Wild Woman

by Marina Sur Puhlovski

  I’m not a crier, especially not when there are witnesses, I’m embarrassed to cry even when I’m alone; look at her, I sometimes reproach myself when I flounder, especially if I start to cry, as if I’m talking about somebody else, but I suppose that visit to the badger was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and this camel already had a lot on her back, had carried too much on her back for days it just took that last straw to break it.

  No, no, she says and the two of us are already smiling, she with her round face, round and long, and her red-framed thick lenses, and I with my round face, without glasses, she a dark brunette and I a blond, she with her hair in a bun, and a long leaf-shaped hair clip, a red precious stone at the tip of the stem, and I with a bowl haircut, the ends curling in, with both of us plump, she a bit too much, especially her bottom half, in the legs, though her waist is narrow, with me unhappy, her happy, a wonderful husband, gorgeous and successful they say, I saw him once from a distance – tall, blond, straight-backed and strong, as if he’d just stepped out of a Greek myth, somebody you can lean on, or at least you think you can.

  She says she’ll immediately ask her father, a doctor, chief physician, professor, there’s nobody he doesn’t know, to inquire about my husband’s condition and what needs to be done, how to help him, where to go, to whom, which is the most important thing, and he will intervene.

  That afternoon I run to the hospital with his food and the news, but he already knows, she’s already intervened, they already know that he has the protection of such and such a head physician and professor, who is a name in the world of medicine, and his cousin, a doctor, also called, he’s returning from abroad and when he gets back he will decide what future steps to take and which treatment to adopt. He’s red in the face and his breathing is laboured as he tells me all this, he says that when he heard the diagnosis he thought of committing suicide, it was either that or finishing up in an insane asylum, but now he thinks there may be hope after all, he’s relying most of all on his cousin. I’ve never met that cousin, but I have met the cousin’s parents, twice, Frane’s brother, a gentleman and tall like Frane, but with a head full of hair, and his wife, self-important, too loud, with a mouth like a frog. The story was that the cousin had divorced his wife, with whom he had a daughter, after taking up with some nurse, as is so common in hospitals, and later married her.

  Two weeks later we celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday, my mother and I cook up a storm of good food for him, what my mother calls ‘špampandale’; we stuff veal scallops with cheese and ham and then fry it in batter, and we stuff beef scallops with bacon, garlic and parsley, then close them with toothpicks and braise them with onions, it’s a delicacy called Spanish Birds, and along with that we make all sorts of salads, a French salad, Waldorf salad, shopska salad, tuna salad, and Danica makes the cakes. We invite our friends, Adam, Kostja, Leon, Petra and Filip, and we all take the food to celebrate his birthday with him in the hospital. There we open his presents, books, monographs, coffee for the nurses and liquor for the doctors, whiskey, wine, and there are some black leather slippers, as elegant as anything I’ve ever seen, from Kostja, and they make his eyes shine. I give him a new dark blue, ribbed velvet dressing gown, its lapels bordered in red, with a red-and-gold crest on the breast pocket, because the one he has is old, it was my father’s, and he immediately puts on the new one. We share the food with the others in the room, who are sitting on their beds watching us hungrily, and then we all go back to the flat because I want to treat everyone to some food and drink, after all they came and brought presents, I can’t send them away without anything, so I have some food for them, because I don’t want to return to the flat alone.

  The only one who doesn’t join us is Kostja, he feels that you shouldn’t celebrate a birthday when the celebrant isn’t there, what’s more he’s in the hospital, maybe even dying, he says, scowling at me, his magic eyes looking at me darkly; so he leaves, resentful, driving himself home in his little Fiat 500.

  After that, our relationship was never the same, although we still saw each other, and later I was even a bridesmaid at his wedding.

  XVII.

  Knickers, bras, tights, slips, clothes for cold weather and for warm, because it may be the end of April but you never know if you’re going to boil or freeze, and I despair because I can’t close the suitcase, it’s too full. I’m excited, I’m packing, I’m going to Rijeka where my darling is in the hospital and has the best doctor for this kind of tumour in the Balkans, and beyond, according to his cousin, who arranged it all, he was Tito’s doctor, he says, and our jaws drop. He will be the one operating on him.

  He’s been there for a month already, but I couldn’t visit him before because there’d been an outbreak of smallpox in Serbia and we were under quarantine. We all had to be vaccinated and I stood in line for five hours waiting to be inoculated. If you were here at least we could have waited and grumbled together, I lamented in a letter, because the post could travel. It was just humans who were contagious.

  During the quarantine Danica and I made our own clothes, I would take patterns from Burda, draw them on a big sheet of wrapping paper, then cut them out, lie them down on the fabric, to trace the pattern onto the fabric with chalk, cut the fabric along the chalk lines, and then that part was done. Next Danica would pin and then sew the different pieces together by hand, as a first go, then she would sew them on the machine, where again she would adjust the width and length with pins, and then it was back to the sewing machine. If there was a collar or cuffs, Danica would make them separately. The next-to-last bit, the hem, was Frane’s job, followed by sewing on the buttons, if there were any, the zipper, if there was one, and finally ironing the finished piece and hanging it on a hanger.

  We made a dark blue suit with red buttons and a collar for me, it had a fitted jacket and fitted skirt, short, because I had lost weight, and I was going to wear it on the trip to Rijeka once we got the green light, and another two dresses for a change of clothes if I stayed longer. To go with the suit I bought a dark blue purse with a gold-like metal shoulder strap, and dark blue shoes with a gold buckle, and a beige silk blouse, with a hint of gold in it, which I barely managed to iron, I had to sprinkle water on the whole thing. I don’t know why I bought all these things, I suppose so as to have something new for the hospital, to begin a new chapter in life in which he would recover and I would arrive as the advance guard.

  The days passed by but there was no word about the operation, and it was making all of us nervous. The operation was given a fifty per cent chance of success, which was not much and it was risky, but it’s even riskier to do nothing, said his cousin, who was for the operation but even he didn’t know why it was being delayed. All the tests had been done, but he wasn’t being operated on and he wasn’t being sent home, and then I got it – the operation had to be paid for.

  They won’t do anything without money, I know it, I said to my mother, to Danica and Frane, to friends, among them Filip who immediately offered to help, he didn’t have any money but his father would give him some, his father was a Partisan veteran, a Serb from Bosnia. Frane got a job at the Institute for the Blind, working on nutrition plans, on what’s known as a “bordereau”, the money was better, they had managed to save some and would also borrow some, and meanwhile I had received the official decision on my right to receive my father’s pension, which included money in arrears, so we had enough to put together.

  I had decided to rent a room in Rijeka, nothing bigger than the little room in our apartment, one in an old pre-war building somewhere in the centre of town, so that I could step straight out into the hubbub of the city, with its shops, window displays, cafés serving espresso, newsstands with cigarettes and newspapers, human bodies rushing to work or simply out for a stroll. And all that in the sunshine, which was plentiful because Rijeka was by the sea and smelled of salt, of fish, of pine, of the joys of life in the south. As soon as I arrived I would join the library and continue studying becaus
e I had to think of my exams. Otherwise, I could forget about keeping my father’s pension!

  Danica would come as well, not to Rijeka but to the island of Krk, just a hop and a skip away, her sister lived there in her lover’s villa, because she had struck lucky; yes she had a hard face and voice, was a garish peroxide blond, busty and stocky, walked like a goose with her head high, swaying her chest right and left, and was fifty years old, but all the same she had a lover and enjoyed her life in his villa, doing nothing from April to November.

  And so I took the train, wearing my new suit, carrying a suitcase I had only managed to close by sitting on it until the locks clicked.

  I stepped off the train straight into my childhood when my mother took me via Rijeka to Omišalj, on the island of Krk, because I had rickets and she had found a job at the seaside so that I could get some sun and finally start walking. The porters were still there, calling out, Porter! Porter! All of them skinny, their faces furrowed with wrinkles, holding the handles of their wooden carts like the Chinese in rickshaws, because they hauled the carts themselves, with them at the front and the cart at the back, and there were always children sitting on top of the luggage, like at an amusement park. It was always the same and yet new, because it belonged to a bygone time that was hard to fathom, you couldn’t believe that you were once a child and now weren’t, you could accept it but you couldn’t understand it, it was too weird.

  And then the room: I immediately found what I wanted, in the centre of town, in an old building, with a broad staircase and steps that were so low you could skip two at a time, they were smoothed by the tread of generations, sinking in places, hemmed by a wrought iron railing studded with iron flowers. A fat old lady opened the door, her hips had gone to hell so she waddled right and left, almost like a pendulum, she was dressed in black, a widow I decided, though I don’t remember her face, it’s as if I erased it from my mind, just her sallow skin and the hairs on her chin, a woman transformed into a man, old age had seen to that. She opened a dark door and showed me the equally dark room, with a bed, wardrobe and desk, its yellow ornamental mat lit up by the sun coming in through the closed window – peace and quiet, I liked it, I could already see myself sitting there studying Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, whose books I would borrow from the library that I would join.

  I left my things there and went to the hospital where I found my darling mobile, in a good mood, I was glad to see that he had even gained a few pounds, then he went to have his lunch and I went to the post office to phone my mother and tell her I had found a place to stay.

  ***

  Cancel it, my mother said, why pay for something when she had found me a place to stay with the daughter of an old friend of hers who had married somebody in Rijeka, and they’re already waiting for you; the granddaughter was a nurse in the same hospital where my darling was a patient and she was ready to help. All splendid arguments but my heart sank, I had already imagined myself living in that dark quiet little room with the ray of sunlight slicing through the air and landing on my open book, I had already seen myself happy there.

  Why did you make such an arrangement, I snap at my mother, but there’s nothing I can do, her arguments are too strong, especially the part about the nurse, I can’t miss out on such an opportunity; fine, I say, sulking, back it is to get my things, tell the old lady I’m not taking the room after all, and then off to a houseful of people I don’t know, whose kindness is already exhausting me.

  And she doesn’t live in the city centre, where I want to be, by the sea where I can feel the city but also be on my own, where everything is exciting, no, they live on the outskirts of town, in a new building, without the layers of previous lives that make me feel alive, that keep me company without my being in their company, no, I have to take a bus to get there, look for a difference in the sameness, lose my way, ask, until my hands go numb from carrying the luggage, bag, umbrella, overcoat, and I really want a cigarette. At last, fed up, I arrive and am greeted by their smiling faces, mother, father, the nurse and her pubescent brother, good-looking though pimply, curly blond hair, a few years younger than his sister who is barely nineteen and already working, though she looks like a child. She has curly blond hair, like her brother, they are both tall and well-built like their father, the mother is petite, heavier and dark, I am barely a year or two older than the girl, but compared to her I feel like a grown-up, no, not like her mother but a hundred years older, as if I am from a different dimension.

  I am given a room full of light, and lunch, and solace that I don’t need, because they can’t comfort me, and I am given the nurse, who is a hundred years my junior, to take me to my darling in the hospital and be a nuisance there, along with a poppy seed cake and little pail of strawberries for him, and a life that isn’t my own to live, because that’s what my mother wants, my mother who is always in need of people and therefore can’t understand me.

  No studying, it is impossible to study at their place, they want to be with you all the time, you are interesting, you’ve brought them your city, they’ve never been there, and it is the capital city, and you’re bringing them your interesting student life, at least that’s how they imagine it, you’re bringing them stories about one thing and another, because I have to keep talking, because that’s how I started and that’s what they now expect of me. And I can play chess. The boy can’t get enough of me, it’s as if he’s fallen in love with me in his childlike way, everybody is constantly at my heels and so kind that all I can do is sink into this communal life until time rescues me, until I return home.

  But I am with my darling, the weather is beautiful and during visiting hours we sit in the park. He admires my suit and shoes, and likes showing me off on the ward, especially my legs, which I’ve finally revealed. He likes the fact that I’ve lost weight, but he doesn’t want me to lose any more, he prefers me with meat on the bones rather than skinny, clothes are one thing, a girl in bed is another, he says. He becomes excited when he talks, which isn’t good for him really, and wants to fondle me on the bench, he wants to put his hand inside my blouse, between my legs, ah, it seems you’ve recovered, I say with a smile, pushing his hand away, cupping his face with my hand and looking into his eyes.

  Even in his letters he was always writing about my body, I remember, always my body, how glowing it was, how he couldn’t stop thinking about it, how wonderful and beautiful I was, and I wrote about his eyes, about his profile which for some reason made me sad to look at, about how I wanted to be as small as a fingernail so that I could slip into his pyjama pocket and he could take me out whenever he needed me. I gave him a toy, a black cloth cat, with whiskers and a red bow tied around its neck, and a cute face, to sit on his night table and cheer him up, to remind him that I was his kitten and he was my tom, that’s how we signed our letters to each other.

  I’ve been here for a week already, and we’re racking our brains about when I should offer the doctor money and how I should do it. Suddenly I feel unsure of myself. I’ve never offered anybody a bribe before, I haven’t a clue how to do it, I might offend the man, he’s not a porter or a waiter, and plus he was Tito’s doctor, what if he turns me down, I think glumly. I still think it needs to be done, but not by me, maybe Danica, when she comes to visit him, she’s timid and docile anyway, she cries at the drop of a hat, and, anyway, she’s the mother so she’s more likely to be forgiven if we’ve misjudged him. But my darling wants me to do it, he believes in me more than in his mother, who could screw everything up, he says. Just smile, talk to him, shove the envelope into his hand and say: this is for you, he’ll say thank you and then you can leave, he says confidently. We decide to wait until Monday and see if he’s on the list of scheduled operations – they announce the operations on a board in the entrance hall – and if he isn’t, I’ll come with the money.

  On Sunday night I can’t sleep, all I do is imagine that moment when I take the envelope out of my dark blue bag with its gold-like chain, make sure it’s a white, not a bl
ue envelope, he warns me unnecessarily, because I know the difference between the two, blue is for workers, white is for their bosses, and then I say, this is for you, and I smile and push the envelope towards him, oh hell, how am I going to do that, we never bribed anybody when my father was sick, we just invited his doctor to dinner when it looked as if he was recovering.

  But on Monday, no mention of the operation, so I have no choice, I’m going to have to knock on the door of the best doctor in the Balkans and beyond, this fifty-year-old man with sharp features and a face furrowed with wrinkles, but who looks calm, confident and kind, yes kind, I notice, and that unsettles me, I’d prefer it if he looked nasty, they are easier to bribe. I haven’t slept, but I’ve made an effort to look good, I’ve put on make-up, combed my hair, put on my new suit, with the matching bag and shoes, a bit of perfume that I stole from the nurse because I didn’t bring any of my own. I sit down, cross my legs, and ask about my husband’s condition, casually taking the envelope out of my bag, offering it to him, saying: this is for you; and then, oh hell, he immediately stands up, pushing the envelope away, thank God I didn’t drop it, I catch it at the last minute and put it back in my bag.

  How could I even think that he would accept money, he says, I blush with embarrassment, I stammer something to the effect that we’ve been waiting for the operation for so long, and we thought, we thought, I can’t finish my sentence, I just fall silent, my face burning. He understands, explaining that he still hasn’t decided, he’s still in two minds, because when he removes the tumour, the thickness of the knife’s blade will also remove a part of the brain, he’s precise, and nobody knows exactly what is in this area they call hollow, because it’s not dominant, it doesn’t contain the centres for survival, but something will be removed, something will be missing. And nobody knows, he says, how he will behave afterwards, he may change beyond recognition. He may not even survive. So it’s better for him to stay as he is, while he’s alive, he’s still young, he’s still got a chance, better that, he says, than maybe being sectioned, conscious but not quite himself, that’s the worst thing that could happen. But, if we insist, he’ll do the operation, the day after tomorrow, he says, after all, everything is ready, all the tests have been done, it’s just a matter of deciding.