To Mervas (18 page)

When I was about to be released from the mental institution, the counselor told me I ought to get a new apartment and move to another part of the city. She said I ought to start a new life and get away from the place where everything would remind me of what had happened, everything that bore witness and whispered of the past. There were neighbors who knew too, she hinted, neighbors with knowing glances I would have to greet on the stairs.

I've killed my own life, I'd wanted to say to the counselor, but in reality I just nodded to ward her off.

If I'd been able to speak then, if I'd had the words, I would've said that I'd killed my life and there is no new life, no other life, waiting for me.
All I have are the traces and ruins from the past and that's where I'll be. That the neighbors know what I've done is nothing compared with the fact that I myself know.

When I returned to my life in what we call the real world, it was actually comforting that the neighbors knew. That they'd seen the rotating blue lights of the police cars and the ambulances, that they'd read about it in the paper. They also knew that I too had been a mother, they'd seen the boy with me, they'd witnessed our life together and held doors open, occasionally helped me carry things. What was hidden in the way they looked at me didn't scare me much. The things hidden inside me were what frightened me most, my own story and everything lurking in the darkness where you couldn't see anything, the hole where my story had been lost.

I've been thinking about
Uncle Vanya
again. About when everyone had left, when they were alone, Sonja and the uncle, when they sat there, afterward. That's when they saw their lives again; they saw themselves and everything around them, the farm that needed to be cared for, the muddy road, and the light filtering through the treetops. Perhaps it was fall, I don't remember when it was in the play, but let's say that now, a flock of ravens lifted from the largest tree, everything was real in that inescapable and meticulous way, it couldn't have been any other way. And they saw that this was their life. They saw that was where they were, that they existed. They bent down over it, they crouched over it, got hold of it; let the tips of their pens labor and scratch it down. Without even thinking the thought, they knew that's how it was, how it had to be. And I know it too. Kosti's note told me. I exist. This is my life that I'm living, letter after letter.

It's been hot today. The heat here is unusual, a dry, pine-scented inland heat, a strangely stifling forest heat. Hardly a breeze in the air, just the
bright light from straight above, the heat trembling in the reflections of the sun. There's an alarming number of mosquitoes around and today the horseflies arrived too, everything is coming alive; I can feel it, in the midst of the silence and the solitude there is a sense of rush, of urgency.

I woke up far too early this morning and couldn't go back to sleep even though fatigue ached in my eyes. When my thoughts had cast me from one side of the bed to the other for nearly an hour, I still couldn't sleep, so I got up. Outside, the sun was light yellow and already warm; I brought out my sleeping bag and sat inside it, leaning against the wall where the sun hit. Between the trees, a stone's throw away, I could see the surface of the tarn; its colors were still deep and warm. Each morning, the world is new and untouched once more; it comforts me, the mornings are never old and worn. I sat there thinking of Kosti, wondering what he was doing down in the mine, what it was that he'd found down there. I also wondered when he was planning to come out again. Because I'm here waiting, all the time. At any moment, he could be here in front of me. At night, the sounds always come together to seem like
his
steps through the woods,
his
movements getting closer. Sometimes I imagine that he's sneaking around the cabin and peeking in through the window and the cracks in the wall; I can almost hear his breathing and the sound of his hands against the plank wall.

But the sun shone on my face and it was bright and I closed my eyes and let it penetrate my skin to warm and thaw me. Behind my closed eyes, blacks and reds were dancing and I let the sun melt down my thoughts and heat them up until they simmered and became fluid, and like liquid copper could reach everywhere, into the narrowest pathways. I thought about my mother, I reached for her; it was her face I wanted to touch. But my older sister kept coming between us, obscuring my view. She stood there protecting Mom's body, she blocked the entire image
of her and I wanted to tear her out of the way. But everything was as if submerged in water and my sister slid away from me with the image of my mother like a shadow behind her.

I saw myself too, saw myself constantly heading straight into my father's voice: the rumble, the barrage of gunfire, the heavy, lethal detonations. I'd been sent there because that's where I was supposed to be, running along the front lines like open prey. Again, I tried to get rid of my sister, pry her out of the picture. We were in the kitchen now, in our first apartment. I pushed her as hard as I could, and she fell to the floor and began crying. But when I then looked at Mom, she had my sister's face and with this mask over her real face she yelled at me and pushed me out of the kitchen and into the dark, scary hallway where Daddy came home at night and where the cleaning cupboard was and the carpet beater and the gloomy coats on their hangers. I now stood in the hallway of my childhood and it grew and grew; the coats hanging in it became a forest of dim green fir trees, the tall, bone-white closet doors became house walls in a big, insulated neighborhood of high-rises. Under my feet, the brown-speckled linoleum floor was about to collapse and open into a hole. Far, far away, I saw a door open; a rectangle of light fell across the floor and I tried to call out, tried to scream something, anything.

I woke up soaked in sweat. For a long while, I sat pinned to the dream images floating around in me. Then I remembered something from my childhood, an event I'd never thought of or remembered before.

This also happened in that first apartment we lived in. I couldn't have been very old. I was in the bedroom and Dad sat on the edge of the bed with my older sister across his lap and he hit her bare bottom. Mom was in the kitchen, pacing back and forth. My sister wailed and Dad poured his enraged litanies over her as he hit. I stood in the doorway watching. Suddenly, I ran up to Daddy and started jumping up and down like crazy,
yelling: Hit me too! Hit me too! You have to hit me too! You have to hit me too!

I then remember how Mom came rushing into the room and grabbed my ear and dragged me out of there.

“You ought to be ashamed!” she growled at me.

And I still curled up in shame when I thought about it. Beneath the deepest level of humiliation there is something else altogether that you're searching for, that you need to live, yes, even to survive.

I know there is violence inside me. It is hidden in there, under my skin, behind the bone of my skull, in my nerves, in all the arteries of my body; it is the swelling, slippery muscle of violence itself, a secret animal inside me.

Violence is inside me, naked and shiny, I can feel it, I have it in me, I've inherited it and it has survived and been reincarnated and when it awakens in me I rear up on my hind legs and beat the air with my hooves. I've entered into violence as if it were an ancient tongue, an old dialect that speaks to me and overtakes me. There is a passion inherent in the violence, a longing to be obliterated by it, a desire to become even more violated by giving in to it.

I'm not trying to excuse myself. I'm not defending myself and I'm not saying that the violence inside me is incurable, congenital, a handicap. All I want is to see, to see down into that dark kingdom where so much of my life has taken place. The film from the day of the boy's death is down there too. It is still undeveloped and very sensitive; it cannot stand any kind of light. I know that the images have to be bathed first, and I think that's what happening with me right now. The images are being bathed in my darkness in order to learn how to endure light. It's odd. Before, I didn't think a human life could be so rich. That it could contain so many layers. Now I feel a kind of softness inside, I want to bend, bow down to it.

Everything I've written here in Mervas ought to have begun with the words: Kosti isn't here yet. But I don't want the days here to be about Kosti, about his absence. They are about me. They are about what's present. This morning I found his car. It was hidden on a small street behind the water-filled mining holes; I don't understand how I could've missed going there, I've wandered through every corner of Mervas. It was a dark brown Fiat. Locked, of course. In the backseat was an old blanket and I suddenly got it into my head that I'd seen it before. Suddenly, I began to cry. “You're feeling sorry for yourself,” spat a contemptuous voice inside me. And I agreed, I thought I was pathetic. But I still had to cry. I cried because there were no kind hands to hold my shoulders, no one I could lean my head against. I cried because the memories burned inside me, made me contract.

I've stood at the top of the stairs that lead underground several times, but I haven't been able to make myself walk all the way down; my legs have gone weak each time.

Sometimes I wonder if the lilies of the valley have already faded in Deep Tarn. Lilldolly and I would walk around together picking big bouquets of them. There are no lilies of the valley here. I often think about the little girl they lost, about Lilldolly and Arnold, their world, into which I had been welcomed.

On the days before the boy's operation, he had to be scrubbed clean each night with a special disinfectant soap solution. I was so afraid that he'd die during the operation; they were going inside his head after all, to cut him there. When I washed him with the strong-smelling soap, I thought that it was like a ritual cleansing before a sacrificial slaughter. The animal that was to be sacrificed had to be very clean and prepared before it was handed over to the sacrificial priests. The soap smelled of incorruptible ritual and was so alien on the small, soft baby body in my hands, so foreign to the boy's own scent. Now I was following directives while I prepared to give him away. After doing this, I would, for better or worse, place his life in the hands of strangers who spoke a different language, a language that came from the outside instead of from the inside.

The operation did go well in the sense that he survived and stopped crying and twitching. But at the same time, it was as if they'd cut him off from himself, as if a connection had been severed. His spirit couldn't find a place to rest in his body afterward, he had no way of expressing himself, there was no city that was his own city, not even the city of tears was left. But what I kept thinking of was those cleanings, that particular kind of cleansing, the preparation.

For once to wash yourself clean. I don't know. Perhaps it's not dirt that I want to wash off. But rather a sense of presence, of myself; an invasive feeling. A consciousness that never gives way, that isn't about anything in particular but simply about being, about existing. It's a feeling so intense and infringing it's like being slowly grated into shreds, like being scraped against sharp holes, no part of me is spared, no surface left alone.

I'm supposed to be alive; I've understood as much. I have to keep living. All the deeds evident on my body, like fingerprints all over me, like dirty, inappropriate hands, Daddy's hands, mostly Daddy's hands in addition to my own, they will remain. I was Daddy's girl. I was the apple of his eye and even though he beat and humiliated me as much as the rest of the family, I was somehow his, part of his sphere. My mom was inaccessible; she sat with my older sister and the younger siblings and I stood outside their sphere and looked at them as if they sat in a spotlight of some kind. I longed for my mom – or perhaps I should say that I longed for Mom since she wasn't mine at all. At any rate, I stood outside and longed to be with them, with Daddy's hands, his presence clinging to my entire body like a virus.

I think it was because I was standing there to the side that it became
my responsibility always to watch, that I was the one who had to witness everything, not just how Mom was humiliated, or my siblings, or myself. I had to watch Daddy too, and not walk away when he gave in to his fury. Sometimes I think my sister is the kind of person who spared herself, and I can hate her for that. She protected herself from seeing and didn't participate or feel guilty; she just sat there with Mom like some noble victim. I was already tainted from the start, my heart couldn't release me from getting mixed up and dissolved and touched and I often think that this was my fate, exactly this. It was meant for me. I don't claim that I'm any better than my sister as I write this, I just envy her. I will never be clean.

Inside me, the boy's gaze and spirit and what I've done are preserved. It is now part of my life. You can't run away from your deeds; they become hands on your body and you have to live with them, force yourself to remain human with a voice and a face. I knew this afterward, when I was rocking and mute. I was in the kitchen with the boy where he lay on the floor wailing in despair, I was there constantly and would never get out.

I'd made him a birthday cake, a lovely birthday cake. We admired it for a long time together before I cut into it. Then I had to witness how he couldn't eat it. I fed him spoon after spoon, but the cake kept falling out of his mouth and down his chin and chest. I couldn't stand it. I just couldn't stand it. At first, I was overcome with sorrow. I couldn't bear seeing that he couldn't live. And those eyes of his. Trapped inside of him. In those eyes I glimpsed his own terrible sorrow of not being able to do anything. Of being so helpless. Something in me snapped. Rage welled up. A rage that told me to defend him, in some way defend him against all the frustration and impossibility he was experiencing. I began beating him, beating his body and everything that hindered him. I began beating the obstacles out of him that cut him off from life, beating the curse out of him that he'd inherited from me, everything but his gaze and his
longing. I beat him. I wanted to break something inside me. I thrashed out with anything I could reach, chairs, bottles, I flung anything I could get hold of, flowerpots, plates, cups, spoons. I threw them at him. At the one I saw. At myself. At the world. At his inability to live. At myself. I was responsible. I had given birth to his misery. At the same time, I screamed.
No!
I shrieked.
No
,
no, no!
I screamed in a terrible voice.