Breathless (18 page)

W
inter passed and so did spring. Lukas worked the night shift at the factory, and Gábriel went down to half time and then was forced to give up altogether. The treatment he received was like sugarcoated pills in the face of death. April passed, its promises broken time after time. May the same. June—no more promises. We heard the nightingales. The area around the river was typical nightingale territory, and however alluring their song was, it still made me uneasy. The early summer slipped past in warmth, morphine sulfate, waiting, while the illness spread through Gábriel's bones.

We put a bed outside his room to be able to hear if he woke up in the night and needed something. I dreamed that a violent storm was tossing us apart, and when I awoke Lukas was holding me so hard I could scarcely breathe. Sometimes he murmured his own name in his sleep, as if he were already alone, the only one left.

Rice and cigarettes for breakfast. While he was waiting for the rice cooker, Lukas washed in the homemade shower that turned into an electric current in stormy weather. I followed his movements behind the nylon curtain. Suddenly he stopped. He was motionless for a long time, stood quite still in the jet of water until I was afraid and went up and pulled down the shower curtain. He was just standing there, as if he had forgotten that he was supposed to wash his hair.

“Fetch my cigarettes.”

“Are you going to smoke in the shower, Lukas?” He'd gone mad, forgotten where he was, what he was doing. Lack of sleep and worry had eaten away at him and made his body sharper, more chiseled, as if death were attacking it as well. When I reached my hand forward to touch his chest, he fended me off quickly.

“Fetch them.”

I didn't intend to. If we started to do more than one thing at a time, how would we make the time pass? If I were to go and fetch things for him while I had the sheets in soak, and he were to smoke while he was showering . . . then the days would be endless. The time we spent in the house to be there for Gábriel crept forward so slowly, even when we only did one thing at once. But he said, “The days won't last. The nights.” And it was true, the endless days were numbered. For Gábriel and perhaps for us as well. We were on a narrow strip of ice, alone. There might be a thin band of ice that would bear your weight in a large area of weak ice; Papa had taught me that. We were standing on it now. If you walked out on a narrow strip and it broke, no one could help you.

—

It was clear that death wasn't going to take Gábriel quickly and mercifully, it was going to take its time. Bone cancer . . . the worst kind, Lukas had heard. His papa's body would soon be as hollow as the coral in the pearl fisher's house.

Did Mama guess what was happening, when one afternoon I said I was going to Lukas's and then didn't come home again? Or did she think that we were in the claws of love, that we spent all those days in bed, wrapped around each other, irresponsible, lazy, defiant, shirking school and work?

The first time she came and knocked on the door was twenty-four hours later. Lukas said that I was asleep, which made her suspicious, as it was afternoon.

“Have you been
drinking
?”

“No.” He had. I hadn't.

“Why is Lo asleep at this time of the day, then?”

“Because she's been awake all night, we—”

“I don't want to know any more,” Mama interrupted. Though of course she did, even though she thought she already knew.

I was sitting measuring out Gábriel's afternoon dose, following the instructions left by the district nurse. Through the door I could smell the sweet scent of ripened grain and heard Mama point out that even if I was not underage in one way, I certainly was in another. If Lukas was giving me alcohol . . . He made a sign to me that I should stay where I was, he could handle this, he was on his own ground now.

“It's cool, trust me,” he said and shifted a millimeter in the doorway. Mama couldn't even peep around him.

“Trust you?” she said coldly. As if she ever had . . . ever would . . . “When she wakes up, send her straight home,” she ordered, as if I were the common property of two foes and it was her turn to have me now.

“She'll do as she wishes.”

“No, she'll do as
you
wish, that's the problem!” I heard Mama say, before she turned and left.

Whatever you do, don't lie to her, that never works, I whispered when Lukas came back in. He pulled me out of Gábriel's room so that we could speak undisturbed.

“Listen, it makes absolutely no difference what I say to your mama, you know. She's never liked me.” I wanted to contradict him, but that would have been ridiculous. I caught sight of the two of us in the hall mirror. We looked wrong. Especially together. It was impossible not to think that our eyes should change places, he with his summer-bleached hair and almost black eyes, I dark and green-eyed. He held me a little too close, a little too hard. I wriggled away. Since Copenhagen he had kept his distance, but now it was as if he could no longer maintain that restraint. There was something insensitive about everything he did. He let both his irritation and his randiness spill over onto me and I was afraid of provoking in him what had become so easily provoked since Gábriel's diagnosis. Sex and sadness in a desperate mixture. I moved out of the way with a no. You always say that, I saw in his eyes. Love, love not, love, but what sort of love? Sex had always been the thing that couldn't happen between us. Mama would have detected it in me right away and then we would never have been able to be alone together—that feeling was still there.

“Must you go around seminaked? Can't you show my papa a little respect?” Lukas said, out of the blue. Seminaked? Skirt, pants, top, worn-out sandals, was that not enough? What did he expect? It was eighty-five degrees.

“What about you, then . . .” See-through, threadbare black shorts, that was all. Not that there were any secrets hidden under there, but at least he shouldn't complain about me.

“It's not a problem for you,” he said vehemently, “if I go around like this.”

I shrugged.

“No, well. Go and get dressed.”

—

We had entered a time of constant fatigue, nights broken into small meaningless pieces by Gábriel's restless sleep. When Mama returned it was Lukas who opened the door again. He looked as if he had been living hard for days. His hair had started to form natural dreadlocks and his only article of clothing was hanging yet farther down his hips.

“I want to speak to my daughter.”

I was on the point of going out into the hall.

“Where's your papa?”

“Asleep,” Lukas said.

“You know—I don't like this at all.” She insisted on speaking to Gábriel, but Lukas said it wasn't the time to wake him. “Fetch Lo,” she demanded.

“If she wants to go home, she knows the way. Calm down!”

I stepped in just before it got out of control. Mama looked so alone standing out on the porch. We had never been apart as long as this, and as soon as she saw me she started telling me off.

“What do you think you
look
like? Have you been in bed all weekend? Has he turned your head completely? When are you coming home?”

“Soon,” I lied. It was best that she didn't know. She was afraid of dead people, and dying was so much more frightening, and Mama had never been good at dealing with anything to do with death. “Mama, I just need to—”

“What?” she asked, looking out over the scorched sloping fields as if she were searching for storm clouds on the horizon.

“Stay with Lukas for a little while . . .” I didn't expect her to understand, and she didn't. She just said that she hoped I knew what I was letting myself in for. Looked at me as if convinced that I didn't have the faintest idea.

You know when a newcomer has arrived in town if he steps down from the train in slow motion, the last passenger, his eyes sweep along the platform, probing, squinting into the peculiar light that platforms like this are always bathed in, before he puts his bags down on the ground and suddenly he looks exhausted. He hasn't arrived yet, he doesn't even know that he is on his way to our village—first we have to place an ad. It is just a question of persuading Lukas.

“Everything's so easy for you, Lo.”

“And you make everything so hard.”

Always the same, waiting and hesitating. It's only an ad . . . A gamble.

“What do you have to lose, Lukas? Nothing.” I slip away when he tries to keep hold of me. We've discussed it all morning, and I've run out of arguments. It feels as if we have been talking about this for half the summer and soon it will be too late.

He thinks it's a bad idea. Period. Mostly because it's an idea at all. Ideas imply change and Lukas's immediate response to anything that deviates from our normal routine is: no. When did he become like this? I don't remember him this way.

“You're going to regret it.”

“Why the hell do you always think you know best, Lo? Especially things you haven't got the foggiest about.” The questions he has . . . it is time to ask them now.
Now
—not later. There won't be a later. Gábriel won't live many more weeks.

It's not intended to be a truth commission, just a conversation. The last chance, the last conversation he will be able to have with his papa—and the first as well, for that matter. Interpreter required, for private case, that is all that needs to be in the ad.

“Private case?” He looks at me, distrustful. “Sounds like something dodgy.”

“Oh Lukas, stop it . . .”

—

They've argued over everything, without understanding each other. Never spoken. There are so many things the two of them have never talked about, never overcome the short and yet insuperable distance of language. They've shared the same life, the same kitchen table, over which they could see but not reach each other, just enough vocabulary in common for everyday life, simple commands, and sometimes not even that. When Gábriel turned on Lukas it often seemed to be caused by some misunderstanding. Something Lukas neglected to do, simply because he hadn't understood that he'd been told to do it.

This unwillingness to speak as well. Gábriel surrounded himself in silence as if it were a natural condition. Small wonder that Lukas soon forgot the language that was his when he arrived here. He quickly began to speak better Swedish than Hungarian. The new language became his only one, because that was the only one he heard.

—

Only when I've given up the idea, stopped believing in it myself, does Lukas unexpectedly give in. Before he has a chance to change his mind, I make the call. Half a minute, that's all the time it takes to dictate the ad over the telephone. Then it is just a question of waiting. We sit on their wooden porch, listening for the ringing of the phone, scratching at mosquito bites, watching the kites soaring with predatory elegance high over the late-summer sky. Bide our time—or maybe it is Gábriel's time we are biding; it is at any rate his time that is running out.

Every day he grows worse. Before it was every week, and before that it was every month. The irrevocable process of distraint and seizure has begun. Death's henchmen, some kind of execution squad, come and, bit by bit, remove his life and carry it away, and we can't stop them. As if it is no longer his, as if he has lost his right to it. All of a sudden they come and take away his ability to climb out of bed by himself. He could do it a moment ago, and we didn't even think about it—now he can no longer do it and we have to think about it all the time. For him it means immense frustration, for us it means that we can no longer leave the house together for more than a very short time. He can still manage to get to the toilet, but first we have to help him out of the bed and support him against the wall through the hall.

He's in pain when he walks. But he's also in pain when he's sitting and lying down. He seems to have reached the stage where he suffers with most things. It is merely a matter of how much.

—

A week passes without a single response. I had imagined that the telephone would start ringing immediately, at least not this humiliating silence. Another one of your bad ideas, Lo, Lukas appears to be thinking. Gábriel himself is luckily unaware of the whole thing. It's the only luck he has at the moment, so we let him remain that way.

Lukas seems relieved that there's no call. After all, it's not he who has been the protagonist in this. He acts as if he would rather be spared the trouble. But one day he will thank me, even if it just ends up as a failed attempt.

—

Sometimes it rains at night, but where does all the water go? A parched summer, as if the illness within the house were spreading out into the garden and the countryside beyond. Rustling brown vegetation. The trees around the house no longer cast shadows, having rolled up their leaves until they look like cigar trees that you want to stretch a hand out and pick from. We are careful about only doing one thing at a time—while Lukas rolls cigarettes, we are sparing with conversation—so we don't squander a pastime. He smokes instead of eating, and I have also lost my appetite, but that doesn't matter. We don't need any energy, we hardly move, we are in power reduction mode, don't even argue, lay all feelings aside. It's arduous enough to sit here on the wooden porch that has been our fixed point this summer, with the door open so that we can hear if Gábriel needs anything. It's almost too much to sit here watching the kites lazily glide over the field in quest of the characteristic movement of prey. We are the prey. They haven't discovered us yet, but soon the farmers will start to reap the crops and then there will be nowhere to hide.