To Mervas (5 page)

In the last year, that's how I've adjusted my thinking. In some ways, I have had to conquer myself. But I'm taking care of myself again. I buy clothes, take baths, and cut my nails. You have to be able to tolerate your own life. Day after day, you have to carry yourself through it.

Kosti's letter disturbed me. For the second time, he's trying to disrupt
my sense of order. Now I know. There's nothing for me in Mervas. And I don't want to see Kosti again. As far as I see it, he could just as well be dead. I mean, I haven't known whether he was alive or not for the past fifteen, twenty years. He probably doesn't know any more about my life after we parted than I do of his. He doesn't know about the boy's death. Most likely, he hasn't a clue about the repercussions our love affair had on my life. How it threw me off course and into chaos.

When life has become too torturous, when it has been infused with pain the way water can be infused with salt, you no longer want anyone to witness it. You don't want to be seen. No, true suffering doesn't want to be witnessed. It hurts too much. That's why I'm content being as lonely as I am. No one can see me. I'm glad that ever since the boy's death, the contact with my sister has been limited to a few phone calls a year. I don't want Kosti to see me. Only idiots think it's necessary to drag everything to the surface for show. Many things can only heal in darkness, out of sight. If they can ever heal at all.

For the first few weeks after Kosti left for the Orkney Islands, I was at war with myself. The struggle between the Red forces, which wanted to swallow all pride and be reconciled at all costs, and the White forces, which refused to bend, was constant and ruthless. I was becoming an increasingly ravaged battlefield. Weeks could go by when I didn't get out of bed in the mornings. I thought like the child I still was: He thinks I'll come anyway. But I'll show him. I'll show him who he's dealing with. I'm not going to come crawling back to him like a sorry dog and lick his fingers.

I wanted to be strong and proud. To defend my honor and let the White forces win the battle.

When the war was over and the Red forces had been conquered, I was powerless for a long time. A kind of fatigue that closely resembled an illness paralyzed me. I didn't have the energy to think. If I even got close to completing a thought, I felt as if drugged with exhaustion. But I sensed, yes, I could sort of hear, that beneath this huge fatigue, my rage was whimpering. If I'd had the capacity to listen more attentively, I would have heard something else besides the rage. I would have heard my fear squeak. And the lamentation, the lamentation from someone who had just lost everything.

But it was my rage that one night led me to put makeup on my face and dress up in a way I never used to, that fortified me with a couple of glasses of wine and sent me out to explore the city's bars. There, I soon got quite drunk since I wasn't used to drinking, good girl that I'd always been. So when the man whose name I still do not know started caressing my buttocks during our dance, I pressed myself harder to him.

When we arrived at his small, messy dorm room, I found out that he was a couple of years younger than I. To my surprise, I also noticed that he was both shy and insecure in my company. As I'd always thought I'd be the one to be shy and insecure in a situation like this, I started feeling something I'd like to call a power high. I felt strangely cruel.

We sat on two chairs opposite each other, drinking instant coffee, and my irritation grew with each sip I took. In various ways, I tried insinuating that I hadn't come home with him just to have coffee and chat, but he pretended not to hear my hints. Instead, I could tell from his face that he felt pushed further and further into a state of confusion and gloom. It wasn't that he didn't want me. I could tell that he wanted me, my callous eyes could see that. But he didn't have the nerve.

I felt in some way clinically evil, and I enjoyed it. I didn't feel sorry for him at all. Instead, I regarded him with a passionate severity. He was struggling to free himself like the wingless fly a little girl had placed on an anthill. Now that I had become someone I was not, now that I'd started the game, he too had to join. I wasn't going to let him bail out like a kid when the game gets too scary, to bail out whining:
I don't want to play anymore.

When we'd finished our coffee and nothing happened and the clock was ticking toward three-thirty in the morning, I went and lay down on his bed. I was on my back, looking at him, and he sat glued to his chair, looking back miserably.

I could whip him, I thought, almost lustily. The notion caught me by surprise, I usually did not think or feel such things. At the same time, there was something oddly familiar about the feeling, an echo from far away. A quivering tension.

“Now that you dragged me to your place, you damned well better do something about it,” I hissed at last.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

He finally came to me. We turned out the light and our clothes flew across the room. Naked in the dark, we turned into small animals. After a while, our hands and tongues and lips made all the insecurity and contempt vanish. We had sex over and over again until dawn became morning.

Waking up hungover the next day and realizing I wasn't lying next to Kosti but a complete stranger, I felt terrible. I didn't want to look at him and I didn't want to know his name. I didn't want to see him wake up and I didn't want to exchange a word with him ever again. I didn't even want to get close to thinking of what had happened during the night; I just wanted to erase it from my memory. So I carefully snuck out of bed and gathered my clothes. I quickly showered him off my genitals, got dressed, and padded out.

Since then, I have never been with a man. And I doubt it will happen again. I don't know why I say “doubt” – it will never happen again.

A few weeks later, I realized that my period had decided not to come. My relationship with Kosti was now irrevocably over. I had no thought of an abortion. I was going to show Kosti how serious my desire to have children was. To have a child now. How much he'd hurt me when he'd forced me to let our child be fathered by someone else. How badly he had wronged the child.

An odd thing happened upon receiving Kosti's letter. I didn't want it to happen, but I suddenly saw myself as part of a story. And it was about me, about Marta.

Everything inside me resists it, but it is as if the story presses itself against me and I can't get away. It is as if the story itself is going to carry me. Out of this. At the same time, it has to move straight through me, like a child who needs to be born and on its way out ruthlessly opens up all the closed inner portals. The mother may burst from pain, but that doesn't matter. The child has to come out.

The arrival of Kosti's letter bothered me. It forced me out on a marsh, and when I try to find my way back to solid ground, I realize that the only way to go is straight through the memories, as if they were planks laid out for me to walk on. In some strange way, I think telling my story will bring me back to solid ground. The problem is that I've never enjoyed reminiscing. I have never devoted myself to telling or even cultivating my memories as some people do. I've never told anyone about my childhood, not a single person, not even myself. The reason for that is simple. There hasn't been anything to tell, there hasn't been a story. There have only been scraps. Bits and pieces.

Until now, I've lived according to my own order and taken refuge in it. I've been able to decide that this week I'm going to read this or that book and focus on this thing or the other. Because even though it has been a long time since I worked within my profession, I've continued doing a little research on my own. In this way, I've been able to live inside my own mind. I've looked for books and articles, read dissertations and research reports.

But for the last few weeks, my thoughts have constantly been elsewhere. Like flocks of birds, they've lifted from the pages and flown away. And my thoughts have not been fluffy daydreams or memories of the boy. No, they've been busy telling a story, assembling, comparing, sorting, and memorizing. I have been forced to realize there is an order to this also, but a different kind of order than what I'm accustomed to. It has even struck me that there are similarities between the writing I've begun and an archaeological excavation. The carefulness. You have to be so incredibly careful with the things you find down there. They may for example be positioned in a specific order in relation to one another that mustn't be changed. Or they may be fragile and crumble at the slightest touch. A sudden shift of the hand (or the brush, or the pen), and the entire story could literally dissolve into dust.

You can have what appears to be a disorganized collection of bits and pieces. But the truth is that the position of each shard of vessel, its exact place in relation to the other pieces, is just as much a part of the puzzle as the shard itself. What I think, especially since I began to write, is this: every piece is part of the puzzle, of a story.

It is quite easy to lie without being a liar. All you need is a slight imbalance. Or the wrong internal order. One little bump in the road can overturn your cart, as the saying goes. One small, insignificant imbalance somewhere in the story may one day topple over and grow into a different
story. You don't have be false to lie; I actually think you can make up events and still tell the truth. Lying isn't so much about a lack of truth but rather a lack of meticulousness and devotion. It is not about disturbing the sensitive balancing act that truth represents, but rather recognizing this frail order and sensing it inside you, just as the tightrope walker senses every muscle and tendon in her body before she steps out on the rope.

Something I've been thinking about is that for long periods of time, I've been imagining that Kosti was dead. It's been a small, hard, tugging notion inside me. He could actually be dead without my knowing it. It's been frightening to think about this. Like walking around with someone dead inside you. Secretly harboring a dead body.

Other parts of me have tried to convince me that I'd know if he were dead. That something inside me would change. This change would be noticeable but very slight, like when a petal falls from a flower and floats to the ground. There'd be a difference.

But that first thought has still continued to tug at me, no matter how hard I've tried to push it out of my mind.

You wouldn't notice his death, it tells me. His death would alter less inside you than a flower petal. Reality is prosaic, it has no connection to the hereafter, the thought insists triumphantly.

I realized it was one of those thoughts that are out to get you, that want to crush you, want to shrivel the world. But now I know. He exists. He called me from somewhere. Through my life, through the ruins among which I've been moving, he called me. And that thought tugs at me harder than any other. It's a thought that could turn the world on its head.

My dad had one passion. He wanted to populate the world with his offspring. At the very least, he wanted as many children as it's possible to conceive in a monogamous marriage. The way he saw it, it was Mom's duty to assist him in this mission. She was meant to give birth to all of his children. That was the sole reason for her existence.

After Mom's third pregnancy, from which came twins, the doctors warned her that another pregnancy would put her health at serious risk and suggested sterilization. When Dad heard this, he became so enraged that he pressed a knife against her throat and said he would kill both her and us kids if she went through with the procedure. She was soon pregnant again.

Dad wanted to prove something with his big and healthy brood. It wasn't simply to show that he was a virile and capable man. No, the main thing his offspring were supposed to prove by their quality and intelligence was something the world had so far neglected to acknowledge: that Dad was a genius.

But Mom's fourth pregnancy became very complicated. She had to stay in the hospital for a month after the delivery. When she finally came home, Dad would spew his venom upon her at every turn.

“A woman who can't bear strong and healthy children is utterly useless,” he declared at the kitchen table. “In the old days, women could give birth to twelve, fifteen children without suffering any damage. But the modern world has ruined motherhood. The sloppy lifestyle, the doctors' coddling, the entire medical profession is false. Listen to me, modern women are spoiled. But I'll tell you this, she can do it if she wants to!”

The color rose on his cheeks in a frightening way as he spoke, or rather, lectured. My dad didn't speak, he lectured.

“Women who give birth,” he proclaimed, and gestured theatrically. “Women who give birth! There are no words, I repeat, no words as grand and beautiful as these!”

At first, he lowered his voice when he continued speaking.

“But modern women don't want to give birth. They think it hurts too much. Ouch, ouch, it hurts! They can no longer stand pain. Can't stand the pain that has sanctified women for thousands of years. Do you understand? Do you understand what I'm saying, children? Do you understand how important this is for me, for you, for the future? I want you to understand what I mean when I tell you that your mother is useless. She's a useless woman because out of some kind of stubbornness, she refuses to bring children into this world. This makes her subhuman; genetically, she's garbage! And this is my wife. Your mother.”

I don't understand how Mother could stay quiet. How she could remain where she was sitting. But she did. When our eyes would meet, I would immediately avert mine. I was so terribly ashamed in front of her; I felt dirty and guilty and deceitful. And her gaze was somehow inquisitive.
Do you believe what this man is saying?
it seemed to ask.