrow at the top and the bottom, his little legs underneath barely able to support his body, and a bald head on top that he covers with a strand of hair. We like him, even though he told our pregnant neighbour who planted the apricot tree in the yard that she was fine when in fact she had the measles and gave birth to a deaf boy. And even though I know that, I still run over to him with my own diagnosis of what’s wrong with my darling, meningitis, I say, and he doesn’t think that I’m brazenly interfering in his work, this twenty-two-year-old who hasn’t got a clue about medicine, who thinks she knows what she’s talking about despite having no knowledge, in life everything is secret, he says, and then, as if my diagnosis is correct, he tells me to call for an ambulance to take my husband to the hospital. Which I do as soon as I get home, where I find my darling and my mother, and Filip with his moustache (but no beard), always so full of sympathy, and I go with my husband to the hospital.
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