August
(…)
I took off my slippers and went barefoot out of the house. Is it August or not? On the sunny side, the Savoy cabbage was still hanging on beneath the glass cover. I squatted and lifted the cover from the corn salad. It was looking good, the plants persisting in spite of the temperature falling below freezing at night. I sat on the cold bench beside the bed. My bare feet felt for the remnants of grass.
Will this now be my life, God? Is this how you test my faith?
“You know nothing will grow, it’s a waste of time,” the high voice of my neighbour Goričnik rang out knowledgeably from the other side of the fence. I started. How long had he been watching me here?
“Do you need any corn salad, neighbour?”
The small man with thinning hair and a protruding belly sniffed:
“It’s time for snow, not salad. If you need a hand clearing it, let me know.”
“There’s no hurry, it won’t be winter all that soon.”
“Oh yes it will,” he gave a knowing nod.
I returned to the house and asked myself what he must have thought when he saw my bare feet. I was angry with myself.
September
(…)
When Nino was speaking, Maca always called all of us. She insisted that the children, too, should listen to his speeches. It seemed to me that the camera more often stopped on Nino than on the others. He was certainly the most likeable, the best looking of them all, the most attractive when he got up beneath the unfolded purple flag with the Carantanian shield in the centre. Although the Poles sometimes acted as if the Christian Union was their property, with clear, decisive, friendly words he reminded them of our common mission. He was not afraid of anybody.
Maca stopped the picture on Nino and asked the twins: “Who’s that? Well? Daddy? Where’s daddy? And where’s nana?”
The twins called their father to come out from the glass box, and then cried noisily, banging their small hands against the screen, trying to open it and squealing in disappointment on the living room floor. Oliver screamed with them. Astrid covered her ears and yelled for them to stop. Whenever I managed to hear anything through the hubbub, it sometimes seemed to me that they went a bit too far. When Nino came home, I asked him: “Did you really have to vote to restore the death penalty?” and “Fifteen years for sodomy, isn’t that over the top?” He thought about it and replied: “Wasn’t that your idea?”
I remember that it was my idea to wear purple. We chose a new colour for a new time, a moderate colour between cold blue and passionate red. Purple is the colour of a person in balance, the colour of hope. It emphasises my eyes. Not that other colours would be banned, although we no longer wanted to see black, the colour of mourning. It was also my idea that Adeste Fideles should become the Union’s anthem. Every time I heard it I felt a little bit proud of myself. Hubris, I know, but only Nino and I knew that it was my idea and not his.
Except for the odd nasty comment from someone or other, life was quite tolerable, at least on the surface. Maca was trying to take over, I wouldn’t let her, and I was torn between the feeling that I would rather leave and take the kids on the first available plane to my Aunt Ilonka in Australia, and the awareness that Maca was their father’s mother and part of the family, also mine. I prayed a great deal. I offered up my feelings to the Lord and dressed a little warmer when she went round behind me turning down the thermostat. I ignored the television as much as I could.
But sometimes it was hard to be humble. One evening she watched a film about the bloody countess Erzsébet Báthory, and then over the following days she kept looking at me in an accusatory and mistrustful way.
“What kind of nation are these Hungarians?” she suddenly asked no one in particular, while she was tightening the pipe on the vacuum cleaner. “They have nothing in common with the rest of us here.”
I helped the children cut out cardboard swords and shields and taught them: “That’s us! Magyars! A horrrrde of terrrrrible Hunnnns with the bitter north winndssss at our back! We shall drink your blooood!”
They enjoyed rushing round the house like a horde of Huns: “Blooood!” yelled Filip, jumping into the air, his cardboard sword dancing in his little hand.
(…)
He was watching me.
“What?” I reached for a serviette and wiped my mouth. “Did I take too much?”
“Of course not, you eat. I was thinking how much joy in life there must be inside you.”
I looked at the plate in front of me and shifted on my seat.
“Why do you think that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just… You have so much work, four children and a husband who’s never there. How do you manage?”
“It’s not hard.”
“Didn’t you have any different kinds of plans before?”
“Before, everything was different to what it is now. And you?”
“We’re talking about you, not me. What do they call you otherwise?”
“Suzana.”
“Oh come on. No Suzana is called Suzana at home. Suzi?”
“Žuži,” I said – I don’t know why. Since I left Prekmurje, I’m just Suzana. Nino never called me Žuži. He said it sounded like some kind of fly.
At one time I was studying, I told him, and then I met the senator. I spoke of myself, of my childhood, about secondary school. About Nino.
“Does it seem better to you now?” he asked.
“Of course it is. Doesn’t it seem so to you?”
“In which regards?” He leaned back.
“Okay, well. Before, people were afraid of each other all the time. People who lived honestly and did their job were constantly under stress because of all the laws and rules and demands. Teachers were afraid of parents, who went to the school with their lawyers. Mothers couldn’t bring biscuits to nursery school in case someone sued them because some child got sick. Does that seem okay to you? If you called a sin a sin, you were threatened with jail.”
“And now people no longer fear each other?”
“Not if they live in line with Christian principles.”
He gave it some thought.
“And if someone doesn’t believe in God?”
“No harm will come to them.”
“But don’t you have some laws on heresy?” He smoothed his eyebrow with a finger.
“But who has ever been convicted on the basis of that law? We did, though, introduce the maximum penalty for corruption. You know yourself how it was before. Man is made to be good.”
“And you help him to be good.”
“We help him to be good,” I snapped back. He leaned his head to one side, almost as if he was mocking me, but I knew that I was right. It is easier with God. With God, things are where they’re supposed to be, there is love, harmony. Everything has its place. A woman does not try to wear the trousers and a man doesn’t act like a woman. With God, you know which path is the right one. I could show this to Dejan, if he let me close, into his heart.
“You know,,, Jesus really is your friend, he never abandons you. There were periods when I would have despaired without him.”
“And if I don’t believe in all that?”
“You’d better start believing. It will help you.”
“I never have and I never will,” He shook his head and did not take his eyes away from mine.
“So, and what will happen to you?” I replied. “Nothing. Have we ever forced anyone?”
“No,” he said. “You haven’t.”
He got up and put two white coffee cups with a gold rim on the table.
The coffee that he carefully poured from the coffee pot smelled headily of the sun. It was genuine, fresh coffee from Gabon.”
“Milk?”
“And sugar, please.”
“Of course.”
We each stirred our cup. His grey eyes examined me.
“If you were still dealing with history, which period would you choose?”
“The Middle Ages.” I said without hesitation. There is something fascinating about that time, in spite of all the misery and illness and death, or perhaps because of that. “I know it was a hard time, but nevertheless – they were creating the world completely anew.”
“Like now,” he said thoughtfully. “I see that in Africa. The first who came bought villas, now I have already seen white shanty towns. There are more and more Europeans there. Whoever wasn’t driven out of Europe by cold, was driven out by hunger. And those who weren’t driven out by hunger…” He weighed his words.
“Are you saying that we drove them out?”
“Do you think there are no people outside who would like to return?”
“And why don’t they? Because of us?”
We didn’t break eye contact.
“Every single thing is good for something and bad for something else,” he said thoughtfully.
“There’s still enough good land on the planet,” I replied.
“There’s more and more dry land, basically. No one needs to leave here. Now food is produced where it is still warm, and we have other things.”
“Which?” He slightly closed his eyes. “Will you export the Bible in Slovene and Polish?”
“Is it our fault that it’s winter?” I asked him.
I didn’t want to argue about politics. Neither did he.
“And what do you do in life?”
“You can see.”
He turned the music up. He got up and pulled me behind him, as if we were equal. Pata Pata went the song, the drums beat like a heart and I followed his body. The waves of rhythm poured over me to where love of life is born, the movements of our hips were harmonised.
Oh God, when did I last dance like that? There was nothing unnatural, nothing sinful in it, just a memory of a time when humankind was still a child. The Earth dances among the stars. Closeness. Heat, night, fire, parrots – mysterious, pagan birds.
(…)
“Mummy, Astrid won’t give me my little picture”, Julijan complained.
“Shhh. Filip’s asleep. He has a temperature.”
“It’s my picture,” Astrid objected. “I got it, not you!”
“You don’t collect holy pictures, I do.”
She put out her rosy tongue at Julijan. “Oh yes, I do!”
“Astrid!”
Astrid stared rebelliously at the cold asphalt. She hid the picture behind her back.
“You’ll need to keep an eye on this one,” Maca said to Nino.
Nino knows what happens to a girl you don’t keep an eye on.
Maca bent down: “Astrid, why did Father Matej give you the picture? Tell mummy.”
“For good behaviour,” she muttered into her chin.
“So? Is it good behaviour not to give your little brother what he’s asking you for?”
In anger, she threw the image of Saint Mathilda at her brother. The colourful card gently floated through the air. Julijan bent over and as he did so blood suddenly began to drip from his nose onto the white ground.
“What’s that? Blood?”
I opened my bag to take out a tissue. Suddenly, I felt dizzy. I took hold of the black metal.
“Can you do it? I gave the bag to Nino. “I don’t feel so good.”
Maca felt my forehead.
“Why, you’re also burning up.”
Nino took off his glove and put the back of his hand to his forehead. “I think I am, too,” he said. “Are your joints also hurting?”
“I’ll go and light a candle for good health.” Offered Maca, turning back towards the church.
“What do you mean, candle? We’re going to the A & E.”
October
(…)
They put me and the children together in one room, while Nino had to go to the men’s part.
“Why am I poorly?” Astrid lay in a bed with a fence, flushed with fever.
“Because of the parrot,” I explained. “The one that died. Because we kissed it.”
“Will we die, too?”
Will we lie on the floor with clenched claws, light and feathery?
“No,” I said with a smile and stroked her perspiring head. “We shall get some medicine, then we’ll be well and we will go home.”
I looked through the window at the building housing the new police academy. Muscular young men in purple t-shirts and shorts were exercising in the snow, in the freezing wind. Youngsters with face fluff, they looked serious, strict, pretending to be big boys. The glittering frost crunched beneath their feet. Around their mouths floated little clouds of breath. The sharp commands were lost in the soft whiteness. Handspring. Hang. Leapfrog. Tuck. Strange words that tell me nothing. I still do not know that language.
The mother tongue is sacred.
Mother tongue or mother? Which now?
(…)
For some time, I just stood there in the bitter cold and looked at the frozen wire. My parrot’s cage, his safe, solid refuge was empty, dead, exposed.
Nino, dressed in a parka and hat, came after me and dragged me back.
“You shouldn’t be outside, you’re still not well.”
I shuddered.
“Where is Oliver?” I yelled. “Where’s my parrot?”
“Will you be quiet?” hissed the old woman and grabbed hold of my tunic. “What will people say.”
They pushed me into the living room.
“Let go of that bloody awful picture,” Maca tried to take it from my hands.
I swear I could have strangled her with my bare hands. For the first time in my life it became clear to me that I was capable of killing someone. But I did nothing. I leaned against the wall and slid to the floor. I held the picture tight. I felt my eyes filling with tears and anger.
“Will you get up!” snapped Maca. “I wiped all the walls.”
“Where did you put him?”
She pursed her lips and straightened up. “What is, is,” she said. “Stop kicking up a fuss. It’s all your fault. Thanks to you and your stubbornness, my grandchildren were in hospital. Now you’ll howl over some tatty bird. Pull yourself together.”
All four children were standing some distance away, looking at me with fear in their eyes. I got up.
“I kept telling you not to bring that devil into the house,” Maca would not give up. “Look what you’ve done.”
“Suzana, surely you’re not going to cry over some parrot. You’re not a child.” Nino frowned at me and shook his head.
“Why?” I sobbed. “He wasn’t even sick!”
What is, is.
November
(…)
“Hello, hello, head mistress,” said a woman, all smiles. A long dialogue of old colleagues followed: Oooh, fancy seeing you, how’s it going, it’s been such a long time, how are things in Ljubljana.
“We keep seeing your son on the television,” said the teacher. “And it doesn’t seem long since he was this little. Do you remember, Marija, how he was sometimes there in the gym when you were teaching, such a sweet little thing. And now he’s a senator! Are these your grandchildren?” she turned. “Just like their dad!”
I was last in line. “Oh, let me look at you,” she said, taking hold of my shoulders. “How well you look, half your age! Having children has made you younger. When will there be another one?”
I trawled my memory for when I’d seen her before. Perhaps on some visit to Maca. Was I really so old already, grown up?
I got the impression that Maca and Nino glanced at each other for a moment,
“Mummy,” said Julijan, tugging at me. “Is all your age twice as much as half your age?”
“My husband saw you last weekend at the seaside,” the woman rattled on. “In Piran, wasn’t it? I recognised him straight away, he said, and what a beautiful wife he has.”
Yeah, right, I thought – at the seaside. Now she’ll want something from him. A job for her daughter, a donation for a charity project, an amendment to a law… People swarm over him like leeches in a swamp.
Nino wouldn’t let himself be bothered. Warm, congenial, he takes her hand and holds onto it, looks in her eyes, he focuses on her. He winks at me on the sly.
I left them and sneaked out, to the other side of the wall. I lit a candle in memory of my sister-in-law, who bled out on a kitchen table in some cellar when she was seventeen. I have a hazy memory of her from secondary school as a black-haired girl with glittering eyes, and as a warning. If you don’t play smart, you’ll end up like that girl from year three. You don’t want that, do you?
(…)
The nurse was gossiping about someone into the phone in a language that no one understands. If I understood Hungarian, I’d feel like it was Midsummer Night, Nino once said. And Dejan once commented: that’s why we get on with them so well, because we can’t argue.
The surgery door immediately opened again behind me. Doctor Esterhazy said to nurse Doris: “I’m going on my break, twenty minutes”. She didn’t look at me, merely nodded in my direction. And so the nurse looked at me. She took her time, weighing me up, and then she turned as if I wasn’t there and calmly carried on talking.
“When you see the wife, it’s all clear. She’s the same. Exactly the same,” she emphasised. “Just twenty years younger.” The voice at the other end buzzed something back.
“Oh, no,” said the nurse with a laugh. “It’s obvious she doesn’t know. She must be quite dim.”
There followed a report on how someone was meeting up with his mistress and how the mistress could not hide her happiness. The mistress was doctor Esterhazy, that at least was clear, because nurse Doris told the other woman how she secretly went through her things while she was at the medical advisory board. I found it unpleasant that in my presence someone was gloating over the painful details of the lives of people that were strangers to me, but at the same time it was too interesting not to eavesdrop. I slowly got myself ready, put on my cardigan, fastened my coat, looked for my gloves. It was some relief that other people were in a worse situation than me, even if they don’t know it.
And what do you lack? Maca would say from time to time, accusingly.
And it was true that I wanted for nothing.
Now, when I tell this, it is immediately clear who she was talking about. Then, I stood there and thought: poor woman, she has no idea that her husband is cheating on her. Maybe I said to myself: I’d know straight away if Nino was lying to me. He hates lying too much not to give himself away. Maybe I remembered what my friend Mirjam once said: the truth is for those who cannot tolerate lies, lies are for those who cannot tolerate the truth.
“A great romance,” said nurse Doris into the receiver, with a hint of envy.
“He wrote her a letter. A real letter with an envelope, stamps, pink paper. She keeps reading it.”
The images swirled in the air and fluttered to the floor, where they formed a picture. /…/
Nurse Doris licked her thick lips. She was enjoying her bravery, gloating over her victory. She was sitting in front of the wife of a Carantanian senator and speaking the language used by the best people: Erzsi mama, grandpa Pál. She was speaking of painful things, happily convinced that no one anywhere near could understand her. Eventually she put down the receiver and looked at me innocently. She got up and took a sheet of paper from the printer.
“Here you are,” she said in a thick accent, holding it out. I straightened my back and lifted my head as if I’d swum to the surface. Don’t forget who you are! said my mother-in-law’s voice inside me.
I gave her a broad smile.
“Remélem, hogy nem volt túl nehéz Önnek,” I replied. I hope that wasn’t too difficult for you.
Nurse Doris looked at me without the hint of an expression. It was as if her face was floating in the air like a badly inflated balloon. Then her eyes widened. The mass of flesh started to tremble. She got up from behind the plastic desk and knelt down. She caught hold of the cupboard. What had she said that time in the hospital? “So that they kick me out of my job? I’d rather hang myself than be sent back.”
(…)
I leaned back.
“Now I understand why Nino wants the kids to learn French.”
“Well, he won’t take them to Canada, that’s for sure. There’s nothing left there. Ice.”
“I’ll leave,” I said seriously.
“Where will you go? What will you live off?”
“He’ll have to pay alimony.”
“What world are you living in? There’s no more of that now. The family belongs together. They can force you. They take your documents, your kids. That’s what you fought for, you and your lot.”
I pursed my lips. “I wanted there to be values.”
“And now you have them.” She sipped from the cup, looking at me over the rim.
“What’s she like?” I asked.
“This Julija? I don’t remember all that well. I saw her when I was little, and then they were in any case no longer in Celje, neither of them. She’s quite a bit older than us. She’s the same age as your senator. Maybe a year older. Have you seen her?”
“Yes, in the hospital. I think she looks like me.”
She looked at me.
“That’s true, now you mention it… She really does. Her hair, eyes… Do you think he’s with you because of that?”
“Do you think it’s possible?”
That was why he had looked at me with such surprise, the first time he saw me. As if he’d seen a ghost. Julija. An experienced and desiccated copy of me. We could be sisters. Or mother and daughter. Me the daughter.
“How well you look, half your age! Having children has made you younger,” Maca’s colleague had said to me at the cemetery. She had mistaken me for Julija.
“Yes, evidently it was very bad when she left. My cousin pumped his stomach out in the A & E when he took an overdose.”
“Who?”
“Your husband. He tried to kill himself because of her.”
My Nino?
“Maybe he really is with you because you are like her. That would explain things,” Mirjam said thoughtfully. “Do you think that was why he threw himself into politics then, because he was so low?”
“I don’t know,” I said “How would I know?”
What do I even know. I know nothing.
Then I asked her how her life was. How her parents were.
“They’re retired. Dad couldn’t get any more biology projects approved.”
She lived at the other end of town, in one of the blocks of flats from where the Muslim families had been moved out. It’s okay, she said, except that it smells. People are raising rabbits and chickens.
She also hadn’t finished her degree. She shrugged. “Five of us had the final exam on the same day. They let the guy through, but all four women failed. For a while I kept going back, but they made it clear there was no point.”
It was unpleasant for her talking about that.
“I hope you won’t do anything stupid, like that woman yesterday who drove her kids across the border in the boot of the car.”
“What if I went to court?”
“What would you say? My husband the senator is cheating on me, can I take the children to Australia? And they will say: Yes, of course, where do we sign?”
At this moment Australia was unreachably far, on another planet. In between, an ocean of salt, as thick as honey, dotted with the glittering bellies of fish.
“If I reported her?”
She counted on her fingers:
“First of all, you’d ruin her life.”
“And what has she done to me?”
The sparrows on the ground suddenly fluttered off in every direction.
“If you get her sent to jail, that’s a death sentence. Jails cost money, the easiest thing is for them to leave the odd window open from time to time and let people freeze by accident. Could you live with that? Second, your husband would immediately get thrown out of the senate and he’d probably lose his job. What would that mean for your family? Third, it’s not going to happen in any case. Has any senator ever answered for adultery?”
“But they don’t…”
Mirjam gave me a pitying look.
“You should think about what they would do to you. Ask yourself whether there really is nothing that would get you into trouble. There are sometimes microphones in confessionals, if you didn’t know.” I thought of Dejan, of Father Matej. But I’ve never done anything wrong. She was observing me seriously.
“It’s good that you got in touch. You’re near the top, maybe you can be of use. I hope you don’t have that crap under your skin.”
I took hold of my arm as if to protect it. She leaned forward. She grabbed my wrist and pulled the sleeve of my tunic up. The lump was clearly visible beneath the skin of my forearm. Her eyes met mine.
“Why?”
“So he knows he can trust me,” I said and pulled my sleeve down.
(…)
“There are rumours that the senate will choose you as the next president of the Union.”
Nino smiles like a man who cares nothing for gossip. He opens his large, powerful hands. These are hands that inspire trust. Here, I’ll do it, he said whenever I despaired over a jar of beetroot or sour turnip, and he took it from my hand. He would barely touch it and the lid would make a sound of submission. People were saying: Wait until Rifnik is in charge. He’ll sort things out.
“My great wish is to work for the benefit of every citizen. If that seems the best way to do it, then that’s the road I’ll take.”
Across the screen fly the subtitles of the simultaneous translation into the languages of the Union.
Halandzsa. Bla-bla-bla.
“What does president mean, mummy?”
“The most important man in the whole country,” she explains.
“Everyone must obey him. Like a king.”
“Will daddy be king?” asked Astrid with wide eyes.
“Yes…” the queen mother says with a smile. “He really might be. The king of Carantania.”
The only real king you ever had was Hungarian, I think.
“Family,” says senator Rifnik.
And: “Order.”
(…)
The wind pushes its way into the purple creases of the coat. There is already ice on the road, blonde Katriina with her dimpled cheeks and I keep slipping slightly as we walk.
“Which way are you going? We have a rented room near Tivoli Park, but that’s only temporary, we’re looking for something permanent.”
This is the world in which she wants to raise her children. Without internet or television, without the dangers there were before. In a world where people know what is right and what is not.
She looks happy and fragile.
“Then let’s go together.”
She takes my arm, as if we have known each other for some time. She chats and chats.
“Do you know how few Catholics there were before in Finland? The least in Europe. Nought point two percent. Before it got cold we moved to Koupio to be near the church.”
“What’s it like in Finland now?”
“There is no more Finland. Just a few mines are still working.”
December
(…)
I was biting my lip and observing him. He was talking turned to the wall, his shoulders up, hands unclasped, shaking his head. For a brief moment, the conversation at the table ceased.
“They are watching you!” I woke up.
They all know, said nurse Doris. Did these people know? Did he take her with him to Warsaw? They all know, but not a single person approached me and told me.
One of those days, Mirjam said to me: “Don’t over-dramatise! Don’t try to rewrite now the story of your past, that he is the biggest scoundrel and liar, you are the biggest victim. You lack nothing. He gives you everything.”
I excused myself and went to hide in the toilets, where a long wall of mirrors in silver frames gleamed above the washbasins.
I had lost weight. Now I was even more like Julija.
It was as if she was watching from the other side, as if we were standing here, the good twin and the evil twin, her green eyes drilling into my green eyes.
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest?”
I carefully watched the pale face, the wide-eyed look. “The truth, mirror?”
Nino banged loudly on the door.
“Are you in there? We’re leaving.” His voice was like an order.
“Where? They haven’t even brought the cake?”
“I’ll tell you outside. Wash your hands.”
“What’s happening?”
“Touch nothing and stay as far away from people as you can.”
He went past me and nervously scrubbed his hands with soap in the marble washbasin.
“My wife’s feeling unwell,” he said to the people at the table. Among calls of “Surely you’re not leaving already!” and “We’ll pay for a mass for another son,” we hurried to the garages. He was painfully gripping my forearm.
“What is it Nino? Is something wrong with the children?”
“Not with the children, with everyone. There’s something wrong with the whole fucking world. Something in the air. People are dropping like flies.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re dying, for fuck’s sake!” He wrenched open the door of the Pygmalion. “People are d-y-i-n-g, Suzana! A couple of thousand have died and no one knows why.”
“Who died? Where?”
How was it that I didn’t understand him immediately, I ask myself now. How did I not immediately know what the cold lakes of bodies meant?
“No, it’s not a poisoning. It’s serious,” he said to the air in front of him, clutching the steering wheel. “It’s not just panic.”
The radio was warning of strong gusts of wind that would strengthen during the night. It felt as if the wind was trying to move the heavy car here and there a little.
I’ll admit to you the first thing I thought of, even though I am ashamed. The plague, I said to myself, that means the infection clinic. Doctor Esterhazy will have her hands full. Now she will have no time for interfering in other families’ business. Maybe she’ll die.
That’s what I want for Christmas, I prayed on the way home. For Julija to die. Just that.
(…)
The wind entered the house with stabs of cold.
“Where do you think you’re going?” called Maca. I slammed the door behind me.
I ran along Mary’s Path, that was once called the Path of Remembrance and Comradeship.
Where is he? What have they done to him?
How could I be so stupid?
We’re talking about you now, not me, Žuži.
An informer, the member of some cell conspiring against the state, a spy. Interested in Anton Rifnik. Not my children. Not me, Suzana.
I told him about the stores in Postojna Cave! What else did I tell him? Oh God! My brain felt as if it had been frozen. Maybe it was all some misunderstanding, maybe he would call me, be waiting for me behind the house so that I could sneak the children past Maca to his car, we would drive to the airport and fly off together. Maybe the police would hunt for us, their sirens blaring, but it would be too late. His comrades would cut them off before the airport and Dejan would tell me that from the very beginning it had all been a game, carefully planned in advance, designed only to save me. I would be his forever.
(…)
When I once again went through the main entrance into the freezing evening past the thin figure of Father Viljem, with his cowl up and his hands tight to his sides from the cold, he detached himself from the crowd. I saw him out of the corner of my eye.
Surely he’s not following me? I wondered. I quickened my step.
On my other side, someone decisively gripped my arm. I eagerly turned. It was the stocky Father Mihael, who in his robe was reminiscent of a Japanese wrestler. Both figures found themselves by my side: Mihael on one and Viljem on the other. I wordlessly went with them. Viljem directed me with his hand into the parish house, where the large and good-natured Matej sat at a yellow desk sipping camomile tea. The large room smelt of honey and lemon.
“God be with you, Suzana,” he said in a friendly voice and invited me with a movement of his hand: “Have a seat!”
I remained standing.
Viljem and Mihael sat on the red upholstered chairs on either side of the door.
Matej was looking at me sadly as he stirred his tea with a silver teaspoon. The metal sang pleasantly against the porcelain.
“Oh, Suzana.” He shook his head.
“What’s wrong, Father Matej?”
He opened a drawer and took from it a small black button, which he placed on the desk.
“Sit, sit,” he invited me again. I sat.
With the tip of his finger he touched the device on the desk as if playing with it. His fingernails were cut extremely short.
“You haven’t been entirely truthful, have you Suzana?”
I said nothing. Matej sadly shook his head. He was disappointed with me.
“You didn’t tell me about Dejan Rejc.”
“What about him?”
(…)
I wanted to call Nino, to tell him.
I wanted to call Dejan, to tell him.
I leaned against the edge of the washbasin and with my mind empty watched the drips falling from the tap. I wasn’t going to die. Not completely. The two men that I trusted had betrayed me!
The whole Milky Way leans towards its dark side. You cannot sit and wait for someone else to repair your world for you. To scratch, pull, dig everything out. And what would be left? If I decided to fight I would be alone. Completely and utterly alone. Against everyone. No one would stand by my side.
I was still holding Oliver’s small round mirror with its pink plastic frame. I moved it so that it showed part of my face, and then another. My face was light on one side, dark on the other.
Here-there. Here-there. As if I was playing chess against myself.
Once I was the white queen, once the black queen.
The black-purple-white queen.
Rook.
Pawn.
(…)
Where are the warm summer nights? Where is there warm anything? How I wish for someone beside me.
“But you do have people around you,” Nino would say.
At that point I thought that I could even welcome Julija into my home.
Would that be so strange? Nothing is as it was before. There are ever fewer of us and at the same time ever more.
Just the idea that we would meet, stand face to face. A childless woman. What can she do to me? Maybe I would see her differently if we met.
What would be so bad if we took Julija in?
The world is not black and white. The world is black, white and purple.
Do we not have enough of everything – goods, children and love?
(…)
Then a new message came from the government to the citizens. It was so important that it was transmitted from the main studio in Poland.
“A decree of the Senate of the Christian Union: in order to cross the borders of the Christian Union, women of all ages must post security of a hundred thousand talents; men of all ages must post security of fifty thousand talents The decree comes into effect immediately.”
Jadviga, Astrid, Filip, Julijan, me. Four hundred thousand talents. How much did I have hidden away in the toy dove?
“Why did you do that?” I asked Nino when he came down in the evening from his office. The children crawled all over him.
“So that you don’t get away from me,” he said playfully and threw Filip into the air, so that he laughed like jingling bells.
(…)
“Senator Rifnik is my husband.” He awkwardly steps back. “And take that chewing gum out of your mouth.”
The woman straightens up and spits towards me. Her spit crackles in the air.
They surround her. “Documents!” says the one with beautiful eyes. His voice breaks like a boy’s.
I go, I don’t look back. The voices are lost in the wind.
I hear: “Black is the devil’s colour.”
And: “On your knees!”
Behind me I hear a bang, which is followed by silence, and then I hear a breathless voice, conveying admiration. This voice was deeper. I think it said:
“Brother, you really shot her.”
I didn’t look. I saw a little penguin wandering lost down the street and I didn’t turn. Maybe it was looking for its mother.
This would be a good image for a poster. Suzana walks down the icy Čopova Street, behind her an unusual army, which in the hazy distance grows into an armada. In the background of the picture Christmas lights illuminate the silhouette of a hung person and on the ground we see the body of a woman with blood oozing from her head. Suzana looks back in concern, she is fleeing, but the army follows where she leads. Her cheeks are rosy from the cold and her eyes greener than they are in reality. She looks beautiful in her purple coat.
(…)
“Julija? Julija what?”
“Julija Esterhazy.”
“I am Julija Esterhazy.”
Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t.
Maybe there are two Julijas.
(…)
“Qu’est–ce que vous allez faire en Afrique?” What will you be doing in Africa, asks the black official. Her face is covered by a mask, but her eyes are evaluating, measuring, drilling into me.
Her voice sounds like Africa. A land emptied of people, but warm from the sun. Fruit, but no one to pick it. Soft soil waiting for seed. A thatched mud hut in front of which we sit beside the fire after a day, full of earth and sweet fruits.
The dark searching eyes frown. What should I say to her? I’m fleeing from the cold and the craziness and from people who do not love me. Nothing else.
The official shakes her head. She looks at the people behind us and indicates that they should come to the window. She dismisses me with a gesture. Back to the perpetual winter, says the hand in the white rubber glove. That’s where you belong.
Fragments translated by: David Limon
