‘Did you say something?’
There was no woman’s voice.
There was no dog either, or boy with it. The remaining tenants met as they hurried past. They were living through their first terrible winter in the besieged city. They warmed themselves by tepid stoves. In one such stove, in our fat, the old ‘Two Agdofias’ invoice burned. In the besieged city old invoices cease to be valid. Their value is not enhanced even by the traces of strange little stories jotted on the back of them. But still, while the ‘Two Agdofias’ were burning, it seemed to me that the fame was licking something similar to one of those two notebooks belonging to my left-moustached uncle. But I soon stopped thinking of him. There was nothing to conjure up any of his strange, silly sentences in the terrible days we were living through in the surrounded city. There remained only a pain in the chest and the thought that the train of every ball-gown, no matter how long and luxurious, would have burned up long ago in Galina Nikolaevna’s stove, as she struggled unsuccessfully with this vicious winter. Besides, Galina Nikolaevna had not brought a ball gown with a long train with her from Russia. Everything about her was ordinary, even wretched. Apart from her voice and the captive tear.
She began coming again. Usually towards evening. For no reason. She would sit for a few minutes, say nothing, rub her frozen hands and lean confidentially towards me:
‘The telephones ... they’re not working, are they?’
She no longer put her hands into her pockets. Nor did she leave us little stories like that of the two Agdofias. She began to ask questions. Soft enquiries.
‘And do you know what’s in store for us ... what’s in store for us wretched people?’
Her tear was still captive and it seemed to me that it was devouring the blue of her eye from within. As though one of Galina Nikolaevna’s eyes was no longer blue! There was something dull and diluted in it. Something sad, inexpressibly sad. If that captive tear were to slip down her old woman’s cheek, it seemed to me that Galina Nikolaevna would have been quiet and reasonable again.
But the tear did not slip. And Galina Nikolaevna asked questions. Nonsensical questions.
‘Do you have any milk?’
Looking absently, in no particular direction, she whispered:
‘Keep your milk, you poor people! You’ll soon be needing it!’
There is no milk, of the liquid kind. The last carton disappeared long ago. We sometimes get powdered milk. I keep it jealously for the boy. For a glass of milk a day.
And why was it milk she asked me about? It was always the same! Always that milk! And that nonsensical warning in her voice.
Now she was standing in front of me in the cold morning. She had heard my footsteps and come out to meet me. She was wearing that satin dress again. She had wrapped a thin grey blanket round her. She was shivering, squinting and whispering by the half-open door.
‘Christ is born? For you too?’
I looked at her helplessly. I felt that pain in my chest again. Like a frequent, sharp twinge. Something moved from the depths to the surface, following the spasm. Now, finally, I recognised this pain. I had first felt it ten years ago when I held my left breast to the tiny lips of my newborn boy.
Galina Nikolaevna did not know that the previous night I had been dreaming of sounds. Like frozen birds falling out of their nest. And what did that have to do with her Christ, who had chosen such a bad time to be born? Why now?
Galina Nikolaevna looked at me sadly. That foolish game with the blue had ceased long ago. This was something serious and difficult. I looked at the old lady, then at my hands and chest. Like an unwilling new mother, unprepared to take her newborn child. What to feed it with?
‘He’s born, he’s born ... Auntie Galina ...’
I ran down the steps afraid that the captive tear might reach me. It seemed to me that Galina’s eye was giving up and the tear was finally beginning to slip. I ran along the street. Without stopping for breath and without feeling tired. I ran right to the editorial office. In the doorway, I said to the colleague who had spent the night there:
‘Christ is born!’
I wanted to address that frozen, sleepy man properly, but I could not remember his name. He was rubbing his stiff hands, looking at the death notices scattered over the desk and, without looking round, he replied:
‘Does anyone care about being born this morning?’
Someone else came in. From the next-door room where there was a fire smouldering in a tin stove. I smiled and said:
‘Christ is born!’
He looked at me wearily. He pointed at the papers that had arrived on the editor’s desk during the night and responded in a half-whisper:
‘Really born?’
Then the three of us fell silent. The one whose name I couldn’t remember was tapping his pencil on one of the death notices. The other rubbed his knees, looked at us and said:
‘A low or a high start? Low or high?’
He went out of the room without waiting for an answer to the question I did not in any case understand. Judging by the expression on the other man’s face, he was not thinking of replying either. He went on tapping his pencil.
I leafed through the papers on the desk, and the warmth that had accumulated in my body as I ran from home drained out through my fingers. I rubbed my hands, one against the other. On the piece of paper I picked up, it said:
‘The famous ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev died yesterday in Paris, at the age of fifty -three.’
‘Nureyev has died!’
‘Who would think of dying now?’
I turned round to see whether there was anyone else in the room. Just the man whose name I couldn’t remember. On my way to the little office toilet, I caught sight of the notice board and a note that someone had pinned there a few days earlier.
‘Any citizens or medical establishments that have the epilepsy drug UDANFEN are asked to take some urgently to the porter at the RTV nursing home for S. Dugarić.’
The previous day, someone had stuck a little picture of a cartoon character across the top left-hand corner of the mirror in the toilet. With big pink ears and a sticking out violet tongue. When the city was not surrounded, pictures like these used to be packed and sold with chewing gum. Children collected them and stuck them into albums. The filled album was sent to the sweet factory and then, a fortnight later, a packet full of chocolate, sweets and chewing gum would arrive. It seemed to me that it was this very picture that the boy needed to complete his album. Picture number twenty-nine. I still remembered. If I could partly lift the picture of the mirror, I would find the number on the back. Under the creature with the pink ears and violet tongue someone had written in blue felt-tip across the whole width of the mirror: antimation! There was no woman in the editorial office in the habit of writing in lipstick on mirrors. But there was a young man from the sports’ page, with a large mole beside his right eye, who sometimes left messages like this on the mirror in the toilet. The day before, on the cultural page, a text had been published which said that in the besieged city we were living in a pure post-Disney world. Before they left the printer, the last sentences had run: The final act is the mercy of the shell, that ultimately radical tool in the process of decomposing the world. In its wake, not even the proverbially all-powerful animation can put things back together again. At the printer’s the letter ‘t’ had been added to ‘animation’ and the signatory of the text, when she opened the paper, found proverbially all-powerful antimation. The news spread through the office like a catastrophic fire. The culmination was when the young man from Sport, choosing a moment when the agitated author of the fateful text was in the room, asked the colleague next to him quite seriously:
‘What was the name of the character in that antimated film ...?’
Witnesses of the scene maintain that the huge spectacles worn by the heroine of culture, a sign of her ‘proverbially all-powerful cool’ began to weep with fury.
The pink character was still sticking hi
s violet tongue out at me. I kept looking at it. I was grateful to the hand that had put it there. And to that mischievous boy from Sport. His letters flickered in front of my eyes. The violet tongue gave extra strength to their colour. They helped me not to lower my eyes.
I would not lower them. Not even to the level of my own refection that was somewhere there, out of range of my direct gaze. I felt a pain in my chest. A current, which had started in the depths of my breast, was finally reaching the surface, reaching the two burning spots from which at any moment thin, tepid trickles would start to drip.
I would not lower my gaze. Nor would I touch the material of my clothes to feel whether they really were damp at the level of my breasts. Sometimes, for important but inexpressible reasons, you have to believe your body, and not just your eyes.
HOW WE KILLED THE SAILOR
1.
If I mentioned it, he’d say I was being petty and that was unworthy of me. He’d close his eyes and, as though he were speaking about someone who wasn’t in the room, he’d say:
‘I’ll count to three to make it go away. There, she didn’t say a thing. One, two three. Forgotten!’
That’s what he did when I pointed out that he was spreading the margarine too thickly on his slices of bread; when I remarked that he had given away almost the entire contents of the package of humanitarian supplies that the inhabitants of the besieged city occasionally receive. All he’d left us was a little packet of green mints. I once told him they reminded me of my grandmother who had died long ago – my mother’s blue-eyed mother who was never hungry. It’s true that we still had the cardboard packing. It burns well, but we won’t use it. The inscription on it and the list of contents may one day feed some future story.
He closed his eyes and counted to three when he noticed … but I won’t say what. Maybe I’ll use that too, when the shame passes, to feed some bitter story. For the time being, let it be forgotten.
The room had lost its box-shape. The light of the thin candle didn’t reach its corners. It created a dim, uneven oval that shifted lazily if an unexpected current of air happened to touch its tiny wick. There was a transparent, trembling film over us. The few objects that were bathed in dim light, and the two of us, made up the inside of a giant amoeba. We were its organs, pulsating in the same rhythm, but not touching. Is an ‘amoeba’ that single-celled organism covered by a transparent membrane we looked at down the school microscope? If you touched the drop of water it was floating in with the tip of a needle, it would slowly curl up. Right now in the besieged city, where tonight no fiery balls are falling and no whistling bullets are being fired from the other side of the encircling ring, there are thousands of membranes hovering like this. The people in these bubbles of light are silent. Frightened, tired or indifferent, they are silent. Or listening. Hoping for sleep. To overwhelm them and spare them this vigil.
He had lit five cigarettes that evening and each time he used a new match. He put the dead match down in the saucer by the candle. In the ashtray lay cigarette butts and the narrow red band from the cigarette packet.
‘Why are you doing that?’
I sensed that sleep wouldn’t come for a long time yet. But, as I uttered the question I was aware that it was unworthy.
He didn’t reply.
Now I had a reason to be angry and speak.
‘Why are you doing that?’
I didn’t care what was worthy of me and what wasn’t. He looked at me and waved his hand, as though removing invisible headphones from his ears. He’d put them down for a moment and focus on me and my impatience.
‘Doing … what?’
‘Using matches to light your cigarettes!’
‘What am I supposed to use?’
Now he was prepared to put his invisible headphones properly away. He was interested in learning something new, something he hadn’t heard before. He was expecting me to tell him where the sun could rise apart from in the east. That someone was killed every day on his daily route through town, that he already knew.
‘The candle! You know yourself that we don’t have enough matches. They’re hard to find. The candle’s alight, so use it for your cigarettes.’
There were already too many words in our silent bubble. Added together and expressed like this, they were all unworthy. Without them, we would just have been two organs pulsating to the same rhythm until they were overcome by sleep.
He looked at me as though he was standing in front of a stupid child who understood nothing and who had to have everything painstakingly explained to it.
‘I can’t!’
‘You can’t … what?’
‘Light cigarettes with a candle!’
‘Why not?’
‘Every time a person does that, someone dies somewhere in the world.’
If he had said this in daylight, or had there been a light bulb burning in the room, I would have laughed. I like it when a room is lit up like an operating theatre. I would even have remembered some images from films in which He lit cigarettes from the candle illuminating a dinner for two. First for Her, then for Himself. Gazing the whole time into Her eyes while the audience sighed deeply in the dark, in unison.
Besides, whatever he did, at least one person died somewhere in the world every second. There were even cold statistics about that. In the books that the candlelight didn’t reach. That was why, suddenly and unexpectedly, his answer put me under an obligation, like a holy rule whispered into the ear of an unwilling novice.
2.
Maybe one day I’ll scatter all those matches into his hand and say:
‘That’s how many people you’ve saved from dying!’
Then red-hot balls will no longer be falling on the besieged city and people in it will not die from tiny pieces of hot iron in their bodies. They will again die of illness and old-age. There will be light bulbs again and no one will be obliged to light cigarettes from candles. That will only happen in films.
I’ve been collecting the dedicated matches for three days now. I put them into an empty Solea cream tin with ‘contents: 250g’ written on it. But even if it didn’t, I can assume from its size that it can hold another hundred or so matches. Sometimes I miss one and it ends up in the ashtray. In the morning I dig it out from under the butts. After that, the tips of my forefinger and thumb stink all day and the child frowns when I touch the end of his nose.
The matches he lays beside the saucer with the candle don’t stink. There is even something agreeable about the slightly piquant smell from the phosphorous tip that remains even after it’s extinguished. When I take the lid of the tin and count the matches, I’m aware only of the left-over smell of the cream. It is sweetish, like a woman’s deodorised armpit in summer. Huddling in them, resting, are the souls that have been saved. There are twenty-five of them for now. When I close the tin, they come to life. I listen in to the sounds they make while the tin rests on my hand. Twenty-five saved souls rest in my hand. Today in the besieged city fifteen people were killed by one fiery ball (sent from the dark hill where the bad people went). No one had wanted to save them. I’ll see their faces tomorrow in the newspaper obituaries. What about these saved souls in my hand? How old are they? What are their faces like? How much good is there in them? Do they know that there is a besieged city somewhere in the world with the saviours of their souls in it?
3.
I found out where this idea of the candle and the cigarettes came from. The morning was quiet, but as though damned. At such times I reach frantically for the books on the shelves. I open them, leaf through them, put them down. An old bill fell out of one of them. On the page it slipped out of, in the last line, it said that every time you light a cigarette from a candle, somewhere in the world a sailor dies. This was a book by Dario, our former neighbour. He smoked a lot, lighting each cigarette from the last. Now Dario is somewhere out there in the wide world. And the sailors are in a harbour, somewhere on the sea, in a ship, in a tavern, in the bought embrace of some lady of
the harbour … Are there any sailors where Dario is living now? On the other hand, if you were to thrust that sentence published long ago back at its author, perhaps he would not remember that he had written it.
Like in that film … was it called ‘Night’? A man and a woman come out of a house after a long, barren night that has made them strangers. They sit down on the grass. Dawn is breaking. She takes an old letter out of her handbag. She reads it aloud. Emphasising every sentence. Declarations of love, words of tenderness, swearing devotion till eternity … When she has folded the letter, she puts it back in her bag and looks enquiringly at the man. He asks:
‘Who wrote that to you?’
‘You!’
Dario’s ‘somewhere in the world’ is now America. Everyone has his own troubles, even if he isn’t in a besieged city. But he doesn’t have to think about matches and candles. He can switch on ten light bulbs and turn the room into a dazzling operating theatre with no dim corners nibbling at the space, where painful questions nest. He lights his cigarettes with a lighter. The first one in the morning with a lighter, and then through the day, each one from the last. When he uses up his lighter, or loses it, he buys a new one. He can choose a new colour and trademark every time. And he’s left the all sailors’ souls to us. He has off-loaded all their weight onto our weary souls that even sleep no longer spares.
‘Do you know Dario’s address in America?’
‘Which Dario?’
Death in the Museum of Modern Art Page 6