Invisible Woman
and Other Stories

Slavenka Drakulić

Invisible Woman
and Other Stories

Translated by
Christina Pribichevich Zorić
with Jacob Agee

F R A K T U R A

Co-funded by the
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © Slavenka Drakulić & Fraktura, 2018.

Copyright of the translation © Christina Pribichevich Zorić and Jacob Agee.

All rights reserved. Published in Croatia by Fraktura.
www.fraktura.hr

Edited by Paula Gordon

Proofread by Paula Gordon

Jacket design by Klara Rusan

Designed and composed by Maja Glušić, Fraktura.

Printed and bound in Croatia, EU.

ISBN 978-953-358-500-0

Ma mère devient décolorée. Vieillir, c’est se décolorer, être transparent.

— Annie Ernaux,
Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit

My mother’s color is fading. To grow old is to fade, to become transparent.

— Annie Ernaux,
I Remain in Darkness,
translated by Tanya Leslie

Invisible Woman

You ask what disturbed me so much.

How would I describe it …? One day in my own apartment I met a person I didn’t know. I was heading out but stopped. Before me stood a grey-haired woman with blue eyes. She was looking at me, aghast, unblinking. A strange woman, and yet somehow known, surrounded by greyish haze. It seemed to me that I had seen a ghost.

I didn’t immediately recognise myself. First of all, my hair is not grey – look! I neatly dye it every month with L’Oréal light blond. And there are many other hues too, some sounding crazily appealing – champagne, strawberry, cognac, like something you’d eat or drink – but this one is the most dear to me, I’ve always used it. I dye my hair myself, I’ve gotten used to it over the years since I retired. But it’s not so much about the hair, for this colour is sufficiently light to look grey in half-light. In fact, it was the face that scared me. You see, this was the wrinkled face of an old woman. It was as though I had seen in the mirror my older sister, who’s been dead for at least ten years. We were quite alike. But I couldn’t possibly have seen my dead sister! It took me a moment or two to collect myself and get it through my head that this woman staring at me was not an apparition, but my own reflection in the mirror. And the realisation that I was she shocked me further still.

Why did I figure that an apparition was in front of me?

Well, it was already late, it was dusk, and only the contours of this person were visible. She somehow seemed to be … fading away? Like when you look at yourself in a very old mirror, dimmed by brown discolouration. The stains spread and entire parts become hazed, the rest of the image hovers, the edges are unclear, evanescent. A bit frightening. It’s easy to say that this is not the real image of a person, and yet, it seems it is. That is how others see you, or don’t see you. As if you were a ghost. And the real person too – I have experienced it personally – becomes somehow paler, increasingly transparent. I thought that this unknown person, this strange woman, had somehow entered the apartment, perhaps because I’d forgotten to lock the door. I know this happens with me, more and more often I forget to lock up. Or I leave the key in the outside lock. And then it dawned on me that it was I, as others see me. My own image.

The mirror has always been there, in the entryway, right by the front door. A big old mirror from my late mother, from the old apartment. With a worm-eaten baroque frame. I had already forgotten that it was there – so many useless things have piled up over the years. I keep planning to clear up thoroughly, throw out the junk, but I haven’t got the strength. I am tired. I might have removed the coat from the hanger or the curtain from the window and thus rediscovered the half-hidden mirror. But I noticed it only when I saw in it this strange person – myself.

After this encounter, all mirrors became a real nightmare. I’m always looking anew at this person standing in front of me. I ask myself how it is possible for a person not to see, not to recognise themselves immediately. Is it possible to see oneself so differently? True, my glance in the direction of this person is usually hurried, quick, nonchalant, superficial, the way you look at a passer-by. But, for the love of God, I almost crashed into myself! I was walking straight towards this woman, who was approaching without showing the slightest intention of moving aside for me. I stopped at a distance of only a few feet and it was only then that in this woman I saw myself. The way others see me. If they see me at all.

This encounter with myself, the way others see me, disturbed me for another reason, too. It reminded me of something else that I hadn’t seen for a long time. Of the gaze of a man. No, not of some particular man! But occasionally something similar happens when I’m walking and see an unknown man coming towards me. The pavement is narrow and you must inevitably squeeze by each other. When two people squeeze past, they usually instinctively look one another in the eye. Unless they really want to avoid it, but why should they? Their glances meet, it’s inescapable, so I believed. Perhaps because I was used to it. He is, let’s say, middle-aged, his temples are already grey, he’s younger than you, but still not young enough to be your son. And then you notice his glance. He’s looking at you, and you can tell he doesn’t see you. He’s looking through you, as if you’re made of glass. You see how his gaze passes through you. Of course, your first thought is that he’s some madman, a somnambulist about to crash into you. He’s moving like you’re not even there, as if his whole body will cross through you, not just his gaze. Still, at the very last moment he detours round you as though an indefinite object has blocked his way on the road, a disturbance, a living obstacle. I didn’t recognise myself, and this is already terrible enough, but now others don’t see me either!

I’ve become an obstacle, nothing more. And that’s only the beginning.

The beginning of what?

Well … of people looking through me. Or, if their gaze does rest on me, of feeling their sympathy, sometimes I might even say repulsion. I feel more and more invisible, like I’m fading away. Yes, of course I certainly exist, but what does this mean if I’m not receiving acknowledgement of my existence from others? If they act like they don’t even see me?

I live near a big crossroads. Sometimes if the traffic is light and there is daylight, I dare to cross the street without waiting for the green signal. I shouldn’t be doing this because the cars drive fast and they could easily run over someone crossing the street against the red signal. It happened that a driver just didn’t see me, didn’t slow down. This experience frightened me. Naturally, I can’t run anymore, nor do I want to. Sometimes I stand at this crossroads and watch drivers braking when they see a mother with a stroller crossing the street, a woman with a child, young people. I am the same size as a girl who, right before me at the same spot, crossed the street against the light. But all the same, the driver acted as though I weren’t there. He was driving so fast that I had to step back onto the kerb. Of course, it was not the same driver that had slowed down for the girl. But still …

You ask how I explain this to myself.

I seem to be discovering a new dimension of existence. I simultaneously exist and don’t exist, because I’m … fading away. Maybe in society there is some sort of custom that prohibits telling older women that they are in fact turning into glass? First the translucent kind, then the completely transparent. Size means nothing, weight and height are irrelevant. Clothes too.

It’s not exactly that you don’t exist, more like you’re living in some other dimension. Everything is the same, and yet – it’s not the same. People behave differently towards you, and it is you, as the invisible woman, who must adapt. It’s just that for me it’s not at all easy to do. On the contrary, it took me quite some time to even comprehend that I’m becoming invisible. In the shop, in the bank, at any counter, on the street …

It took me long enough to notice how I’m disappearing; I first saw it in the eyes of others. In fact, the hardest part for me is that I still see myself just as clearly as before. I’m conscious of the change, but I’m still visible and real, a living person, although I’ve grown old.

I thought to myself, if I now exist in this invisible form, maybe this transparent thing I’m turning into is – pure ghost?

Yes, I’m asking, even though I know you don’t have the answer.

You may have noticed that up to this point, I have not used the word “ageing”. It is a process, at first quite a slow and imperceptible one. At a certain moment it begins to hasten, and you might only notice it then because someone else has noticed, and suddenly you have become – old.

You say I’m harbouring a negative image of myself?

No, no! The problem is that I don’t have such a negative self-image, I simply see myself differently than others do. Certainly not as some unknown woman in a mirror. Or as an apparition. Or a transparent ghost. It’s the others, it’s their perception. When other people stop noticing you, soon you no longer see yourself.

You’re interested in knowing when I started to feel I was changing, growing old?

First it was my body that changed. I originally noticed it when buying new clothes. All of a sudden nothing seemed to fit. Or better put, I felt as though I were trying on someone else’s clothes. And it was only yesterday that tailored dresses and form-fitting tops looked quite good on me. How could it be that there was no longer anything that might suit me? Everything had become too tight and too short, somehow unsuitable. I no longer had the strength to try anything on. It became boring to me, pointless. Spending hours going through piles of clothes to get to something you like. Furthermore, I shuddered at the changing rooms, at the neon light and the tight space in which you have to undress while trying not to look at your tired, dejected body, your surplus kilograms, your sagging skin. No, no, this was not due to my current state of mind. The exact reverse: I’m unnerved due to the fact that nothing fits me. I started to hesitate at the entrances to those shops where, until yesterday, saleswomen would greet me warmly since I spent a lot on myself – and it showed.

Now, if I do resolve to enter, the young saleswoman scans me from head to heels, assessing if I’m just going to take up her time. These very beautiful girls are not kind. They are brusque. They make me painfully aware of my age. At my age I’m supposed to be more self-confident, I say to myself. Don’t let some whippersnapper stop you from shopping. As long as you have money, you’re the boss. But it doesn’t help. I feel terrible. I no longer go shopping.

I used to find pleasure in a beautiful pair of shoes. But when I could no longer walk in high heels, I found out that elegant low-heel pumps are quite a rarity. Previously I had never noticed this – it had seemed to me that there were all sorts of shoes and they were all stylish. When my soles started to hurt – “madam, your arches are falling,” as the orthopaedist explained – I started wearing trainers. I remember when a friend of mine showed me her bunions one summer. Back then she was only fifty-six. “Your arches are falling,” I told her, and she looked at me in bewilderment. She just waved her hand as if to say it’ll pass. It didn’t pass, and the pain got worse and worse, until she too started wearing comfortable flats.

But you asked when my invisibility, as I call it, began.

Until recently I’d have said that it began with the encounter with the unknown woman in the mirror, with the non-recognition of myself. Thinking about it today, I’d say it was a longer process. I would call this process the Disappearance Chronicles. It is strange how particular parts of a person gradually disappear.

Is the face the first to disappear?

No way, the face is not first! From today’s vantage point, I know that the face is the last to disappear. You don’t stare at it, but you see it, you meet with it daily. And the people around you, they still look only at your face.

The first symptoms of invisibility begin not on the street, but in bed. In the conjugal bed. My husband and my invisibility are closely linked. It began on my sixty-third birthday.

He’d had a few. Later, in the bedroom, while I was undressing, he said I was fat. Just like that, fat! He had never said this before, never used the word.

He himself wasn’t all that skinny. He said it as if he’d just then – after a long time – looked at this body, my ageing body. And it was unknown to him. Then when he did recognise it, it was as though with these words he both acknowledged and simultaneously dismissed it. Dismissed, that’s how I felt at that moment. I still remember the horrific feeling of shame that overwhelmed me as I stood naked before him, who saw me that way. I remember, I was going through the menopause and I’d gotten a little belly that I could easily camouflage with clothes. It happens to all women. I was maybe five kilograms overweight, but I looked a lot better than him, with that beer belly of his.

I know, I should have been on a diet, lost the damn kilograms. Gone to the gym or yoga … I should have taken better care of myself. But I didn’t have the time back then: I was still working, I had an interesting job and friends. Anyway, was he taking care of himself? No. He found it normal that I should take care of myself and he didn’t have to. It was as though he’d suddenly slapped my face, though that never actually happened.

I felt more and more like a piece of furniture, a useful piece that only occasionally speaks, and more often listens, cooks, saves him from loneliness and depression. My husband was a good man, but books interested him most, not people. He didn’t live completely in this world. I was his only link with reality until he died from dementia.

And so, that night I withdrew to my side of the conjugal bed. He stretched out his arm to draw me in and embrace me, as he always did before sleep. He knew he’d said something bad. “I didn’t mean it,” he whispered. He didn’t mean it, but he said it, because that was in fact how he saw me.

I kept to my side of the bed. Don’t despair because of him, it’s not worth it, I told myself.

There comes a time when we are too old and too wise to suffer over such words. At that moment I conducted myself very rationally and calmly. But the pain I felt remained, and today it’s still there, I can practically feel for it, like a small lump in my breast. Yes, on the left side, of course. Here, in the heart area. Like a pebble that chafes.

I no longer wished to be intimate with him. We tried, yes, several times. He occasionally showed a slight interest, though more from habit. And I responded, also out of habit. But instead of the bedroom, I changed in the bathroom now, and I traded lacy silk panties for high-waisted cotton briefs – this sort of intimacy was over for me. Somewhere around the age of sixty-five. And it was no longer pleasant for me, either. At a certain point, intercourse became painful. When my gynaecologist gave me a lubricant (“the mucosa seems very dry”), it was already too late – I no longer needed it.

We lived together out of a love that turned into solidarity, out of a habit that became an obligation and out of a fear of being alone. But it tortures me that we didn’t know better how to help each other. He could no longer protect me from fear, from pain. Can anyone?

No one touches me anymore, except the hands of doctors, hairdressers, dentists, but these are not gentle touches – they’re all only there to fix something.

Recently I waited in hospital for hours for my turn for a standard eye exam, due to my cataracts. I remember, I was sitting completely hopeless among an equally hopeless crowd of people. Our charts were in the doctors’ offices, in the hands of nurses who came out every now and then and loudly called for people. I was already glued to the seat when they called me. The check-up was short and only confirmed what I felt anyway, some sort of creeping blindness. After so much sitting and waiting and the loudly uttered confirmation that a part of my body was failing me, I felt half-dead. I could hardly wait to get home.

I need more and more time to shake off depression and I sometimes cannot do it alone. I need a human being to whom I can confess my fear of blindness, admit that I’m tired and that I can no longer waste time in waiting rooms to have confirmed what I already know, that there is no cure.

I called a friend. She listened to my not-too-long lament, my attempt at describing this feeling of sinking, suffocating, vanishing … After that I felt even worse. What did I expect? What could anyone tell me to make me feel better? I thought a hot tub full of scented bubble-bath might relieve the cramping I was feeling in every part of my body, but turning on the tap and waiting for the tub to fill seemed simply too strenuous. Instead I lay down on the couch, covered my head and cried. There was no one to even just sit and hold my hand, even though I know there’s no consolation. In any case, the experience of choking in fear isn’t transferrable.

When my husband died, I spent days washing the curtains. Not only washing, but starching and ironing them as well. I had never done that before. Never washed curtains in my life! It was like a cleansing ritual. I was burying the past, my youth. With slow movements of the iron I traversed these curtains of thin cotton linen with lace trimmings. But I never hung them back up on the windows.

It has already been a long time since, instead of going out in the evening with friends – to a café or a concert, or sometimes to the theatre – I started to watch TV. And no, I don’t read like I used to, either. My sight is deteriorating. I don’t go out, especially at night, the darkness bothers me. I’m somehow more interested now in the lives of others – not of real people, but of those in TV shows or films. When I rouse myself out of this dull goggling at the screen, I feel how hollow I am, and that this hollowness in my head is being filled with spider-webbed soporifics which put me to sleep and don’t allow me to think.

I wonder why I’m telling you all this.

This encounter with my own self in the mirror disturbed me. My friend took me to you, for you to calm me down, supposedly. But how could you even help me? Yes, the only way is by listening to me … Or – could you perhaps write me a prescription?

It’s Nothing

“It’s nothing,” said the doctor, not shifting his gaze from the computer screen displaying the results of her blood test. In so doing, he also waved his hand backwards as if swatting away a fly. “Your test results are perfectly fine,” he added, certain that these words would finally convince her. But she was unsettled precisely by that small abrasive flick of the hand, by which he seemed to indicate there was nothing more to be said. The little black numbers say she is healthy – so why, then, is she asserting otherwise?

She stood at the door of the surgery, indecisively, with her hand on the door handle and with a feeling that her GP hadn’t understood at all what she was saying. The room was small and stuffy – the narrow couch, the desk, the medical cabinet and the two chairs all barely fit into it. The desk was buried in papers – why so much paper, when he has a computer? – topped by an untouched cup of coffee. Suddenly she felt sympathy for this man in his not-very-clean lab coat who spent all his days here.

The pneumonia had passed. She felt fine, but still, something had changed since the incident. Something unrelated to these test results. She herself had changed and was trying to explain this to him. She had to repeat to him, again, that she remembers putting on her coat, stepping out of the apartment and entering the lift. It was a Sunday, early in the morning, very early, she had absolutely no reason to go out. The next thing she remembers is ringing her own doorbell because she has no key. She had stepped out without her keys, without her handbag, and in slippers. What happened in those few minutes before a neighbour walking his dog noticed her? This afflicts her dreadfully. She cannot stop thinking about this gap in her memory.

“Madam” – the doctor’s voice was measured, unnecessarily patient – “these things happen.” He paused, took a swig of coffee and finally looked at her. They had known each other for a long time, since she had moved to this part of town. He didn’t say “at your age”, although he thought it, evident from his facial expression. “The pneumonia caused a spike in your blood-sugar level, which caused an effect exactly like being drunk. And sometimes drunk people don’t remember what they did. In fact it’s a matter of a chemical reaction in the brain, which causes short-term memory loss. So, nothing dramatic to worry about, unless it happens again.”

Now this explanation ought to have satisfied her but, just in case, he added a pinched smile.

“But since then, I’ve been feeling unsure of myself,” she uttered stubbornly. She still had no intention of pressing down the door handle to leave.

“That will pass,” he said, patting her on the back. In fact, he was gently nudging her out of his office. The nurse gave her a referral slip for a check-up at the hospital. She too had also been sitting there for years now, and in that time had given birth to two children, who must be going to school already. Strange, the nurse’s office is much bigger than the surgery, she thought, as if seeing all this for the first time.

The waiting room was full, so she couldn’t begrudge the doctor for not having time to listen to her psychological problems which, having been chemically induced, would most likely have no lasting effects.

And yet the effects were definitely there: unrest and uncertainty. And these seemed lasting to her. She had been feeling them for more than a month now. Had the doctor or anybody else taken any interest, she would have told them how she had arrived at that state.

The night before the incident, she had slept badly because she had a high temperature, and twice she’d had to change her sweat-soaked nightgown. When she got up, it was exactly seven o’clock in the morning and the thermometer out on the kitchen balcony showed ten below zero. Then she put her coat on over her nightgown and stepped out of the apartment. Why did she set out into that icy Sunday morning, for what urgent task? Even today she cannot remember. As she later found out, her neighbour, returning from walking his dog in the park, opened the lift door on the ground floor, only to happen upon her there, bareheaded and in slippers. “Where are you off to so early, in this cold?” he asked. Apparently she just mumbled something incoherently. The man saw she was not quite herself and figured she was drunk. “It was like your mum sort of stank of alcohol, but I know she doesn’t drink,” he told her daughter, whom he called immediately afterwards. “It’s cold, first put your shoes on and then you can go outside,” he said, as if speaking to a disobedient child, before pressing the button for her floor. She stepped out of the lift and reached into her pocket for the key. It was not there, and this was the first thing that surprised her. She rang the doorbell. Her husband, still in pyjamas, opened it. He was astounded, presumably because he had not yet noticed she was not in the apartment. “Where, for God’s sake, were you off to?” “I don’t know,” she replied, and that was the truth. “How can you not know?” But she had nothing to say because she was asking herself the very same thing. They stood for some time at the door, not knowing what to make of it.

Afterwards, she sat at the kitchen table for some time longer, not thinking, scared. After the neighbour’s phone call, her daughter came and took her to the hospital. There they drew a blood sample. The results came back immediately. “You were on the verge of a diabetic coma,” said the older of the two duty nurses compassionately. The word coma sounded to her somehow soft, less threatening than usual. She did not have the energy to demand an explanation because she felt like her temperature was rising. She shivered on the bed in the cubicle while the infusion slowly, too slowly, dripped into her vein. Her daughter sat on a chair, pale-faced and with a worried look. She felt bad about this, she had marred her daughter’s Sunday, usurped her free time, she thought as the fluid in the bag dripped more slowly still. “Another forty minutes or so,” said the younger nurse when she came to check on the infusion. That long, she thought, sinking into half-sleep. She would open her eyes only to check that she was not alone. But each time she saw her daughter sitting motionless, with just as worried a look as before.

About a month was needed for her to recover, to finally get past “that ugly episode”, as her husband called it. Until this visit to the doctor, she had not even tried to confide to anyone just how much it petrified her that she could not remember those few minutes between entering and exiting the lift. A few quite unimportant minutes, in the course of which nothing significant had happened. But these were her minutes. A tiny part of her conscious, waking life irretrievably lost. Whatever the cause, for the first time she felt a loss of control over herself. And with that loss, or perhaps just for the time it lasted, she felt she had taken a step into the unknown.

Had she not remembered this loss of memory, she would still have a chance, after the incident, to continue to live her life as before. But as it was, something deep inside her had been thrown into disorder, some balance which had irretrievably tipped to one side and would now be impossible to get back. She held a cup of hot tea with both hands. She felt the heat and her hands warming up, but her feeling of wholeness now fell short. No, she was no longer intact. A fragment of reality had, for one moment, slipped away from her and pierced a tiny hole through which it was dripping out.

Now nothing was as before. Not even the kitchen, the table at which she was sitting, the light, the dishes in the sink, the sounds from the bathroom, not even the trumpeting of cars outside on the road.

Only when she rose one evening to strain the boiled pasta, only when she poured out the pasta into the strainer and the water trickled away, did she realise she was like that utensil. But unlike the strainer – which let flow on all sides – the tiny hole through which her memory had dripped was, to the naked eye, invisible and unfixable. She could hardly sense it, yet she knew it existed and felt that, slowly but steadily, she was losing herself.

Weak winter light flooded the kitchen. Who knows how much longer I will last, she reflected, conscious of the question’s absurdity. This dripping, trickling, emptying was no longer separate from her, since no tiny hole can exist without its vessel. It will be easier for me when I am no longer able to remember that I can’t remember, she said to herself, while placing a bowl of pasta with sauce on the table, all set for dinner.

Sunday Is Quiet and Grey

Sunday is quiet and grey. Loneliness wraps me like a cloak. When I hear Mum’s voice, it’s worse still. I spoke with her this morning, she seemed more serene than yesterday. She had got out of bed after having the flu and this had cheered her up. She’s much better than over the previous two days, it seems to me. But just as we were deep in chatter, when I asked her who had come to visit, she said: “You know, my old neighbour called and brought some biscuits, they’re really good.” I was about to say it was not her neighbour since that neighbour was, like me, in Zagreb. But I just validated her words. So this is how I converse with her now, I confirm whatever she says. Experience has taught me that nothing else makes sense. I go along even when she complains her suite in the home has no bathroom, even though, naturally, it does. Or that she cannot get out of bed because her soles are burnt. Or that the nurses neglect her, don’t bring her food.

Afterwards, the nurse tells me the hallucinations began a few days ago, when Mum took a new medicine. Thursday to Friday, she saw people jostling in her room. Friday morning, an unknown little boy visited her. She is living, evidently, in two parallel realities.

The psychiatrist warned me this can occur overnight and the medicine is not necessarily the cause.

I fear the beginning of the end, but I don’t dare to think about it. A girlfriend awkwardly consoles me: “But your mum will soon turn eighty-six.” What she means is that Mum’s time is up. But somehow the end is always unexpected. My sole consolation is that Mum ordered me to buy her a cashmere cardigan, a good sign. I quickly agreed – there was no other answer.

I must visit her. Always a hard resolution to make, I’m afraid of what awaits me.

On Wednesday she opens the door to her suite in the nursing home, lets me in, then sits down at the table.

I think I perceive a faint scent of jasmine. Where’s it coming from? I know she likes the fragrance. I remember how once in Pula we searched for hours for the street on which she had lived sixty years before, and how she recognised the house by the smell. Via Petrarca, so the street was called in 1948, when the Italian minority forsook the city. A few passers-by whom we stopped were not able to match the old street name to the new one. Mum knew it was in the vicinity of the General Hospital, and that it descends vertically right into it. We passed through several streets in the late spring afternoon, climbed and descended until Mum stopped in front of a single-storey maisonette. After more than half a century she recognised the house. “It was here,” she said. “This was our first flat, here on the ground floor, facing onto the garden.” She was twenty-one then, had left home for the first time, and found herself with a husband in an unknown city where he had found a job. Her feeling of uncertainty was soothed by the courtyard which, in late spring, when they arrived, was fragrant with the scent of jasmine. They didn’t stay there long, within a year they were somewhere else. “Look, the magnolia’s still here, in the garden, the jasmine too.” And indeed, over the fence, the crown of the huge magnolia dipped down, its petals already lost, though in the garden the jasmine bloomed. I breathed in that strong fragrance – ancient fragrance of the Pula garden – which for Mum had remained in memory as the fragrance of youth.

I set down before her the cashmere sweater she ordered, but, unusually, she doesn’t open the package straight away. I feel hurt. Is she signalling that I ran late with this important assignment? But it’s still winter … I haven’t seen her for a few months. Three exactly, in fact. I must endeavour to be precise, time is important. I must endeavour to be conscious of the passing of time, both hers and mine. Because as she sits with arms resting on the white tablecloth with blue florets, I see she has grown strikingly thinner over these last three months. Her shoulders are bony under her grey top, her arms thin, those “wee hands” ascribed to children, but not to the elderly … As if she were dissolving and diminishing before my eyes. All of a sudden, her disappearance is quite certain. I ask myself how much longer her heart and lungs will endure.

As we sit at the table, sunlight enters the room and illuminates the floor. Those craftsmen had put down laminate, a cheap plastic. Was I not, at least, able to begrudge her parquet flooring? No, I was not. Because when we did up this small lodging in the nursing home, besides changing the floor and painting the walls, we also needed to remodel the entire bathroom and buy new furniture because for her the home’s was out of the question. And when all was done, she became annoyed when the young cleaning lady said: “A shame to spend so much money on doing up a flat for the few years you have left.” Upset, she phoned me. “What does she know about how much time is left me? How could she say this to me? But tomorrow she could get killed at a pedestrian crossing!” “Yes, Mum,” I consoled her, “she shouldn’t have said this to you.” Still, I thought of how the girl was speaking from experience. However, for Mum it was inconceivable to move into a space with worn-out carpeting, rickety furniture and a bathroom lined with brown – brown! – tiles.

Now she has been in the home for four years. I’m afraid to look at her like this, so completely melted. I’m attempting to divert my gaze away from her shoulders and thin arms. I observe how the thin skin of her forearm hangs, all wrinkled like finest silk. And I think, indeed hope, that she’s not conscious of how she herself will also soon metamorphose into dust, into miniscule motes like those which float in rays of the sun. I wish to not look at her, to not ask myself if I’m seeing her for the last time. Once again I divert my gaze, and shower her with a torrent of words. I talk about the snow on the road, about the plot of land for which documents need to be sorted out. I’m convinced I’m also averting her attention this way, for we both know that these words of mine are a routine attempt to escape from reality. From this room where she sits, emaciated and too quiet. I hope she does not notice tears welling up in my eyes.

I want to hug her, but still I do not. In truth, I want her to hug me, to console me. I don’t understand – yet – that the feeble old woman at the table no longer has the strength even to hug me. But at this moment I have a desperate need for her hug.

As I bustle around the stove making coffee, darkness descends slowly. I feel sorrow pressing all the more powerfully upon my shoulders, I’m no longer able to fill my lungs fully. I switch on the light, move the bag with the new cardigan off the table, and set down the coffee and cups. How is it I’m only now seeing her arms?

Otherwise, she looks as she usually does, she is made-up, and spruced up. She got up early, I know, to make herself up. She hates if anybody sees her without makeup. She is struggling to remain a person, and not just a body. “You bought new shoes again,” I say, and immediately bite my lip. “So what? They were cheap,” she answers defiantly. She is defiant, not only towards me, but also towards old age. Like how she never wants to wear sleeveless dresses in summer, because her upper arms are wrinkled and she doesn’t want to bare them to the gazes of others.

“I wanted to study medicine, but my parents wouldn’t let me, Mum was especially against it,” she declares suddenly, wistfully somehow, without cause. I’m hearing all this for the first time and immediately I shake my head inwardly, it’s not the truth, she’s embellishing it. Now she has time to fix the past. If she would at least keep quiet, and not pronounce sentences that irritate me! Who implanted in her the idea that she had even wanted to study? I know: her neighbour on the same floor is a professor and Mum probably wanted, in front of her, to justify herself as to why she had not studied – so subsequently invented a justification. Late to be inventing the past, I think, but stay silent. But why, actually, don’t I believe her? Because it seems to me that with this sentence she is devaluing her own life. As if she wanted to say: “You know, I’m better than I seem to you, a person with ideals which remained unfulfilled due to force of circumstance.” Guilt emerges within me, as if with my own disbelief I myself am somehow belittling her. While I keep pouring coffee and listening to these words, I’m flooded – as so many times before – by totally opposing feelings. I’ve not been here even an hour, and the visit is becoming unbearable, I feel like I’m in a hot oven. How long is it polite to sit at this table, to suffocate in her room, in her presence? I’m angry for no apparent reason. Although I know the hidden reason: I can see that she is leaving me.

I stay silent. I stare at the wall. On the wall hangs Father’s photograph. It has been more than twenty years since death erased him from our lives, so completely, so harrowingly and so without trace, that it sometimes seems as if he never even existed. We simply do not mention him. First he left our lives, then our speech and finally our memory. The memory of him dwells with his remains, at the graveyard. Mum still goes there on All Saints Day and usually brings new plastic flowers, because they last longer. Like the laminate on the floor. In fact it seems to me this is how she reminds herself that this man was her husband and that she lived with him for over forty years.

“If only I could live with you, just the two of us,” she sighs, hungry for my attention. She is egotistical, the egoism of old age, I imagine. But at the same moment I have a guilty conscience: I remember how once we walked along the shore and Mum somehow stumbled and fell. She fell forwards, on her side, winded. She needed a long while to catch her breath. She complained to me how she was unable to breathe due to a sharp pain in her ribcage. “But you only hit your ribs a little,” I said, “it will pass.” We did not go to the doctor. For months she felt real pain. Much later, at an x-ray examination, the doctor told her that she had broken a rib. Why did I not believe her when she said it was painful?

“If only I could live with you,” she says – but, while saying this, she surely no longer recalled what such a life looked like. She was seventy-three when she was operated on for breast cancer. They removed one of her breasts. There were still surgical dressings on her, but she was already busying herself around the oven, in her nightdress and bathrobe. I had just returned by transoceanic flight and was quite dazed by the time difference. Although she was barely moving her right arm, she wanted to prepare a hot meal for me. “Here you are, have something to eat, there’s no bread though,” she said, setting a full plate of lentil stew on the table. With her left arm, since the right arm was still swollen and painful. “No bread?” I snapped at her. “I fly all the way from America to see you, and then – there’s not even any bread?!” Mum stopped dead in her tracks, slowly turning in disbelief. She became hoarse: “I couldn’t get to the shop, I’m unable to dress myself.” I felt not even a crumb of empathy as she tried to justify herself, I became still more enraged. I showed not even a shred of understanding, not even superficially, as from a neighbour or acquaintance. Breast cancer – had I considered at all what the complete surgical removal of a breast had meant to her? I didn’t want to know about her illness because emotionally I was unable to bear her agony too. My egoism – childish or frightened, same difference – was far crueller than hers. My own sorrow was more important to me.

So that’s how it was when we were together. Her desire for attention and my feeling of incessant guilt – which her very presence stirred up in me – created an atmosphere of tension in which every word uttered had additional meaning.

In conversation with her, both empathy and anger, both roughness and tenderness, alternated regularly, rhythmically, like the throbbing of hearts.

We sit at the table, and in our veins, instead of blood, time courses.

Why do you never call me?
You could visit me more often.
The food’s bad here.

She is right. I neglect her, I’m not of any help at all to her. I remember the last time she travelled by bus. I accompanied her to the bus station. I didn’t know this would be the last time she travelled on her own. She was eighty and just getting ready to move to the home. I remember every detail: while we waited for the bus on the platform, Mum slides her hand into her coat pocket, then pulls out a crumpled bus ticket. She holds it on her palm, then spasmodically clasps it. I know she’s afraid the perforated part is falling off. I should have taped it, I think. But the problem is not the ticket, rather her insecurity. She is no longer sure of anything. She has no reservation. I ask the driver, who’s shoving her small suitcase into the belly of the bus, if there are seats. I see that there are – and no more than a handful of passengers on the platform, freezing and smoking. The driver, a moustachioed man in his late forties, says brusquely: “There aren’t!” “Can I buy a reservation from you?” she asks. “You can’t,” he says, closing the lid on the baggage hold, which falls like a blade. In her question I have a presentiment of the helplessness of a person who is too old for all this, there is no need for the driver to bellow at her. On the bus, first she sits in one seat, then shifts. As if in this second seat there’s a better chance of not being ousted by someone with a reservation.

I observe her. My stomach hurts.

Inside the bus, Mum does not take off her coat. I know in fact she is waiting for a passenger with a ticketed reservation to appear. If someone comes, she will be prepared. She sits stiffly somehow, in expectation of yet another blow, whether from the moustachioed driver or someone else. She clasps her handbag in her lap, the only thing which at this moment she can rely on. In it are the keys to her flat, medicines, documents, handkerchiefs, loose change. Proof that she still exists, although it sometimes seems to her she is no more. In her left hand she still clasps the ticket, in fear of losing something so important. I cannot watch her any longer in this grubby bus, in expectation of a blow I’m unable to protect her from. I take my coward’s leave. On the way home I think that I nevertheless ought to have taken her by car, that I ought to have done more than a send-off at the bus station. For a long time, still before my eyes, are her fist with the crumpled bus ticket, her fear.

When visiting, already at the entrance to the home, I am hit again by the smell of stale air, cleaning liquids and the bad odour of bodies, that smell of old age.

As she tidies the bed, I notice two yellow stains on the sheet. Does she see them too? Were they already there, perhaps impossible to wash out?

About a year before, she asked me to buy her a rubber mattress cover. “Buy it for me, just in case I don’t manage to get up in time at night,” she said. That rubber cover wasn’t at all easy to find. After a search of pharmacies I found a blue one, unlike that red one she would place on my bed every summer before I arrived on holiday. “Blood on a mattress cannot be washed out, and the mattress is new,” she would say, justifying herself. Menstruation was a word she did not utter. I never accepted this explanation of hers. I remember how I would always burn again with the feeling of shame and humiliation.

Since bringing her that cover, I’ve developed an ugly habit. Whenever I visit her, I sniff the air. I worry that one day I will sense the smell of urine, the smell of surrender. Now we have switched roles. In the pharmacy, I also bought a packet of night-time incontinence pads. How to avoid others seeing your humiliation, finding out? I don’t want to repay her in the same measure. So I just silently sniff the air, and this for me is sufficiently awful.

But it seems only yesterday Mum and I were together at the pool in the spa. She must have been seventy. I remember watching her still beautifully shaped body – no belly, and small firm breasts – in a black one-piece swimsuit. The only thing was, she no longer had any muscle tone in her thighs, the skin had lost its tautness and smoothness and she betrayed her age with each movement. I remember I held this against her. Why had she dropped her guard? She, to whom beauty was the most important thing in life. In her, this little defect, this imperfection, became more prominent than in those women whose bodies, after the confident years, had succumbed to the merging of waistline and breasts until they were indiscernible. Form was always important to my mother. Why at one moment had she relinquished the attempt to continue caring for herself?

Since then, I never again saw her in a swimsuit. She no longer exposed her own body to the gazes of strangers. Long ago she stopped being young, but she could not bear that she no longer looked young. To lose youth and beauty was a trauma to her vanity, especially in an age when old age is ignominy, almost like the plague.

Why don’t mothers speak to us about how the body changes with the years, how beauty disintegrates, about the feelings of loss and shame?

Is old age, even when there’s no illness, just a continuous list of humiliations accompanied by ever greater indifference?

I remember, not long ago, when she was in the hospital for a gall bladder operation, she wanted me to help her change her nightgown. She sat on the edge of the bed, and her bare legs crept out from under the blanket, almost to the thigh. Already even this was too much for me. Quickly, hysterically, I shot a glance over her twisted toes, over the net of thin purple veins that every year climbed higher and higher up towards her knees, like a flood. But my torment did not stop there. Mum pulled up her nightdress. “But you’ve nothing on underneath,” I said in a panic, glancing at the visitor by the neighbouring bed. Luckily, he had just turned towards the door. Mum was quite unaware she had nothing on underneath her nightdress. She had her back turned to the rest of the room, but not to me. As if she were not at all ashamed of her melancholy nakedness, as if it were all the same to her. To her, whom I had almost never seen without makeup on. Without perfect makeup, her perfect mask.

I quickly grabbed the clean nightdress and pulled it over her head. I took care not to see anything except her bare shoulders. I especially took care not to see that one remaining breast. I could not bear looking at her naked, I had never seen her naked in my life. “Don’t give me this now,” I thought, on the verge of tears. But she was already a child, unaware of her own nakedness. She knew only that she needed a dry nightgown.

Why did this behaviour of hers shake me up so much? Because it was a sign of indifference towards the body, her one single identity that always mattered to her. How it hurt me, this stance towards her very self, an obvious sign of old age and surrender.

After discharge from the hospital, she spent a few days in my flat. She asked that I help her wash her back. I don’t know if she could sense my resistance, but the request horrified me. I didn’t want to help her because if I did, I would have to see her naked again. I resisted even the mere thought of it, but I was unable to withhold my help.

As she undressed, I noticed again the same indifference towards the body which she had already shown in the hospital. She took off her clothes in front of me in the little bathroom as if she had always done so, as if it were something completely natural. She held onto me with one hand. Her robe remained lying on the floor, like the corpse of a cat. She also took off her pink nightdress and stepped into the shower cubicle, turning her back to me. Not because she was ashamed, but because of how the shower faucet was positioned.

While she showered in the cubicle, I didn’t know where to turn. Suddenly I noticed rust was spreading along the rim and a thin thread of spider-web was hanging from the ceiling. How did it materialise right there? Probably the ventilation wasn’t working well. The shower cubicle needed remodelling. The bathroom needed painting, and those few cracked floor tiles needed replacing. I tried to set aside my thoughts, I wanted to escape from that bathroom, from her. But Mum would not allow me, I was unable to escape from her. She requested that I shampoo her back. I scrubbed vigorously with a sponge, I pressed her skin as if angry. And I was angry. Her skin was silken, smooth, sprinkled with moles, just like mine. The same crooked spine, protuberance on the right-hand side, the very same build. I tried not to touch her by hand, only by sponge. My hand was unable to go further than her back. I was unable to wash under her armpits, this seemed too intimate to me.

She stood, head bowed, wearing a plastic shower cap, since her hairdo must be shielded from the shower. God, how is it she is so thin and small, but was always stronger and taller than me.

Mum, is this you?

Who is this naked woman in my shower cubicle?

I handed her a towel, she wrapped it around her waist only, and stepped out of the cubicle. And then, right then for the first time, I saw the long scar in place of her right breast. Fifteen years had passed since the operation. I saw the other breast too, small and wrinkled, lonely. She did not try to hide it.

She must not allow herself to be seen. I must not be allowed to look.

And then, in the bedroom, when she sat down on the bed, the towel fell completely open. Again a wave of discomfort and fear flooded me, as if even in my gaze upon her, there lurked for me an especial danger. I became scared because, at that moment, I saw myself in her – a shrivelled and wrinkled copy of her.

I grasped then that old age is contagious.

Sitting silently across from her that day in the home, looking at her arms as if seeing them for the first time, I’m aware that compassion is pressing in on me. The same feeling that overcame me the last time I saw Grandmother, who had also wound up in a nursing home, and died there. Because neither of her two sons was willing to take in their mother, their wives did not allow it. At the time, I thought they were cruel. Then, I did not take in my own mum, just as she had not taken in her own, her husband did not allow it. There was no room for her, and anyway, I did not especially want her to live with us. So compassion tormented me still more. Her melancholic voice, her loneliness, hurt me on Sunday afternoons. She did not know how to socialise, to cultivate friendships. This aged, puffed-up beauty, my mum. She refers to her neighbours in the home, even those much younger than her, as old people.

My visits are too short for her, too long for me. We never knew what to talk about. Although she longed to talk with me, to speak seriously, as she used to say. But about what? About her childhood and youth, which I had heard about a hundred times? About the woman who had moved into the flat next to hers and listened to the radio too loudly? She was right, I lacked the patience to listen. I would continually interrupt her in a nervous voice because she was repeating stories I already knew by heart. I would fault her for always only uttering banalities. Later, on the way home, I realise she was taking pains to reach me in the way she knows best. Maybe she thinks I underestimate her, that she is not a good interlocutor for conversations about the things that interest me or about my work. But I could not tell her that it is hard for me to converse because we had long ago become strangers, that only my feeling of duty and her feeling of neglect still link us.

Worst of all, we both knew we were unable to speak of what had really been tormenting her for more than twenty years already – the death of her son. I was her sole remaining child, somehow a poor substitute. Although I was the firstborn, five years older than my brother, after his birth I always felt he was more important to her. Her adored blond-haired little boy whom she shielded until his thirty-fifth year, when illness took him from her.

When I saw my brother for the last time, he was lying in a hospital bed in a coma, attached to machines. “He can’t hear you,” the doctor said. I didn’t believe her. I took him by the hand, he was burning with a fever. I told him how he would sail on his own sailing boat, which he had just completed. Suddenly, he raised his other hand into the air. I was convinced this was a sign that he heard me. Though perhaps he just wanted to wave to me, to bid farewell before departure. On his arm, strangely, he wore a watch. When he raised it, the watch slipped to halfway down the forearm, so thin had he grown.

Then, at that moment, I knew I would never see him again.

I remember the church and how, after the hospital visits, I would accompany Mum there. Those September afternoons were long. The church was usually empty at this hour, and the pliant light which clawed its way through the stained-glass windows would illuminate the altar and Mum, who would kneel before it, head bowed, concave in prayer.

After a while, her immobile figure would stir. It seemed as if she would rise and depart, but, still on her knees, she would begin to circle the altar. She was already getting on in years and her movements were slow and somehow awkward, probably painful. The marble floor of the church was cold. While I would sit waiting for her, I was certain her rheumatism would worsen, and that her knees would be swollen for days.

Soon she would execute the first circumambulation, and then one more. I knew she would keep going like this until she was no longer able to move due to feebleness. Yet I did not try to stop her, day after day, from going to the church and crawling on her knees. She did this out of desperation. She was a fervent Catholic and this was how she begged her God to save her son, lying in a coma in the nearby hospital. The only thing she was able to do was to try to settle terms, to ask Him to take her life, and spare his. She spent her time next to the head of her son’s bed in the hospital, watching him as he melted away, or in the church, circumambulating the altar. I accompanied her, mute, like a pale shadow. When she was no longer able even to rise, I would approach and help her rise to her feet and somehow make it to the car.

Above all I remember that terrible impotence, facing which, I comprehended, it is natural for human beings to believe that some higher power exists, to which one can turn. Because the pain is so unbearable, and the loss so incomprehensible, it is almost impossible to survive it alone, without help, regardless of where it comes from. And yet, she survived it. Perhaps prayer really helped her to survive – her, but not my brother.

While I would sit there on the pew by the church doors, knowing that her prayer and painstaking crawling round the altar would take time, I sometimes felt envy. Yes, I felt pain because of my brother, pity and terror at the thought of his death, but also envy of her faith. Because the single thing that gave Mum the strength to endure, to even rise out of bed in the morning, was faith. Without faith, she would be alone with her unendurable suffering, unable to share it with anyone.

I envied her too when my brother died, even then when she stood crushed between me and the priest over the grave dug into the fat clay earth. If her faith didn’t weaken even a little after the death of her son, then it would not forsake her till the end of her life. Faith at first proffered hope, then solace. Like a warm coat when you shiver from cold, like tea and aspirin when your head hurts … Although faith was perhaps not much more than this, it aided her struggle against pain.

And years later, when we would journey together to that same grave, I would, watching Mum sweep the pine needles off the black marble slab, think of how I have no God to turn to, to pray to or keep cursing at, with whom I could share pain. At such moments, Mum reminded me of the Mother of God, the one from the painting in my great-grandmother’s bedroom. Above the bed hung this big painting, which frighted me because the heart of the Mother of God was exhibited, bloody, wrapped in thorny branches. But even with her ripped-open ribcage and wounded heart, the Mother of God smiled calmly, a smile which perplexed me. She must have suffered insufferable pain, I would imagine before sinking into sleep, filled with compassion. That same expression of calmness was in the paintings in the church where my great-grandmother would take me, and even on the plaster statue on her chest of drawers. Why was she not crying? Already as a child, I comprehended prayer soothed even the terrible pain of an uprooted heart.

Mum would only cry once we were well away from the grave, as if it were shameful for her to show feelings there.

I remember too my own feeling of uselessness after my brother’s death. I was unable to help Mum in any way, because nothing could help her any longer. Lonely, she would complain to me that I don’t have time for her, that I never have time.

In the corridor, after visiting Mum, an old man throws himself onto me in front of the lift, with all his strength, holding me tight in a hug. I sense his desire for touch, I sense a hunger not masculine but human. Also his unpleasant smell, and his tongue-tied smile by which he tries to exculpate himself.

Frighted by this unexpected gesture, I think of how I didn’t hug Mum when departing, I just lightly kissed her cheek. I did not hug her, and I needed to. She too is hungry for touch. Why did I withhold it from her?

A Strange Mishap in a Hotel Room

It was one of those mishaps which, afterwards, one thinks couldn’t have happened. She had travelled to Leiden, a city in the northern Netherlands, where one of the oldest universities in Europe had decided to award her an honorary doctorate. It was not her first, but this one was more significant than the others – if anything could still be significant at her age. She hadn’t managed to devise any credible excuse not to travel to the award ceremony, except age. Seventy-six and not in the best health, and so evading travel.

The flight was, luckily, direct, and a young woman, a student, greeted her at the airport in order to escort her to the hotel. In the evening, the student came for her, to take her to the festivities. The ceremony unfolded in a theatre built at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with a certain amount of gilding on the auditorium ceiling, though certainly less than in theatres and churches she had seen in the south. She spoke for fifteen minutes, improvising. Mostly these were anecdotes, since she didn’t want to weary the students with sagacities. Likewise the speeches from other invitees were not too long or tiresome, and the champagne they drank afterwards was high quality, though proffered in modest quantities. The guests at the reception were neither conspicuous nor talkative and, as a result, she breathed a little easier. Protestants are always measured and modest, and dear to her for this reason.

The dinner followed, the worst part of any visit or festivity. Not so much because of the food – she mentioned to them beforehand she was vegetarian – but because they usually don’t serve it before nine. She was no longer able to eat that late, in fact she no longer had dinner at all. But she had brought along her medicine for acidity, so she hoped her small portion of smoked salmon would do her no harm.

Back at last in the hotel room, the taste of a superb Chablis still in her mouth. Firstly she took off her elegant, uncomfortable shoes. It was a small boutique hotel, in fact a refurbished historic family house alongside a canal, built at the same time as the theatre. The stairs were very steep, and naturally there was no lift. Luckily, she was installed on the first floor. As soon as she entered the room, she noticed weights arranged on a shelf between the two windows. They seemed to her too strange to serve as ornaments. But when she examined closely the old-fashioned double-hung windows, whose sashes were hoisted and dropped with the help of such weights, she remembered that three hundred years ago weights served precisely this purpose. Admittedly, in those times, the weights were usually hidden in the frame, and they perplexed her, exhibited like this, at first sight functionless.

She would have forgotten this detail if not for the students – or rather, the racket they created.

She had already fallen asleep when voices jerked her from sleep, music and laughter reaching in through the open window. Slowly she rose, she was no longer as nimble as before. She needed to bend down in order to push her head out of the raised lower part of the window. The small street on which her room looked out was teeming with students. She remembered that it was the first day of the academic year, and that here freshers celebrate it loudly, with a beer in hand. As she pulled her head back into the room, she felt a strong blow to the top of the skull. She touched the spot of the blow. It was moist. She switched on the light. Her fingers were bloody, and a warm rill trickled down her neck. On the floor she saw one weight, the largest, probably two kilograms. How did this happen? When she pulled back her head, the fall of the window frame shook the shelf on which the weight stood, which then fell on top of her head. Any other explanation was impossible.

She had to stop the bleeding. The collar of her flannel nightdress was already steeped in blood. She wet a towel with cold water and put it to her head. She felt no pain or dizziness, only confusion. What to do? She glanced at the time. At one in the morning, she wasn’t able to call the organisers. And, besides, how would they help her? If the cut necessitated stitches, she could put herself in a taxi and head for the emergency room.

She wrapped herself up in a coat and descended to reception. The girl who had received her that day and who had scarcely lifted her gaze from the computer screen – virtual life was clearly more interesting to her than the real – had been replaced by an older man. “A weight fell on my head,” she said. He immediately sat her down on a chair. She noticed he was not surprised at all. “I’ll fetch you some ice now,” he said, and vanished from reception. He reappeared with a small plastic bag with ice and a first aid box. Firstly, he disinfected the wound and laid gauze on it. “The cut is small and not deep,” he diagnosed. “Just hold this bag to your head for about half an hour and the bleeding will stop.” She felt less confused, his confident movements worked reassuringly on her. “What do you think, do I need to go to the emergency room?” she nevertheless asked weakly. “I would say no, unless you vomit or your head spins.” He spoke as if he had seen other such mishaps at hotel reception. “No? Then maybe it’s best you go back to bed and rest.” Does this happen often, and so he already has experience? Or maybe he completed a first aid course?

She returned to the room, composed once more. A mishap, nothing more. Those moronic weights … She took off the nightdress, washed out the bloodstain with cold water and put it on the radiator to dry. Nevertheless, she felt fatigued, as if the strong blow had dazed her. Fatigue was catching up with her all the more often.

She first noticed this last summer. From the heat, she figured. Even before nightfall, her eyelids would droop and she would need to lie down for a bit. She could barely muster the strength to brush her teeth and, apropos reading, there was no question of it. She would fall asleep the same instant.

Soon every evening was thus. The gravity amazed her – the attractive power pulling her towards bed. And it amazed still more that she did not resist this power. What is more, she sank – or better said, plunged – into sleep with the thought of how one day she would likewise fall asleep and no longer wake up. She was not so much worried by death as by a long-lasting, painful dying. When she would nonetheless open her eyes in the morning, she felt as if she had sunk into deep water and lost her breath, then rapidly returned to the surface. The light was more luminous, the colours more radiant, the smells stronger. Did I swim out to the other side, she would ask herself.

She fell asleep so quickly, she had no time to become afraid.

When she opened her eyes in the morning, she wasn’t sure she was fully awake. It was cold, bracingly cold. In darkness under the curtain, there hovered a feeble ray of light. She pulled the coverlet over her head. She thought of how she hadn’t managed to finish the text for the journal, and knew at once that it was too late for all that.

Clearing Up

Mum died on Monday, 4 March, early in the morning. She died in the hospital, exactly where she didn’t want to die. “Please, don’t let me die in the hospital,” she used to say. “Promise me.” I promised, of course. She hated this hospital and avoided it for as many years as she could. Because everyone close to her died there: father and mother and husband and son. It was the only hospital in town. I let her down, but there was no way I could stop it.

On Friday evening the ambulance took her from the nursing home to the hospital. She had trouble breathing, a nurse later told me, but she was fully conscious. They probably didn’t want her to die in the nursing home clinic, where she had lain the past few weeks. My cousin, who lives near the hospital, came to see her straight away. The doctor, a young woman, told her that the test results were normal for her age and illness, and that they would probably send her back to the nursing home the following day. Still, they kept her in the pulmonary ward for a specialist examination. On Saturday, my cousin said that Mum looked exhausted and had barely spoken. A nurse told her that she’d had soup for lunch, which had comforted her. We spoke on the phone. Mum murmured indistinctly. Later I found out that she had an oxygen mask on her face. I was nervous, as I always was when we spoke. “I can’t understand you at all!” I said angrily. It was the last thing I ever said to her.

On Sunday my cousin again informed me of her condition – Mum was weak, she couldn’t get out of bed, but she was composed. They were awaiting a pulmonary specialist, who would come on Monday. She had eaten a fruit yogurt and drunk a bit of juice. “No,” the nurse on call whom I spoke with that day told me, “the situation is not alarming, you don’t need to travel down, everything will be all right.”

Everything will be all right? For a patient with chronic pulmonary emphysema, on oxygen and with a barely beating heart? Shouldn’t these very words have set my alarm bells ringing? Why, instead of believing a nurse who wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible so she could get back to sitting in front of a TV screen, watching her favourite series, did I not pack straight away and set off to see my mum? I must have known the end was near. But I didn’t want to accept it.

On Monday morning the phone rang around half past seven. My cousin again. I no longer remember what exactly she said, how she said it – how do you even tell someone their mother died? Even though it was too early in the morning for a phone call, I didn’t suspect it even for a second, I wasn’t startled – I didn’t sense death coming. Was it just self-defence?

The hospital had just called to tell her that “madam died”. I remember only these words because from her, even though she was obviously quoting the doctor, they sounded too formal.

I didn’t react. The meaning of these words at that moment somehow missed me. I lived in a different city, in a different country. I saw Mum every few months. I didn’t immediately comprehend that I would never see her again. I didn’t cry. I dreamt of her almost every night. Only a few nights after her death I dreamt of her lying on a couch. She was sleeping on her side, uncovered. She was naked. I remember how it astonished me, even in my sleep. I touched her, her skin was warm and unbelievably tender, like a child’s. I must have remembered it because Mum was already dead, yet still was warm to the touch.

I travelled, although I don’t remember how. Those few days before the funeral are as if erased from memory.

In the mortuary my cousin placed on the bier a black-and-white photograph of Mum I hadn’t seen in a long time. In it she is about thirty, it could have been 1960. Her hair is up and her face symmetric, open, smiling. Around her neck is a pearl necklace. Her head is slightly inclined, the way they used to take portraits in photographic studios. I remember the dress she’s wearing, dark blue silk with three buttons on the collar, the kind you couldn’t find in shops in those days – gilded, with an inlaid crystal that glittered like a diamond. In the picture Mum looked classy and elegant. I was grateful that she chose this very photo, because if there ever was a single photo that was meant to portray my Mum in her best light, the way she saw herself – then this was it.

Not even the funeral convinced me she was dead. I couldn’t watch them lower the coffin into the tomb, but perhaps I should have. All that remains in my memory is a small cemetery lit by the stingy sun peeking out from under clouds, moist clumps of earth falling onto a wooden coffin. And then, the empty village square in front of the church and a small group of friends and relatives. The square is flagged with white stone and we are all in black, almost like giant birds slowly and clumsily massing towards the inn.

I tried to postpone clearing up her suite at the nursing home for as long as possible. After two months, though, I finally made the trip. The day was sombre and the journey took longer than usual. I figured I would need a few hours to clear up her things. Two people would be helping me – I didn’t dare enter that space alone, rummage through her clothes, feel her smell.

I mustered up courage only when I remembered how it was Mum herself who packed for the nursing home. She was used to moving house, because of Father’s work she had already moved five or six times in her life, not counting the move to the nursing home. She spared me then. But now, the last clearing up awaited me.

How much could a person living in a nursing home suite leave behind? It should have been easy, but still, when I opened the wardrobes – first one, then the other – the task seemed all at once enormous and indescribably difficult. Two closets full of clothes! Clearing up the kitchen and the living room was easy. Some dishes and documents, jewellery and pictures. Nothing too personal, I thought, no letters or notes … How few of these intimate remnants were left behind. But what was I expecting to find? A diary? Love letters? In fact, the most intimate thing she possessed was her wardrobe.

With strange nimbleness and determination I dug into the first closet. The smell of her overwhelmed me. Just as some women leave letters, a lock of a child’s or a lover’s hair, these clothes were the personal, the most personal, possession my Mum left behind for me. How beautifully they were hung and lined up, sorted by type and colour, these garments of hers. Coats, jackets, skirts, trousers, pullovers, shirts, blouses, nightgowns. At the nursing home she would have changed clothes for lunch and sometimes for dinner, too.

This was her, the neatly arranged closet with the clothes she loved and which made her what she was. She would spend so much time washing, ironing and matching them into outfits, enjoying her wardrobe and taking care of it.

When I reached out to take the first garment, I felt a sudden pain in my chest. But nevertheless I roughly, almost brutally, started taking things out, paying no attention to how and what. I brusquely selected what to leave at the home and what to donate, throwing them onto the left or right pile. I wanted to get this torturous duty over and done with as soon as possible.

Her long mink coat was already at my place in a closet, wrapped in a sheet, as she had instructed me. “You must take the coat,” she said quietly, confidentially, so as not to be overheard by the clinic’s nurse. As if she were talking about gold or diamonds. “It’s not safe here!” “What do you mean, Mum?” I asked her in wonder. “You know that the key to the suite is not with me, it’s in the infirmary, anyone can go upstairs and take it.” I saw she was seriously worried, the mink coat was something of great value to her, something she cared about.

“First put it on the balcony for a good airing, then put it away. Take a clean sheet from the drawer and wrap it carefully, and by no means wrap it in plastic!” That was as far as her instructions went. She didn’t say anything more, like it’ll do you good, because she knew I don’t wear coats of real fur. “Pity,” she said when I turned down another of her fur coats, earlier. Although she had expected it, it was a shame to her all the same. I hope she sold it later. The fur coat for which I had gotten instructions was expensive, a sign of prestige. She had bought it on credit, of that I’m certain, although she didn’t actually need the coat – in our coastal town it never really got that cold. But she wore it, she wore all clothes with natural grace and style.

Maybe she then remembered the fur coat she bought me a long time ago, after I spent my first winter in Zagreb shuddering in a thin little coat of brown corduroy. That autumn of 1966 I visited a friend who was already at university. I slept at her dorm. I had intended to return home quickly, but I stayed a bit longer, without clothes, without anything. I remember I was standing at a tram stop when the first snow found me. Back home on the sea it rarely fell and as a child I rejoiced in the fluffy flakes, speeding around the yard and catching them with my open mouth before they melted. That day snow swept over me in dense drifts, accumulating on my hair and shoulders. I returned to the dorm freezing and soaking wet.

The next winter, when Mum had gotten it through her head that I was staying in Zagreb, she brought me a brown sheepskin jacket lined with fur, visible only on the edge of the sleeves, around the neck and along the front fold with the buckle. It was warm and simple. I remember how she beamed when she took it out of the suitcase. It was a symbol of her victory over Father, who disapproved of my decision to move to Zagreb. She must have considered buying something that expensive a true success of her own and undoubtedly kept this loan a secret from Father. To be sure, she paid the instalments out of her own salary as a state employee, which was not low. She knew that winters in Zagreb are humid and cold and she was proud she could at least ensure I had a coat to keep me warm. That was as much as she could do for me, every now and then secretly slip me a good garment or a little money. It was her way of showing she cared despite the fact that Father thought I didn’t deserve it.

I didn’t thank her. I couldn’t accept this gift simply as warm clothing. To me this fur-lined jacket was a reminder. I couldn’t forgive Mum for not defending me from Father’s enraged attacks. Why was she so powerless? When I once later asked her about it, she replied in wonder: “What was I supposed to do, divorce him because of you?!” What she meant was – all because of your stupidity and stubbornness?! – but she didn’t say it aloud.

This lambskin jacket could not substitute for her care, although it was – as I later realised – exactly that, a sign of her genuine care. I was constantly rediscovering this anger of mine, kept coming back to it uncontrollably on almost every visit. We would start talking, and my voice would suddenly change, shift to a higher key, tense, full of suppressed feelings.

Nevertheless, I wore the jacket throughout my studies – I had nothing else, not one other coat. When I graduated, I left it at the cafeteria, on purpose, hoping that it would serve someone else. In fact, it was as though I threw it off me, and in so doing, threw off all the things it reminded me of. Years later I met a young man, I can no longer remember his name, who told me that this fur-lined coat saved him and that he later gave it to someone else who needed it. Perhaps someone is still wearing it?

Mum would have been happy if I even just occasionally wore her mink coat. But later, it was too late for any mending between us.

On the top shelf of Mum’s wardrobe stood a hatbox. At the bottom of this box, beneath felt and straw hats, was a black tulle veil. Already frayed, creased, as though it had gotten there by mistake. I recognised it immediately and an image of her appeared before my eyes. Mum is standing on the edge of a grave, Father is holding her, she is leaning dangerously close to the vault into which my brother’s coffin has just been lowered. Her face is hidden beneath that thick black veil, the one I’m holding in my hand. I’m standing next to her and all I can hear is her sobbing, muffled by her hand in a black lace glove held firmly against her mouth. I still cannot comprehend how she endured it, standing there while moist lumps of soil fell on the wooden coffin of my thirty-five-year-old brother, echoing dully like distant thunder. And before that, sitting in a cool chapel listening to the sermon and, earlier still, kissing his face in the mortuary by the hospital.

Then, only a month later, my father died, crushed by grief for his son. And the same scene repeated itself, her face covered by this very veil, on the edge of the tomb.

She lost them both in a month, the two men with whom she lived and to whom she meant everything. Only I remained for her, distant, bitter, poor support in her old age. But I did take on her care, I’ve always been good at fulfilling duties.

I dropped the veil in the black rubbish bag, together with her old slippers, newspapers, leftovers from the fridge and two dirty kitchen cloths. After my brother died, more than 20 years ago, Mum wore only black. But a few years ago, when I paid her a visit, she was wearing a long summer dress, a kaftan actually, of bright colours. She saw my astonished face. “Well, my girlfriends here at the nursing home told me that I’ve mourned long enough, that I should wear brighter colours,” she said, justifying her new look. I think I laughed, but I’m not sure. I guess I couldn’t believe Mum would listen to anyone’s advice regarding clothes and fashion. There, she’s found an excuse to shop for more clothes, I thought, but immediately knew how unjust this was to her, how cynical. To redeem myself, next time I brought her a set of light grey angora shirts.

Underwear was neatly arranged on the bottom shelf. In two piles, by colour. Black and white. My mum’s generation experienced not only the post-war shortages, when both food and clothing were rationed and bought with coupons, but also the subsequent shortage of anything beautiful. Of course, there was underwear (manufactured by Galeb of Omiš and Tvornica Rublja of Duga Resa), but there was no choice. Ladies’ underpants, and men’s too, were cotton, high-waisted and only available in white. That’s why Mum all her life longed for lace underwear. Luckily, we had an aunt who lived in Italy who Mum visited relatively often. The most important thing for her was to buy underwear and shoes.

In the closet I found an outfit from the fifties, a skirt and blouse. a purple and black combination, light satin, today again in fashion. I didn’t throw it away. I couldn’t, not after Mum had kept it for decades, then not worn it for the two decades spent in mourning, only to start wearing it again towards the end of her life, proud that she could still fit into the clothes of her youth, that she had kept her figure.

Her bras, even the orthopaedic ones, had to be lace, black lace, no less. When she had her breast cancer surgery (of which we were not allowed to speak, no one was allowed to know), the prosthetic bras covered by her health insurance weren’t good enough for her. Back then it was incomprehensible to me that she wore fine underwear exclusively for herself, for her own satisfaction, because no one else saw it except her. But looks were what mattered most to her.

Did I throw all that underwear away, both the black and the white piles, simply because I couldn’t stand her vanity? I threw it in the black bag somehow too quickly, too decisively, more decisively than with other clothes … But without her these were only remnants, ordinary rags.

She used to tell me: “Look how you’re dressed, your trousers don’t fit, you’ve gained weight again, these colours don’t match …” I endured her criticism because I knew she was never satisfied anyway. Once I tried on one of her jackets and of course it didn’t fit me like it fit her, although we were built the same way. “It’s not about what you wear, but how you wear it.” I’ve never forgotten that comment of hers.

Throughout that day, ruthlessly and perfunctorily, without stopping much, I was clearing up all these carefully ordered garments that she held so dear. I penetrated into her most intimate world and demolished it – just like a painstakingly constructed structure is demolished. Mum was disappearing before my eyes – not the body that had betrayed her, whether heart or lungs – but the real Mum. Clearing up was the undiluted destruction of her identity. I destroyed that which had made her unique. People leave behind paintings, compositions, money, houses – she left her second skin, the one in my hands and made of fabric, without which she would not be – herself. She didn’t leave it to anyone in particular – it is simply what she left behind as proof of what she was.

I had a dream about her the first night after the clear-up. Mum didn’t like escalators, once she fell on one and injured her leg on the sharp edge. After that she used them only if someone held onto her. We were in some large space, maybe a department store. At the top of the very steep stairs she took the first step and tumbled down. She was lying lifelessly at the foot of the stairs. I saw people coming towards her. I was standing at the top, paralysed, and I heard my own sobbing, the sound that woke me up.

I only saw her a few times in my life without makeup. Even when she came to visit me she’d get up early to put makeup on, before the rest of us woke up. She considered it polite to look your best.

At the clinic, in a drawer of the bedside table, she had a cosmetic bag, and as soon as she had the strength she would take out a mirror, and first put on some cream, then foundation. Then she would place a magnifying mirror on the table and start outlining her eyebrows and eyelids with a liner-pencil. After she became too weak to go to town, to the pharmacy, we brought her all the cosmetics she needed. Her instructions were precise, and this was the most important command of all. Not long before her death, we went to the pharmacy together and she bought three liquid eyeliners! “Why three, Mum?” “Because I don’t know when I’ll get to the shop again, I need to stock up.” She didn’t even finish one. It didn’t occur to her that soon she might not need so many eyeliners, eye pencils, lipsticks and creams. “You know,” she said, “I somehow can’t believe I’m eighty-five, I don’t feel that way at all. If it weren’t for these breathing problems and weak legs …” Indeed, Mum was much younger than me – I felt old even before my body started to fail me. She had well-groomed hands and nails. She could no longer get up and go to the hairdresser’s to get her hair dyed, and her hand trembled too much to make up her eyes, but the last time I saw her she had lipstick on. It’s only now I know that in clearing up I buried her a second time around: she died only at the moment when she was left without clothes and cosmetics.

But it wasn’t just her vanity at issue. She had an innate sense of beauty which she hadn’t acquired by upbringing or education. She had style, and that took more than mere vanity, more even than knowledge. It took talent.

Perhaps because of that she was not popular – she stood out too much, and not only because of her looks. Sometimes she was known to complain a little coquettishly of how both her sisters had envied her. And indeed, both younger sisters, who both died before her, resembled their mother. My grandmother was a short plump woman of plain features who secretly smoked in the toilet. She used to send us granddaughters to buy her cigarettes, which were then still sold by the piece. Mum resembled her father, a tall well-built man of symmetric features. From him she inherited something more important than looks: an upright posture (which could strike one as arrogant at first glance). Such posture cannot be taught – it is something you’re born with. This is precisely what caused her to stand out from the crowd. And the two little chubby girls, her sisters, had to learn to live with it from very early on. But she tried to make everything around her beautiful as well – her sisters, for instance, sewing them summer dresses on the old Minerva sewing machine. With the same passion she redecorated the rundown apartments we moved into, as well as the furniture, which became shabbier and shabbier with every move. She wouldn’t accept the dreariness surrounding her.

The price she paid for looking different and putting that touch of hers on everything around her was loneliness and misunderstanding. Her talent for beautification was like some sort of sin, pretentious behaviour considered inappropriate in post-war provincia.

When she moved to the nursing home suite, she behaved exactly the same way. On one occasion when I visited her, I was surprised to see a new painting on the wall, among several old ones she brought from her apartment. An oil painting of an olive tree. “What do you think?” she asked me, anticipating my appraisal. Because of my education she thought I was more competent than her. I didn’t respond well. “So-so,” I said, casting a superficial glance over it, with the obvious intention of avoiding an answer. “It reminds me of our olives, of my childhood,” she said. It seemed to me then as though she were justifying the money she had spent on this pleasure of hers. The same way in which she, in defence against an anticipated accusation of extravagance, would speak to my father. I didn’t call the painting ugly or pretty. I didn’t comment on its value – I simply didn’t say a single word about it, and this hurt her feelings. Her aesthetic, her need for beauty, the important resolve to not begrudge herself something that would make her life beautiful or at least rekindle memories – was of no interest to me at all.

Today when I remember this scene, her reproachful look, I think of how she in fact did not want to justify herself anymore. Mum wanted me to finally accept this need of hers. She tried to draw me to her reasons, appealing to sentimentality, to memories, hoping I would understand her better. Perhaps the olive tree did indeed remind her of childhood, perhaps that was why she decided to purchase it. But the crucial thing was that she couldn’t endure the suite into which she had moved unless she tried to refine it somehow. Before the move I’d had to have it redecorated for this reason and this reason only, which I then saw as trivial, although to her it was of the utmost importance.

When she moved to the nursing home, she let her own apartment out. She did it so as not to be a burden to me, as the rent covered her accommodation costs. It was a reasonable solution. An older married couple moved into her apartment, completely void of her belongings. She went over a few months afterwards for the signing of some documents, for bills, mail and the like. And came back in a state of complete shock. She couldn’t believe what the place looked like. No, they hadn’t destroyed anything or stained the walls, nothing of the sort. They had just decorated it according to their own taste. Nothing of her, of her personality, remained in it.

While I was clearing up the last things from the closet, like a stranger, I came to the purple shirt, the very last garment she ever bought. Still today it hurts me the most that I didn’t, when we were then at the shop, buy her the long white cardigan that she had found on sale. It doesn’t comfort me that I did not know this would be our last visit to a clothes shop. She was like a child in a toy store, she was feeling and trying on the clothes, undressing was not a problem for her. Finally she chose a cyclamen-coloured wool shirt. But then she saw the long white cardigan on the sales rack, almost a coat, made from the kind of wool that sheds. It even had a warning tag on it: This garment sheds. “Mum,” I said, “don’t buy that. Your clothes are mostly dark, you’ll look messy, like you have a moulting cat.” “But it’s so beautiful and warm, who cares if it sheds,” she said, looking at it longingly.

She wore the purple shirt often. But I keep thinking of the white cardigan we never bought, and my wish that at least once in my life I could have taken her shopping and bought her everything, absolutely everything, that she wanted. I imagined how it should have been somewhere in Italy, maybe in Rome, she loved Italian fashion. Or at least in Trieste. As in the old days, when she would stop before a luxury boutique and enthusiastically point to a dress in the window. Or shoes. We would go inside. She would try the dress on and it would fit her perfectly. For a moment she would see herself somewhere else, at a ball or a première, with a glass of champagne in hand, happy. Then she would return to reality and take leave of the dress, actually of herself in this dress. She would sadly shake her head while returning the dress to the saleswoman, who was trying to persuade her to buy it because it fit her like a glove.

She had that same longing look on her face the day we went shopping for the last time. She had trouble breathing and was puffing heavily as we climbed the small slope towards the street with the boutiques. Nevertheless, she had no trouble, no matter how weak she was, in undressing and trying on the clothes in the changing rooms.

I could have assumed this was her last shopping trip. But I didn’t want to think about it. Her insistence on buying the white cardigan irritated me. I did not succeed in granting her even this simplest of wishes, although I wanted to buy her everything.

I am the one who abandoned her when it was the hardest for her. I betrayed her, and not the other way around.

One of my earliest memories is of me standing in my grandmother’s apartment, at the front door, crying. I am three or four. I’m looking at the shiny, yellow brass door handle, I can smell the Sidol cleaning paste that my grandmother used to polish all the handles in the apartment. I cannot reach it to open the door and look for my Mum. I don’t want to move away from the door. I am inconsolable. “Mum, Mummy, why did you leave me?” I’m sobbing. “Mummy didn’t leave you, she just went to town for a short while,” my grandfather says, trying to console me. It does not help. There are no words to alleviate the pain of our separation. “Mum, Mummy, why did you leave me?” – I repeat this over and over, standing by the door until she finally appears. This childhood cry has crept through, through my entire life. I have never forgiven her for leaving me. I never grew up, and that is the reason I was unjust to her right up to the very end.

Trousers on Sale

He stood in the middle of the men’s clothing shop as if he had strayed in. Around him hung suits and raincoats, and on the dark wooden shelves on the wall were rows of shirts arranged by size and colour. The red poster in the shop window proclaimed: Sale – 30%-50% off!

It was an old-fashioned men’s apparel shop, perhaps the last one in the city with a tailor in-house for customers, who could immediately have any new trousers or jacket shortened or narrowed. At the back of the shop, in front of the changing cubicles, were a big mirror and a few leather armchairs, and even a ceramic flowerpot with a real growing palm. The shop looked just like the lobby of an old-fashioned hotel, where one can lounge comfortably and read the paper while waiting for somebody. His spouse sank down wearily into an armchair and silently caught her breath. Her feet hurt. They had passed by several shops which he hadn’t even wanted to peek into. Obstinately, he had held out for just this one, the fine and expensive shop his father had patronised long ago. Once upon a time, before any mass sales, the owner himself – whom his father knew, naturally – would approve a discount for his loyal customers. She would simply have been satisfied for him to enter any men’s clothing shop, since he no longer had anything to wear. All his suits had become tighter on him over the last few years. First, she would adjust the buttons, but when the jacket would again become too narrow, he would still wear it for some time without buttoning up.

And then one day he saw himself in the mirror and realised how ludicrous he looked. For some time, he tried to convince himself he would lose weight, even tried a diet of apples, then that high-protein diet, the Montignac … what hadn’t he tried. When despite all this he did not succeed – because he was ready to give up any sort of food, but not to stop drinking alcohol – he started evading situations for which he needed to don a suit. Invitations to lectures, diplomatic receptions and gala openings were much fewer anyway, having thinned out over the years. Not long after that, he gifted almost his entire wardrobe to a friend who also adhered to elegance and quality, but who was unable to afford such clothes himself.

The day was warm, and he dragged one foot a little as he walked, already tired though it was only morning when they started for town. He did not see the orthopaedist, although he had an appointment arranged. For aesthetic reasons, he didn’t want to wear shoes fitted with orthopaedic inserts that would have enabled him to walk normally. Aesthetic reasons! “As if anybody would pay attention to some old guy’s shoes,” she said to him. Although she immediately regretted these words, she knew she was right. Even the shop assistants aren’t looking at him, she thought.

It was one of the last days of the big summer sales, but at eleven in the morning the shop was empty. Three shop assistants stood by the till, laughing loudly and playing with their phones. Not one of them paid any attention to their single customer, even though it was their job to sell him something. He was completely uninteresting to them. When they spotted him, dressed in that fake Ralph Lauren polo shirt and too-wide shorts, as if inherited from an older brother (a sure sign his wife had bought them), his white trainers with black socks showing … with an experienced glance, they figured that this guy would not buy anything at all. He had been standing there indecisively for several minutes already, as if afraid to approach the rack of trousers and select a few pairs to try on. Why bother with him? They could already see from his facial expression that he wasn’t going to try them on. And even if he did choose a pair, he would take them to try on at home and later send his wife back to exchange them. But in here, he would first need to untie his trainers, which would not be easy for him with such a belly. And if he succeeded, he’d be embarrassed by his foot odour after getting them off. And he would also need to avoid looking in the mirror, at his own body in his old-fashioned white boxers. Then he would need to pull up each trouser leg one by one, standing, being careful not to lose his balance and fall.

He’s not worthy of their attention, so they don’t even look at him, the wife thought, rising up. If you only knew him before! she thought, on the verge of tears. Just a few years ago, English suits still hung in his wardrobe, from exclusive makers you’ve never even heard of in here, shirts which cost more than your monthly pay, even silk ties … Shoes were his special love. Italian and English, made by hand and to measure, from the finest leather, of course. Wherever he would appear dressed like this, he provoked attention. But at the same time there was in his appearance something old-fashioned, last-century, without regard to the latest styles and colours. His manners betrayed him – a refinement you could see only in films. The way, let’s say, in which he became acquainted with ladies, with an easy bow and a kiss on the hand. Needless to say, he called women ladies, although this term had already gone out of fashion in his childhood. As if he were not from this era. As if he were still trying to find favour with his father, whose elegance he never equalled. The years converted him into his opposite, into a negligently dressed, albeit not neglected, old man who hated shopping because he no longer had either the energy or the money for quality and aesthetics. Into a man who knows he has little time left.

She was no longer able to watch him standing there like an abandoned child not daring to touch the fabrics, let alone look for matching sizes. She felt tears welling up, roiling her vision. She knew this feeling, especially in an apparel shop. How many times had she too found herself in the field of vision of young saleswomen who didn’t lift their gaze from mobiles or deign to approach her with a single word? She would immediately turn and exit the shop, as he is probably about to do himself. In just a minute he will collect himself sufficiently so as to come across as definitely interested – but nothing of his size or colour is there. Even though it’s only the trousers on sale that interest him, and this merely because she had got it into his head that he needed to buy them. She stood up from the comfortable armchair in front of the cubicles and went to the till, where the shop assistants were still having fun with their mobile phones. “My husband is waiting for you to help him,” she said loudly so that the whole trio would hear her. They turned around, one sized her up impolitely and signalled with his head to the youngest, who started towards the racks with the trousers. He was wearing light, beige-coloured summer moccasins without socks.

The shop was still empty. Her husband managed to point out a certain coat, though they had come only for the trousers. A coat was the last thing he needed, she knew that. Has he really taken a liking to it? Or is he just feigning, in order somehow not to come to the trousers? But why, for God’s sake? Sometimes such behaviour irritated her. It’s as if he doesn’t grasp he’s still the customer, that he has rights to choose and condescend, to try on, to change his mind – regardless of age, regardless of whether he now looks like a slighted German tourist. Does the sale make him uncomfortable? But his rights aren’t any less if there are clothes on sale – and even discounted, they are still not cheap. “Half of very expensive is still expensive,” she said to him before they entered. “It’s stupid to pay more if there’s no need.” Perhaps because she’s a wife, and shopped more often than he did, she conducted herself and calculated differently. She comprehended how for him even the most ordinary purchase of trousers became a matter of pride. He wasn’t accustomed to shopping in sales and she bet he now felt humiliated. Especially since no one took the trouble to serve him.

No, my darling, she thought, you’re not humiliated because you’re buying clothes on sale, the whole world does this. Rather, it’s because you’re acting as if you’ve come to cadge something from these jackasses. You stand there like a beggar, pathetic and frighted. What is it with you, what’s happened to us?

He tried the coat on – go on, that’s something at least, she thought. But it turned out tight on him, which only exasperated him further. He had already turned towards the exit, ready to leave, when she made one last attempt. “You need trousers,” she said to him and turned towards the shop assistant. Her voice rang out authoritatively. She knew he disliked it when spoken for, as if feeble-minded – so that it was still more unpleasant for him now, yet she needed to try, even if this was the price. If she were alone, she would buy him trousers and that would be the end of it. And he would wear them, of course, in order not to need to go shopping himself. She regularly bought him T-shirts, shirts, underwear, socks, vests and even trousers. She knew all his measurements by heart, from waist circumference and trouser leg length, to sleeve length and width of back, as well as the size of his shirts. “Please, one pair of long khaki trousers, waist 56, I see you have them here on sale,” she said decisively and pointed out the stand with her finger. The young shop assistant placed a few pairs in different shades on the counter and left them to think about it. “No, I don’t like them,” said her husband (whispered it in fact), although he hadn’t even properly looked at them. When she turned to show him one pair, his gaze was so imploring that she too gave up. If only his mother were alive, she thought, she would take him by the hand and say: “Come on, let’s go for ice cream.” The little blue-eyed boy in little shorts would look at her with relief and firmly take her hand.

At that moment she felt her back wet from sweat. She knew how his feet surely hurt from standing, and that he was thirsty. “Let’s go for a drink,” she said. She thanked the shop assistants for their trouble, but wasn’t sure they got her irony. On the face of the young guy who helped them, it seemed to her that she noticed the trace of a cynical smile.

As they exited, her husband gratefully squeezed her hand. Both invisible, they at least saw one another.

Father Sits at the Bottom of the Steps

Daddy – chocolate in a red wrapper, taste of orange, frozen sea, raspberry juice on a Sunday.

From the time when I had just started speaking, I remember the garden around the house. From the garden the railway line is visible, rolling by into the distance, towards the hills. “There goes the train, go wave to Daddy,” says Mum. I wave. Daddy is either in Ljubljana or Sarajevo, I remember these city names, whose one significance for me is that Daddy’s far away. When he appears, he’s dressed in a dark blue uniform. He has arresting blue eyes. He lifts me high above his head. I’m a bit afraid. Afterwards he gives me a big chocolate in a red wrapper. Even long after he returns from the trip, I wave at every train I see.

I tasted an orange for the first time on New Year’s Day 1955, in the place where he was posted. Father had brought some round sunny fruits from somewhere. As Father peeled off its skin, the orange smelt of a new, strong fragrance. He handed me a bit, somehow solemnly, the way the priest dispensed the host in church when Grandma took me with her to mass. I wasn’t fond of new flavours, but was aware of the importance of the moment and bravely bit in. The piece was succulent, sweet and tart at the same time. I ate it from Father’s hand, a good part of the orange, segment by segment.

One winter, in this small town, it was so cold that the sea froze solid along the shore for the first time ever. Townsfolk headed out to see this wonder, a frozen surface stretching more than twenty metres out from the shore. White and rippled, it blazed in the sun. Even the waves remained frozen in the moment, in the air, turned to ice by a blast of north wind from the hills above town. Cameras were a rarity then, but a local photographer appeared and took pictures of the children walking on the sea, awkwardly, learning the slippery ground that eludes solid footing. He also photographed Father, standing on something which looked like an ice crag. He seemed very handsome and brave to me, so high up, with a smile on his lips.

On Sunday mornings he would take me and my brother for walks, and for raspberry juice. He led us firmly by the hand. In the café, we were allowed to choose between lemonade and raspberry juice, I don’t remember if any other drink existed for us kids. On the way, Father would buy the newspaper and while he drank coffee and read, my brother and I would have fun sipping our raspberry juice from straws. These were real straws, made from straw. At the bottom of the glass would remain a spoonful of overly sweet rose-coloured liquid, because it was rude to slurp. Sometimes, when some acquaintance would join him at the table, he would allow us to watch the fish from the shore.

Father – not Daddy, rather the man who addresses me with a raised voice. His eyes are cold.

He was already dead for years when, on a few consecutive nights, I dreamt this dream: I’m leaning on an iron railing, shouting. I’m calling him. I see him sitting deep down at the bottom of a spiral staircase, looking up at me. He gives me a sign with his hand that he can’t hear me. For some reason I can’t descend to him, and so I shout louder still. I must ask him something, something very important. I make every effort, but my voice doesn’t reach him.

I always woke from this dream with the same feeling of heaviness and tightness in my chest. I would wonder for a while afterwards: can a dream really provoke such pain? And what is it that I wanted to ask him that was so important?

Maybe I wished, in this dream, to ask him about the picture book? I never mentioned it to him. There was no opportunity. For a long time, for years, we didn’t speak at all. The question would surely – I consoled myself – seem strange to him. He probably wouldn’t even remember what I was talking about. Or maybe he would? Maybe, there remained in him, too, a joy in the memory of me reciting a ditty from the picture book that began with the words: Jujuba village in Senegal… Today it seems to me I remember this picture book because only then did he take pleasure in something I did. I was five years old when I got it from him as a present. I remember the drawing of an African village, straw huts, palms and black people. Do I remember this picture book because I saw for the first time – and this only in a picture – a person with black skin? It had just a few rigid cardboard pages, like most picture-books for very small children. And probably only a few verses of a ditty which I no longer remember. I don’t know how many times Daddy read it to me, but I soon knew by heart the text of this little ditty. A little black girl is talking about soldiers who attacked her village in Senegal with cannons. Do you remember Jujuba, Daddy? And how pleased you were when I recited it to you? This is what I really wanted to ask him. It was important to me, very important, to learn the answer, because for my whole childhood he called me – precisely because of the black heroine in the picture book – Jujuba.

When did I cease to be Jujuba? When did I cease to be his good little girl? Because all the later memories of him provoke in me only unpleasantness and tension.

For me, it wasn’t strange that he didn’t hear me in the dream: he didn’t hear me before either, when he was still alive. He was either absent, or so unreachable that I failed to get through to him.

When did I cease, in his eyes, to be that reciting little girl, whom he would take on walks and buy presents? Was this when, at fifteen, I was late from the cinema? Every evening, I had to be home by exactly eight o’clock, except when I got permission to stay out longer. The films usually ended earlier and the cinema was nearby. That evening I ran late, maybe about ten minutes, maybe more. I couldn’t have known because at the time we still didn’t wear watches – they were expensive, given as presents after graduation from high school. I don’t remember if the film I saw lasted longer, or if on the way home I met someone from the neighbourhood and lost track of time chattering. I was serious and obedient, I still hadn’t learnt to lie to my parents like my girlfriends from school, to change out of my uniform after school, to put on makeup.

That evening, I remember, I had on a simple light-blue dress that Mum had sewed up for me. But since I usually wore slacks, maybe Father, when I showed up at the door in a dress, noticed for the first time how I had already grown up. Maybe then suspicion and fear were born in him and this was why he was unable to forgive me running late. He met me at the door, immediately shouting: “Did I not say you must be home by eight sharp?” He didn’t wait for my response. He slapped me – so hard my glasses fell to the floor and were broken. He had never struck me before. I stood numb on the threshold while the sound of broken glass rang in my ears. Mum bent over and wordlessly handed me the frames, as if glassless frames served some purpose.

Nothing was said about this the next day. The slap was punishment for disobedience – for Father, this was a closed matter. But for me everything was changed. The kitchen, from that day on, became enemy territory, lunch a torture. Daddy disappeared, Father became a man to be evaded at all costs, and Mother a person whom I could no longer trust to protect me.

The chasm grew larger. I was increasingly disobedient, and Father increasingly strict.

One autumn, I got to know a tall young man, a law student with whom I was able to talk about books. The days were hot, brimming with light. He read my poetic compositions and was enthusiastic. When he visited me in my provincial town, I would skip class at gymnasium. We took walks around town, avoiding the streets where somebody who recognised me might see us kissing. Father’s prohibitions extended to going out (“Straight home after school!” “No going out at night!”), to my appearance and even to my clothes. I was not allowed to put on makeup or wear jeans.

Still in my mind is this image: the two of us walking down the street, holding hands. At one moment I turn my head, and (it seems) I see Father some twenty metres behind us. Impossible, I think, what would he be doing in town during working hours? I remember the tight feeling of constriction in my stomach, the nausea and unease at the very thought – what if he saw us? I knew that in his eyes holding hands with a young man, with shoulder-length hair to boot – would be a grave transgression. Not only was his daughter so disobedient that he had to introduce a slew of rules to control her, but she still strolls through town with this long-haired type, shaming her father.

The thought that he would slap me again was, at that moment, the worst thing I could imagine.

Late that afternoon, when classes finished, I saw the young man off at the bus station. On the way home I prepared myself for Father’s blow. How does a person prepare for that? By somehow receiving the blow in advance. I imagined taking it, saw the icy fury in Father’s eyes and felt his heavy hand landing on my cheek. This time, I took off my glasses before opening the door. Only then did I enter, muscles tensed, in expectation of punishment. He wasn’t home. Maybe he really hadn’t seen us after all, maybe out of fear I saw Father even when he wasn’t there, and all my preparations were in vain?

But he saw us. In the morning, on the kitchen table, I found a sheet of paper with a message: You shame us with your behaviour. Decide – it’s either him or us. I held the piece of paper in my hand and read it over and over, as if these two sentences, penned in blue ink in his recognisable handwriting, were set down in some unknown script. I needed time to decipher and translate it, to understand what it wished to say to me.

I imagined Father extracting from the drawer a sheet of “mercantile paper” ruled with thin vertical and horizontal lines, then picking up his Pelican fountain pen, which he had received as a gift for some birthday or anniversary, and sitting down at the table with a grave expression. Did he stop before he lowered his hand and began to write, or did his pen immediately start to scratch the paper because he had already come to a decision? Did he tell Mum that he intended to proffer me such a choice? Did she impotently burst into tears? She was never able to stand up to him, not even when he decided he no longer wanted their daughter to live with them if she continued to “shame” them. She could have told him to try speaking with me first. “A child’s not to be thrown out of the house just like that, without a conversation. Where will she go, for God’s sake?” With this, maybe, he would start to shout at her: “What do I care, why doesn’t she think, why does she tramp round the town with that long-haired good-for-nothing? What will the neighbours say?”

I believe that Mum made peace with his decision, hoping that the message would make me see sense, that I would, in the future, calm down and not violate Father’s rules. Even he himself didn’t really believe what he wrote, he didn’t believe that these words of his would be able to drive me out of the house. He loved football and for him this was, I’m sure, a warning before exclusion, a yellow card. He wrote this threat to shake me up, to “make me see reason.” Who wouldn’t be afraid of being thrown out of the house? What girl, not yet seventeen and not finished gymnasium, would choose such a step?

And so they left the paper on the table and peacefully fell asleep. In the morning they found neither me nor the paper. I believe they weren’t even frightened, because Grandma lived nearby and they were sure that I had gone to her.

I kept that document for some time, like a bill of indictment against my parents. Then I threw it away. All the same, afterwards I often remembered the moment when I read the note, that first experience of icy loneliness. I felt as if I were standing at the edge of a chasm, and something was forcing me to jump into the depths. Terror grew in me. I was no longer Daddy’s little girl. Nobody would catch me if I fell. I was a little outcast, unloved, terrified.

Was I searching, in that recurring dream, for an answer to the question he never answered: How were you able to let me leave home? And what would he say to me? That I had already left anyway. That nothing was able to stop me.

Father’s life project was to build a house on the island. Mum and her two sisters inherited their parents’ house in the old part of the little town. She wanted to buy out her sisters, and so acquire the house that she loved, and where we summered for my whole childhood. But Father declined their agreement. He didn’t want to have anything to do with that house and his wife’s inheritance, probably because her parents had received him very coldly long before, considering him not good enough for their daughter. He didn’t want anything from them, not even when they were already dead – for his whole life, he stubbornly tried to prove them wrong, that he alone was able to provide for his own family. He’d acquired a bigger flat and had a better job than the other sons-in-law, had more money, lived better and yet still helped them out. He decided to build his own house with a big terrace and a view of the sea, and for this he would be beholden to no one. The terrace was almost more important than the house. On it, he would – he dreamt – sit in his old age, staring at the sea.

Now and then, in my infrequent telephone conversations with Mum, I heard from her about the progress of the construction. Years passed before it was finished. Mum didn’t comprehend Father’s need to prove something, because he no longer had anyone to prove it to. But he was proving it to himself. If not building the house, he would have remained nobody and nothing, just as his father-in-law and his wife’s whole family had expected of him.

I finally saw it in the summer of 1972. It was a simple two-storey house, with a konoba, a large storeroom for tools and foodstuffs, and garage on the ground floor, still unplastered. It had a huge terrace overlooking the entire bay, positioned in such a way that in summer one could spend a good part of the day on it. But how to ask them about that which immediately caught my eye: the new house had only two bedrooms and a living room. Where is my room? Where am I in this? There was no room for me in their life. The new house wasn’t envisioned for summers with the whole family: son, daughter and their children. When building the new house, why had they only made two bedrooms?

I didn’t ask them this, either then or ever after. It was too late for that, and I also knew that I didn’t really have the right to insist on my own room. If I had even mentioned such a thing, they probably would have been amazed. Already for years, I had lived somewhere else. Why now, right now, was I looking for my own place in this house? Had I not left of my own free will? Am I myself not to blame for not having a room?

One evening, my brother’s good friend came to visit. When we were introduced, he said, surprised: “But I never heard them talk about you,” and then turned to my brother with a question: “I didn’t even know you had a sister, why didn’t you mention this to me?” My brother just smiled – in a strained way, it seemed to me. I felt sorry for him. Was he forbidden to speak about me to his friends? Or was I so far outside of their everyday lives that there was no occasion to mention me?

I felt as if something were choking me. My brother’s friend’s comment revived the memory of that fearful panic I experienced after reading the letter that morning, when I found myself in front of the building where we had all lived together until then. I stood there with bag in hand. In the bag were a typewriter and some books. I looked towards the windows of the flat. I was sure that Mum at least would peep out from behind the curtain, but I didn’t spot her. Had Mum at that moment appeared at the window and waved to me, I would have probably burst into tears and run back inside. If only my little brother had appeared on the balcony and called to me, I wouldn’t have persevered, and would have gone back. Had my father come down, taken the bag and hugged me without any words, I would have returned home with him.

While my brother and his friend conversed, I looked out towards the garden to hide my tears. There, my four-year-old little girl swung on the swing which Father had put up for her. There was something comforting in this scene, in the fact that the two of us had at least received this type of acknowledgement, that we belonged to the family.

So little’s needed for me to feel welcome, I thought. One child’s swing. I still craved their attention. But after the words of this young man, again I felt cast out.

No, I never distanced myself enough from them not to care that they didn’t mention me – despite everything, I never went far enough away. I lived far away, but was at the same time too close.

Father did not take well the news that I was expecting a child. My pregnancy, probably, confirmed the premonitions and fears which began that night when I didn’t return from the cinema in time. We rarely saw each other: I was studying and living with my husband and his family in another town. After my wedding, at which nevertheless he made an appearance, we didn’t visit one another at all. He visited us once, a few months before the wedding, I myself don’t know why, probably he came to our town on other business. When we entered the narrow lift together, he was unable not to see my belly. He had to notice it, however much he evaded it. He didn’t mention my condition. He didn’t even ask me, “how are you, how are you feeling,” as every parent ought to ask a pregnant daughter. Ever since I left them, everything that concerned me was torture to him, unbearable. From the cold gaze of his blue eyes, I saw that he still thought this to be my greatest sin, the consequence of the whole list of my bad decisions. And now he’s unable to look at this proof of betrayal, proof that he was right to be suspicious of me, when he greeted me with a slap that long-ago evening, as a warning sign in advance. My departure, my marriage and my child-on-the-way – none of this should have happened. He was scarcely able to muster the strength to look at me in such a state.

I never forgot the expression on his face, but it’s only now I know this reflected despair and resignation. I ought then to have said to him: “But what did you expect? How could you just let me leave home?”

After the child’s birth, our two-sided silence continued like a punishment we both had to bear. It seemed to me that not even the child succeeded in bridging the gulf between us. Still, he put up the swing. Did I judge him too harshly?

Father fell seriously ill even before the house was finished. I visited him in hospital, maybe I wanted to redeem myself in his eyes, to “mend my ways”, as he would say, and be a good daughter. By then I already knew that I was at fault too, that I was too unyielding, not only the morning I left home, but on other occasions as well. A wise father would say to his daughter that she had an awkward, hard character like his, which would, if she wasn’t careful, only harm her. I was too young to leave home, too young to be left to myself, and I should have acknowledged to him I understood that. I simply needed to utter these words once. I didn’t need to seek forgiveness, only to tell him that I knew that I too was at fault that morning, when I left home because of his message. But I too could have started a conversation with my parents and asked them why they had forced me to choose? What did I do that was so terrible that he had to threaten me with expulsion from the house? Maybe then my father would have finally begun to speak and would have said to me what I wanted to hear – that he was sorry.

In the hospital room it stank of medicines and iodine. I looked for Father, glancing around. In one of the beds lay a thin man, his face racked with illness. My father, suddenly old and enfeebled. When did this happen? In this frail body, nothing remained of his dominance, of the threat which I once saw in him. Already he had been through war (I had never given any thought to the fact that my father and mother had lived through the War), a career, numerous relocations, a yearning to prove himself to his own wife and to others who, like her, believed themselves better than him. Then the problematic children, illness. And this house he dreamt of, the terrace on which he wished to sit looking at the sea, will he have any time left for this? No, he no longer needed to tell me he was sorry. Too similar, too disappointed in one another, we let slip all opportunities to make peace with each other as we were, and so to try to be better towards one another. Even at that moment we did not succeed, on the threshold of his death. I sat on the bed and held him by the hand for a time. He dozed, dazed by all the medicines. I don’t know if he saw me. Maybe everything was already all the same to him.

Not long ago I found a photograph I took when I dropped by my parents’ place on the way home from summer holidays. Father sat at the table in the small kitchen. Although it was still hot, he was warmly dressed, even then, he already suffered from chills during the summer. I don’t know why I took this photograph. I dread to think I had a presentiment of his end. He beckoned me to sit across from him. I don’t remember any longer what we spoke about, just his inflamed eyes and grey skin, his exhaustion. He was already having difficulty breathing and moved around the flat only with exhausting effort. “Seka,” he said, and a chill went through me; years had passed since he called me by that nickname, which replaced Jujuba.

“Seka,” he repeated, looking me in the eyes, “I’m afraid to die.”

These were the most intimate words he had ever directed towards me. Words which I did not want to hear.

Why did he say this to me? Why to me specifically? Because he had no one else with whom to share his fear? As if he had deposited some huge burden into my arms, I felt as if his words were weighing down upon me, fighting to overwhelm me, as if they were alive. I didn’t try to comfort him. Perhaps it would have been enough if I had just said – Daddy.

A month afterwards, at my brother’s funeral, I saw him alive for the last time. He sat next to me in the small local church. His house, his beautiful new house, no longer had any meaning for him. It was just an empty, absurd shell. And he himself was already a shell, in which only his illness and agony dwelt – for a short time longer. I console myself that he was no longer afraid to die.

Unwanted Witness

The day before, the pavement froze over, so I knew this was my last chance to go out and get vaccinated against the flu. Because if snow started falling too, it would be hard to leave the house, let alone ascend to the clinic. It was the end of November – an epidemic was on the verge of spreading widely, the news warned, particularly to us “senior citizens.” I intended to go alone to the clinic, but he set off with me because he worried I would slip on the black ice, even though I walk cautiously. With my osteoporosis, if I were to break a leg or an arm, not only would he need to care for me, but he’d also have to assume all the housework which he considers my responsibility, or so I figured as we set out from the house. Malevolently, I recognise. My first thought should have been that here was proof of genuine concern for me, and not an expression of his self-centredness. But there you have it, over time practical thoughts have trumped romantic ones.

It didn’t occur to him to get vaccinated. He has no need for it, he had never got vaccinated and had never got the flu, and has good immunity, he tried to convince me – lest I declare it’s stupid to speak of how it was before, when we were young.

He said this despite his own acceptance that he too had at last become a “senior citizen.” When he turned seventy-five not long ago, he declared on his birthday, that very day: “There it is, now I’m old!” Not the day before, not the day after. Was this only due to the round number? Does some definite moment exist when it’s possible to say – “There it is, now I’ve grown old”? Is old age a question of years, or of some internal feeling? While we sat around the table at his niece’s place, where she had prepared a dinner party for relatives and friends, I figured at first he was exaggerating. Why this statement, when the other guests are of a similar age, why make a parade of it? His uncle of eighty-seven simply burst out laughing and waved a hand. “What do you know about old age, you’re a snotty-nosed little kid to me,” he shot back.

But this solemn declaration somehow made an impression on me, like an acknowledgement of age to one’s own self. Because I saw he wasn’t joking. He looked exactly the same as over the last ten or so years, he’s one of those men on whom it is difficult to fix an age by face alone. The wrinkles he acquired had not become any deeper, he held himself just as uprightly, he walked briskly. What keeps him young, in my opinion, is curiosity. With just as much passion, he follows the news, reads history books, debates world politics, socialises with people, goes out – whereas I’m all the more tired, more partial to the house and television.

Still, I had the idea that it might have been a specific meeting that prompted in him the surprise of feeling old. Not long before this celebration we were at dinner at the home of an acquaintance of his, of the same age, whom we hadn’t seen in a long time. We knew he had married for a third time, rumour had it that he was a womaniser and that his previous wife had left him because of this, but we were not acquainted with the new lady of the house. A tall young woman opened the door to us. A daughter, I reckoned, knowing that he has three grown-up children. The friend appeared, embraced us, and introduced the young woman as his spouse. Afterwards, we also met a little girl of ten, their daughter, who came forward. We dined on fish he had prepared, and everything was as it should be, tasty and pleasant. But I remained a little surprised when his wife, on two occasions, did not succeed in saying what she thought. She attempted to participate in the discussion about the sexual harassment of women, on which much was being written at that time. But with these two, it was difficult to get a word in. She needed to raise her voice in order to ask theatrically: “Might I, perhaps, say something too?” They both glanced at her, surprised. “But of course, dear,” her husband said, “why do you even ask?”

I was bothered by his resorting to dear. I don’t know if she had maybe become accustomed to this, but it sounded over-emphatic and hence ironic. She spoke quickly, hardly catching her breath, as if calling out to them from a neighbouring room. I had the impression she was vigorously exerting herself, not just to be convincing in outlining the example of one of her own friends who experienced such unpleasantness at work, but also to get them to hear her at all. As if she and these two males were not in the same room, in the same world. This type of rushed female speech is well-known to me – the fear lest they interrupt you, lest they don’t hear you. But not at home, only at work. Our young hostess, perhaps owing to her age, found herself in this position at home as well. She did not allow herself to be hushed and this pleased me. The little girl was watching her mum, then her dad. Did their communication sound to her like a quarrel, or had she become accustomed to such scenes and knew that her mum simply needed to overrule her dad? “Well OK, but for God’s sake, why are you shouting?” he finally said angrily, instead of continuing the discussion with her. “It’s not possible to speak with you otherwise,” she replied, and began to gather plates from the table. Judging from her sagging shoulders, she wasn’t angry, only resigned. She received both attention and support from her husband, but it was as if he didn’t hear what she was saying. As if he didn’t take her words seriously.

On the way home, my husband didn’t comment on this little incident which seemed so interesting to me, maybe even characteristic. He didn’t mention that his acquaintance was twice as old as his new wife, the same age as his daughter from the first marriage. That amazed me a little, who wouldn’t look back on this with some comment at least? Not maliciously necessarily, maybe with a dose of humour, I don’t know. Had he read a piece like this in the paper, he would surely have said something. Perhaps: “But what’s he thinking, how old does he think he is?” Of course it’s not possible for the acquaintance’s relationship to be reduced to a single detail, in this case the big difference in age, but still I expected at least a bit of his commentary.

For example, I myself reckoned that his friend probably would not live to see the little girl grow up and that this was sad. And I said so, too. He just nodded, looking through the bus window. I don’t know exactly why I concluded this, but in his behaviour after the visit I had a presentiment that something more powerful than himself had overcome him – male envy. His acquaintance, a man his age, had energy for a wife half his age and a child, thereby seizing for himself the right to a future. Because of this, he probably felt old and defeated.

Holding hands, we arrived at the clinic. I don’t know why he came in with me, he could have stayed in the waiting room and completely avoided the nurse turning to him next. Because when she finished with me, she turned to him and said: “Let me vaccinate you too, since you’re here already.” Surprised, he looked at her and started defending himself as if a wasp had attacked him. “No, I just accompanied my wife, I’m not prone to the flu.” “Oh, you don’t say? I think I know better,” the nurse said flirtatiously, showing him a seat. “You’re not afraid of injections are you?” He placed himself in her hands, powerlessly shrugging his shoulders with an insecure smile. She took him by surprise, maybe he even reckoned I had called and arranged all this in advance. “I know them,” she winked at me, smiling, “men generally resist, cut an important air, that’s just how it is. They never stop cutting an air of importance, and the older they are, the more stubborn,” she said as she prepared the injection. “They’re afraid, you know. But when I say this to them, they really want to prove to me that they’re not afraid – works every time!”

He began to fumble with his sleeve, rolling it up. But since he had a pullover on over his shirt, he wasn’t able to roll it up high enough. I knew the problem lay not in a fear of injections, but rather that he was trying to avoid undressing in front of anybody. It doesn’t matter that the nature of her job is such that the scantily clad body of a patient would provoke no other reaction than indifference. His pride didn’t allow anyone to see his pale, thinning skin studded with age spots and his drooping muscles which even he himself doesn’t wish to see, especially if he doesn’t need to. He exercised every day for half an hour. He lifted weights, rode his indoor bicycle, but more for his circulation and heart health. That’s how he justified it to himself, because a real man doesn’t worry about his appearance. But it wasn’t a matter of pride, rather of vanity. He was vain, and every situation which demanded he undress caused him awkwardness, whether this was a vaccination, a check-up or trying on a suit. On the beach or at the pool it was different, there everybody’s in their swimming trunks and swimsuits, almost the same thing as everyone being dressed. But if he were to decide to do laps in a hotel swimming pool, he would go there early in the morning, when there are fewer swimmers. Not only so they wouldn’t see him, but equally so he wouldn’t see them. As if older people lose the right to expose themselves, to exhibit the body to others. Their bodies only alarm others, even when they’re not especially forbidding.

They are spent, as women feel especially keenly. But neither is it all the same to men – I’ve been noticing, for some time already, how my husband avoids looking at himself in the mirror in the corridor. Or even if he does cast a glance, instinctively he first pulls in his stomach, then his cheeks, so that his face will look thinner and more elongated, like in his youth. Naturally I know all his little tricks, we haven’t lived together in vain all these years. Sometimes I’m able to tell him: “Don’t strut about: you look fine for your age. You want to look like a thirty-year-old? Me too.” And then we laugh, because what more can we do, besides laugh at our own vanity.

“Just pull your arm out of the sleeve, it’s easier for you that way,” the nurse said. He unbuttoned his shirt and obediently pulled out his arm. Luckily, he had a T-shirt on so that, to a certain extent, he was protected from her gaze. She approached him and thrust the needle into his arm, a little below the shoulder, so that she didn’t even touch him – same as with me. As if it disgusted her to touch aged skin, she didn’t pinch the spot of the jab with two fingers, as was done in the past. Maybe it’s just no longer done like this? I’ve known her for a few years already, ever since she came to work at our clinic after finishing college. Young and adroit, she made an impression with her amiable and warm personality. She took our blood pressure, temperature, pulse. She had to touch us and others like us. The disgust was in my head, not hers, just as on this occasion of his vaccination, his shame before her gaze was squatting in him, not in her. She stuck a plaster on him, on the spot of the prick, and said: “There, it’s done,” patting him gently on the back. “Do you really think the jab will help me?” he said, trying to crack a joke, and she laughed, glancing at him somehow affectionately. But it was still unpleasant for him – I saw this in how, a couple times, he missed his sleeve when trying to push his arm back into it. Once again I interfered, as if I really needed to control everything, but also because all this undressing and redressing and affectation over such silly things as routine vaccination was getting on my nerves. “Hurry up,” I said to him, “get dressed already.” He looked at me, hurt.

We walked home without speaking, slowly, shuffling our feet, because in the meantime more snow had fallen, a thin layer which concealed the black ice. It truly was beautiful outside, as it always is when the snow covers everything, when only the contours of humans, houses, cars are discernible through the heavy snowfall. In this whiteness, you have the impression that you too are yourself somehow less corporeal, less real, and yet – you are alive. Later that day, he seemed to me to be in an unhappy mood, as if he were ashamed, as if he thought all this had been thrust on him unnecessarily, he had just wanted to keep me company. Of course, we didn’t speak about this, long ago we had learnt to keep quiet about unpleasant themes. But he seemed to me dejected the following day as well. Something had changed, not much, but still something. Nothing visible, palpable. Only a nuance of mood. Was it troubling him that he had hesitated to undress in front of the nurse? Or maybe he noticed she did not even see him, and that hit the mark? Or maybe, at that moment, he thought what he later declared at his own birthday, that he had become old? Exactly as before, he would lie down early, would fall asleep book in hand, glasses on his nose, lamp still on. Yet he was somehow quieter.

That day, I needn’t have let him go with me. Nor, when he was already there, let him be vaccinated. The problem was not with the nurse, it was with me – the unwanted witness to his moment of weakness.

Anniversary

Recently, my mother visited me in my sleep. She was dressed in a simple tunic and latte-coloured trousers, wearing a gold necklace and earrings, fully made-up. She stood in front of me, ready to go out, reprovingly looking at my untidy T-shirt and trousers. As if she were alive and about to say to me: “Give me a shawl, please, I’m cold.” She seemed so present, so alive, that in the morning the fact of her being dead and interred sounded like somebody’s stupid joke.

On the anniversary of her death, I didn’t go to the grave, about a two-hour drive away. In place of this, my daughter, her one granddaughter, prepared dinner for me and three of my girlfriends, all of whom knew Mum well. My daughter made potato gnocchi, Mum’s specialty. Her husband made beef goulash. And so, while we ate the soft and perfectly delicious gnocchi, we thought of her and talked about how she couldn’t have made them better herself. In truth, my daughter learnt from her grandmother how to mix the flour, how much hard flour to use and how much soft (half and half), what kind of potato you must boil (white), even how to mix in the three whole eggs and a little butter (roughly) – not to forget the salt – and how to knead all of this into the perfect dough for the gnocchi, which, when boiled, are neither too soft nor too hard. “Just think,” she told us proudly, “this is the first time they came out right on the first go, and I didn’t mess up the kitchen or myself.” I didn’t draw her attention to the fact that her black trousers were a little white at the back from the flour, probably she unconsciously wiped her hands on them or leaned against the edge of the kitchen counter. I watched her dropping the gnocchi into the boiling water – one by one, with floury hands and black hair tied back, stooped over the pot in such a way she reminded me of Mum. When did she learn to cook? During those few days each summer she would spend with me at the weekend cottage? She didn’t spend much time with her grandmother, but now she’s a maestro – she, who never, really never, displayed the least interest in cooking. But she decided to learn to prepare gnocchi out of love for her husband. She cooks them once a year, as a gift for his birthday.

Mum’s second specialty, which we both love, is vegetable soup. My daughter learnt this also, though the recipe is actually simple. But the third, apple strudel, neither of us knows how to pull off. We would maybe succeed in kneading the dough, but rolling it out and stretching it on the table so thinly that it’s completely translucent is for us too difficult a mission. So we both make strudel from store-bought crusts. But we prepare the apples like Mum did: first, they must be grated, and left to drain, then we squeeze the rest of the juice out by hand, add grated lemon peel into the mix, and cinnamon too – but never sugar. The tarter the apples, the better the strudel, though everybody except me and her has to sprinkle them with sugar. But our strudel never turns out as fine as Mum’s. She ceased making it about five years before her death. It was hard for her, standing bent over like that, patiently rolling the dough, it’s painstaking work.

Good gnocchi are an art my daughter has mastered, and for this reason she was proud last night as we enjoyed the fine food and proposed toasts with red wine. It wasn’t sad, or at least it was less sad than if I’d gone alone to the graveyard and then, like Mum used to do, brushed the withered flowers and pine needles off the black marble slab on which, next to hers, are engraved the names of my brother and father. How many times, over the twenty-five years since my brother’s death, had I been there with her, watching her first clean, and then bend down and kiss that stone as if it were a living human being. Every time, tears would cloud my gaze – which I would nevertheless withhold. Afterwards, Mum’s hands would tremble for some time in the car, but she would restrain herself from again bursting into a desperate weeping that ends in sobs. Usually I fell silent, not finding words of consolation. How to console a woman whose child died? Even though he was then thirty-five – or precisely due to this. At such moments I became still more conscious that once again we would not bridge the drifting apart that had begun between us so long ago.

Our relationship was like that fragile translucent saucer from the Chinese tea set I inherited from her. It was already cracked and there was no saving it when it fell from my hand while I dusted the shelf. I was unable to admit this to her. Mum would be affronted not only by my negligence but also by my attitude towards her things. And the Chinese saucer had survived several generations, ever since my great-grandfather brought it back from one of his travels to America. On it were painted three scenes: in the first, a little girl dressed in a blue kimono is crossing a bridge; in the second, a woman is coming out of a house; and in the third, the same woman has caught up with the little girl in a garden and is saying something to her. To me, she looks like a mother warning her daughter to take care, her facial expression worried, one hand raised. The little girl is turned towards the mother, but as if in surprise. I know them by heart, I looked at them countless times as a child, concocting various stories about this little girl and her mother. The Chinese saucer moved in with me when Mum left for the home, along with several other things which were important to her and for which she gave me precise instructions concerning what to do with them and how to take care of them: the plaster sculpture of the Madonna that sat atop the chest of drawers in her grandmother’s bedroom, one dinner service, a wall clock and a never-used fine set of bedlinen which she had kept for special occasions.

In my flat are a few of her things. While these things were never especially important to me, she guarded them carefully. She considered me negligent and careless.

A few years later, Mum suddenly remembered the wall clock which she had tucked away in a box and gave to me for safekeeping. She begged me to remove the box from the shelf, take the clock out, and hang it on the wall in her weekend cottage. “It was so expensive, I worked hard for it,” she said to me. “You work and do without, in order to be able to buy certain things, and then … nothing. And put those sheets of mine on the bed, they’re quite new. Never used,” she said. “Such fine sheets, which I never slept on, it’s the biggest shame. Like the guest dishes, which were too fine for us to eat from, except when we had guests,” she added.

What did I do with those sheets, with her fine dinner service, with the clock, after I took charge of them before Mum’s relocation to the home? I stored them away, exactly like her. I placed the service on the highest shelf of the wardrobe, the one with other things that I don’t use, and the sheets at the bottom of the wardrobe, underneath the ones I do use. There they stagnated until I moved to another flat, which has a basement.

On the day when bulky waste is collected, I paid two students to clear out this basement and carry the things of the former tenants out onto the pavement in front of the house. Not much furniture was left behind, three armchair skeletons without cushions, a small table from their erstwhile living room, a kitchen table. And an engineer’s framed commendation from sometime in the fifties. The overnight gatherers of bulky waste, those who come ahead of Sanitation, were especially happy with the iron pedestal of the Singer sewing machine. They also carried off the kitchen table and one tapestry, everything that they calculated could be converted into cash.

They didn’t want to take the wooden trunk with clean, neatly arranged jars for homemade preserves. How long had those jars stood shut away in the wooden kitchen trunk? When had the unknown, already long-dead woman who lived here given up on making preserves? Preserves are prepared for a family. Did she stop making preserves when her husband died? What age was she then? And that matching fabric for bedspreads and curtains? When did she stop sewing? And was it only after her husband’s death that she carried the trademark AEG typewriter down to the basement? She also tucked away a few tiles from the former bathroom, in case of a crack. And one grey suitcase. I opened it before they carried it off. In it – wrapped carefully up in fabric – was a sepia photograph of an older woman from the end of the nineteenth century, in an oval frame. Then a watercolour of a girl, signed by the artist, as well as a charcoal drawing – a portrait of a man. The granddaughter who sold the flat hadn’t even peeped into the basement. She wasn’t curious. She said to me: “Throw it all away.” To her, the grandmother’s things were ordinary trash.

That day I watched how someone’s former life was exhumed from a cellar, as if from a grave, dying for a second time. The bulky waste was not even bulky at all, but tiny. I reckoned there would be no need for me to worry about their things, I didn’t know these people, after all. A pathetic defence against indifference.

Their innermost poetry lay unfolded on the pavement, transformed into trash, not because it truly was trash, rather because others, through their own non-interest, made it so. At night, the metal arm of a giant crane gathered the remnants from the pavement. In front of the entrance, no trace remained of the former residents, the former people, not even in the form of waste.

In time, everything must be got rid of: pictures, tapestries, diplomas, letters, everything personal. But this somehow presupposes a consciousness about departure, about definitive departure. That’s why Mum resisted moving to the home for so long. Only, how to recognise that the time has come for departure?

After this, I nevertheless began to use Mum’s dinner service and to sleep on her bedlinen. After so many years, it was hard for me to make the bed with these sheets she had kept for guests, or for some special occasion which would never come. These were no ordinary sheets, it had not been easy to purchase them, they’d cost money. She must have purchased them in one of the better shops, of which there were few, then hidden them from her husband so she wouldn’t need to admit the debt she had incurred for them. I remember their raised voices in the bedroom, my father shouting about how she knows nothing except how to spend, Mum defending herself, saying she too earned money. “Yes, but you spend it all on yourself, there are never enough of these rags for you!” I saw and heard all this again while I spread out the blue sheet with its hand-embroidered border, which no human body had ever touched.

For the first time I’m thinking that some of Mum’s other things might come in handy in my new flat: a yellow and red tablecloth with an olive motif, towels, a bedspread, ornamental pillowcases. I could wear her dressing gown, the one I ordered from the dressmakers on the neighbouring street and brought to her a month before her death, when she was already at the home’s in-patient clinic. She took a liking to the brick red colour, but unfortunately I forgot to ask them to sew on at least one pocket, so she would not need to stash tissues in her sleeve. Obstinately, she still called paper tissues handkerchiefs and she tucked them into her sleeve, she was unable to free herself of this habit. “But Mum, you don’t need to save paper tissues,” I would say. “But I’m used to it,” she’d say, justifying herself. She wore that dressing gown only two or three times before the day I saw her for the last time.

“These things weren’t worth so much trouble,” said Mum when she mentioned the wall clock. “But a woman doesn’t know this when she’s young,” she added. “She thinks she has infinite time and so saves things for some better occasion.”

What are these better occasions, Mum? Those which never come?

When the children and I left the home that winter afternoon, Mum was seated in bed, her hair combed and her lips made-up. Exhausted, she collapsed on the pillows and shut her eyes. She said: “Leave now, while it’s not late, bad weather is brewing.” She knew we always hurried back – even when I came alone on a visit, I still hurried home. It was late afternoon, we put on our coats and quickly took our leave. Mum stayed in bed next to the big door to the balcony. She waved to us. Outside, the south wind bent the boughs of the park’s trees, and clouds swirled uneasily in the sky. We hadn’t switched on the light. Darkness slowly swallowed her face.

Apple Cake

A winter afternoon. Darkening already. This time he arrives at the café right on time, which rarely happens. Although he comes straight from work, she can’t anticipate exactly when he will arrive, but for her, excuses don’t help. If he runs five or ten minutes late, she experiences this as an irrevocable loss. She thinks of how she might have spent this time with him, hearing his voice, watching his face.

He leans over her and lightly touches first one cheek then the other with his lips. She deeply inhales his familiar scent.

They have around an hour and a half, two at most, at their disposal. For her, this is the only time that counts before she sinks back into the habitual rhythm of the everyday.

She looks at him. He’s a little out of breath – he hurried. And his forehead is bedewed, despite the cold. His high forehead. Smooth, without a single wrinkle, the forehead of a handsome young man. He diverts his gaze, he does this sometimes when he sees she has been examining him too long with that look. Like she’s hungry. So he said to her once, “You’re looking at me like you’re going to devour me.” Naturally, she remembers every detail of this scene: the way in which he sat opposite her at the conference table, how he at first evaded her gaze, looking doggedly down into his cup of coffee, how he turned to the professor next to him and discussed something with him for a long time.

“I’m hungry,” she says with a smile, trying to cover up her own real hunger. She daren’t speak more, articulate the sentence through to the end. “I’m hungry for you,” she would say to him if she were allowed. But there are no such words between them.

The unarticulated words burn in her gullet as she swallows them.

She asks herself if she’s been successful in this cover-up, and why anyway is she covering up what so obviously exists between them, the desire to be together. But she knows the answer is so banal that sometimes it pains her: she must restrain herself. He’s so much younger than her, and perhaps he’s ashamed by that gaze of hers in a public place. Maybe the waitress will notice him and be scandalised by the older woman to whom this young guy is surely not a son, because she is staring at him so greedily. But isn’t his shy evasion of her gaze childish behaviour? If she warns him he’s acting immaturely, maybe … At that very moment when, with his own hand, he reaches out for hers, her suspicions are quelled.

She knows that they will both order apple cake. Later on, at home, she will join her husband for a dinner she prepared earlier. She will eat only a little, only enough to keep him company. Her husband doesn’t like to eat alone. Lunch, he can still do alone. But not breakfast or dinner. That would be a betrayal, he would be angry like a little boy whose favourite toy has been stolen from him. Sometimes it seems to her that food, these two daily meals which they eat together, is the only thing that holds them together. But she knows that this isn’t the truth and that she’s sometimes unjust towards this man whom she cares about and does not intend to divorce.

And today she will, as usual, speak with this young editor about the latest issue of the journal, about book reviews. This is a work meeting, each of their meetings is about work. They talk about the texts which she must translate.

They avoid talking about themselves, about life before they met.

He closes his eyes, as if he too needs a moment to collect himself and transport himself into the reality of the café. Then they talk. A lot, passionately. She thinks of his words as a substitute for touches, and that he is maybe aware of this. She concentrates on the sound of his voice, deep and lovely, evidence that he is here, with her. Both are here, together, at a table in one gloomy café. They cannot stop being together. They do not touch, just talk.

Now he’s talking about the new book she has just started translating. That much, she manages to follow. While he speaks, his eyes are unbearably blueish-green, like the sea in those posters of the Caribbean in windows of travel agencies. She thinks of how this colour is quite unreal. He too himself is somehow unreal. For a while already, he appears in her life once, sometimes twice a month, then disappears. It would be unbearable to see each other more often. Their delicate relationship would be converted into ordinary meetings, or would grow into something dangerous, suicidal. She worries he is too young to be conscious of the feelings he arouses in her. She is the one who evades encounters with him, avoids going to the editorial office, invents reasons for not coming to meetings. Still, she’s conscious he senses something in her gaze at his skin, his face, as if she were caressing him. Touch without touch.

As soon as they arrange the date for their next meeting, she awaits it for days in advance. She changes outfits all morning, not a single item of clothing looks good on her. Her hands sweat, she feels a slight dizziness, a hurried beating of the heart, nervousness from the excitement. For some time already, her own body – its demands – scares her more than their encounters.

Now her warmth reaches him across the table. He takes off his coat. He smells of tobacco. She doesn’t handle the smell of tobacco well. She doesn’t allow guests to smoke in the flat, only at an open window. The smell of tobacco on him is intoxicating. Because it blends with the scent of his skin, which she hungrily inhales. While both lean over the manuscript of her translation, again she experiences that smell, from which her head spins lightly. She tells him he’s poisoning her with the tobacco smoke exuding from him. He laughs. His teeth are white and straight, his lips full.

That smile. She craves it. The most blissful thing would be to clasp his face in her palms, draw him towards herself across the small table and thrust a kiss on him. Why doesn’t she do it, at least once – nobody in the café knows them.

The difference in years between them sometimes confuses her. Sometimes, when she sees him after a long time, she feels worry, motherly worry, which has no place between them. She looks for signs of fatigue or illness, something that reveals to her more about him. He speaks reluctantly about himself. There’s something soft in him, some vulnerability, almost childlike, due to an illness he recovered from in childhood. Without reason, she imagines him as a little bedridden boy, with a book in his hands. Then he’s running, playing football, wanting to be the same as the other boys in school and to conquer his illness. And he succeeds. His athletic muscles are outlined under his clothes. He’s no longer a boy, but the vulnerability that he hides so well remains. An exciting blend of youth and man who, seemingly by chance, will touch her shoulder. Or lean over towards her to direct her attention to some word in the text.

She hates herself when she feels worry, and tries to picture him at moments when they are not together. As they are now, at the table, in the café. With a plate of apple cake and two glasses of white wine in front of them. For these two, no other time exists except this. And no other place exists except this café which, in the winter gloaming, no longer appears so gloomy.

Sitting with him at the café table, she feels totally present, concentrated on him. She is no longer even listening to his voice, she hears it only as a far-off hubbub. Only his presence is important, and the excitement it fills her with. Only the time they are together is important. She wants him, she wants to be with him, but she doesn’t do anything to draw him in. Except that, before every encounter, she is becoming all the more conscious of her own transfiguration. The young man on the other side of the table is turning her into a woman again. It’s enough for him to gaze at her, to smile at her. He illuminates her with his smile, makes her visible. He is a beautiful and fallacious mirror possessing the power to show her a different self.

She knows it’s unfair to her husband, with whom she’ll be sitting in half an hour, at the dinner table, listening absent-mindedly to his familiar, calming voice. The calming voice – in this, the difference between them.

One voice settles her. The other unsettles her.

When in the young man’s company, she feels that her body behaves as if it had its own will. Suddenly the past vanishes, all which otherwise comprises her life becomes unimportant, and at that moment she exists in one dimension only. She is in his power, exhibited to his grace.

Sometimes, when she returns home from the café, a frightening chasm yawns within her. She lives as always, goes to work at the publishing house, drops by the shop on the way back and makes dinner. She cleans the flat, hangs up the washed clothes, throws out the trash and changes the bedclothes. Until in the middle of one of these chores, she feels such a powerful yearning for him that she must urgently sit down somewhere or lean on the wall. Alarmed by the feeling that she does not know herself.

He’s the new editor at the journal for which she sometimes translates. When he appeared, he didn’t attract her attention. They would encounter each other at editorial conferences – he struck her as authoritative, but informed about the job. Amiable with his co-workers, with a disarming smile and a beautiful voice. Handsome in a somehow ruffled, carefree way. All this she registered as incidental facts.

And then something happened, she doesn’t know exactly what. It was at a conference in another city. She sat down in an empty chair next to him. In the darkness of the hall, she made herself comfortable, getting ready to listen to the speaker. Suddenly she felt his hand on her own. This lasted for only a second, he immediately pulled it back, leaned over towards her ear and whispered: “Sorry!” She pulled her hand back as if burnt: through her whole body, warmth flowed lightning fast. Unconsciously she touched her upper arm and carried on along to her face, looking at him quite confusedly. But the warmth which she felt had still not faded, as if with this touch his skin remained glued to hers. Did he observe this gesture of hers? Did her reaction betray her, did he sense that his quite accidental touch provoked in her some kind of physical shock? She was unable to remain sitting peacefully next to him. She rose and barely made it to the last row. She trembled as if in a fever, as if this touch, this gifting of warmth to her, had afterwards immediately flooded her with a chill.

After the lecture he approached her, with a worried look on his face. “I’m sorry if I unsettled you, it was accidental.” She shook her head, not knowing what she would say. She accepted his invitation for a drink. When he handed her the glass of vodka, she clasped his hand with her own and conveyed the glass to her lips. She thought that in this way she would show him she wasn’t offended, and that she’d had to shift for different reasons. He let her conduct her little performance. His hand did not pull away, did not offer resistance. Then he drank from her hand, which he took firmly, and winced – “That’s how they drink vodka here,” he said, “they don’t sip it.” That evening she drank a lot and laughed very loudly. And she saw that the young man hadn’t only a dangerous touch, but also an irresistible look and smile. If he said just a single word, or took her by the hand and started towards his room, she knew she would follow him.

That night she was unable to fall asleep. She rose, switched on the light and stood before the mirror. She looked at her body with his eyes. She saw the body of a woman who had given birth to two children, two sons almost his age. Preserved, still-soft and taut skin. But she knew this word “still” loomed between them, that it was a barrier impossible to jump over, regardless of the feelings he aroused in her.

The desire aroused in her by the first, accidental touch didn’t disappear the following day, at breakfast. And was aroused afresh at every one of their meetings. Theirs was a relationship of professional respect, interpersonal collaboration, even admiration. Of reciprocal focus, of an intensive feeling of one another’s presence. As if they were, in fact, lovers. For the hour or two they spent together every couple of weeks the world around them did not exist. Is it possible yearning alone could bestow such intense pleasure? While she looked at him from the other side of the table, she knew that this is possible.

Their drawing-near was long-drawn-out, too full of hesitancy, gradual.

She remembers when he embraced her for the first time. Rain was falling, and they had to squeeze together, so that they could stand under her small umbrella. He put his arm around her without hesitation, as if he had done this countless times before. Under the thin fabric, she felt his firm grip. If at that moment she had turned her face towards him, she was sure his lips would land on hers. If only there was some third-rate hotel nearby, and if he swerved towards it, if they entered and climbed up to one of the rooms, without hesitation she would throw herself on the not-exactly-clean bedspread smelling of moisture, of the bodies which lay on it not long ago.

They came to the bus station. He lit a cigarette and a fleck of the paper stayed stuck to his lip. Instinctively, she extended her hand and removed the tiny speck, just then becoming conscious of how she violated her own unwritten rule about not touching. He did not back away.

But he did dodge when, for the first time, in a moment of glee, she accidentally touched his hair. They sat in the café at “their” table, and he said something that made her laugh and prompted her to forget herself. She leaned over and lifted her hand with the intention of running her fingers through his hair. Suddenly he pulled away, almost as if expecting a blow from her. He took her hand, already dangerously close. With a shy smile he checked her movement. This meant: You don’t have the right to touch me in that way, not now, not here. He was right. But when she nevertheless did it again a second later, out of defiance, he let her slowly run her fingers through his wiry hair. They looked each other in the eye.

We are close, too close, she thought then, breathing in his breath.

One rainy evening, she missed two buses because of him. Without saying anything, they stood and listened as the rain hit the roof of the bus station. She got onto the third. Dinner was waiting for her. And dinner was waiting for him too. She carried the touch of his arm around her shoulders on the way home. And into the house. And into bed. She felt it for days, like an impressum. Like a wound.

That evening, her husband, already sleepy, nevertheless noticed that she smelt of tobacco. “Yes, imagine, some of them smoked at the meeting.” “And you didn’t step outside?” “No, I sat next to an open window, but still, the smell sneaks into your clothes.”

At another conference, she’s looking at his face in the front row. She’s on the stage, speaking. She sees him clearly, he’s pallid, as if illuminated from within. The hall’s in half-darkness, but she sees him, maybe because of his light hair. On this face is a smile. Does he know she’s looking at him? It’s difficult to see this from below. But it’s to him that she’s speaking, addressing herself only to him. He must sense this.

Afterwards, in the beer hall, the whole group of around twenty participants is there for lunch. She follows him with her gaze, and even though she’s at the other end of the table she feels his presence, his every move, as if he were sitting next to her. When their gazes meet, her body quivers. It’s become unbearable to her to sit surrounded by so many people. She gets up and leaves. She knows he’s unable to leave with her.

Afterwards they stay on alone, drinking coffee. For a long time they’re quiet, unable to separate. Suddenly, so much time to themselves. They sit, each bewitched by the closeness of the other. It’s not easy for her to understand what’s happening. She feels the body has its own life, although consciousness resists this.

That evening, in the hotel lobby – did she observe a moment of hesitation from him? They stepped into the lift together. Alone. He stood leaning against the doors, his head tilted back a little, eyes half-closed. She was a short distance away, perfectly still, almost stiff from the tension. Without leave-taking, each went to their own room. She took off her coat and shoes. He entered behind her. In the half-dark, leaning against the room’s wall, she received his first kiss. They only kissed on the lips, very gently at first, as if worried about violating one another. Their bodies didn’t touch, not yet. Their relationship was still innocent, a retreat was still quite possible.

The moment she found herself in his arms, she felt riveted to him, as if there were no longer anywhere to go, because she wanted him.

She cried for a long time after that first night together. She was aware that her body, driven by desire, is at the same time a traitor, the reason the desire between them would disappear just as it had appeared.

He came the next night too. In fact, they entered the room together. He lifted her dress immediately, before he even closed the door. He was so sure of himself, as if they had already made love countless times.

Later she tells him about her dreams in which they made love from the moment they met. And about how she has been trying to see herself through his eyes.

He laughs, looking at her. His smile is contagious. He tells her it’s quite impossible, she cannot see herself as he sees her. She cannot know how much she thrills him.

“Can you?”

“No.”

Nevertheless, he doesn’t like it when the morning finds them together. One morning, when he woke up, he abruptly turned away from her. It seemed to her that he was taken by surprise when he saw her face. Did he forget where he was, and with whom? She kissed him tenderly on the shoulder. He turned and gazed at her, caught off guard by her gesture. Exactly as if an unknown woman had taken him by surprise on the street, come up from behind and kissed him. She sensed that he was tense, that her touch was unbearable to him at that moment. In his eyes, she saw him at that instant far away from her, and that she had no way to reach him. And yet, a little before, he was lying there next to her, sleeping serenely like a child. She was wide awake, set atremble by the sight of the blueness of the sky, the touch of the sheets and the nearness of this body which makes her different.

Only the night before, while he lay on his belly, she ranged her fingers down his back. She felt the flowing of his warmth, and his skin was hot, sweaty. He succumbed to her hands, almost melting under her fingers. Massaging was for her a way to come closer to him, for the touch of her fingers to break down his body into muscles, for this perfect and precise organism to be in her power.

On the last night of the conference, in the middle of the night, he got up and left without a word for his own room. He left behind strewn sheets, and a whiteness which terrified her. White is the colour of solitude.

Her expectation he would join her at breakfast was transformed into a feeling of sudden emptiness and defeat. The outside world found its way to her in fragments – the tinkling of crockery, somebody’s laugh, snippets of conversation. She’s completely concentrated on him, even when he’s absent. She realised that he had departed earlier.

The city where the conference was held left her indifferent. On a tourist bus, she was driven round with the remnant of the group, feigning enthusiasm. She saw the people around herself as two-dimensional figures. She didn’t have the strength to converse with them, in their voices she would hear his, in their faces see his. She dreaded lest they notice her absence, her tense anticipation. She lied that her head was hurting.

After this, it seemed to her every second of togetherness became ever harder. That second reality slowly slipped between them, lay down with them in bed, woke up with them. She became frightened that this was the end. Her body would have to continue to live without him, deprived of the possibility of them being together. So, it was better that she kill her longing for him as soon as possible, in advance. Because no one would ever provoke such passion in her again.

It is the end. The end.

No, it was not the end. She was astonished by how poorly she knew her own body, herself, him. On business trips, at night, she left the door of the hotel room unlocked. And waited. Sometimes it happened he didn’t come, but she didn’t have the right to ask why. She wished to remain cocooned in pleasure, while it lasted. She was conscious that this state, even if it lasted, must end. Every time they managed to be together again, it was a happy conjunction of coincidence, but short-lived and without hope. Without any regard for her hunger, which he alone was able to satiate.

While they’re together, she endeavours not to fall asleep, to stay awake after he falls asleep next to her, believing that consciousness of this moment will postpone their parting. No, she will not sleep, she wants to be alive longer to the touch of his sleeping body, his smell, the rhythm of his breathing. And to the fact that she is with him because the two of them forgot their age, doubts, fears and resistances. The two of them had their own language, a language of deciphering glances and gestures, the speech of the body.

Once, on a plane, contrary to arrangements, he took the empty seat next to her, then fell asleep. She was angry, even though they spent the night together. Then she had the thought that this was a sign of his slackness, that he does not need to be tense all the time, vigilant. She sometimes would ask herself what he got out of their relationship, besides pleasure. She didn’t ask him.

In company, she learnt to restrain herself. Not to look at him, not to follow his motions, not to pay attention to those with whom he converses, and after every encounter to tell herself: this is the last time.

Still, that afternoon in the café, she didn’t sense this was their last meeting. She didn’t know that the end, however much she prepared for it, would still be a surprise. Just as one is nevertheless surprised by the death of a very ill loved one. The memory will remain in her of reaching out, with a little spoon, for a piece of cake, and lifting it to his lips. She remembered the cold touch of metal and tart taste of apple. The apple cake in this café was never too sweet. “Taste some,” she said to him, using the formal mode of address. Ever since Oslo, they kept the custom of addressing one another in this way when in a public place.

While he transferred the spoonful of cake to his lips, somehow hesitantly, while she smiled at him, while the darkness entwined them, they still for a moment belonged to one another.

Later, she found out he got a better job and moved to another city. She was sure he intentionally didn’t tell her. She had already reconciled herself beforehand to his departure, it only remained for her to suppress her longing’s memory of him. When she would sometimes close her eyes, she would see again his high forehead, eyes, smile. Sometimes a strong desire for him would emerge in her, in the street, on the bus. At such an instant she would shudder, as when a dental nerve suddenly flares with pain. Then her body, which remembered his touch, would briefly come back to life.

She avoided apple cake.

A Short Winter Walk

The liquid which poured down her leg was first of all pleasantly warm. She stood in front of the shop window knowing none of the passers-by would pay attention to a woman of her age who had stopped for a moment in front of a shop, perhaps attempting to remember all she needs to buy. She couldn’t hold it in. She lost control and the stream flowed and flowed, although precisely because of this she’s careful not to drink before going out of the house. Now her shoes were also wet, and the damp trouser fabric stuck to her skin. Suddenly she became cold. She got gooseflesh and rushed to her entrance. Nothing in this was as devastating as the fact that her bladder gave way so close to home, maybe fifty steps from the front door.

As she did every day, she had started out on a short walk to the nearby square and back again. She needs around forty-five minutes for the walk, exercise she adopted in lieu of the boring gym. She dislikes exercising alone, but even less in a group. That leaves only walking, which is enjoyable, something’s always happening in the street, even in winter. After lunch she marches to the square with a brisk gait, goes round it, then returns the same way. Along the way, she does any necessary shopping at the pharmacy or supermarket, it’s a good time because people are still at work, so she avoids the crowds. Sometimes, if it’s very cold outside, she slips into the department store and strolls through women’s apparel. Not to buy something – she has too many clothes already – but out of curiosity, to see what’s being worn that season. She doesn’t buy women’s magazines. From early spring to autumn, she changes the route. She goes in the other direction, towards the big park with a little lake. She usually takes some old bread and feeds the ducks, which rapidly learn to recognise, already from afar, those bringing them food. Then she walks along the lake to the first footbridge. Joggers and mothers with prams usually constitute her company, and sometimes she bumps into a woman of her own age walking a dog. She sees from their faces that these are their wearying obligations and that they would be happier dozing off in front of the TV. Several times she wanted a dog herself, and once was very close to this decision, after a neighbour found a stray, a little mixed-breed puppy. Going out three times a day would do her good, but still she changed her mind. She was already of an age at which she also needed to think of the dog. Who would take care of it when she was no more?

On this, her winter route, she passes a fake Greek and a fake Spanish restaurant, the owner of both being a dubious local type, their menus the same. A little further down the street is a sushi bar – in this district, there are three sushi bars, as if people here had gone mad for raw fish. In its window, the plastic figure of a cat, allegedly for good luck. The cat waves its right paw, which especially gets on her nerves. Then the hair salons, more hairdressers in this district than sushi bars, five more besides this one, each more expensive than the last. It’s impossible not to notice such things if you pass by them twice daily. Further on, towards the square, is an art gallery specialising in birds, but never open. She still has to pass a children’s store and, right next to it, a recently opened second-hand clothes shop – now there are two, not a good sign, increasingly poorer residents are evidently moving into this district. The next shop she passes is for bio- and eco-products. They stock everything interesting, food and juices, vitamins, medicines, but she rarely enters for such trifles. Behind the shoe shop – she last shopped there at a sale five years ago, and the shoes still serve her well – extends the square. A long time ago, trees flourished on it, there were benches and a kiosk for sausages, and one was able to sit pleasantly, but now all of it is paved, a completely desolate surface. Yet she has no desire to drop into a snare of laments about how everything was better before. Yes, it was, but only because she was young. Now she’s gratified she has no need to go any further than this square, where the bank and pharmacy are, the department store, clinic, even the post office. Returning, she walks on the other side, though it’s more boring, there being nothing to see. A school, a solarium, a beautician, a pedicurist in a basement. She could go along the parallel street, but she dislikes changing her habits. Nor does she like surprises. When, not long ago, they remodelled the old supermarket at the intersection closest to home, she needed time to find her feet in the new layout. And she still needs more time to do the shopping.

When she stepped out, she felt it was a bit colder than anticipated. Her breath turned to vapour, and it was as if the cold somehow succeeded in worming its way in, even under her downy coat. But her feet were warm, in sturdy boots, and walking quickly would surely warm her up, she thought, heading out across the street. When she was already halfway, and had just reached the square, she felt pressure below her belly, unusual for such a short walk. She didn’t go round the square, instead turned around by the shoe shop and hurried back. This was nothing new, she had a sensitive bladder and if the need caught her by surprise in town, she would go into the first café. She hated those cafés where they write the warning “toilets for customers only”, as if the waiters know whether somebody is a customer. In order to avoid unfriendly stares, since sometimes they look at you like you’re going to the toilet at their own home, she would drape her coat over a chair as if she were going to sit there. Or she would, on returning, leave some change on the counter. She developed different strategies to beat them. She ought to have gone immediately into a café on the square itself, but she was certain she could, if she quickened her pace, make it home in time. Nevertheless she probably dressed too lightly. Is it possible she has become so sensitive? Not outside even for half an hour …

Once already, it happened that her bladder gave way, though only a little. So her body had betrayed her once. She remembered it well, it was last summer on a city bus. The day was insufferably hot, and the bus was suffocating inside. She sat next to the door. She had two more stops to go when she felt a wetness between her legs. A little urine escaped her so quickly she didn’t even manage to stand up. Panic seized her. She had on a dark-coloured dress and was sure that in the crowd nobody would notice the moist stain. But the seat would remain wet, somebody would catch sight of this, and would see it was her who just risen from it. Or still worse, would sit and feel it was wet, and with a glance search for her, maybe even make a remark … No, she can’t allow this. As soon as the bus stops, she must quickly get up and immediately get off, immediately push her way through, be the first at the door and get off so as not to give anyone the chance to bear witness to her shame. She ruthlessly elbowed her way through and got off first. But now she needed to walk to one more bus stop with a wet stain at the back. From her bag, she took out a silken shawl which she always takes along in case of a draft, because summer also has drafts which can be unpleasant, and perhaps dangerous. She wrapped it round her hips and only then began crying. She didn’t break into sobs, but felt her face wet from the tears mixing with sweat.

Already she was a third of the way home, when right next to the hair salon, she felt covered in sweat from the rush. A cold streamlet slithered down her back. She quickened her steps, now already running, she was unable to go faster. She was within reach of home, next to the supermarket. She had only one block more to cover, was not more than a few minutes away. But at that moment she realised that in those couple minutes she needed not only to reach the front doors but also to unlock them, then wait for the lift – and what if she makes a little puddle in front of the lift, what if one of the neighbours comes along right then? Then she would need to climb up to the fifth floor, unlock the two locks on her front door, close the doors and pull off her coat. It was too late. Better that she slow down, all she needs now is to trip and fall, maybe even break her hip. That’s how people her age wind up in the hospital, then get pneumonia there or some such hospital infection, and don’t come out again. Or passers-by would reckon she was drunk, she’d have to listen to commentaries about drunkards, or worse still, about drunk women who don’t know how to drink, and so when they drink they pass out. Or they would pity her, what’s a poor wretch of a woman doing on the street in this cold, isn’t there anyone to keep her at home? How to explain to such a person that old age is an entirely special kind of seclusion? She wished to live alone precisely because there would be no witness to her powerlessness, no one to see her enter the flat wet and sorrowful, to hear how she sobs. Only public pity is worse than this. To somebody like that, to somebody stooping down to help her up, maybe she would say that she was one of those people who want to choose for themselves how their life ends. The problem with this plan is that one has to be conscious to be capable of effecting it.

She took off her shoes in front of the doors, but she didn’t leave them there due to the smell. She carried them to the kitchen balcony. Luckily, the coat was dry. She undressed in the bathroom and tossed the clothes into the washing machine. She sank into the bathtub and ran the hot water. She shivered as though in a fever, for the first time fully conscious that her body had turned into her prison.

When she halted in front of the shop window and the warm liquid poured out of her, she became fully cognizant that her will no longer meant anything. From now on, she will live in uncertainty. Which part of the body is next in line? “You have a healthy heart,” the doctor said to her recently. Now, that sounds like a condemnation to long-lasting mortification. Already, tomorrow, she will need to go to the pharmacy for incontinence diapers. She will go three stops by bus, she will not risk going further. She will consult with the female pharmacist under her breath, so that others don’t hear. With understanding, the latter will place before her a packet in an opaque plastic bag, and she will return home. Again by bus. Every day she will be more insecure. Maybe soon she will not even wish to leave home. Can she even count on herself to be sufficiently present in spirit to decide when she’s had enough of everything? And is this already too much? She mulled it over, looking at the wet shoes on the balcony.

House for Sale

That day, some years after Mum’s death, I set off for her grave to bring flowers. But before I drove to the graveyard, I stopped off at the homeplace. I had no intention of visiting my elderly relative, a woman of Mum’s age. Mum’s relationship with relatives was not especially cordial, and I barely knew them. Whenever I go to the graveyard, I usually pass the homeplace without stopping, just as Mum did when she was alive. Ever since Mum sold the house on the bay below, she stopped by the homeplace only reluctantly. She felt she no longer belonged there.

But all the same, at one point, she wished to return to the small island town where she was born. Not to her parents’ house, but to another house, which she was very attached to in youth. So I stopped there too, to see once more the house which made Mum wish to return here. Namely, to the house where her grandmother, her namesake, was born.

When Mum would send word we were coming, my great-grandmother would go out to the small wall from which the harbour can be seen, as well as the quayside where boats put in. I remember how she would sit and wait for her granddaughter and great-granddaughter – Mum and me – while we climbed up the long winding road from the harbour to the homeplace. Then panting and sweaty from the climb, we would catch sight of her on the last bend, sitting on the little wall, dressed in black even in the middle of summer, her white hair gathered in a chignon at the nape. When I would hug her, I would get a waft of the lavender which she kept in her chest of drawers with her clothes. I knew that in the pocket of her pinafore, she would have early plums that she picked in the yard along the way. And that sheep-curds awaited me in her kitchen. My great-grandmother lived alone long after the death of her husband – women live longer here.

My mother was already eighty when she heard that the house her grandmother was born in was for sale, a local acquaintance informed her. For a long time after the spouse of the last owner died, it stood there all closed up, just like many other houses in the homeplace whose former inhabitants moved away to the mainland or to America. They come back sometimes, but only in the summer, so that the houses then come alive, shutters and doors open, and voices rise from the yards. But others stay shut – forever, it seemed to me. As if the Amerikani owners had forgotten about them. They stand like sleeping beauties, big, vividly coloured facades, silent. As monuments to those who long ago built them, earning the money by working abroad. Their heirs are unable to resolve to sell them, even though they never visit “the old country” because it’s far away. They don’t know any people there, not even their relatives, and the little place itself means nothing to them. Sometimes they gaze at a house in a photograph that somebody sent them, think of how beautiful it is and how they would make a fortune if this house were in Hoboken, New Jersey. But they are unable to appraise its value in this far-away province, and they have no feeling for it. Nor do they speak the language of their ancestors anymore. They’ve even changed their surnames, Americanised them. It’s easier that way, and anyway their life is there, and not on some island in a remote country whose name they are no longer even certain of.

Mum was very excited when she rang me with news that this very house was for sale, as if she actually had some idea of buying it, even though she didn’t have the money. She lived off her pension and could – maybe – buy it only if she sold the flat she lived in. She was aware of this, but she still wished at least to go and see the house. “But wouldn’t you be living in it alone?” I sputtered into the receiver, as if she intended to move tomorrow. My first reaction to Mum’s various ideas was always resistance. Of course she would be alone, she lived alone in her flat too, so why wouldn’t she in the house? And in this small town, everything would be more accessible to her, from the shop to the assistance of neighbours. Anyway, I had no right to be annoyed, she was only daydreaming about this house. And only because I never offered that she move in with me, even though I was living alone. Still, it did not take her long to persuade me that we should travel together and look at the house – she for memory’s sake, and me from curiosity. Also, neither of us had stopped at the homeplace for a long time, and the guilty feeling that I was neglecting my mother tormented me.

A few days afterwards we arrived in the little town. As we made our way down the steep, slippery, flagstone street leading to the sea, Mum needed to take me by the arm. She was already old and increasingly unsteady. In a row of ten or so houses, my great-grandmother’s stood out because it was the only one without a restored façade. It was neglected and obviously abandoned. The façade was cracked, swollen and darkened in spots where water had got in through fissures. On two windows, shutters dangled as if they would fall off any minute, but as long as they were closed, they were still secure. In the front yard, which seemed smaller to me than I remember from when I was a child, last autumn’s drift of leaves rotted on the ground. Where a stunted little tree, whipped by the north wind, was sprouting up. The front doors of the house were already bored into by worm holes, but at least locked.

I remembered when, as a little girl, holding Mum firmly by the hand, I entered through these doors for the first time, into the shady passageway that led into the innards of the house. I remembered the smell of coffee and the old woman, my great-grandmother’s sister, sitting at the table. On her nose sat glasses, and behind the thick lenses were her small blinking eyes. She was almost blind and recognised people by their voices. She had probably lived in the house since it was built. Because of the glasses, she seemed to me like some kind of bug, and I shrank away from her a little and didn’t let go of Mum’s hand. I was a timid child. I didn’t know then that I too had inherited poor vision, maybe precisely from this old aunt who hid in the kitchen from the summer heat.

At the back of the passageway were wooden steps. No one went up there except to sleep, same as in the house where my family summered. Children did not have access beyond the living room. In the summer we spent our time outdoors, in the yard or at the beach. All the houses had the same layout: on the ground floor were the kitchen, living room and konoba, later remodelled as a bathroom, and on the upper floors two bedrooms. During the day, the rooms were darkened by the half-closed, Janus-faced shutters. They smelled of cleanliness, of the wax with which wooden floors are coated on a big cleaning day. Most of the houses did not have a cellar, the earth was full of rock and hard to dig out.

That long-ago summer, I often visited the aunt with Mum. Mum would sit down and pour herself a coffee, and her antiquated great-aunt would pull from an invisible pocket under her pinafore a piece of chewing gum and give it to me. Chewing that gum was the height of bliss. It was American, square, rose-coloured, and they called it choongum. Its taste was unlike any other, and you needed to chew it slowly, so that it would last longer. I would sit in the semidarkness, in the pleasant coolness, savouring the gum, listening to the voices of Mum and her aunt. But I wasn’t allowed to blow bubbles in front of Mum, even though it expanded so beautifully and didn’t stick to my fingers at all.

When Mum mentioned in our phone conversation that she wished to see the house, the memory of the taste of chewing gum, the summer heat I took refuge from in the passageway, the uneven stone floor, suddenly returned to life. And something else too – an indeterminate feeling of joy.

As we slowly went down the street, I thought of how on bygone visits I didn’t notice that these houses don’t face the sea. Only a few houses on the edge of the little town, those built later, were oriented in such a way that the whole bay and the mountains in the distance can be seen from them. The old houses in the centre of the town mostly face towards the square, on which there are a church, an inn, a few shops, a barber’s and the school. As if the people who built them long ago saw nothing special in the view of the offing, as if they were fleeing from the sea. The sea meant something different to them. They didn’t go to the sea for holidays, nor did their eyes take sustenance from its beauty. They didn’t take enjoyment in it. Women of the same age as my great-grandmother, born in the nineteenth century, saw their husbands off to America, waving to them from the quayside; they didn’t swim or sunbathe at the local beach. They didn’t even wear those now comical-looking swimming costumes that cover the whole body, such as they would have seen in the papers or worn by foreign women on a sailboat straying from the fashionable summer resort nearby. Amongst the locals, only girls of my mother’s generation, those who grew up during the Second World War, went swimming.

Finally, we stood in front of the house. Mum kept looking back, as if remembering something. What did she remember? Herself in youth, walking down the same street, in a light summer dress that only covers her knees, and new sandals that her father, the local cobbler, made for her? Or herself as a little girl, heading out for a swim, running without stopping for breath down the hillside, all the way down to the sea, and then jumping off the stone pier on the quayside, and swimming far away from the shore? Did the boys join her in her run to the sea, or were they down there already? Why didn’t she tell me about her childhood on the island? And why did I not ask her? Did I not ever have time for such conversations with her?

How many times did she pass along this road alone, how many times did she travel the distance from her parents’ to this house? Surely she still remembered what the house she’s preparing to visit after so many years looked like inside, from the table and chairs to the last little pillow, from the embroidered tablecloth and plates to the dresser. She had probably already buried the memory of it and of her dead relatives who had peopled it when news of the sale awoke these recollections in her. Why else would she wish to see it again at her age, and perhaps even buy it? What does this house mean to her now? Perhaps she didn’t mention to me the reason because she herself didn’t know it. Perhaps the house drew her in because she had lost her own foothold in the homeplace she had in fact never truly left. The house was her link to the past, from which remained so little, next to nothing. Only memories becoming increasingly dim. All that was of material worth was as if melted away. Divided up or sold. When she heard my great-grandmother’s house was for sale, did she only then count her losses and feel a void? The houses and flats her father had worked for, and still more her grandfather, all were scattered, lost somewhere. As if in this, both their pasts and her own had eluded her grasp.

Since Mum died, I’ve become increasingly aware of how little I really know about her, and this has troubled me. I would remember this every time I went to the graveyard. And maybe that’s why I visited the graveyard so rarely. That day it seemed to me I had the presentiment of why she had so wanted to see the house – perhaps in her grandmother’s house, she would be able, through memories, to return to her own past. Not to that immediate past of loneliness and sorrow, nor the one before that – the time of her marriage, rows and migrations – but rather to the time when she used to come to this house before anything bad had happened. Only the distant past brought her tranquillity. Because what happened afterwards had turned into a dark sediment she did not want to touch.

She will need a cane soon – she holds herself upright, but she no longer has the strength – I thought at the time, as we waited for the neighbour to come with the key to the house. Her hair is still beautiful, only now dappled with grey. I remembered how on summer holidays, when she was young and I was still very small, she would rinse the sea out of our hair in the wash basin when we came back from the beach in late afternoon. She would squeeze the juice of half a lemon into the water, or add a few drops of vinegar, which, she said, gives lustre to the hair. While Mum would stand with her head bowed over the basin, I would watch how her hair moved in the water, as if alive. Although she would rinse it well, the smell would linger, woven into her long hair. Afterwards, when she would lift me up with a hug, I would catch a little whiff of lemon. I would plunge my face into her lush hair, and would nestle against her shoulder. Mum’s skin was soft and studded with moles.

Never again was she as close to me as then.

My great-grandmother’s father probably earned the money for building the house by working in America. Many left the place, someone from almost every house, whoever could scrape together the money for the trip or incur the debt. Really, they were lucky to live on the island, a big harbour with a regular line to New York at their fingertips. Few people in the place tilled the land; for generations already, the men went to work in the nearby city or abroad. They weren’t afraid of travelling despite not speaking English – and anyway they went with acquaintances or relatives and got by with Italian.

They would return after a few years, but then leave again, this was the only way possible to build a family house. To have one’s own house was considered a success. Only then, as the owner of a house, were you able to be a gentleman. Many did not return, instead sending tickets to family, who then spent weeks travelling to America. Mum had some male cousins in America whom she had never seen. She knew them only from small, black-and-white photographs.

From America – or Merika, as the locals then called it – this great-grandfather of Mum’s brought not only money, but also crockery, rolls of silk and sundry unusual objects in big wooden trunks called bauli. All that was unusual and fine was “from there”, from that far-away world to which so many islanders had emigrated. For example, plastic fruit – apples, pears, and bananas (we didn’t even know about the latter) – which Mum saved for a long time. I remember how much it fascinated me that her great-grandfather brought these precise things from America, which were valuable enough for him to carry with him. “Like they’re real,” the locals must have said, turning over in their hands the plastic apples and pears from the green glass bowl. And I remember the bunch of grapes, with the big white oval fruits, so faithfully reproduced that even today somebody might bite into one by mistake. Perhaps to her great-grandfather this plastic fruit was a symbol of America, in which everything’s different. “Like here, but still so different,” he said. The bread, he told Mum, was inedible, except from Italian bakeries. They drank neither wine nor watered-down wine after lunch, like we do here. At breakfast, they didn’t drink white coffee of the sort drunk on the island, the one made from barley – instead, they drank it black but thin, made by dripping hot water through paper filters filled with coffee.

In this place, in a special small pot, they brewed real Italian caffè. First, the raw coffee would be bought at the one grocer’s. Then the beans were roasted at home in a pan with a lid and a handle that turned a small lever on the inside. Thus, the coffee beans were mixed so as to be roasted evenly, and we children would delight in turning this little handle when we were allowed. Afterwards, the roasted beans had to be ground in a wooden coffee grinder shaped like a box. I remembered this aroma of early childhood, full-bodied and intoxicating.

In the homeplace, America wasn’t spoken about with fascination, and Mum didn’t remember ever hearing that it was beautiful there. Everything was big – buildings, streets, shops, and shop windows – and different. “You were worked hard,” her great-grandfather said, as if with this sentence devaluing the work of the people of the homeplace, as if saying to them: “You think you work a lot, but that’s nothing. I know what hard work is.” Was he glad he returned? Or did his birthplace seem to him tremendously backward after life in Merika and Neviyork? After all, he’d seen the world, and then returned to a place without electricity or running water, without asphalt, cars, stores. Maybe this sort of life suited him in old age, but maybe sometimes he was ill-humoured because he no longer felt good at home. Maybe it became dismal for him to sit in the kitchen, in the one warm room in the house, to sift through memories, and sometimes to drink a glass of wine with someone just returned from America.

Mum told me how she remembered a scene from the kitchen, him sitting on a chair by the window, pensively looking out into the empty yard, and her grandmother every few minutes throwing split logs into the stove. He was tall, already bald, with a long grey moustache. Whenever she visited, he would ask her to shave him. He spoke quietly, in the island dialect, but his voice was deep. Mum was his pet. She would top up the caffè in his cup, and he would entertain her with stories about Neviyork. She had never visited any city so big, and it was hard for her to imagine that it was a hundred times bigger than the city to which she had moved. “Really, a hundred times, nonno?” “Yes, yes,” he nodded. “Except, in Merika, my child, by God, you have to graft to earn your cash.” She remembered his exact words.

I believe it’s only because of her memory of him, and of her own picture of that magical country – which she never travelled to – that she kept the plastic fruit. I remembered these depictions of Mum’s, and it was strange to me that she used the formal mode of address with both her father and mother. This manner of expressing respect to your elders fell by the wayside long ago. I didn’t use it even with my grandfather or grandmother, let alone with my father and mother.

I remember how in the early fifties, parcels with second-hand clothes began to arrive from unknown relatives in America. The shops in the little town were still always empty, and such packages were welcome. There were no clothes or shoes, and food was bought only with ration coupons. The second-hand clothes were altered at home, the coats were taken apart and remade, the shoes would always fit someone. Mum was skilful, she knew how to sew, tailor, knit for herself, for her sisters and their children. Anyway, the clothes the Amerikani sent were scarcely worn, if even worn at all. According to her grandfather’s narration, people there had lots of clothes because they were cheap. And a little summer dress fell to me, printed with grey and yellow dice, one of two from America given to me and my cousin. They were identical. Both of us were around three when they photographed us in these little dresses, by some wall. My cousin is leaning against the wall, and I’m standing on it, but both of us are somehow discontent, with scowling faces. It’s evident I’m afraid of the height, and that somebody outside the frame of the photograph is holding my hand. It’s summer, our light hair is tied in pigtails on the sides. We’re wearing the same small white sandals, which my grandfather had probably made, and those little American dresses, in poplin, with short sleeves.

The other photograph that I’ve saved from that time was probably taken the same summer. Did the camera arrive in one of the parcels? I’m sitting on steps with my mother, her sister and my cousin, and everything we’re wearing is American, all somehow urban and different. We’re sitting on rough-hewn stone steps next to some ruins, grass sprouting between the stones, because the people who lived there emigrated, perhaps even to America. My mother and aunt have on dresses sewn to a similar pattern, narrow at the waist. Both are wearing high-heeled sandals, which surely made it hard to walk, they must have slipped on the smooth, uneven stone of the narrow streets. There’s a clear sense of discord between the clothes and the place in which they find themselves, as if they were foreigners, as if they didn’t belong here.

While we waited in front of the house, I thought of this photograph and of how Mum wished to return to those days when her great-grandfather told her of the magical land, and when she could still dream about how one day she too would travel there. To the land of plastic fruit, wonderful dresses, film stars and luxuriant tree-lined boulevards.

“Do you know who inherited the house? Do you remember that little girl adopted by my cousin and his wife?” Mum asked me when she phoned with the news of the sale of the house. I did remember that little girl, she was a bit younger than me. “Now she’s selling the house because she has two grown-up children who need a flat, and anyway, she hasn’t been to the island for years,” continued Mum. I didn’t ask why not – it was known that her husband is a Serb. The war ended long ago, but as yet few people visited the island on holiday from Serbia, not even those who owned a house there, where they used to spend every summer before.

When the neighbour finally arrived, he unlocked the already rusty lock. The doors creaked, groaned – or so it seemed to me. Out of the daylight, we suddenly dived into the darkness of the hallway. It smelled of damp and staleness. From the smell alone, it was discernible that nobody had lived in the house for a long time, that nobody had opened the windows to let the summer heat drive the dampness out of the walls. We peered into the kitchen where Mum once sat with her aunt. In the semidarkness, the table and chairs, the stove and the old-fashioned kitchen dresser appeared in mere outline. Mum grasped the doorframe, I thought I saw tears in her eyes. Then we climbed the worn-out wooden steps.

In the bedroom on the first floor, the neighbour did not open the window wide to let the sun illuminate the room. Instead, he switched on the light. I reckoned he didn’t want to make any effort because he had a feeling that our visit had some other purpose, that we hadn’t come to view the house because we wanted to buy it; or perhaps he was afraid the shutters might fall off. But when I set eyes on the bedroom in the weak light of the bulb, I grasped that it had to do with something quite different. The wardrobe, two beds, chest of drawers and two bedside cabinets were all in place, but ransacked, as if someone had searched for valuables, but made a real rush of it. The bed linen was strewn around, the koperte – white lace bedspreads made by hand – were pulled onto the floor, the pillows were scattered, even the picture of the sailboat on the wall was aslant, and the small cushions from the chairs were ripped open and thrown on the floor.

Something happened here. And the owners had not come to clear up the house. They didn’t ready it for sale and so the room looked like a battlefield.

It was immediately obvious that whatever happened in the house was something shameful and sad, like a secret, but not familial – which is worse, because a family secret can be concealed, but this one could not be concealed, at least not entirely.

Mum fell silent. Had she become speechless from terror, or did she know something?

“What happened?” I asked the neighbour. It was obvious he wasn’t inclined to conversation.

“War, the war happened,” he said.

“But there was no war here, on the island,” I said.

Suddenly, it became clear to me that here, in this house, which my relative in Belgrade inherited, a court-martial had been held. The house was punished because the owner married a Serb, and they forsook the island when the war began.

Is it possible to rape a house, violently force it open, break into its womb? To disorder its order, smash things, soil it, defile someone else’s innermost world? And the other rooms looked equally ravaged. Beds with bedclothes strewn around, open wardrobes with clothes thrown to the floor, drawers spilling out their contents, the smashed white coffee service … The pictures and photographs stripped from the walls, thrown on the floor, crushed under foot. Nothing, it seemed, was stolen. These housebreakers who raided the house in the name of a nation had nothing to steal, nor did they need anything. In their houses everything was the same: lace tablecloths and dark chests of drawers, the same glasses and hanging lamps, bedspreads and candlesticks. To upend a house – this was their aim.

“Is it known who did this,” I asked further.

The man nodded. This is still a small island town.

“Were they punished?”

He shook his head.

These two movements of the head told the whole story of the people who lived and died here, about the inheritor and her fate, about evil, fear and powerlessness. Mum had remained in the homeplace because of one war. Her adopted cousin forsook it because of another.

I stepped out with the tortured feeling that the past still dwelt here, not just Mum’s, but someone else’s too, along with our collective one. I gazed at Mum. She was pale. Her hand shook as she pulled a handkerchief out of her bag and wiped her sweaty forehead.

My mum, in her old age, wished to return to a place where she once, long ago, felt secure, to something known, belonging only to her. How did she feel when she saw the house broken open, and that there’s no going back, that her past was also pilfered, even her memories? And that there is nowhere to return to, even if she did move in here, clean everything up, fix and return things to their place.

Mum is no more, but the house still stands. The house too will die if somebody doesn’t save it soon, because its ruination is in plain sight. The shutters dangle even more than before, the façade is already falling off in pieces, the roof has caved in on one side. I wonder how it is on the inside, did somebody clear up that terrible disorder to which the two of us bore witness? I want the house to be sold. Those who buy it will know nothing – nor will they need to know – about its former inhabitants, about the neighbours, about the war on the island and revenge.

I lower my hand to the door handle – maybe the doors are unlocked? – and then abruptly let go, as if it’s red hot. Suddenly, the spectacle from the bedroom pops up before my eyes: two chairs stood up against the wall. The wall behind them is rose-coloured, with stains of red, as if blood-spattered.

Coffee No Longer Tastes the Same

Coffee no longer tastes the same since my husband died three months ago. True, the smell is still rich and opulent, but not the taste. Something is missing – in fact, after a sip I sense bitterness, as though the beans were burnt. And it cannot be an accident that I’ve chanced upon such coffee several times in a row. Therefore it thrilled me to find a new brand on the shelf in my supermarket, one they never had before, also an espresso blend, pure Arabica. I decided to try it.

When we were getting to know each other, he drank filter coffee. I found that out, of course, the first time I stayed over at his place. In the morning he made an excellent breakfast, with soft-boiled eggs and croissants, butter and marmalade, all served in silver bowls and with silver cutlery. But the coffee was revolting, a brown liquid that barely even reminded me of the taste of coffee – and it didn’t smell good either. If I had known I was going to stay overnight, I would have brought my espresso machine, the little one for two cups. It would have fit in my handbag. Although it would have been of no use, because it takes a different type of coffee. And I wasn’t that enterprising.

The thought that the man who swept me off my feet drank filter coffee was as agonising as telling me he had some infectious disease. It was a bad habit that needed to be uprooted. It proved easier than I thought. He didn’t resist, he even found a cafetière in the kitchen, the kind in which hot water is poured onto the coffee which, after standing a little while, is pushed down almost to the bottom by a perforated metal disc. This coffee was much better, stronger, more flavourful. A decent replacement, but only a replacement, for espresso, for which I had to wait until we started living together, so as not to strike him as too meddling. Then I bought two espresso machines, of two different sizes. And for his birthday, the first we celebrated together, I got him a real Gaggia machine, a retro model, with a handle like those in coffee shops – except for home use, of course. To me it was a sort of test of a good relationship, not to mention marriage. I don’t mean so much a love for coffee, but more adaptability, sensitivity, listening attentively to the other person’s needs. From then on we began our days with a cup of coffee together, one from a larger cafetière or moka pot – whatever you call this little appliance – for six persons, served in mugs to which we added some milk to make a macchiato. But a strong one, to carry us through the day.

He quickly forgot filter coffee and came to love this morning ritual, so much so that he even would be the first to get up and put on the coffee, and I would join him only when the seductive smell would creep into the bedroom and wake me up. He continued to make breakfast, though I have to say not as grand and without silverware (except on my birthday). More than the coffee itself, it made us happy to drink it together, as this was our morning ritual to start the day. So much had kept us together through the years, but the shared drinking of coffee was like glue. That’s why I still drink it now, although I’m alone. In fact, it is precisely because I don’t want to be alone that I drink coffee; when I drink it, I think of him, and in a way it feels like we’re still together. They say that people live as long as somebody remembers them. Now I think about him intensively every morning, and quite often something in connection to him crosses my mind later on too. When I listen to the news I think about how he would comment, or when I cook a meal he liked, such as beef soup, I always make too much. Getting used to living alone is hard for me, it takes time. Half an hour in the morning belongs to us, the way we were, the way we liked it to be. To me it was beautiful to watch this vigorous man bring the cup to his lips and look at me over the rim with a smile. Listening to his voice while he tried to bring my attention to the book he’d just been reading, even though I didn’t always listen attentively to his words. We’re together and still going strong, I would think. Sometimes I would ask myself how much time we had left, but I’d chase away the idea like a pestering fly. Why think about that which we cannot influence, while we’re sitting by the open window that looks out on the garden, with already blossoming primroses, and while I’m pouring us another cup of coffee?

It was precisely with coffee that his illness began, with the word coffee. I can never forget this. One morning, exactly seven years ago, he seemed to me somehow strange. He was looking at the cup, frowning. “What do you call this,” he asked, confused. “Which, you mean the cup or the coffee?” “Coffee, yes, thank you, for a moment I lost the word.” Lost the word? How is it possible that a man who lives off words – loses a word? He didn’t say, “I forgot it”, which seemed even stranger. Did he also forget the word forgot? I didn’t immediately take it as an omen. I attributed the loss of the word to fatigue – the last few days he had been spending too much time staring at his computer, translating. “But it happens to everyone,” I said, “the other day at the shop I couldn’t remember what I had come in for. And my mum, as you remember, she couldn’t remember words like flour or milk, things she used every day.” We even laughed at her expense. This comforted him. But soon he began to lose more and more words or, even worse for me, he replaced them with whatever came to mind that very moment. For salt he’d say bread – at least the same category, food – but if for book he said shoe – for example, “could you please pass me the shoe from my desk” – I found it hard to take. Moreover, the desk was covered in books. Should I perhaps ask him which “shoe” he needs? The very next moment, unconscious of the mistake, he would say the right word. Then a new phase followed: he began repeating himself. Whatever he would tell me about, some event from his youth – and he returned more and more often to youth and childhood – he would repeat a minute later, almost word for word. It was hard for me to listen to him, although at the beginning I found it odd that he recalled older episodes but couldn’t remember what had happened yesterday, or that very morning. For example, the fear of a maths test. “If you only knew how much I was scared by this maths test. We had an old teacher, one who’d pull a schoolboy’s ear if he suspected him of whispering: everyone was afraid of him. When he gave us a test, he would walk between the benches ensuring we weren’t copying. For years after I dreamt that I didn’t pass the test, I still today don’t know how I managed to graduate from high school.” And then, not five minutes later: “Have I told you how much I was scared by a maths test?” I adapted, I got used to not listening to what he was talking about – just his voice.

But still it happened sufficiently rarely that we didn’t worry. I started sticking notes wherever I could, so that the book said book and the shoe said shoe, but at first he removed them. The idea that he needed help made him angry. “It’s like learning a foreign language, only that now you’re relearning your own,” I would say to him. But the words did not entrench themselves in his memory, and would fall again out of his vocabulary, which dwindled all the more. Like when trying to keep loose change in a torn pocket, the journey to deep illness was studded with lost word-coins. Mostly the ordinary ones, the names of things surrounding us. Stairs and door, soap, newspaper, chair, all vanished. For some time he still went to the shop with a list. What would happen is that he would read, for example, dough, but would have forgotten what it was and wouldn’t ask a shop girl to show him, so he would come back home with cookies or the first thing he laid his hands on. Or he would leave his wallet at the till. At the market, while he could still walk, he would pay for lettuce with a large banknote and walk off. I say while he could still walk, because soon he started falling. Out of the blue. He did not trip – rather his legs would simply fail him. I was with him once when it happened. He just clung to my sleeve and crumpled down on the pavement. Slowly, as when an actor in a movie is shot and he falls and falls and it takes him ages to reach the ground. He got some medication, but it was a sedative which made him drowsy. It was of course easier for me, because before that I had to be on standby all the time to make sure he didn’t get out of the house in his pyjamas or burn himself. But still he was more dear to me awake, though his behaviour started to physically wear me out. I didn’t have the strength to make sure he didn’t find the matchbox because he loved to watch how they burn, or shove crunched-up newspapers down the toilet or rummage in the dustbin in search of a little car he had lost seventy years before.

Then the nightmares followed. He was already sleeping alone in the bedroom – I had moved to our son’s room, but the door had to be open. At first he would talk in his sleep and wake up in cold sweats, not knowing where he was. I would sit by his side and calm him down until he fell asleep again.

When he came around, he was sad to be sleeping alone. He promised me he would sleep quite calmly, that he would neither squirm nor wake me up … “I only want to touch you in the night, to know that I’m alive and you’re by my side.” I cried, but only when he couldn’t see me. I knew I was losing him. The worst thing was that in between the fits he was completely conscious of what was happening to him, that he was losing himself. His pain could not be compared with mine. “I’m begging you, put me in a home. I don’t want you to see me like this. This isn’t me, you understand?” I just nodded. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t want to leave him alone.

After he started to cry for his mum at night, he didn’t come around to himself anymore. He would moan like a baby in terrible pain, and cry: “Mum, Mummy, it hurts, come, it really hurts.” When I appeared at the door, he would stretch out his arms towards me. “You came!” He would hug me and squeeze me tightly. I let him call me Mum, there was no point in explaining. For he was indeed nothing more than a little boy lost, very sick, who needed his mum to stroke his hair and comfort him. Fortunately, he contracted pneumonia and his torture was ended. Fortunately, because I believe he wanted it that way. When I entered the room after one peaceful night, quietly, so as not to wake him up, he was lying on his back and his still-striking face seemed so serene. I found comfort in the thought that he died in his sleep because I would break down at the thought of him fully conscious and alone at that moment. Yes, he died in his sleep – otherwise he would have called me. But sometimes I think he didn’t want to call me, he wanted to spare me his dying, it was his farewell gift and his way of showing me how much he loved me. Although it is completely certain that he had lost the word love long before.

“Mum, go back to your room, you can’t live in a museum dedicated to Dad and me,” said my son after the funeral. He came from Canada, stayed for three days. I was content that he didn’t see his father in that state. “But this is not a museum, I just don’t have the strength to change anything, clean up, rearrange, paint … but I will move,” I told him as he departed. I lied. I did not return to the bedroom. I’d have to sleep alone in the bed I had never slept alone in. And wake up in the night listening closely for whether he’s breathing. And hearing that he’s not breathing. What does our son know of loneliness, of the emptiness in me after the death? Or of how it cannot be mended like holes in socks long ago?

The new blend of coffee happily announced itself to the kitchen. The pleasant smell filled the room – and I already knew by the smell that he’d like it. I thought of the resilience of the organism, of my own obstinate cells that keep on living as if nothing has happened, of the lust for life that has nothing to do with my will. I took a sip of the hot liquid. He’d like it, I concluded contentedly – but this new brew does not have the same taste as when we drank coffee together.

Album Without Photographs

I don’t know how long that photograph has hung in the hallway, or how I didn’t notice it, let alone give it a second look. I also don’t know why that particular day I stopped in front of it, and realised I recognised not one person in it. Five people, three men and two women, watched me from the sepia picture in its plain wooden frame. They looked at me seriously, as if demanding my attention. How was I able to pass by them so many times a day, and yet not stop once?

But why would I hang a photograph of quite unknown people on the wall? Of course I wouldn’t. Of course, when I hung the picture, I knew these people. I took it down from the wall and flipped over the back side, hoping the names were written there, or at least the year. Nothing. When did I decide to hang it? When was this? When we moved in? When we painted the flat? It must have seemed to me then that no such note was needed because I knew who at least some of these people were. In the meantime, I forgot them all.

Judging by their clothes, especially the shoes of the bride, the photograph could have been taken some time in the thirties. One of the women sat holding a bouquet of flowers, the kind a bride usually has. Her blouse had frills and padding to accentuate the shoulders, making her face look more serious. If not for the flower in the buttonhole of the man next to her, the whole gathering would seem to have just come from a funeral. Their dress was formal, the men in suits which they absolutely also wore to funerals, because this was their finest clothing, of the sort not worn every day. A wedding, a formal occasion for which they stood in front of a camera in a photographic studio.

I felt uneasy. How is it possible I recognise not a single face in this photograph? I looked closer. One of the men had a middle parting and a toothbrush moustache, and was clearly somewhat older, but his face said nothing to me. His wife – although I only suppose she is from the position of her body and the touch of their shoulders – was dressed in a simple dark dress and wore a little hat. She too was quite unknown to me. They stood just above the married pair, obviously the best man and bridesmaid. The bridegroom, who also sat, had short-trimmed hair, like a soldier. And maybe he was? The only one who stood apart and somehow marred the formal impression was the young man to the groom’s side. The sleeves of his suit were a little too short for him, as were his trouser legs. As if, overnight, he outgrew his own suit, if even his at all. But this is noticed only if the photograph is studied carefully. This young man was the only one who seemed somehow known to me.

I took the photograph down from the wall, carried it to the light and put on my glasses. The narrowly elongated face, the straight nose, the high forehead and bright eyes … This was my father. It was possible he was about seventeen, and the photograph taken after his elder brother’s wedding. The two of them didn’t resemble each other at all and so were difficult for me to connect. Indeed, this was one of two pre-war photographs, and so I had put it on the wall. In the next one, from 1947, he’s already twenty-five, the war is finished and he’s dressed in the uniform of a naval officer.

My own negligence began to pain me. That I eventually recognised him made it easier, but I knew I still had more photographs where I was no longer sure who’s in them. And that I would need to decide finally whether to assemble them in an album while there are still people who can help me. Mum is no more, but her cousin’s still alive and I could ask her if she remembers whether the woman in one photograph is my grandmother when she was young, or some distant relative from America. She is my sole remaining connection with the past.

I keep them all, these known and unknown people, captive in the darkness at the bottom of the wardrobe, in shoe boxes, in disintegrating envelopes, in small plastic bags, as if somebody rapidly gathered them and put them away out of harm’s way. They’ve been gathered from relatives, from nursing homes and flats and houses they long ago moved out of or sold. As if I’m hiding them from myself because they conceal stories I don’t like.

Why aren’t these photographs assembled in albums, where did the family albums from one or the other side end up, and how is it that only a few unidentified remains fell to me, as if pulled out or cast off or left over after others sorted out their own? Did my parents not pay attention to this? Or were the photographs scattered about when they moved from place to place, the majority of them lost one by one like so many other things? Maybe they were lost even earlier, during the War. Who worried about saving photographs and assembling albums at such times? Or maybe, simply, there had never been any others?

If I arranged at least the old photographs that fell to me – and there aren’t many of them – into an album, then some kind of order would be established, some continuity. The identity of these people would be preserved through time, proof that they existed and that it mattered to someone to remember this. I’m thinking about the photographs that make me uneasy because I’m not completely sure whom I’m looking at and worrying that my memory, at this age, is starting to let me down. But to do this, I would have to examine all the photographs, even the ones that would unavoidably awaken in me unsettling feelings. My relationship with my family was tortured, torn apart, painful. They’re all dead now, but that doesn’t mean their photographs cannot cause me pain.

Already in advance, I am somehow tired and dispirited. But I remember what a friend said to me when her father died: the most precious thing he left her were albums of family photographs. “See to them,” she said. “Or maybe those very old ones will end up in some flea market, displayed between the embroidered tablecloths and the silverware. Especially if they are in pretty frames.” Even that, I reckoned at the time, is better than in the basement, attic or – most probably – the trash. People seldom want somebody else’s memories.

But reasons also exist to not sort photos and assemble albums. Unease, a fear of confrontation with the past, fear of memories of certain people, unsettling angst. Who needs that?

And in the end, arranging photographs in an album in chronological order, with the years and names cited, seems to me like a retroactive ordering of one’s own life. To metamorphose it – as if it were otherwise, neater and more civil than it truly was. So that the photographs might again serve as documents and corroboration, not only of one’s existence but also of a correct life. There was no correctness or polite behaviour in my life – the emptiness which I have nothing to fill it with, the shortfall of photographs, my intentional obliviousness all testify to this.

Will anyone at all wonder about these photographs from the twenties and thirties of the last century? About, let’s say, the one of my grandmother as a young girl, taken in a photographic studio around 1915? She leans with one arm on a small table with a vase, dressed in a long dark skirt and a festive blouse. Her hair is gathered at the nape, leaving her face fully visible. But her face is unsmiling. It’s obvious that this is a serious occasion and that nobody told her that she can dissemble, that she’s allowed to smile into the camera to look more serene. Her stiffness is an expression of her discomfort before the unknown. This is, undoubtedly, the first time she’s been photographed. Somebody, most likely a girlfriend, told her this is how it needs to be. For remembrance and long memory, she will perhaps write on the back, along with the date and her signature. She will gift this photograph to her fiancé before he leaves for the front.

Grandmother is just as rigid in a photograph taken about ten years later, again in a photographic studio, probably the same one. Now she’s nearly thirty, but her face does not show her age. This time she sits, and next to her are two boys, two sons aged eight and five. Fashion has changed, long skirts and cinched waists are no longer worn, and she’s dressed in a light calf-length dress that gives her more freedom. The boys are in everyday clothes, shorts and little shirts. They give the photograph a more relaxed tone. In the meantime, between the two photographs, Grandmother married a stonemason from the neighbouring village, whose work was such that he was almost never at home. It’s as if this photograph was taken precisely for him to carry along, as confirmation that he indeed has a family.

His photograph I don’t have. Grandmother obviously didn’t preserve it. People then didn’t get photographed often. Photographs documented certain formal events or served as a document, proof of existence, validation.

Yes, validation, just like the one of my great-grandfather on Mum’s side. He needed validation too, needed a photograph with his son to carry with him and show in foreign parts, in America. He left home at the beginning of the twentieth century for work abroad, to earn enough money to build a house, his only way to have a secure old age. He had already bought a parcel of land, with a view overlooking the whole town. He had to leave the island, his wife and his children and set out for America.

It’s no small thing to have a son, especially one at college. This photograph is taken in New York, in Little Italy, where Italians lived, and my great-grandfather amongst them. The photographic studio was located on one of the main thoroughfares, Mulberry Street. When I visited New York decades later, there was a bakery there, and the street was inhabited mostly by Chinese. But Photo Studio was still painted on the façade.

In this photograph, my great-grandfather is dressed in his best suit, which nevertheless is a bit crumpled, although somehow it’s evident he did not wear it every day. He also wears dress shoes, but these are worn out too. He worked on the New York docks, then in a bakery and in a mine. Did his son visit, and so did they get photographed together? No, in the twenties people rarely travelled from this part of the world to America for recreation. They travelled out of necessity. This photograph is a photomontage. The son’s photograph is glued onto the father’s. The photographer did as well as was possible at that time, and to the inattentive eye it might seem father and son are standing one next to the other, formally dressed, in a New York studio. But it will not slip the more attentive eye that their sizes are out of proportion. And the colours are different: the underlying photograph, into which the son was subsequently inserted, is sepia, while the son’s is a darker shade. The son’s formal black suit fits him like a glove. He’s wearing a white bowtie, and white gloves. His shoes are new and brightly polished. His father is proud his only son doesn’t have to do physical labour, like him. He’s just graduated in law, he has an intelligent head on him. One day this son of his will surely be somebody. Everyone who looks at this photograph can be convinced of this.

Pride drove my great-grandfather to commission this photomontage. So that he could show it to acquaintances, could laud his son. There, amongst Italians, where he felt most at home, because he spoke Italian. Father and son, best edition – that’s what it was for, to show others, and for the two of them to have it as a memory. For that matter, it’s the single preserved picture of my big-boned, moustachioed great-grandfather with rough hands, which luckily aren’t seen in the photograph. Because a photograph is a fine thing, for the genteel. Just like the formal suit, the gloves of soft leather, the silken handkerchief in the breast pocket and so many things that he was unable to afford for himself, but could for his son.

And Mum’s photograph from 1943, when she was sixteen, is also for recollection and long memory, to a dear friend, as written with green ink on the back. If she had not written this, I would not recognise her in the round face of this serene girl, not even by the smile, or by her big brown eyes and thick hair falling on her shoulders. She’s wearing a fine dress, narrow at the waist, she has a small golden chain with a medallion round her neck, holding her hip with one hand. She’s smiling not because the photographer told her to, but because she’s self-assured – and remained so.

In 1956 a photograph arrived of my aunt, living in Italy, taken at a private party in some flat. In the background is a big, decorated pine, behind which is written Buon Natale – good wishes for the celebration of Christmas. Her black party dress indicates that the photograph documents a private moment, and no longer just formal or important events. Small black-and-white photographs – with the serrated edges of those years – are beginning to accumulate in shoe boxes. No one knows how to take photographs yet, cameras are expensive, film is brought to photo-labs to be developed, the pictures are priced according to size. So these from the late fifties and sixties are small as cigarette boxes, only rarely the size of a postcard. Today such family photos from outings and birthdays seem useless and ludicrous, a pile of people whose faces are difficult to discern.

It’s already 1959. In a photograph the size of a postcard are my younger brother and I at the beach.

I’ve forgotten nothing about the taking of this photograph. Not the sun, not the touch of the breeze, not the heat of the rock under foot, not the squirming of my little brother’s body that day on the beach as he settles down beside me for the picture. One of the grown-ups has a camera and all the friends and their children have to come in turns. Father combs our hair, both the same way, slicking our wet hair down towards the back so it stays glued to our heads. The same way he combed his own hair, because afterwards it will be his and Mum’s turn for a picture.

My mother would not comb my hair like a boy’s. She would divide my fair hair, straight-cut just below the ears, with a parting to the side, as usual, and maybe would put a hairpin in so that the hair wouldn’t fall into my eyes. “You look like a boy with that slicked-back hairdo,” she said afterwards. I have only trunks on, because back then little girls my age didn’t wear bathing suits, especially if they were skinny and willowy, as they used to say.

This photograph is now important only to me. Not only as a memory, but also because soon there would not be any more family photographs with me in them too. As if I had gone somewhere and taken them with me, then lost them. In a proper album, an illogical gap in time would follow. Because the next pictures in line would be those of my own family, taken around ten years later.

The time without photographs is a dark place. I feel how my memories of it lead me somewhere I don’t want to go.

What of the photographs taken but which disappeared? Am I able to piece together an album of photos which no longer exist? In my imaginary album, will they forever remain blank pages, as testimony that this period is undocumented because the photographs vanished somewhere, went missing, were lost or were destroyed?

My “album without photographs”, a hole in the orderly documentation of my life, begins in the summer of 1965, shortly before my sixteenth birthday. I don’t have a student photograph taken “for recollection”, but I do remember my extremely short haircut and glasses, the first that weren’t provided “socially”, the kind everybody else wore at the time. Besides that, I most often wore trousers that my mum sewed for me and cardigans that just as easily could have been either mine or my brother’s. In my first year of gymnasium, my girlfriends already wore nylons, low heels and elegant dresses. After school, they rouged their lips. For some reason they looked and behaved as if they were much more grown-up than me. But I don’t know any more exactly what they looked like, or what they had on that day when we were photographed on a walk along the seafront or on the beach. I have only one photograph from that time, from a school outing, which one of them recently sent me. It’s black-and-white, taken on the deck of a ship. My hair is still short, and I’ve taken off my glasses because I don’t like being photographed with them on. Three of us girls lean against the railing, smile into the camera. I no longer remember their names.

One image from that time breaks agonisingly into memory: a small pile of white paper at the bottom of a deep litter bin. Quickly after, the little pile bursts into flames. The paper burns with tiny bright flames, a few incandescent red embers twist around as if alive, then disintegrate into ash. Not a handful of ash remained of the pile of photographs I had just incinerated in the litter bin.

The incineration of my own photographs was supposed to be the final deed of my departure from home. I am departing. I will leave my parents, their pathetic behavioural rules which I despise, their wretched lives. I will leave nothing behind me, as if they’d never even had a daughter.

That little pile of pieces of ripped-up paper at the bottom of a litter bin, that proof of my truculence, now gleams white-hot and provocatively in my memory.

I envy the people in well-ordered albums and with well-ordered lives, with ancestors whom they haven’t forgotten. Albums are important. Photographs are important. Why otherwise would Bosnian refugees save them from houses in flames and carry them into exile, thousands of kilometres away? I remember the sight of Bosnian women from Srebrenica gathered on one of Berlin’s squares, showing passers-by photographs of their houses, as proof that they are not nobody and nothing. Like identity cards stating that they too, not so long ago, lived ordinary lives, just like Berliners.

So it seems I need to buy, while I still remember these people, a few albums and then arrange the photos with names and dates under each one. Because all these people die again at that moment when there’s nobody left who could recognise their faces.

Blue Pills

In the morning, in the sink, the pile of dirty dishes from last night’s dinner greeted her. He promised to wash them, she thought. Why did I actually believe him? She’s conscious that midnight had passed when the guests left, and that both of them were tired. Indeed they only lately had comprehended how strenuous it had become to entertain people: you must come up with a respectable meal, go out shopping, tidy up the house, prepare the meal, serve it up beautifully … then wash the dishes and clear up the house after the guests. That’s why she said to him beforehand she didn’t want to invite friends for dinner, at least not while the dishwater was broken – and by the way, he might try calling the repairman now, what’s he waiting for, it won’t fix itself. You’re constantly finding faults with something, was his answer. But of course, I’m to blame for the machine as well, she couldn’t not retort. And, you are – you surely pressed something incorrectly or overfilled it with dishes, he didn’t let her have the last word. Why didn’t you arrange them better, why didn’t you turn on the machine if you’re so smart, she resisted. And now here she is, throwing fish bones and heads into the trash, trying not to look at their wide-open jaws and empty eyes. Then she runs water and decants detergent into the sink and floods the dishes in a soapy bath which smells comfortingly of lemon.

She hates washing dishes before breakfast, but there’s no sense in wrangling about washing up, especially since the trash is already starting to stink. This means, of course, that she will go downstairs and throw out the trash before making coffee and even taking a sip. Despite this being precisely his assignment. Every morning when he goes for the paper, he takes out the trash which she leaves before the door so that he’s unable to open it, but also so that he doesn’t trip over the little bag. Otherwise he would not remember. Who am I living with, she sighed, putting the coffee maker on the stove. She plunged her hands into the warm water and began to wash the plates. I must buy new rubber gloves, otherwise I’ll break out in a rash again, who knows how long this bother with the machine will last. “It would be worth your while to buy a new one,” a neighbour said to her. “With this you’ll pay for a repairman and the new part, which will come to half the price of a new dishwasher. And the repairman won’t guarantee you that some other piece won’t soon fail. And you said the machine is about twenty years old, explain to your husband that things don’t last forever. Nor do we, for that matter,” concluded the somewhat younger, energetic neighbour, who also gave her the number of a repairman and directed her to the nearby electrical appliances shop. Naturally the neighbour’s right.

Why is he incapable of behaving like other men? Why is he so indifferent and slow? Is age his excuse, or did I spoil him? Such thoughts milled around in her head while she washed up and then wiped the glasses. The coffee was already done. The wonderful aroma flooded the kitchen and drove out the smell of stale food. She knew he would soon wake up and appear at the kitchen door in pyjamas, still groggy. Sunday is a day he spends in pyjamas with the paper on his lap.

When she opened the cabinet to set the glasses in place, she spotted the pills. A blister pack in fact, one cavity empty and one still unopened, containing a blue tablet. Viagra was printed on the foil. She halted mid-motion, a glass in her right hand and the pills in her left. Then she carefully returned the blister pack to the same place, arranged the four clean glasses and closed the cabinet. She poured coffee for herself and sat at the table. She still needed to remove the tablecloth and napkins and put them into the washing machine, which luckily was working. Such a strange place for medicine – the thought floated through her mind – we don’t keep medicines next to glasses.

She needed a second small cup of strong black coffee to collect herself. Where did the Viagra in the glasses cabinet come from? Did he want her to see the pills? Or did he forget to put them away where she wouldn’t see them? She’d been away for a few days, visiting her sister, but nobody, not one other man, had spent the night at their place. And if someone had, it would have been difficult to leave the pills in this exact place. If the pills are his – who does he take them for? Maybe her husband has a lover who visits him when she’s on the road, there’s no other explanation. Why otherwise would he take Viagra when she’s not there?

The surface of the coffee in the cup wrinkled. Her hand was shaking.

If indeed he had found a lover, was she to blame? Sex had long ago ceased to interest her. Her unwillingness became all the more obvious when at night he would snuggle up to her in bed, and she would move away or turn her back to him. He’s never said anything – though maybe he should have, she thinks now, maybe we needed to talk about this, and not bury ourselves in silence. It was easier for us that way. I was glad not to have to try to justify myself. Fatigue, frequent headaches, high blood pressure, sluggishness – all this would sound like justification, and not actual explanations. In the end, she concluded it was better for the two of them to accept this in silence, because obviously he didn’t want to talk about it either. Her body no longer desired him, though that didn’t diminish her feeling of togetherness. Does he not also see how much we’ve changed physically? she asked herself. Would he understand her if she were to say to him she must love her body in order to surrender herself to another? Sometimes she imagined that they had simply expended the whole quantity of desire allotted to them as a pair, perhaps too quickly, maybe they had been improvident about this? Can desire be eked out over the long run? Is it possible to keep some in reserve, at least a little, save a bit for old age? She didn’t believe so.

And now, this sudden doubt which caught her unawares from the glasses shelf. It was hard for her to imagine he had a lover. She knew his shyness, even prudishness. He hated complications, and even if he mustered the courage for some such relationship, how would he organise this in his everyday life? With what pretexts would he leave the house, and where to? But maybe this wasn’t any sort of liaison, rather an incidental opportunity presented itself? Is that why he bought the pills, to have them at hand in case such an occasion arose? She attempted to imagine some quasi-official dinner at which he threw himself on a younger female colleague – surely not older like her. But for this, he would need to drink at least a bottle of wine. After that, what would happen? They would leave, take a taxi and go together… where? To her flat? To a hotel? But half-drunk like this, he’d fall asleep as soon as he touched the bed. But she was able to imagine him, in fact, taking Viagra for this very reason. She had to acknowledge to herself – for the denouement, her imagination was insufficient.

When she opened the medicine drawer in the bathroom, she was already completely calm. She briefly listened, not even the smell of freshly brewed coffee woke him up, he was still sleeping. He probably drank a little too much last night, that white wine was so drinkable that even she herself drank two glasses. In the drawer were neatly stacked little boxes and little bottles: felodipine, metoprolol, candesartan. And next to these, aspirin, cough syrup, propolis drops, and a blood pressure cuff, a thermometer, and a blood sugar monitor – but no little boxes with blue pills. Then she realised she was searching for them in the wrong place. Of course, she knew exactly where she would find them – in the drawer of his bedside cabinet. Just as she kept in her own drawer a tube of vaginal lubricant, as the cream is officially called, which has surely dried up by now. She bought it when she still thought that sex in marriage was obligatory even at her age, or so the women’s magazines and films tried to convince her. The lube had to be applied prior to intercourse. She didn’t give up right away, she would tell him to wait and would go into the bathroom. When returning to the room, the transparent gel would slither down her thighs and soon there would be more of it outside than inside. She knew this too by the fact it didn’t lessen the burning in the least. Such a nuisance, this tube, languishing for years between the ibuprofen and sleeping pills, paper tissues and ear plugs – why doesn’t she just throw it once and for all into the trash?

Quietly she opened the bedroom door a crack. He was sleeping on his side, with his back turned towards the bedside cabinet. She entered and carefully opened the drawer. If he wakes up, she will say to him she’s looking for the tissues. Amongst an old pair of reading glasses, ballpoint pens and notepads was a small box sporting the Viagra logo. She picked it up and opened it. In it were two more blister packs, one untouched with four blue pills and one missing the two she had found in the kitchen. She was surprised – only this many? She had read somewhere that they are quite expensive.

She gazed out the window. The glass was dirty from the dust of the nearby building site. Soon it will be spring, I’ll need to wash the windows, she thought. But the curtains too were somehow grimy. She turned to look back around the room. Maybe because of the sunlight flooding the room, it seemed to her that for the first time she saw how the wall above the bed’s headboard was cracked like an old oil painting. She noticed spider’s webs in the corners of the ceiling. The whole room seemed to her worn out and somehow different. She wasn’t able to remember when they had last painted the walls.

He stirred. “What time is it?” he asked. “It’s still early, you just sleep,” she said and left the room.

So, he took just one pill. What could this mean, she wondered, already back in the kitchen mopping the pale floor tiles, which each time reminded her how this wasn’t a good choice. They should have laid variegated or grey ones, yes, grey, so she wouldn’t have to wash them every single day, since every single drop and crumb can be seen on these … But maybe it’s just a matter of curiosity, a desire to try out the effect, even without a partner. Maybe he wanted to summon the courage to test his own renewed self-confidence with me, his own wife, she reasoned. Why do I always accuse him in advance, am I being unfair? But then one long-ago scene appeared before her eyes. This was when they both still worked at the university. They were on an excursion with her students, all young women because generally only girls studied languages. A spring shower caught them by surprise, so the twenty or so of them crammed together onto benches around a long table at an inn. She leaned over for a carafe of water and so accidentally saw a scene which sickened her. Her husband, who was sitting right next to her, that gentleman of fine manners who regularly showers, changes his underwear, uses deodorant and generally pays attention to his appearance and conduct, although already in his fifties – or maybe, it just now occurred to her, precisely because of this – had just dropped his hand on the thigh of the student next to him, who was wearing a short dress. This was a gifted girl, she remembered her because otherwise she was especially nervous and anxious and would burst into tears at the slightest thing. Now she’ll start crying, stand up and make a scene, she had thought at first, ashamed of herself. But the girl picked up his hand and set it on the bench as if an object and not the hand of a living man sitting next to her. She didn’t get up, she appeared neither furious nor hurt – and maybe that’s what was most surprising. She simply moved away the unwanted hand of the stranger, maybe moist, maybe slimy, for her it was certainly slimy and repulsive. Neither of them noticed that she witnessed their gestures. Even today, she wouldn’t be able to precisely define her feelings, something between rage, shock, and pity for him.

Of course it had to be my student, on the joint excursion, was he not able to restrain himself for my sake – she remembers asking herself as they travelled back by bus. The nausea lasted a few days, but afterwards the whole incident seemed to her too pathetic, and she decided to pass over it in silence. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed silent, she thought as she took the lift down to the yard with the litter bins. Why wasn’t I able to muster the courage? Did I ease the situation for him, or for myself? A lie would follow – but what are you saying, who knows what you saw, don’t make me laugh – and then, if she pressed on with the argument, saying she would speak with the girl, he would begin to justify himself, that he drank a bit, forgot himself, it happens. And then he would taunt her more, would say to her – but you’re jealous, just look at this, who would have guessed, it seemed to me you completely gave up on me. No, no, she simply didn’t have the will to listen to him.

Only, once started along this course, her memory couldn’t be stopped. A few years later he was staying in England on a fellowship, and she joined him for the last month. Then too he committed an unpleasant, scandalous incident with the wife of a colleague from Hungary. His wife also came to visit him, and so they had prepared dinner for a few of the other fellows. They had run into each other in the hallway the day before. The wife was an attractive blonde, around forty, short hair and flirtatious demeanour. She was a fashion editor at a Hungarian women’s magazine and it was evident from the way she dressed that she followed fashion. And at the dinner it was she who opened the door of the flat. She had on an evening dress with shoulder straps. As he presented her a bouquet of delicately pink tulips – for some reason he likes giving tulips – he suddenly leaned over and kissed her on a bare shoulder. Just as if she were his wife, and not his colleague’s, who stood and watched, as amazed as I.

She acted naturally, took the flowers and went off to find a vase. Perhaps a strange man kissing her shoulder was something that often happened to her. All the same, at dinner she cloaked herself in a silken shawl. Did her husband say something to her while they attended to the food in the kitchen?

That entire evening, she remembers well, she was unable to look into the eye of the man sitting across the table from her, who was taking pains to maintain the conversation though it was evident that he was barely restraining himself from rising from the table and walking off. All the while her husband threw himself with gusto on the roast and politics, perhaps not even noticing that his inappropriate gesture had shocked anyone. In this situation, only wine could help them relax. All four drank a lot, she a little desperately attempting to wash the taste of bitterness from her mouth. She felt at fault, as if she had brought them, as a guest, a juvenile prone to unruly incidents.

She wasn’t able to pass over this gesture in silence. The next morning, she didn’t get out of bed before him as usual. She waited for him to wake. She was in his face as soon as he opened his eyes. “Why did you do that, what got into you, man?” He didn’t feign confusion, he knew exactly what she was talking about. “Ah, but I didn’t mean anything, it happened spontaneously somehow. Instead of the cheek, I kissed her on the shoulder, so … unintentionally. Without thinking. I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” he said. Her fury suddenly deflated in the face of this stupid, childish justification. Because, there it is, impulse got the better of him. Poor wretch, he was unable to control himself! Already in his sixties, but he still hasn’t learnt to control himself. It didn’t occur to you that you might maybe humiliate her husband, your own colleague? Or maybe me, your own wife? She wanted to say this too, but it became obvious to her there was no sense in it, he had already forgotten the episode and started talking about something else completely. She remembers how his behaviour began to hurt her like the prick of a sharp object, and how she experienced this like a rout of her own femininity. The sharp pain in the chest lasted for some time. These memories, like scars, still bothered her. She urgently needed to console herself somehow. She said to herself: But why am I getting so agitated, he has only committed two such outrages, and both in front of me, although with the first he didn’t know I saw him.

Only two – that I witnessed.

Like now, with the blue pills, she consoled herself, wringing out the mop in the already shipshape kitchen. The Sunday concert played softly on the radio, only the scraping wail of the violin rose a little, which gave her goose bumps. Is it better that this happened right in front of me, she asked herself, or is this a sign of his complete indifference? Yes, he’s unperturbed, it’s no worry of his whether she will see it or not. And now he’s proved it by leaving Viagra right under her nose. Which means it’s all the same to him whether she will resent him for it or not.

No, it hadn’t happened only twice. Why does she lie to herself? The third time it happened was a year ago last New Year’s. Again they were guests, but at the home of old friends. There was a crowd, three families at a New Year’s Day lunch. She was helping to set the table. She had just carried the plates from the kitchen into the living room, eleven dinner plates from a fine set for special occasions, with gilt edges. She remembers this detail because just then she spotted her husband, who had already knocked back some whiskey, as he grabbed the hostess’s bum. This was not a friendly pat or an accidental touch – rather, he took advantage of the crowded room to touch the curves of a woman. Repulsive, she thought. He’s behaving like those creeps on the tram. She could, of course, have let go of the plates, screamed out or something similar. She could have made a scene, publicly shamed him. But she should have done this long ago. As she halted, rooted to the spot with the heavy plates in her hands, the hostess, her friend, did what she herself would have done. She slapped his hand without turning to see whose hand it was.

In truth, this spectacle didn’t have the same effect as those earlier ones, when they were younger. It disgusted her, that it did. But it also worried her. Then, for the first time, it occurred to her that his behaviour might have some connection with the diabetes he’d recently been diagnosed with. He suffered from the milder version, “senile diabetes,” which, of course, it was not permitted to mention. The first month, he hysterically measured his blood sugar level and doled out his food by the gram. Later he was more relaxed. The doctor told him to be careful about alcohol. He stuck to this recommendation roughly until the first convenient opportunity, then continued to damage himself by eating and drinking exactly as before. The doctor warned him, perhaps deliberately in front of her, that diabetes can strongly influence sexual desire. He laughed and waved his hand, as if this surely could not happen to him. She knew he did that out of sheer embarrassment, because afterwards he was reticent and sombre. But by way of this movement of his, she had the presentiment that it was not all the same to him.

But of course, it’s not me or my unwillingness causing his behaviour, it’s his illness, she reckoned. Maybe now he’s at that stage where he’s searching for an affirmation of his masculinity? If that is indeed so, should she mention the Viagra to him? She ought to at least share with him her knowledge that Viagra isn’t exactly harmless, she read somewhere – a lot was written about this a few years ago – that it can affect blood pressure and the heart. And if he continues to take it, then he ought to consult with the doctor. Would he fear for his own health? Would he admit it to the doctor?

Maybe she’s being too much of an alarmist, only a single pill is missing, that’s no reason for alarm. Has something changed between them? Had his behaviour changed?

After all this, she was able to presume with certainty what a confrontation with the truth would look like. Let’s say she took the pills from the glasses cabinet and put them in her own bedside cabinet. Over the following few days she would wait and see if he noticed that they were not there when taking glasses to set the table. Indeed, she would wait to see if he mentioned their disappearance. She believes he would be silent, and that she herself would lose patience. One evening before sleep, while he’s reading, she would produce the pills from the drawer and wave them pointedly under his nose. “What’s this?” she would ask him. “Why?”

He would look astounded for a moment, and then would probably stammer: It’s not what you think. And this would indeed be the worst. This would finish her off, this sentence would perhaps bring an end to their marriage. If she could be sure that he would fall silent, or turn onto his other side, that he would cry or confess his infidelity, or justify himself, maybe she would even tell him she had found the stupid pills and so warn him that he should be careful, it’s not especially healthy at his age. But if he said: It’s not what you think, the banality would erupt into their room. In all those bad films and series they would watch together on television at night, too tired for anything else or out of pure laziness and the need to escape from themselves, the committing of adultery is revealed through this very sentence. This piece of trash of a sentence, like vomit, would suddenly find itself in bed between them, on her clean sheets. They would remain buried, flooded, suffocated by this trash – as if their relationship no longer belonged to them and they could not even find their own original words to speak of it.

She returned to the kitchen. The smell of coffee had already completely disappeared, but that of the fish still lingered. She needs to open the windows wide, create a draught, and air out well this suffocating flat.

A List of Things Needed for the Road

She took the sheet of paper and wrote: documents, money, telephone, medicines.

Then she stopped. If this is the list of things she needs to take on the road, then she doesn’t need such a list at all. But still she’ll add: books, clothes, cosmetics, keys, though she ought to remember that much. So why, then, did she begin writing this list at all? Because she needs, of late, to note everything down, she needs even to write down a list of things for the shop: bread, milk, yogurt, butter, etc. Or when she goes to the bank, for instance, she writes on a scrap of paper: current account statement, check whether payment for garage is on list of standing orders, pay balance for the gas – otherwise she’ll surely forget something. And she must take especial care when she goes on the road. Even if only for a short duration – for the weekend, for instance – conferences being mainly held at the weekend. Certain things she must needs take with her, as if she were going away for a week or two.

She must put together a detailed list, this she’s already promised herself for a long time.

Documents. Depending on where she travels, she must have an identity card or passport. But also her points card, if travelling by plane. Once, thanks to collected points, she travelled to Israel, and another time she used her points to upgrade to a first-class seat. Useful. Then, perhaps the most important document – the European Health Insurance Card. She’s had need of it more than once, the last time being in Vienna when she got a toothache, and once in Berlin when she suddenly came down with a high temperature. Considering her state of health, better not to go on the road without it. Best of all would be not to travel at all. But how, when this is really the only means of additional income? Talks and participation at conferences, especially overseas, are still well remunerated, whereas her pension is modest.

With money it’s easy, no one carries cash around any longer, bank and credit cards have replaced it. She remembered how she found herself in trouble a few years before in Germany when her purse was stolen along with almost all her documents and bank, credit and health insurance cards – luckily, her passport remained at the hotel. Ever since, she takes care to leave even her credit card and the keys to her flat in the hotel safe. It took her hours to find a police station and report the theft. “Madam,” an older policeman said to her, “pickpocketing has increased by thirty percent ever since the visa requirement for Romanians was lifted. If it’s any consolation to you, documents don’t matter to thieves, they just take the money and throw away the documents. Maybe they’re still in some park, in a rubbish bin.” It sounded consoling, but they weren’t found. Still, it turned out the thieves didn’t even attempt to use them.

The phone wasn’t a problem, but she’s forgotten the charger at times. It would be fine if left at home, someone could always be found with the same phone, but she’s left it behind in the hotel more than once. Then, afterwards, she’d have to call and implore them to send it to her, which was awkward, and also unreliable. Except when she forgot it in Sweden. Naturally, they sent it to her from Lund. But not from Bratislava. She had to buy a new one.

Medicines. The most complicated thing is to assemble her medicines. Years of experience don’t help much, only the pillboxes do, the ones with partitions for arranging the pills by days of the week. A few years ago, she discovered that pillboxes exist, for a week’s worth of daily doses, and it changed her life. Every day has four compartments, so there’s no possibility of error. Fill the compartments up once a week and you can be completely at peace.

It’s also necessary to take medical documentation, a letter from the doctor with illnesses enumerated, from high blood pressure to angina pectoris, from high blood sugar to osteoporosis – in case of a fracture. Once, in Milan, she fractured a bone in her foot and came home in a cast up to the knee, just because she had stopped awkwardly. In the letter, allergies are also enumerated, as well as a complete list of medicines. She had it translated into English, because in any case it’s not meant for her own doctors. She also usually brings her latest blood and urine test results. She’s thinking of ordering a so-called medical bracelet to wear on journeys, but the models seemed to her too expensive (around £20), even though it’s possible to record on it the number which needs to be called in case of an accident, as well as a few diagnoses – but she gave up.

But there also exist medicines for other situations, extraordinary ones, which she also needs to pack for the road. Tranquilisers, sleeping pills, aspirin, painkillers, eye drops, test strips and the apparatus for measuring blood sugar levels, sometimes even a blood pressure monitor, especially if the trip lasts a while. And in no way is she permitted to forget the box of antibiotics, or at least the prescription! It depends on which country she’s travelling to, but experience tells her that antibiotics are hard to procure without seeing a doctor. In America once, she got ill from a severe infection, but was saved by the box of antibiotics she brought from home. Besides, they are very expensive there – a visit to a doctor plus antibiotics could cost as much as a flight change. Naturally, she learnt all this from experience, she had inevitably found herself in a situation where she had to recite her diagnoses by heart, not having the letter from her doctor, or had to buy medicines she was lacking, or had to pay dearly for antibiotics. In her beloved Protestant north, they don’t provide these medicines even when they diagnose a bacterial infection! So it’s better to insure oneself. Along with all the rest, she also brings with her an antibiotic cream for small wounds or infections, as well as a miniature tube of cream for cold sores.

And for the throat – because it’s important to have a healthy throat when you participate in a conference – she absolutely must pack propolis drops, which are far better than tablets. She’s often tormented by a sore throat when changing climates, entering and exiting planes or moving between other chilled and heated spaces.

Glasses – three pairs. Although she has progressive lenses, she nevertheless uses another pair for reading, as she’s not disposed to go to the optician for a change of dioptre, and anyway they are expensive too. In addition, she always packs her old ones in her suitcase in case she loses these, or in case her purse is stolen, or if they drop or whatever else might happen to glasses. Along with these, she brings a piece of thin deerskin for cleaning them, the kind that no longer comes with the frames upon purchase. Once she needed new glasses made, and they produced for her a plastic card with her whole diagnosis, both plus and minus signs, astigmatism, cylinders, eye pressure, everything possible. This too she takes – one more card, and it’s possible to avoid an eye examination. Without glasses she’s simply dysfunctional, as if she were not present, unable to speak without notes, nor to take notes if she’s in the audience. Once long ago she wanted to rid herself of short-sightedness with an operation, but she was afraid of the surgery and so wore contact lenses for decades. Until her conjunctiva became so dry that even eye drops no longer helped, so much did they irritate her. Now, she brings along a pair of contact lenses but puts them in only for formal occasions, whereupon she also dabs a little mascara on her eyelashes, although unable to withstand any of this for longer than two hours. On the other hand, as far as appearance is concerned, it’s a dramatic difference, even for her age.

Then, cosmetics. Her makeup bag, although not big, does not go in her handbag but rather in her small roller case which she can take into the plane’s cabin as hand luggage.

As for face preparation, she puts into her makeup bag a few free samples of different creams handed out in pharmacies or perfumeries, a single trial size sufficing for a whole weekend. Then deodorant, plus the liquid for taking off water-resistant makeup and lipstick. In fact, sprucing up no longer mattered to her, she even considered quitting lipstick, but all the same she surrendered to it. She has done up her lips her whole life, is pleased by the way lipstick changes the face and one’s whole appearance, as if it dressed a person, especially the nuances of intense red which suit her in spite of her advanced age. Then a female colleague, a Frenchwoman (and they know about these things), introduced her to a lipstick that doesn’t smear into those miniscule wrinkles around the mouth, and doesn’t rub off, giving the impression that the woman using it has just eaten a greasy burek. This lipstick, she told her, when applied once in the morning, not only doesn’t smear, but stays on the lips the whole day, maybe needs touching up once and in fact can’t be removed without a special liquid. Since then, sometimes she’ll even fall asleep with it on, and in the morning would in fact look like she had just done her makeup. Moreover, she must take into account that the little bottle of this special liquid, plus toothpaste, plus deodorant all together should not exceed the permitted liquid volume for hand luggage, to avoid airport security officers confiscating them. Absurd rules, as if terrorists have not already found a million other ways to destroy a plane. Anyway, how can you even fight against someone who’s ready to sacrifice their own life?

Vaseline is of the utmost importance to her. For lips, for hands, for elbows, for heels. She always has a small container of it in her handbag anyway, along with a little bottle of disinfectant alcohol, especially when on the road. On planes they used to hand out wipes, but this came to an end long ago. And she read how the majority of infections, especially flu and viruses, are transmitted precisely by touch. For example, you shake hands with someone or go to the toilet on a plane and then afterwards rub your eyes or touch your lips or receive a sandwich or something similar. Disinfecting hands after visiting a toilet in a public place or when travelling doesn’t seem to her like overdoing it, or obsessive behaviour, at least not at her age and given her health. And, understandably, when on a plane in winter, she wears a surgical mask, as she promised a girlfriend, a doctor.

And that’s everything, except for a small travel pack of toothpaste, a toothbrush, a hairbrush and comb, cotton balls for cleaning the face, a nail file, because security officers confiscate any little scissors, no matter how small. And when she accidentally breaks a nail, if she has no file with her, there’s nothing for it except to bite it.

Yes, a few daily panty liners as well. It gets awkward with the sanitary pads, she reflected, as she arranged the thinnest ones in the makeup bag, each in its own wrapping. And one thicker, just in case. It wasn’t anticipated that she would be driven around at length, but if they offer a bus tour around the town, the thicker pad will come in handy. She noticed that her bladder sometimes tends to yield. Maybe because of nervousness or the cold, really she ought to go for a check-up. But she doesn’t, now, have time for this. Everything is still under control, though this yielding worries her more and more, first the eyes, now the bladder as well, not to mention the heart and stomach. And her digestion in particular is not the best. Speaking of which, she remembered, she must put Dulcolax tablets in with the medicines, and also charcoal capsules, just in case. Because with a stomach as sensitive as hers, and with the kind of food served at congresses – all of it artificial, frozen, tinned – it’s no wonder at all that she has problems with her digestion.

Needle and thread, safety pins of various sizes, cutlery – there’s also space for these in the makeup bag. A needle and thread are always needed, and they don’t take up much space. Safety pins are useful in several ways. With them, it’s possible to fasten a shawl or do up a skirt at the waist if the zip fastener has broken, and trousers as well.

Everything put on the list so far dwells in her handbag, though she must still leave room for a few other things: jewellery, handkerchiefs, keys, a shawl, a book (that is, a Kindle), a little notebook, a pencil and of course her phone. It goes without saying that speaking notes, plane tickets and conference programmes are included. As for jewellery, maybe one dramatic necklace for formal occasions and earrings, which she will wear on the plane.

The cutlery is plastic – on one end a spoon, on the other a fork, serrated so it can also be used as a knife. If, for example, she wants to peel an apple – she found it in some shop for hikers and it seemed useful to her, hence she doesn’t need to collect plastic spoons and forks from cheap fast-food places in case she wants to eat a yogurt in her room. When a person travels, one must think too about the situations when one will resist going out or ordering dinner in the room, but instead will bolt down a yogurt, an apple, tea, biscuits … Then, in the seal bag with the cutlery, she also stashes a few sachets of Nescafé, as well as a small box of sweetener, stevia of late. In better hotels, they have an electric kettle, teabags and coffee sachets, sugar as well, but not always sweeteners. Instead of going down for breakfast in the morning, she often makes tea or coffee in her room and quickly eats two biscuits while watching the news on television. Or if she returns to the hotel late at night, she makes herself a hot drink and immediately creeps into bed … But wait: she’s yet to make sure she packed the little case with the silicon ear plugs too, because sometimes the heating can’t be turned off, and its humming prevents her from falling asleep. She prefers the silicon to the wax ones and the sponge ones because they squeeze in better and aren’t sticky or greasy, though much more expensive. For a while, she had to bring them back from America in large numbers, because they are much cheaper there. And finally, a sleeping mask. Welcome on long-haul journeys, whether by plane or even train, although on trains she daren’t fall asleep as someone could take her luggage unnoticed. In the north, the mask is important because daylight lasts longer and it’s difficult for the unaccustomed to fall asleep.

In the suitcase a pair of slippers will also be found, the Japanese make a kind that’s easily packed, can be washed in the machine, are light and take up little space, since you never know if slippers await you in a hotel. Or a bathrobe, and so she brings along a silk one to go over her nightdress. Silk is also light and doesn’t take up much space, excellent for both winter and summer. She also takes a silk shawl, sufficiently large to wrap round herself when she enters from the heat into a terminal or plane. Or when she arrives at a hotel or enters a shop, conference hall or the like. However, she carries the shawl in her handbag, always on her person – as her doctor friend, who also travels often, recommended. In the winter, a shawl of cashmere, not for luxury but rather because it’s warm and light. If she needs to, she is able to wrap herself up in it, or wrap it round her neck, or even cover her head with it, since she doesn’t wear a hat. Those two items of her apparel are obligatory, and always near at hand. And an umbrella, she has a small one which she simply leaves in her suitcase for the next time she travels.

From her wardrobe – two pairs of new nylons, 50 denier yarn, one black, the other flesh tone – these too she leaves in the suitcase between trips. Shoes are next in line. She’ll wear the comfortable walking shoes while on the road, and pack the elegant ones in the suitcase. In Vienna, she found a shop that sells comfortable shoes, the lightest in the world, ideal for travel. As for clothes, she brings a nice dress that does not need ironing, plus trousers and a tunic and underwear, the number of pairs depending on how long the trip will last. The suitcase is now packed. If she brings a laptop, she will place it at the top because she must extract it for security. But even with so few carefully chosen items, for her the suitcase will be too heavy to lift and stow in the envisaged space above the airplane seat. She doesn’t like asking unknown men to help her, and they no longer pay attention to her and proffer help as they used to do when she was young and wasn’t in need of any help. And so, she shoves the suitcase under the seat in front of her.

Everything needed is in front of her, on the table. Everything is ready for travelling, for the short weekend in the small town in which the gathering is being held.

For a ninety-minute journey, she’s already been preparing all morning. And what’s worse, the pile of things, which she so carefully readies, seems to her more and more absurd every time. She’s unable to anticipate everything that could possibly happen to her, from a sore throat to pneumonia, from cold wind to rain.

I can’t do this any longer, she thinks, sitting in front of the crowded table of chosen things.

I no longer have the strength.

With an unhurried movement of the arm, she sweeps every thing from the table.

About the author

Slavenka Drakulić, born in Croatia (former Yugoslavia) in 1949, is a journalist and a writer whose books have been translated into many languages. Her best-known book in the USA and UK is How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Her last collection of essays, Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism, was published by Penguin Random House in 2021. In the USA, she has published eight non-fiction books and five novels. The 2010 feature film As If I Am Not There (directed by Juanita Wilson, written by Eliseo Altunaga) was based on her novel S. – A Novel About the Balkans.

https://slavenkadrakulic.com/

About the translators

Christina Pribichevich Zorić is an American translator born in New York to an Irish mother and a Yugoslav father. She has translated over 35 works of fiction and non-fiction from Serbian/Croatian and French into English and has received several translation prizes, including the Serbian PEN Award for Translation and the Djuro Daničić Award for Translation. Besides translating, she has worked as a broadcaster and headed the Conference and Language Services Section at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Media Diversity Institute, London; English PEN; and the Advisory Board of the Central & East European Book Project, Amsterdam.

Among her translations are The Dictionary of the Khazars and Last Love in Constantinople by Milorad Pavić, Zlata’s Diary by Zlata Filipović and The Taste of a Man and Frida’s Bed by Slavenka Drakulić.

Jacob Eoin Agee, a poet, essayist and translator from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, was born and educated in Belfast and Dublin, and now divides his time between Ireland and Croatia. A scholar of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, he has translated Slavko Goldstein’s study of Holocaust denial, Jasenovac: tragedija, mitomanija, istina (Jasenovac: Tragedy, Mythomania, Truth) and is currently translating Ivan Goran Kovačić’s classic long poem on genocide within Yugoslavia during WWII, Jama (Sinkhole). His poetry has appeared in numerous publications. Slavenka Drakulić’s Invisible Woman is his first published book-length translation.