“Dieva mja,” Elza responds.1
Elza hasn’t ever had the opportunity of meeting God. She has lived without God. It turns out, in fact, that she has been godless. She’s heard about divine revelations that have changed lives. About the fog suddenly being lifted, about the light descending upon the supplicant, about the red dot painted in the middle of a forehead that comes alive like a third eye to bring enlightenment, to see past the material world. The door to God’s house does not open for everyone. How does one become worthy of the key?
One morning, Elza’s neighbor in Greenwich Village, Elisheba Frisha, retired colonel of the Israeli Army, appeared on the street without her red wig, without her false curled eyelashes and sea-blue eye shadow. Elisheba was hardly recognizable. Like a gray, punished dog she dragged herself to the greengrocer, her leather bag knocking against her gaunt legs. On her way back, pushing a cart with her heavy vegetable and fruit bag, Elisheba stopped to catch her breath in front of Elza’s house. Elza waved from her wheelchair and asked Elisheba what had happened. Elisheba smiled and said that the previous night, on taking her prescribed pills for the third time that day, she had encountered God for the first time. It had happened as follows. She’d sat up in bed, taken two tablets in her palm—one white, the other red—picked up a glass of water with the other hand, thrown the pills into her mouth, drunk a mouthful of water, thrown back her head to better swallow the pills, swallowed the pills, washed them down with water, put down the water glass, got up to go to the bathroom…But then, contrary to her intent, Elisheba had gone to the window instead. A slanting beam from the streetlight outside had stolen into her room and had fallen directly on the shotgun leaning in the corner. Everyone knew that Elisheba had a gun. She wanted to be able to put an end to herself when the right moment came.
“When the cognac starts to spill over your lip, it’s time to stop drinking,” Elisheba used to say.
She had looked at the ray of light reaching from the lamppost to the gun, and then it had happened. God had found her. She had not seen Him, had not heard Him, had not smelled Him, but He had been there. Simply put, God had been there. Elisheba felt as if she had been thrown out of a boat. She asked Elza what she should do now. Elza told her to put the shotgun in the cupboard and to throw away all her bright makeup. She wanted to tell Elisheba in English that in Latvian there’s a saying that goes Dievam nepatk, ka nabagi trako—“God doesn’t like the poor to make a scene”—but somehow it all came out wrong. Quite offended, Elisheba protested that she had more than enough money, thank you very much. The next day Elisheba was back in to her usual form.
“Forget it,” she called out brightly, as she passed Elza.
God had wandered into Elisheba’s place by accident. That’s what she decided. God is also getting old, and such things can also happen to Him.
Elza looks on as Nabuco rolls a yellow maidenhair leaf in her two-toned fingers. The inside of Nabuco’s palms are rosy white, while the other side are blue-black. In Elza’s memory the realization dawns that white is supposed to signify good, while black signifies evil. If she said this aloud, Nabuco would object. Different houses, different gods in different sacred corners. But somewhere there is only one door, one threshold for all. You must wait until you are invited to step over it. You have to live in ignorance. Blessed are the ignorant for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven. One could give all living creatures a medal of honor for living in such ignorance.
The squirrel scatters leaves while burying a large nut that some gourmet has generously thrown to her. In doing so, she releases the scent of earth. Elza breathes it in deeply. The earth is the earth is the earth. Scent is scent is scent. A large pile of fallen autumn leaves is burning on a cleared field. The whiff of smoke needles through the pre-frost, invigorated air. A soul crawls through the eye of a needle. The past is darned and the present must be worn carefully so that the future does not become threadbare.
“Ma-as.” Nabuco draws out the vowel sound.
“Miesa.”2 Elza knows well what to respond. She gazes at her deeply veined, arthritis-crippled hands. Her stiff fingers play awkwardly with her small yellow flower. It seems to Elza that she does not recognize these hands. But these are her hands, just the same as the yellow flower is the yellow flower. Trying to squeeze by, the shoulder of the past grazes Elzas’s thoughts.
Making love in a bunker at the front. Elza’s young skin feels the fingers of her lover playing on the keyboard of her neck and her breasts. She responds the same as a musical instrument newly created by a master craftsman. Her flimsy dress slips down over her shoulders and puddles on her dusty refugee boots. Her lover’s hand on her hips, a breath of warm air touches her smooth skin.
“You are so beautiful,” her lover whispers to the sound of thunder.
With his fingers he traces the outlines of Elza’s eyebrows, her nose, lips, eyelids, forehead, chin, cheeks, the contours of her ears, neck, collarbones, breasts, her solar plexus, stomach, belly button, lap, hips, knees, ankles…How wonderful reality is!
Elza has observed the changes in her body without regret or distaste, only with bewilderment. Once, when Nabuco is washing her, Elza, naked, asks to be taken to the mirror. Nabuco obediently holds Elza up under her armpits and politely stares out of the window while Elza looks. Nabuco thinks that this particular exchange too needs to happen without witnesses.
Elza gazes into the mirror. Her thin, splotchy skin is like wrinkled, un fitted linen. Empty breast coffers, a knotted network of veins, the fine wrinkling at her joints. Elza sees on her flesh hundreds of imprints left by time, like the hundreds of imprints on a fossil turned to stone. Time, which has been playful, merciful, ferocious, tender, crude, contained, irrational, sensitive, proud, cynical, polite, deceitful, honorable, unfair, merciless, thoughtful, surprising, patient, unpredictable, real…
Elza gazes at the imprints left by time. All coming to naught. Elza allows her flesh to go the way of naught. She will not stretch herself upon the rack of eternal youth. She will not follow all the latest scientific discoveries about the gene that controls aging. It seems to Elza that her journey is timeless. Elza waits for that moment of silence. Her arthritis-crippled fingers will touch it the same way they touch the yellow flower.
At night Elza can’t sleep. She weaves her thought shuttle back and forth on the loom of time.
Back and forth, back and forth. But Elza’s thoughts aren’t weavers, they don’t know what patterns to make. Elza’s thoughts are like party snappers. When someone pulls them open, they pop and bang into the air, afterward settling down once more in an eternal, silent, painless universe.
When Elza’s thought shuttle again stumbles over the small yellow flowers on Horatio Street, for a moment it seems to her that she knows the reason why. When she smells them, her timeworn memory hears an echo.
Always holding a bunch of yellow flowers, Father is leading the tiny girl to her mother’s grave. Father wants his little girl to forever love the woman who bore her and whom she never met. The girl gazes at the white marble dove, head bent, on one side of the monument. She pats the motionless bird. It seems so alive. It might flap its folded wings and fly away at any moment. But the stone dove remains where it is. It gazes down at the grave-site, always; a bunch of yellow flowers laid on the earth.
“Dvesele,” Nabuco rasps.
“Dvsele,” Elza draws out the sound.3
The color of the leaves in the garden is a sign that it will soon be All Saints’ Day or Halloween. On that one night there will be laughing about death in the city. Since no one knows yet how to exchange souls, there will be an exchange of material things. Sweets will rain down on the crowd. Children will go from house to house, collecting goodies. Elza will sit at her windows and look at how the happy, excited people in monster masks run to the death-games field. All night long drums will beat, horns and trumpets will sound, and laughter will resound in the streets.
Year after year Elza will remember herself dressed as Ice Q
ueen with a chalk-white face, wandering away from the crowd to sit all night on the riverbank. The ant-hill of thousands of lights, the splendid humps of bridges, stars that break out from the haze to be counted on your fingers. Each year anew she will dress up for the death joke parade and each year, having gone once again, she won’t know how to take part. Her soul will drag her away from the happy, colorful crowd. Her soul will sit her down in loneliness on a bench by the riverside under a golden maidenhair tree. She will feed the late pigeons with sweet bread and feel how souls gather—right here in the reflected lights, right here in the fallen maidenhair leaves, right here under the wings of the pigeons. Elza will be Elza will be Elza. She will touch the hair of the mother she never met—hair like the smooth, nearly living marble dove’s wings on her mother’s grave. Father’s warm hand will pat her comically tousled head. Her lover will dip his hands in the city’s river and will wash her chalk-white face clean. Right here on this lonely bench he will kiss her. And above his lips a tiny white powder mark will remain.
Elza will sit almost frozen, afraid to make a move that might frighten the souls. Just the quiet, rhythmic beating of her pulse in her cramped hands, only the throaty gurgling of the pigeons and the rustling of their nails in the golden maidenhair leaves.
“Yuga-a,” Nabuco calls out almost in victory, because she senses the lesson coming to an end.
“Jgs,” Elza drags out the reins of her words.4
Elza’s soul is a horse. Patient and loyal. It has been harnessed for a long journey. It has moved slowly and resolutely past both short-term resting places and comfortable, long-term camps. Elza’s soul is a deported refugee’s cart. It knows where the beginning of the road is but not where the road leads. Elza’s soul is a constant yoke, a gift from God, whom she has never met. Not even for a moment, not even by chance, not even at night washing pills down with water, like Elisheba. Elza is still waiting for a sign showing her where the road is leading. Without this, her soul cannot be unyoked. Elza thinks that the long and lonely journey of her soul has all been in preparation for this time of waiting. Elza’s soul is a yellow earth flower in the kingdom of today. It has its own way of growing, its own way of marking time—a yellow flower is a yellow flower is a yellow flower. It grows by itself by the roadside, horse-drawn carriages race past her, not realizing that a sign can be so insignificant. Insignificantly, it points out that the road upward and the road downward are one and the same.
“That’s all for today.” With the precision of a stopwatch, Nabuco closes the little book. She puts it back in Elza’s hands, once more organizes the blanket around Elza’s knees. Then she pushes Elza’s “coach” homeward. The same old frames speed up past Elza’s eyes.
…people, buildings, dogs, sidewalk cafes, squirrels, the golden-coin leaves of the maidenhair tree, pigeons, short Puerto Rican flower vendors, faded rose petals in gutters, discounted book piles on sidewalks, antique tea services, fresh chocolate cakes, mannequins—transparent virtual lovers with shaved heads in shop windows…
Elza hurries by. Elza is Elza is Elza. When the horse-drawn carriage stops at the insignificant sign, Elza and her soul will understand, without the need for words.
TRANSLATED FROM LATVIAN BY MARGITA GAILITIS AND VIJA KOSTOFF
[ITALY]
MARCO CANDIDA
Dream Diary
Now, however, I want to get back to what I was talking about in the first place, before I interrupted myself with all these dreams and ideas, meaning I want to explain, if I can, how these dreams I’m writing about come to me, where and how I’m sleeping while I dream, my sleeping positions, and what I eat before going to sleep.
First off I’ll talk about my room, so to do that, I’ll describe a dream I had on April 6, 2006—or I should say a dream that I wrote down on April 6, 2006, but I could have had the dream before midnight, so—obviously—on April 5, 2006. I say could have because on April 6, 2006, I wrote down two dreams that I very likely had at two different times during the night. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone having two dreams during the same sleep. So more than likely I woke up but didn’t write down my one dream and then I went back to sleep and had another, woke up again, and I wrote down both dreams one after the other as if they were part of the same sleep cycle. This must be how it happened, and it’s the only time it does happen in my entire dream diary.
In the first dream from April 6, 2006, my room is a very normal seven-by-four meter room with a wooden dresser to the right of some French doors off the back balcony. On top of the dresser, there’s a fifteen-inch television and a CD case with fifteen CDs—there’s mostly 1970s music in my room. The dresser has six drawers, with the bottom three full of files of A4 paper, manuscripts in Times New Roman or Book Antiqua, and the top three full of underwear, socks, and the shirts and T-shirts I only wear around the house. There’s a white computer keyboard, black letters stamped on the keys, and clippings from books and newspapers are taped to the back of the door: a Dante poem, Aphorism 84 from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, an article on Pablo Picasso, a couple of paragraphs from works by Martin Heidegger.
I think our dreams are often fragments from the furthest reaches of our imagination, and that’s why, even with the dreams that seem the most normal, the most real, there’s also the feeling that something’s wrong. Take a landscape from a dream: maybe the bridge over a river running through some fields and hills is the same bridge we saw four days ago in some movie on some TV channel, and the river running through those fields and hills with the bridge across it might be a stream instead of a river, the Ossona Stream, to be exact, which runs through Tortona and flows into the Scrivia River, and the two banks of the stream might not be the banks of the Ossona Stream, which runs through Tortona and flows into the Scrivia River, maybe they’re the sides of that pit that was dug out some five years back for the foundation and plinths on the building site you were supervising for your firm, meaning, the place you used to work, and that landscape of fields and hills with the river running through it and the bridge across the river might be a landscape of fields and hills from an impressionist painting in a show at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa that you happened to catch a few weeks back, and the stars reflecting off the water, the stars in the sky, might be the drops of condensed milk that landed on your blue pajama top when you had that attack of hyperphagia in front of the TV at two in the morning, and…even so, that dream from April 6, 2006 seems to include, down to the last minute detail, everything you’d see in my room, my very own room, without any feeling at all that something’s wrong.
Aside from the fact that in the dream room everything is breathing.
Yes, that’s right, I can’t think of a better word for it: in the dream room, every single thing breathes in and breathes out. Every object in the room is swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking, systematically—swelling and shrinking every few seconds…and something else is happening besides: everything is oozing some sort of fluid that’s—how to put it?—that’s greasy. It squirts out, spraying the entire room with its greasy drops, it’s on the walls, the bed, the floor, on a book, on my wallet. And with the breathing, greasy floor, you can’t stay on your feet, you need to hold onto something, but that something’s also breathing and greasy. And because the ceiling light is raining grease, I slip and fall on my face. But before falling on my face, I try to hook the table with my right hand, but I only manage to grab onto a book, my small 1987 New Abridged Zingarelli Dictionary. There on the floor, the New Abridged Zingarelli Dictionary disintegrates in my hand, and that’s when I see it.
First, the Zingarelli hasn’t disintegrated. What’s really happened is that at the center of the cover there’s now a hole with some kind of pudding inside—a sunken pudding—and this pudding is sending out a silver light. I see things in this light. Inside the soft Zingarelli pudding, there’s a ballpoint pen—the pen I use for underlining my books. I have no idea what my pen’s doing in my Zingarelli, but there it is. I watch it bobbing aro
und a while in the glowing pudding before I reach to pluck it out. Right away, something else takes its place: the yellow notepad I use for scribbling down ideas and stories, and right beside the notepad there’s my old wooden globe from when I was a boy that wound up in the trash after my brother chucked it at my head and gave me a lump almost as big as the globe itself. I can’t imagine what the globe’s doing in my Zingarelli Dictionary. And I try to pull the notepad and globe out, too. But I realize the globe is much too large to come out of the hole that’s opened in the cover of the Zingarelli, and it’s also a little deeper in the pudding than the pen or notepad, so I have to insert my whole hand, almost up to the elbow, inside my dictionary. I’m wiggling my fingers around trying to figure out how to grab hold of the globe and pull it out, when I realize the book’s turning into a sticky sack—and inside the book it’s hot, like a hot-water bottle—and the deeper my arm goes, the more the book stretches, widens. The hole in the book cover’s growing, and I pull out the globe, and then the hole shrinks up again with a sound like a creamy cake going splat against a wall. As soon as the globe’s out, there’s another object, a yellow sweatshirt with a white star sewn on the back. Of course I recognize it: it’s the sweatshirt I always wore from ages twelve to sixteen whenever I sat down to read or write. I put it on every time, maybe thinking that star on the back would help me. So I keep this sweatshirt tucked away in the dresser or in a box in the closet—and once in a while, I’ll look for it. When the sweatshirt’s out, I see something else rising to the surface that’s important to me, or used to be. And I’m beginning to realize that if I don’t stop, I’ll just keep pulling things out of my dictionary, and then I have an idea. I set the Zingarelli on the floor and I take down the stuffed toy dog that’s hanging on my wall. The dog swells and shrinks in my hands and oozes grease. I can’t figure out how it’s taking in air: maybe its grease-soaked fabric is really porous; still, I feel like I’m holding a live thing, a living object. I poke the stuffed dog and my finger sinks into something like putty or Plasticine. I scrape out a furrow then make an opening and once again a silver light comes pouring out. Inside there’s a red rubber ball like the kind from the toy store down the street that my brother and I would buy when we were little to bounce on my nonna’s balcony.
Best European Fiction 2011 Page 24