I turned to kiss him, harder and more earnestly and passionately, as though I couldn’t get enough of him, as though I would never experience this feeling again.
I stood up and held out my hand. He put his coffee cup on the table and gripped my hand, stood up and wrapped me in his arms, kissed my neck and sniffed my hair. I led him into the bedroom and smiled. I turned so that he too would see it. What you just said makes me so happy.
We lay in bed for a long time without saying a word. He was breathing calmly, until I lifted my head from his chest. I concentrated on looking at him, not breathing.
“What?” he asked cautiously.
I wanted to tell him that I was terrified. What if this comes to an end? What if one day you change your mind, though you say that now? How awful would that be? Have you thought about that? Isn’t it terrible that when something good happens, we start worrying about a time when we have to live without it?
I didn’t answer. He glanced quickly out of the window where the evening was beginning to darken and turn red. What if I stopped loving him or what if he could no longer bring himself to say it, or what if he fell in love with someone else or got a job on the other side of the world? Anything could happen. He could die.
He stopped waiting for an answer and wiggled closer to me, pulled the duvet partly over his stomach and his right leg. He exhaled heavily, then rolled onto his side, propped himself on his right arm, and slipped his left arm across my stomach.
“Don’t think too much. That’s your problem.”
He moved his hand on my stomach; his fingertips felt warm and soft and his skin smelled of sliced almonds.
Then I said it too, because it would have been sheer madness not to say those words to a man like that.
2004–2007
MIGRANTS
Our children abandoned us one after the other. They left home and went away to study and work in other cities. At least that’s what they told us, though it turned out to be nothing but a pretext. I’d never imagined a child could turn against his parents like that. A child can be angry for a while, but that he should suddenly deny his parents, I hadn’t thought that was possible, because somewhere deep inside a child always loves his parents and parents always love their children, in some way they are always united.
But when they never called us to ask how we were or to tell us what they were doing, we accepted the fact that from now on it would just be the two of us. They gave us a cursory farewell though we kept them fed and clothed and had given them a home all these years. See you.
Bajram took the fact that his children no longer wanted anything to do with him very hard. He slept badly and no longer seemed to care about money. He tried to telephone them but they didn’t answer his calls. They sent him text messages only a few words long. Everything’s fine.
He drove round the towns where they claimed to live but couldn’t find them. He stood guard in squares and parks and waited, said he wanted to talk sense to them, but something about them pushed us farther away and something about us pushed them away too. We were like two identical magnetic poles.
Once it was just the two of us at home, Bajram and I didn’t say much to each other, and many years went past without much substance to our conversations. Bajram started drinking lots of alcohol and lost a lot of weight.
Now our entire existence hung on our children who had decided to have nothing to do with us. Their departure was like having stakes driven through our bodies. I was so worried about them and so angry with them that I had dreams in which I slapped their faces, shouted at them, pulled their clothes, and demanded they tell us exactly what they were thinking.
After a while Bajram began talking of returning to Kosovo. He said he wanted to move away from Finland but took it back instantly as though saying those words out loud made him less of a man.
Then he started talking about what people would say if he moved back there, and what people would say if he went back without his children. When he asked what I thought about the matter, I was afraid he might force me to go with him, but he said he could happily go back by himself.
Bajram was restless and agitated; he even wept from time to time. I was constantly on edge because he had an ever shorter temper than before and he had trouble with his heart. I was worried he might have another heart attack.
—
I packed a suitcase in the middle of the night and left. I opened the upper drawer of the old dresser, the one that always creaked when you opened it, and took out all the banknotes I’d hidden over the years and saved. Bajram muttered in his sleep, turned onto his side, and mistook the suitcase next him for the woman who, almost by accident, he had ended up spending his life with.
Everyone had gone and the walls were bare. Not a single photograph was on display.
I lifted my suitcase from the bed, opened the bedroom door, stepped into the hallway, shrugged on my coat. I opened the front door as quietly as I possibly could. The door’s tight hinges creaked as though they had been wrenched out of place. Everything else was perfectly quiet, I was quiet, Bajram was quiet. It was as though nobody had ever uttered a word.
I had thought of saying good-bye to him, saying good-bye to the last twenty years, looking him in the eyes for the last time, looking at the deep wrinkles in his skin, his jutting stubble, and the bald patch on his head. I would kiss him on the forehead, clasp his strong shoulders, lay my head on his chest—but I couldn’t touch him.
I pushed the downstairs door open. The cold wind was biting, it scratched my face like tiny needles and howled loudly. As I walked onward it felt as though Bajram had gotten out of bed and walked to the window and stood watching me cross the yard and the parking lot, now covered in soft snow like shredded paper.
—
A few weeks later Bajram left Finland, moved back into our old apartment in Prishtina, and started making a living as a taxi driver. He did this for a few years, and then he died.
III
When you reach the life you wanted.
19
During the next few months he and I went to restaurants and cinemas and theaters, we went on cruises, visited museums, we were constantly doing something new. He took me riding and we tried out wall climbing, we jumped naked into the sea, laughed at people crawling home on our weekend morning runs, and I loved him and he loved me, and we said this to each other every day.
He gave me time to think, time to talk about things I didn’t want to talk about, and he didn’t worry about the sleepless nights when I kept him awake out of sheer spite. And he didn’t mind my smoking or my tendency to stay up late and wake up early, the fact that I drank coffee all the time—to him these were little things, for in return he received more love than he knew what to do with.
I didn’t have time for my studies, but he said it could wait, I would have time later. And I kissed him on the neck and said yes, it can wait, it can so wait, and wrapped my arms round his neck—you know more about me now than anyone has ever known.
When he went to work, I instantly felt such terrible longing that I could hardly sit still. I cleaned, sorted, scrubbed, organized, and piled things—I did anything at all to make time go faster. And when we met again in the evening it always seemed as though he had become even more handsome: stuck to his skin, his shirt revealed too much of the contours of his upper body, his black leather belt separated the white shirt from the quality fabric of his trousers, which made his legs look criminally enticing.
He wore a bespoke suit, a tie, and leather shoes, and I felt like asking him to stop so that I could look at him from head to toe and admire myself standing next to him in the mirror. I wanted to be envious of myself, of this moment. Of the fact that I had found a man like this, my very own bank manager with whom I could come to any agreement whatsoever.
On those yearning-filled afternoons I teased and tortured myself by imagining him sitting in our favorite café with someone else. He would be holding that someone else’s hand across the table, he’d
move the salt and pepper shakers to the edge of the table and out of the way of their hands, their love, he would be sipping coffee even more delicious than the coffee I made him, and his love would be all the more ardent. I imagined this someone else by his side, thought this someone else might be better suited to him. What if this someone else had all the same qualities for which he had fallen in love with me but lacked the things about me that made him think twice?
The words I, love, and you soon became my favorite words, and I wanted nothing more than to say them over and over. I love you. It’s two o’clock, only another three hours and his journey home, then he would be here and I could say it to him again.
He and I were becoming we without either of us really noticing it. Soon he began casually asking whether we were going to his sister’s birthday party on the weekend, because we obviously couldn’t be apart, as if he would have skipped the party if I hadn’t agreed to join him. But I said yes, I always said yes, of course we are going to your sister’s birthday party. Of course I’ll go there with you, you don’t have to ask things like that, you can just tell me we’re going somewhere on the weekend because I won’t have any other plans.
Given my age I could have been his son, and he pondered this fact from one day to the next. He had a habit of asking me if his age bothered me, and I repeated over and over that no, it doesn’t bother me, this isn’t about numbers.
—
Things were like this for a long time. Everything was fine.
So fine, in fact, that I started to doubt him, though he gave me no reason to do so. It started with little things. I got angry listening to his constant moaning about how tired he was. Irritated, I asked why he was always yawning. I glowered at him out of the corner of my eye and pretended to be reading a book on the sofa when his strong hand slipped between me and the book and started massaging my chest.
“Don’t touch me,” I said, clamped my teeth together, and imagined his neck between them.
“Fine then,” he said, pulled his hand away, and started looking for his black-and-white stripy shirt.
“I can’t bear your moaning. Stop it. Right now,” I said.
He tried to defend himself. “I’m allowed to be tired sometimes.”
“You can sleep tomorrow. And on the weekend. Whenever you like,” I replied.
“That’s right, I forgot I’m not supposed to tell you I’m tired because there are people right now dying of hunger, that’s it,” he muttered. “You can’t spend your life thinking about what’s right and wrong with the world.”
He then picked up a pile of my papers from my desk. He had always wondered why I printed out things like this. An article about the Gitarama prison in Rwanda, for instance, where the inmates were so hungry they had taken to eating one another, where the cells were so crammed the prisoners had to stand up. Every hour of every day they spent standing in a large cage on a floor of hard, cold cement that was covered in feces. Their feet are covered in sores, they turn gangrenous and eventually fall off.
The slums of India, stretching out as far as the eye can see, huts built of trash. Dharavi, the largest of the slums, home to more than a million people. A million people in an area of only a half square mile with no drainage or sewage system. Children play in the dirt, they fall ill, and doctors refuse to treat them. Insurance companies demand forms, hospitals require birth certificates. If you don’t have them, you don’t exist.
Chapters of books about people sold into prostitution, slave labor, the organ and drug trades. Girls wait for clients in dark shacks, and the clients can do with them as they please. They are bound, drugged, and unconscious. Or they lie on an operating table, scalpels sink into their tender skin; organ dealers take their kidneys and the rest is nothing but clinical refuse. There are millions of such cases every year, millions of people and destinies like this.
He threw the papers to the floor and kicked them.
“Why do you torture yourself with shit like this?”
“Get out.”
It was our first argument. He called me childish and went home.
Didn’t he understand that it was his responsibility to think about those prisoners and children? To think about if you were suddenly kidnapped and you didn’t know whether you would ever see daylight again? What would it feel like to wake up in a cold, dark basement and scream so long that your throat would no longer make a sound, and on each side there was nothing but damp, icy walls? What must that moment be like, the moment when you realize you are going to die soon but not yet? When you only know it will happen and there is nothing you can do but wait?
Of course he should think about this, everybody should. Not complain about being tired. Ever. It was nonsensical to claim we have the right to feel sorrow and anxiety and tiredness at the most insignificant things, and even more nonsensical to try to justify it by saying that that sorrow and anxiety and tiredness are the same for everybody the world over.
He drove back to my place in his new Volvo and kissed me at the door. His stubble scratched my face, and I stopped kissing him for a moment and said it again: I love you. Really. I’m sorry. You can say anything you want. No, you’re right. Don’t apologize. I’m sorry. I won’t say anything like that again.
And so I loved him even more, more than I loved myself, and he loved me more than he loved himself too. We were perfect for each other, I thought, we will grow old together and I will be with him on the day he dies, I will call his relatives, tell them he has passed away, and make arrangements for his funeral.
—
Until one day I realized I did nothing but sit in the apartment waiting for him to open the door and come home.
He came out of the shower without drying his feet and left wet footprints on the floor and the rugs. Wherever he went, he made a mess. He never washed up the frying pan but left it on the stove, he never scrubbed the bathroom tiles, he never put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket but left them on the floor, and he had no idea how much dust he created because I always wiped it away. I picked up his clothes and washed his dishes and scrubbed the bathroom tiles, and sometimes I imagined his face on the tiles as I scoured them with a wire brush, washed his clothes at the wrong temperature, and cooked his dinner in a dirty frying pan.
He made passing remarks about my neurotic cleaning, about the fact that I changed the sheets several times a week, and before long I was actively seeking out things about which I could make passing remarks too. It became a competition. I watched him closely, manically following his every move just to catch him out: to see when he made a mistake, when I could stick my bristles into his thick flesh and comment on something I would never have done.
Eventually love was no longer enough, neither my love for him nor his love for me, though I gave him more than enough and he gave me even more in return. He started saying I was sick and wondered whether professional help would be enough to cure me.
“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but you’re quite arrogant,” I said.
“Me, arrogant?” he scoffed. “I might be arrogant, but you sit around here all day and won’t go farther than the shop. You wait here for me all day. It’s pathetic. Get up and do something for yourself.”
“First off, nobody’s forcing you to stay. Second, I never stop doing things. I wash your clothes, iron your ties, your socks, your underwear, I cook for you and clean up after you. You never have to do anything.”
His brow furrowed. His left eye squinted, half shut. I could see from his expression that he was clenching his teeth. He tightened the towel he’d wrapped round his waist and seemed to be giving his next words careful consideration.
“You’re free to go,” I said as callously as I could and hopped indifferently onto the sofa to show just how insignificant I found this conversation.
I took my phone out of my pocket and began typing a random flow of letters. “Besides, I’ve been cheating on you.”
“What?”
“Yes, I’ve been cheating on yo
u. I’m just texting him now. You’re too old for me. Did you really think I’d stay with you when you’re retired and I’m still young? Think about it.”
His hands were gripping the knot in his towel. I couldn’t look at him, but I sensed his tears through the thick, stagnant air in the room. I got up to open the window but fell back on the sofa almost instantly. His body slumped, vanquished. He scratched his head, sighed heavily as though the air between us had thickened so much that there was no room for either of us to say a thing. He went into the bedroom to find his clothes. Judging by the rustling from the bedroom he dressed quickly, then walked to the door, said bye, and left.
—
After him I stopped doing things, stopped meeting people, stopped encountering the outside world. This lasted for months, summer turned to autumn, hurried people plodded quickly through the rain and the darkness, opened and closed their umbrellas, shook off the rain and continued on their way. I watched them for a while through the window. It tired me out and I wondered how it didn’t tire them in the same way.
I began to wish I’d already lived my life, because I simply couldn’t bear living it any longer. I dreamed of being an old man with a hoarse voice, a man who had already seen the world, who had loved, hated, and lost, had children and grandchildren, who had sat clapping at their graduations and weddings.
But that’s not how it goes, I told myself when I’d thought about this long enough, so I took my sunglasses out of the drawer, and when I put them on I stepped outside and enrolled in new courses at the university and signed up for membership at a gym. That’s how it works, it’s all about your attitude, I repeated to myself ad infinitum, attitude, that’s what matters, and I told myself it was a beautiful, sunny day, the snow glistening like diamond dust, and I got off the bus not because it was full and I would have to stand up but because I wanted to walk the rest of the journey, and my voice didn’t quiver as I took care of matters on the telephone and I didn’t even hunch my shoulders when I walked past benches full of people.
My Cat Yugoslavia Page 20