Not that dying is any big deal, since almost all of the best sons and daughters of this planet have died ahead of me. Naturally it’ll be a blow for my aging father, my autistic twin brother will develop some new system without me, and the as-yet speechless newborn who was still too small to sleep over will never get to know her father. I do have some regrets, mind you. I wish I’d slept around a bit more and planted the rose cuttings in the soil.
When the girl with the shiny hair gently places her hand on my stomach, I notice she’s got a green clasp in her hair that’s shaped like a butterfly. The woman who is nursing me in the final quarter of an hour of my existence bears the symbol of the continuity of life in her hair.
Rose cuttings can’t survive without water, which is why I hoist myself up on my elbows and point at the backpack.
—Plants, I say.
She stoops over the backpack and moves it closer to the bed. I don’t even have to know the right words; I point and she’s a woman who can understand me. For a moment, I therefore briefly consider whether we might have made a pair, if I hadn’t been on my way out of this world, as it were. She could be ten years older, about thirty-two, but right now that doesn’t feel like any age gap worth quibbling about. The sinister pain in my gut, however, prevents me from developing this steady relationship of ours any further. When I’ve finished throwing up the remains of the airplane breadcrumbs and cheese sauce, she helps me to carefully unwrap the moist newspaper from the rose cutting, as if she were removing the bandages around a patient’s leg after a successful operation.
—Did you bring plants with you? she asks, and now that she’s closer I see that there are yellow dots on the butterfly’s wings.
—Yes, I reply in her language with the fluency of a native.
She nods as if I am a man who knows what he’s talking about.
Then I throw in some Latin for good measure:
—Rosa candida.
When it comes to plants and cultivation, my performance and vocabulary both expand considerably. Then I add:
—Without thorns.
—Without thorns, really? she says, folding my jeans and placing them tidily on the chair, over my blue cable-knit sweater, the last sweater Mom knit for me. In a moment’s time the woman with a butterfly hair clip will also be the last of seven women to have seen me naked.
—And are the other two plants also—she hesitates—Rosa candida?
—Yes, for safety, I say, to produce offspring, just in case one of them dies, I say, allowing myself to slip back onto the plastic mattress again.
Since she has already been witness to my suffering, and helped me to throw up and water the rose cuttings, I feel the urge to share something more personal with her. Which is why I pull out the photo of my child and hand it to her.
—My daughter, I say.
She takes the picture and scrutinizes it.
—Cute, she says and smiles at me. How old is she?
She asks simple and manageable questions that my grasp of the language can easily handle.
—About seven months.
—Very cute, she repeats, but not much hair for a seven-month-year-old girl maybe.
This I had not been expecting. You place your trust in another person’s hands, sharing something important with them in that final moment, and they let you down. All of a sudden I feel it’s vital that the last person I communicate with in this life should understand this hair thing once and for all. That photographs can be deceiving and that hair on blond children isn’t particularly visible in the first year, that there’s no comparison to dark-haired children who are normally born with a lot of hair. There’s a lot I’d like to get off my chest, and it’s only my pain and limited linguistic skills that are preventing me from defending my daughter.
—About seven months, I repeat, as if this definitively explained the lack of hair. Then I realize it was a bit rash of me to show her the photograph and I no longer want her to be fidgeting with it.
—Give it to me, I say abruptly, stretching out my hand to take the picture back. I look at Flóra Sól, my daughter, grinning with two teeth in her lower gum, and remember in fact seeing her with a small curl of hair over her forehead, fresh out of the bath, when I came to say my good-byes to her and her mother without ringing ahead of me.
I close my eyes as I’m wheeled into the operating theater and feel cold under the sheet. Pain is the only tangible reality I can cling to right now, although my suffering obviously pales into insignificance when compared to the mutilations and horrors of this world, droughts, hurricanes, and warfare.
I try to gauge my chances of survival in the expressions and gestures of the people dressed in green. Someone says something to someone else, who laughs heartily behind a green mask; it’s not as if there’s anything serious going on here, not as if anyone’s about to die. There could be nothing more crushing in my final moments than to be subjected to the flippancy of this motley crew, the careless, slapdash attitudes of those who’ll still be here once I’m gone. They aren’t even talking about me—as far as I can make out—but some movie that one of them went to see and that someone else is going to see tonight. The Poppy Field, yeah, I’ve heard about that movie, it’s about a man who’s badly rejected and kidnaps the woman who rejected him and then they rob a bank together; the movie recently won some special award at a film festival.
Suddenly someone briskly strokes my hair. My ginger mop of hair, Mom would have said.
—Don’t worry, it’s your appendix, someone says behind a mask.
Strokes isn’t really the right word. It’s more as if someone were briskly running their fingers through my hair. I’m a bird and take off with heavy flapping wings. Hovering in midair above, I follow what’s going on below but take no part in it, because I’m free from all things. In the instant before everything fades I feel I can hear Dad beside me:
—There’s no future in roses, Lobbi boy.
Nine
When I wake up I don’t immediately remember where I am. For a moment I feel I catch a whiff of wet soil and vegetation, like waking up in a tent in the rain, and yet everything is white. I’m all alone in the room, which my eyes scan before settling on the bedside table beside me. Three green stalks have been placed in as many plastic glasses; I recognize them, they’re my rose cuttings. A handwritten note has been squeezed between them. I reach under the covers to grope the body that has been cut open and patched up to make sure it’s real, that I’m still alive. I check my pulse and then feel a heartbeat. I move farther down and gently stroke my stomach muscles, once clockwise, and also take the time to investigate other parts of the body. Finally I reach the bandaged spot where I was operated on and gently press the wound. Then I hoist myself up on my elbows and, despite my light-headedness and the stretch on my stitches, manage to fish out my dictionary from the top pocket of the backpack. It takes a while to decipher the whole message, word by word: I took care of your rose cuttings and passed the word on to my colleague in the next shift. Am taking time off to visit my parents in the country. Speedy recovery, red-haired boy. P.S. Found Christmas package in the backpack when I was checking the plants.
She’s left the package from Dad on top of the quilt. It’s wrapped in Christmas gift paper with reindeer and bell patterns and a curled blue ribbon.
I open the package. It’s a pair of pajamas, thick flannel pajamas with long, light blue stripes. They look like Dad’s stripy pajamas and those he bought for my brother Jósef. I take them out of the plastic and remove the cardboard. Dad has removed the price tag. As I lift the pajama top up, a handwritten card falls out of one of the sleeves:
Lobbi lad. There is much to be remembered and to be thankful for over the past year. Jósef and myself send you our warmest regards and hope that these unpretentious pajamas will come in useful in those “perilous storms” (his quotation marks on the card) they have overseas.
Yours, Dad and Jósef.
He has even got Jósef to scrawl his initials u
nderneath. What did he mean by “unpretentious”? He knows I normally sleep in my underpants; is it pretentious to sleep without pajamas the way I do?
I’m going to get out of bed in my bare feet, but the stitches hurt and I feel dizzy. I feel how heavy I am, as if I were up to my knees against a strong current, so I lie down again and doze off.
When I wake up again there’s a woman in a white coat standing by my bed, with long brown hair tied in a ponytail, but she’s not the same one as the last time. I get some sweetened teabag tea to drink and a slice of toast with cheese. She talks to me, as I drink the tea, and shows some interest in the plants.
—What species is this? she asks.
I choose words that are befitting to this new lease on life.
—Eight-petaled roses, I say, in an unrecognizable, husky voice.
—Are they all the same species?
—Yes, two of them are extra cuttings, in case one dies, to produce some offspring, I say with a thick tongue and in this stranger’s voice; my body and voice don’t seem to match anymore.
—Your voice will soon come back to you, she says, that’s the anesthetic.
I’m incredibly sleepy and feel I’m dropping off again, as if I can neither shake off my dreams nor stay awake.
The next time I wake up there are two people in white coats standing on either side of my bed talking to each other. One of them lifts up the duvet on my bandaged side, and although I manage to grasp a few words here and there, they’re talking fast and I can’t place the sentences in any context. I’m still finding it difficult to stay awake. They’re talking about me, asking me about something, and as I try to formulate an answer I start to fade again, dozing off mid-conversation.
—He’s out of it, let’s just let him sleep, is the last thing I hear.
Because I regularly fall asleep when people try to talk to me, I get to stay two days longer in the hospital. No one makes any remarks about the rose cuttings; each new shift seems to be filled in and I’m allowed to keep them in peace.
Every time I doze off I have the same dream. I dream I’m in new and pretty good blue Wellingtons and that I’m working in a famous and remote rose garden. I have a clear picture of the boots as I awaken; they’re probably one size too big. Nothing else is in color in the dream, not even the roses, just the blue boots. Then the dream takes a sudden twist, which I’m forced to follow. Looking down a narrow alley, I see Mom standing at the end of it, silhouetted against the light. I follow her in the blue boots up a long staircase and to a door she disappears behind. I knock on the door and she comes to it. She offers me teabag tea with sugar.
When I finally wake up properly, I’ve missed three days on the calendar. Now that I’m alive again there are countless options open to me. Because I wake up in a sweat after the dream, the nurse who is on duty on my last morning at the hospital wants me to have a shower before I check out. I follow her to the bathroom, taking one short step at a time because the stitches hurt. This one has brown eyes, too, but short brown hair. I would have preferred to be left alone, but she stands there watching me, in case something happens to me, I suppose; there’s no denying that the women who have been looking after me have shown great care. I shed my hospital clothes and place them on a chair in front of the bathroom mirror. When I step out of the shower she has already wiped the steam off the mirror. I contemplate my mortal flesh as she changes the bandage on the right-hand side of my stomach. Black bristles protrude from the skin. Right now, the moment after I’ve stepped out of the shower with the nurse on my left-hand side, I feel like I’m nothing more than this new body with a scar. Feelings, memories, and dreams no longer make me what I am, but I’m first and foremost a male body made of flesh and blood. Having experienced death and resurrection and communicated with three brown-eyed nurses in as many days, I graduate from the hospital and am given a box with four pink painkillers to take home with me.
I get dressed and pack the rose cuttings back into my backpack along with the plant collection and pajamas. When I dig into the backpack in search of a clean T-shirt to put on, I find Mom’s last jar of rhubarb jam, which Dad stuck in there. The nurse hands me a few sheets of newspaper to wrap around the plants, and I immediately notice they’re theater reviews.
—Do you have anyone to go to? the doctor who checks me out asks.
I tell him I’ll be in good hands.
The only challenge I face in this life right now is zipping up the fly on my jeans. I do my best to fend for myself and manage to slip into my pants unassisted, but I’m sore around the wound, and in the end the brown-eyed woman comes to my rescue.
Ten
I ring Dad from a phone booth on the way out of the hospital. I clear my throat several times while the phone is ringing and tell him as nonchalantly as possible that I unexpectedly had to have my appendix out. I do my best to strike a casual tone, but my voice is all husky and weird, as if some total stranger had stepped in to dub the first chapters of this brief autobiographical film of my life, and all of a sudden I’m almost crying.
Dad wants me to come home on the next plane. When I tell him it’s out of the question, he wants to fly out himself and take care of me while I’m recovering. I can hear he’s worried.
—Your mother would have wanted that, he says. Actually I’ve been wanting to take Jósef abroad for some time, he adds. He likes flying.
I tell him how things are, that I’ve been loaned an apartment.
—A student’s cubbyhole way up on the sixth floor, with no elevator.
—Well then, Jósef and I will just stay at the inn.
He talks like someone out of an old book, as if there were only one inn in the entire city. As if they half expected to be given no shelter because the guesthouse would be full and they’d have to sleep in a barn.
It takes me a good while to convince my father, who is just three years away from being eighty and on the point of hopping on a plane with his handicapped son, that I don’t need anyone to take care of me. I struggle to revive my voice and tell him not to worry, that I’m going to be staying with my friend who is studying archaeology here.
—You remember Thórgun, I say, the girl who was in my class for the whole of primary school and often came home with me, the one who played the cello, with glasses and braces.
She was also actually in secondary school with me, too, but had stopped coming home with me by then. Then I’d bumped into her in a flower shop when she was back in the country on vacation; I needed some fertilizer and she held a viola cornuta. On the way out she informally invited me to come over and stay with her.
—It’s a very nice apartment she has, I now say, having previously given him the impression that it was a student slum—I’ll be quick to recover there. She’ll definitely cook for me, I quickly add to appease my father, who’s always protective of his twins, his only children. What I don’t tell him is that the archaeology student is, in fact, away for a week, looking at graveyards in two towns and broadening her horizons.
—You can always come home, he says. I haven’t touched anything in your room, it’s just as you left it, except that I tidied it up a bit, changed the sheets, and mopped the floor. It took me a whole evening to iron the sheets.
—We’ve been through all that, Dad. I’ll be here for a few days more until the stitches are removed, then I’m buying a secondhand car and driving down south to the garden, which will take me a good few days.
I can feel how tired I am and simply don’t have the stamina for a long dialogue. Although I’ve yet to thank him for the pajamas. Winding the conversation down requires both concentration and energy.
—Thanks for the pajamas, they came in very handy.
Then I give Dad the phone number of my old confirmation mate—as he calls her—who is lending me her bed while she’s away digging up two graveyards with a trowel and gaining some experience that will presumably be a revelation to her and broaden her vision of the world. He says he’s going to call me again this eve
ning to find out how I’ve managed.
It isn’t far to my friend’s place, but the stitches hurt when I walk. As I’m walking there, I take in the buildings and the people. Most of the women definitely have brown hair and brown eyes.
The keys are in the bakery on the ground floor, although the apartment itself is on the sixth floor at the top, a loft, and no elevator. There are four keys in the bunch, and the woman in the bakery explains to me what each one is for: one for the hall door downstairs, the others for the cellar, mailbox, and my friend’s apartment. The staircase creaks; each step is a challenge for my newly stitched wound. The apartment is cold, but everything is clean and well ordered. The bed has been neatly made, and I’m assuming that under the bedspread there is the duvet that I’ve been loaned for a week, while my schoolmate, whom I’ve actually lost all contact with, investigates tombstones. It’s obvious that a female lives here; it’s full of small, unnecessary objects, candlesticks, lace tablecloths, incense, cushions, books, and pictures I have to be careful not to bump into. She’s obviously bought everything in an antiques market. The nano apartment has an antique desk on which there is an antique lamp, and then there’s an antique bed, antique candlesticks, and an antique mirror in the hallway in which I catch my reflection as I enter.
The height of the mirror is clearly intended for a female of average height, and I have to bend over considerably to be able to contemplate myself.
I run my hand though my thick, bristly hair, one of my striking characteristic gestures. There is no question about it: I’m eerily pale, even when you consider the fact that many red-haired people look drowsy all their lives. Despite my boyish appearance, I feel like a decrepit old man, who’s seen it all but is trapped in the body of a young man. From now on I guess it’s just a question of killing time until I reach the grave; can anything surprise me anymore?
The Greenhouse Page 3