I open the door and walk straight into the empire of the fleas, and they immediately jump onto me, blackening my legs, and I grab the phone, shove the plug into the wall and dial Information. What’s the number for sending a telegram, I ask, my left hand swatting the fleas off my legs, hopping around as if that will help. Then I dial the number they give me, hello, I say, I want to send a telegram: Mama, come back, the fleas are going to eat me alive, says the message, short and to the point, and I put the receiver back on the hook, go into the dining room, and onto the balcony to wipe the parasites off me with a wet rag, inasmuch as that’s possible, scratch the itching and wait – with the last bread cubes, the last drippings in the pan and the last bottle of wine, red of course, Pharos, twelve-and-a-half per cent alcohol, which doesn’t make me drunk. The dog can poo on the balcony.
***
While I was clearing up the place after all the painting, I found letters in a drawer that we had written to each other when he was in the hospital in Rijeka, a stack some eight inches high, held together with a rubber band. What do I do with them, I asked myself, automatically removing the rubber band, so that they fell all over the floor. Addresses, postage stamps, franked stamps, Sofija Kralj Vidović, I see my name in his handwriting, tiny letters, slanting left; my handwriting is big and slants right, or it is straight, it changes. I can’t resist opening one of them, my letter to him, not the reverse, I want to see what the person I used to be.
You wanted me even when you were having me burned at the stake, I read randomly, not recognizing my own words; what pleasure it gave him to send me to the stake while still wanting me, I can’t get over it, as if it was an act of supreme dedication, sacrificing me even though it meant he would lose me, love even through death, I suppose that’s how I explained it to myself, stupid as I was, not seeing that I was being sent to the stake, seeing only that he wanted me, and that this was why I was being sacrificed.
Unbelievable, I say aloud, putting the rubber band back on the letters, wondering what to do with them because I can’t throw them into the rubbish. I’ll burn them in the stove as soon as the heating season starts, if I remember, I think to myself. I find an empty shoebox in the hallway, stuffed the letters in there and put it in the storage compartment of my mother’s sofa, along with the instalments of The Witch of Grič, balls of wool and moth-eaten clothes, where, for the time being, they can stay and collect dust.
Wild Woman Page 22