1
When she got home and saw a small cardboard box fastened with thick brown tape in front of the door of the container, she first thought that the Bluetooth earphones she’d ordered some time ago had finally arrived; she had an agreement with the postwoman that she could leave small packages that didn’t fit into the mailbox beneath the rosebush – around here, most of the time there were only a handful of mushroom pickers, and now and then the odd walker. With the outbreak of another, second epidemic, which was running in parallel with the sixth wave of the first one, the postman, who had always insisted that he couldn’t leave a package without a signature, had also reached a similar agreement.
Steam began to rise from the fondue dish; today from the very beginning, the Friday ritual was doomed: the garlic browned too much, the wine, made sour by lemon juice, boiled before she had a chance to pour in the grated chickpea cheese, and the brandy mixed with corn starch went horribly lumpy. Now the smell of burning was spreading from the kitchen area round the whole container. For a moment she lifted the pot, scraped the chickpea cheese from the bottom, added some wine, turned the ring down and hurried to open both windows. I feel the cold before you feel it, bad vibes are creeping up on me, soon as I close my eyes, I’m in for a nasty surprise, who is keeping watch of me? I dreamt it before it even happened, the shadows in my room were right. She absent-mindedly mumbled the song Colour Me Wednesday. An earworm, she’d been singing it on the way home, somewhat prophetically. Not long ago – before Neva? – she would have recognised the prophetic associations as a foreign body, as a maternal intrusion, lying leadenly on her shoulder; now, allowing for probability, it made her navel and pelvis tingle (how large was the field of subconscious perception, even without squinting into the beyond?).
As soon as she saw the package, it seemed strange that the postwoman or, as of recently, the postman, had left it in front of the door, not beneath the bush as had been agreed. When she picked it up, she of course immediately noticed that there were no stamps on it. She instinctively glanced over her shoulder, quickly looked around and then eagerly opened the glass door of the container, went inside and locked it behind her. A whirlwind of thoughts swirled in her head with unexpected force; had the information about wild fires in Greece, mass die-offs of anthrax infected reindeer and yet another super-virus that she had heard about on the way home on an online eco anarchist radio station, so permeated her private space that she thus found herself at the front door with a Santoku knife in her hand, with no later recollection of opening the kitchen drawer? When she then finally came to, the horror that gripped her made her knees buckle – what was going on? What was she succumbing to, into what pathetic paternal mode had she slipped – had she not long ago decided to put an end to such paranoid outbreaks?
The room was lit from outside by the fading sunlight with a hint of green; at least, that’s how it seemed to Lilit, because the container was surrounded by trees on three sides, and in front of it burgeoned a vegetable garden with pumpkins, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, etc.; she tried to go to the shop only twice a month. There was green all around her; as dusk fell it also crept into the sunlight.
She eventually put the knife on the table, and she cut the brown tape fastening the package with the pen knife that she used for collecting dandelion leaves. As soon as the package opened, she was assailed by the sour, decaying smell of blood and she instinctively dropped it onto the worktop and took a step backwards.
She had moved to this isolated spot because she felt, when an opportunity arose to get a loan to buy a small plot of building land, half an hour’s drive from the psychiatric hospital, that this was for her almost inevitable; she tried to assuage the sense of privileged guilt by using recycled building materials and fixtures and – this was the fundamental guideline – extreme frugality with regard to space. The theoretical coinciding with her mother – and Neva – did not untangle the knot that had formed in her intestines due to constrained living conditions (and relationships). If she was capable of living communally, she would have done it with Mia – but although Mia had with consistent non-intrusiveness adapted to her rituals and humbly set aside her own preferences (doesn’t bother me … whatever suits you … i can fit in), her round, tearful hazel eyes still haunted Lilit years afterwards; they had separated themselves from Mia’s face and, now and then, still found their way from beneath the frame of the bathroom mirror or rolled across the throw spread over the couch. i did everything just like you wanted me to … everything … but you’re still leaving. Lilit didn’t want Mia – or anyone else – to do what she wanted them to; she had never intentionally implied that, she’d never consciously leaned in that direction; but what else was the constrictedness of her routines, her being trapped in rituals that she couldn’t avoid? With each appearance of the tear-stained irises there also returned that other thing: the boundary was not ritual, the boundary was the other woman’s presence, or more precisely, the superfluousness of that presence, which with longer gatherings also occurred with Jakob and Neva. i’m sorry mia, i really am. When an acquaintance of Egon’s offered her an old shipping container at a symbolic price, a container of classic dimensions with EVERGREEN written on the side, she easily and intuitively agreed. The conversion of the container into an attractive, well-equipped living space she tackled herself, Egon sometimes helping her at the weekend, while the water and electricity were connected by Jakob – although they hadn’t known each other long then – who had set himself up as a self-employed Jack-of-all-trades to finance his part-time study of information technology.
Lilit takes the fondue off the heat, she’s distracted and takes hold of the dish clumsily, burning the thumb on her left hand. She throws the cloths she held the dish with on the floor and puts her thumb in her mouth; she could put it under running water, but she’d rather put it under her tongue. She’s not carrying out her routines well today – and this frightens her – maybe even more than looking into the stinking brown box.
It contains her green and grey cotton knickers – the ones she threw away about a week ago because they were torn; the holes are in the same places, the elastic stretched in a familiar way. Then, they were clean, freshly washed (it seemed unhygienic to throw them away dirty). They had come back to her in the box all bloody.
The cheese has stuck to the bottom of the dish. Lilit curses, she can feel the familiar feverish pulse in her temples and pressure in her skull, and she slaps the tea-towel against the worktop as hard as she can; she feels like hurling the dish on the floor. She restrains herself. She grabs some croutons, throws them in the cheese sauce, then picks them out with a fork and rather too quickly stuffs them in her mouth so that they burn the roof of her mouth, but she doesn’t let that bother her; while eating, the rush of indescribable images finally stops to some extent. When she has scraped her way to the burnt bottom of the dish, she wipes her mouth, puts the empty dish into the sink and adds detergent and hot water. Then she leans on the worktop and sips green tea.
Maybe she should talk to a colleague – or Egon, Jakob, Neva … perhaps even with her mother. Of course, she feels awkward, perhaps, in spite of her anger at her father’s paranoia in grabbing for a knife, even a little afraid, she keeps glancing at the windows, this time her solitude does not feel comfortable; the intrusion, together with the hot air smelling of fondue rises to the ceiling, while it doesn’t escape through the windows – even though Lilit opens them wide.
2
Morana, the pit bull that lives with Nace, has been trembling and panting for seven hours already and restlessly moving around the apartment; for a few moments she lies in the hall, gets up, goes and lies in front of the fridge, shifts from one side to another, gets up, opens the pantry door, sniffs the box of kibble, but turns away from it, goes to the living room window, sits … then eventually she becomes somewhat calmer on the foam-rubber couch with a velveteen cover – a couch from the Nineties – on the ground floor, but the trembling never stops.
Nace tries to give her space, as he has been told to do; he checks the dampness of the soil in which the cannabis cuttings are planted on the windowsill, makes himself black tea, and from the contacts in his phone chooses the number of an acquaintance who is a veterinary nurse. And then with paper, paste, water, a large flat brush, a container and PVC-base, he sits in front of the sculpture.
Nace first encountered art therapy when he was eleven; after his first attempt at hanging himself, he was introduced to it by the child psychiatrist. He didn’t stand out in school, his grades were average. In the classrooms he made friends with the walls; during breaks he moved his chair to the wall and with his hand carefully hidden behind his back he stroked the cold white surface. Once, when the teacher had covered all the walls with the children’s drawings and posters, he had spent a long time crying in the toilet, and then, when the other children were rushing around the playground in front of the school during the twenty-minute break and he remained alone in the classroom, he carefully unfastened one of the edges of his drawing and stroked the wall beneath it; sorry, he said. Meanwhile, the teacher was sitting in the office, eating a spam sandwich and leafing through a woman’s magazine with a colleague. On a school trip to Prekmurje, the class teachers of 3A, B and C, along with the social worker, left him behind at a petrol station in Radenci. The waitress in a nearby bar, where he went to escape the February cold, felt sorry for him and offered him a fruit juice, but then she failed to bring it. After school, he would often sit on the partly broken benches in the wooden stands and observe the other children throwing a ball at a hoop on the concrete basketball court. He would chew a salami sandwich with mayonnaise on cheap sliced bread or a tasteless apple, the remnants of the snack that the school cooks placed in red plastic containers in front of the dining room in the afternoon.
With slow, measured movements, Nace covers the strips of paper towel with paste and adds them to the sculpture; the outlines of the first plastic bottle that he began to build his sculpture with fourteen years ago have long ago disappeared. The sculpture has moved with him from room to room, from apartment to apartment, until he inherited a small terrace house from his unmarried uncle, where he can give it its own room – a studio for a single, endless work of art.
Morana begins whimpering. Nace stops what he’s doing and cautiously goes downstairs. He stops on the bottom step and peeps round the corner into the old kitchen with the range. Morana has dragged the old torn blanket that Nace sometimes spreads on the grass in front of the house, the checked shirt that he wears when cutting the grass and the cushions for the garden chairs, onto the couch to the left of the range. Nace’s eye twitches slightly, but he doesn’t move. Morana jumps onto the couch, curls up, pants, and her stomach begins to visibly move, straining slightly. Nace looks at the long reddish scar that stretches across her hip, which undulates strangely as she strains.
For a moment he wonders if he will be up to it. He feels in the back pocket of his jeans and with his index finger strokes the black leather of the tiny, thirteen-year-old notebook.
He had never before been on the roof of the apartment block. Below in the apartment, the air was ripped from his lungs; in the crowd, he was being thrown against the walls and the furniture; he was being assailed by shoulders, backs and elbows. No one stopped next to him, but he spilled beer on himself. Now and then he tried to attach himself to one of the groups of people, but he never managed to join in a conversation. The roof with its tall, orange concrete wall, which as soon as he emerged into the fresh air through the glass door from the twelfth-floor corridor protected his back, offered closed openness, a kind of comforting simultaneity. He squatted among the broken plastic chairs, the artificial Christmas tree protruding from a plastic bag, and some enamel pots, and breathed slowly. He took his Discman from the pocket of his jacket and played Transylvanian Hunger. Because of the bad sound insulation of his headphones, which he had bought with his last pocket money, Skjellum’s voice echoed between the two chimneys, the lightning conductor and unwanted junk. It was much later, when he had already played almost half the tracks on the album, that he spotted the bent-over, slightly older lad with greasy blond hair down to his chin. He was leaning against the wall, staring twelve floors down, rolling a half-smoked cigarette in his fingers. As usual, Nace thought the he hadn’t noticed him, but the lad stopped right in front of him on his way to the door. transylvanian hunger, innit? Nace nodded. thought so … they’re cool. smoke? Mark showed him the black notebook that he was carrying in his jacket pocket about a month later, after they had smashed up rusty old wrecks on the local illegal dump with baseball bats, and were breathlessly drinking the Cabernet Sauvignon that Nace had stolen from the fridge at home. one day all this shit’ll be over, Mark said as he was leafing through the notebook with the black cover. one day they’ll see. After this, Mark disappeared, he never saw him again.
Nace bought the black notebook in Mark’s style with the money that he got from his granny for Easter that year. Whenever he was away from home, he carried it in the pocket of his combat jacket, and at home he locked it in the drawer of the nicely preserved Biedermeier writing desk in his room. He never allowed the cleaning lady, who came twice a week, to enter his bedroom.
Among the first to find his name in the black notebook was the butcher from the end of the street. It was the twenty-third of December, his mum had sent him to the shop for a duck, which she wanted to prepare the next day for Christmas Eve. The queue in front of the display cabinets was long and he waited patiently right up until the moment when some middle-aged guy pushed in front of him. The butcher calmly served him, paying no attention to the fact that he had jumped the queue, and the man bought the last duck in the shop. After this, Nace left a rubber duck on the butcher’s car and stuck a note under the windscreen wiper: THE DUCK IS WATCHING YOU.
Giving up at this point would mean admitting the uselessness, pointlessness, worthlessness of his years-long habit, acceptance of inaction on those decaying floorboards.
Morana’s stomach is contracting ever more strongly. Nace turns off the light on the stairs and slowly, hesitantly approaches her. He watches a watery, slimy bubble appear from the dog’s vagina, the amnion filled with black fluid, and he feels bitter sour bile rise in his throat. While looking for descriptions of dogs giving birth, which in the past few days he has more or less learnt off by heart, he grips his iPhone too hard.
Fifteen minutes after the bubble, the first puppy, wrapped in a caul, emerges from Morana’s vagina; Nace watches the mother dog bite through the umbilical cord, with her tongue she washes the caul off and by licking encourages the puppy to breathe. Ten minutes later, the afterbirth emerges, which Morana eats without hesitation.
Nace withdraws to the neighbouring room; he sits in a worn-out armchair and stares dully, inexpressively at his uncle’s hunting trophies: a leaping fox, a hawk on a branch, four roe deer and a red deer’s skull. He clenches his fists – the yarn of survival is knitted from aggression.
3
Egon and Lilit are sitting in front of Lilit’s container, baking potatoes wrapped in foil in the embers of a campfire; they take the baked ones out, break them in half and spread them thickly with margarine, which lubricates the still painfully burnt roof of Lilit’s mouth. They’re smoking and drinking – she, beer and he, Teran. The sun is going down, the wobbly garden chairs with stripy canvas seats are softly sinking into the grass.
come on, hold it … just a little, come on, says Egon again.
no, leave it out, says Lilit again.
Egon had contacted Lilit on Telegram all ecstatic. it’s here, lilit, it’s here! can i come show you it? go on, go on, lilit. i gotta share it with someone, go on.
With the money that he got for his eighteenth birthday, Egon had paid for an examination in handling weapons. When the local administrative office was dealing with his application for a permit to collect weapons, he had pestered the officials by phone every day. He first made an improvised gun cabinet in the spacious but completely unused storage space beneath the stairs in his parents’ villa. That was the first time that he and Lilit had had a serious quarrel; it had seemed to her that an indignant response of how could you! was sufficient and the fact that he expected some kind of arguments from her infuriated her almost as much as the fact that he had had the permit, which he had received a day later than he ought because one of the administrative staff had lost her temper with him, now mounted in a kitschy red frame.
go on, lilit, go on, go on, go on!
He promised her beer, Teran, jacket potatoes, ok, come then, she wrote. More or less because she was finding it all increasingly unpleasant and not less so, as she had hoped.
She stuffed the box with the bloody knickers in a plastic bag and then put that in a plastic food container; since she only had one big one, in order to get it into the freezer she had to take out a packet of frozen vegetarian patties and a bag of chips. She couldn’t bring herself to go to the police. She fried the patties and the chips and then had them two days in a row for lunch, while for supper on the second day she was able to treat herself to some plum dumplings. The food had – or so it seemed to her – a strangely sourish metallic taste.
When she was in grade three at school, at the only pyjama party she was ever invited to, Lilit had already decided that people tired her; while her class mates played truth or dare, from the living room doorway Lilit watched the evening news over the heads of her friend’s parents, and when they had a pillow fight, she shut herself in the bathroom and read. At first, Lilit somehow hoped that the feeling of weariness would disappear when she was with the right people. But although the leaden weight in her limbs and the feeling of hollowed-out insides after socialising with those she happened to intersect with were less pronounced, somehow diluted, they did not disappear. Egon was thus at best a presence – he had simply never disappeared.
While Egon smears the margarine and mustard that he’s brought with him on the potato, the Nagant M1895 revolver with a five-pointed star engraved on the breech, which Lilit is disgusting by, rests in his lap. Egon is fascinated by the history of weapons, but he doesn’t know how to shoot one. He did rather badly in the practical part of the exam; the examiner at the time sarcastically commented that he should never apply for a gun licence. you don’t understand the history either, Lilit once observed. She does know how to shoot, but Egon doesn’t know that.
Should she tell Egon about the package in her freezer wrapped in a clear plastic bag with a fragile zip? Lilit feels pretty comfortable with Egon, at home, but she guesses that at the moment a conversation with him wouldn’t be very productive.
Egon is holding a potato in one hand and the revolver in the other. He pretends to aim at one of the cherries on a nearby tree. bang, bang, bang, he shouts. Lilit sees that the litre bottle of Teran he’s been swigging from all evening is at least three quarters empty. But nevertheless, why is the guy next to her sometimes such an idiot? She herself is still on her second beer.
go on, hold it, you hold it as well, why don’t you, says Egon again. you know how much history … revolution, first world war, second world war, come on lilit.
no, says Lilit again, this time sharply. give me a break with your militancy, you’re pissing me off. And yet the foul pulsing in her temples and the pressure in her head isn’t completely explained by Egon’s annoying behaviour – to the same extent it is caused by her twitchy fingers, which like her father’s want to reach for the weapon, even though Lilit feels her gorge rise at this.
Egon turns the revolver towards her and aims it at her head. bang, bang, bang, he says in an offended voice, but then he puts it down. Lilit mutters with irritation.
She looks towards the revolver, which lays on the grass next to the fire; of course, it isn’t loaded, naturally it isn’t, none of Egon’s weapons are, they’re not even allowed to be. Technically speaking, he shouldn’t have even brought it here, but now and then Egon commits a small offence against the letter of the law when it suits him. The embers are dying. be a good girl and cop hold of this, be careful it doesn’t go off, go on, just a bit. From the corner of her eye she sees a white kid goat bleating, the rope around its neck is tied to a tree. She blinks, the image disappears, her head spins slightly.
on friday, i got a vampire to deal with. spider, she says almost in passing and just enough to change the subject. To change herself.
Egon’s hand with the revolver drops down and he clumsily hits his thigh. ha? He seems to sober up in a moment. what?
undifferentiated schizophrenia – supposedly. but … the guy’s something else, egon. the next level in carnism; they found him yesterday on some farm in front of the rabbit hutches. he was sitting there, sucking blood from a rabbit that’s legs were still moving. quite a scene, and now when there are such strict measures in place again and all that … he was saying something about living blood, but that’s still not contextualised.
Egon blinks at her. you being serious?
Lilit nods and takes another sip of beer – she resorts to an expected gesture. She doesn’t continue. She doesn’t say that Spider really does intrigue her, she doesn’t mention the unclear feeling that he had crawled inside her unobserved that she must get to the bottom of him, but at the same time as soon as she was aware of him, he paralysed her gullet and dried up her nostrils; no, she can’t tell anyone that; she can see that it’s no good with Egon, she can’t bring herself to say it, her colleagues are out of the question … she thinks that she might trust Neva or Jakob, but then almost at the same moment rejects the idea; she feels a deficit of trust etched into her veins.
An ant crawls from the arm of the chair onto Lilit’s hand; it runs across her middle finger, turns at the nail to the lower side of the finger, stops, turns here and there, runs across her palm to her wrist and then once more onto the back of her hand. Lilit tries to sense the touch of its body on hers, but it’s difficult; it is so light, its legs are so tiny and thin, but she still likes it; she enjoys such encounters. She bends over and transfers it to a blade of grass next to the chair. In the moment when it crawls off her finger, she feels a kind of regret; an end to their acquaintance.
vampire, says Egon thoughtfully to himself. Lilit wants him to go home, which she takes as a good sign, perhaps her discomfort will pass when she’s alone, but now it’s already too late. He has drunk too much. Besides, the restrictions on movement have been in place for a few hours already.
Lilit shudders unpleasantly at her own pliability; shifting paradigms take decades, centuries, she used to tell Leon, the father who, although she spent a significant part of her childhood with him in a kind of single parent household, she found it hard to think of as a parent. Nevertheless, she can sense him in every pesky pulse of the veins in her temples – him and everything she was resisting.
Is she wrong or is this now something temporary? An apocalyptical feeling is seeping into her and she feels how the superfluous, unnecessarily multiplying deaths amplify her father’s character within her – tightening the grip of the rapid pulse in her temples.
For some minutes she controls her breathing – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – to calm the tremor in her hands.
come on, egon, let’s sleep, she gives in when her heart is no longer pounding.
4
On her way to work, Lilit drives past a long street camp in front of the demolished ruins of the squatted artistic quarter. The tents are three metres apart, exemplarily taking account of safe distance. They’re largely unoccupied, just artefacts. A group of persistent activists erects them at night, and in the morning the security men pull them down and throw them in the rubbish. After the demolition of the buildings that years earlier were occupied by squatters, the individuals who were at first here night and day have mostly given up. Apart from Neva. She is still here every day from six in the morning to nine in the evening. Her persistence is becoming an artistic installation.
here you go, bread, beans, sauerkraut, a flask of coffee – have i forgotten anything? Lilit says when she stops by – as she does every morning – to hand over supplies.
that’s the lot, ta, says Neva – when it gets colder, she will also stop, but for now it’s still okay, she feels that she needs to be here, she said after the last time they had sex in the container. Neva’s two years at a squat in the south of France that was trying to introduce new arable farming practices and to ensure inter-species asylum for all who needed it, had both cocooned her and confirmed her feeling that in the fight for community and solidarity it is crucial not to give in; at the thought of yesterday’s trembling of her fingers, dots dance before Lilit’s eyes and she feels dizzy. Shame eats away at her bowels.
Yesterday, when she made an unannounced visit to her mother’s overly scented apartment – vanilla incense sticks, oil of cinnamon in the diffuser, apple, cherry and coconut scented candles on every chest-of-drawers and shelf – and the powerful smells began to assail the back of her eyes, she was a little sorry that she’d decided to come.
In recent years, Matilda has enjoyed the pretence that she and Lilit have something in common – helping “wounded souls” – but more than anything this irritates Lilit; partly because of the somewhat sulky feeling that it’s too late, but also because of the never verbalised feeling of separation, the consequence of the presence of her father, which Matilda probably did not want to recognise because of a sense of guilt.
okay, take care, says Lilit and treads on her cigarette end. The taste of Agnes’s organic Albanian tobacco caresses the roof of her mouth.
you too, says Neva, and then surprises Lilit with a quick kiss. This isn’t a sexual kiss, nor is it romantic or loving; it is an uplifting, encouraging, almost friendly kiss.
this is neva, her mother said to her just over a year ago when she made an unannounced visit one Saturday in May. Neva was sitting there, relaxed, in her mother’s living room with a recorder on the coffee table in front of her. That was seven weeks before she had a chip implanted, during the period of research for Turbulence. The interview with Lilit’s mother was a spontaneous thing, and they were both enthusing about it for months afterwards; they had met by chance in a local laundrette. To begin with, neither of them had a washing machine at home and both of them saw in this not only an environmental but also a communal gesture, a contribution to the mosaic of the apartmental community, and with clustering also the global community. Post-secularism was a point of contact for them; Neva had moved towards this via a transhumanist acceleration of the occupation of her own body with technology, and Lilit’s mother by persisting with a life of pushing away knowledge. Through what they shared, Lilit’s field of understanding widened significantly; this is one of the reasons that now, after the demolition, in spite of the stagnation of what were once heat waves at thirty-four degrees, Lilit still goes to the shop every morning instead of Neva. Neva values this, and at the same time expects nothing more, no psychological support or lengthy discussions. It is Lilit who maintains the borders of the relationship. To confide in her regarding the knickers in the freezer – or Spider – would go beyond, so she says nothing. But Lilit would almost bet on Neva sensing something, that she knows that something is not right with Lilit.
Lilit found her mother in the living room with a large ceramic bowl she’d painted herself in her lap; it contained small bags of crystals, materials for making jewellery and spools of elastic.
i’m making bracelets for the shop, says her mother, lost in thought, without greeting her … come on, you can make one, let’s do it together, that’s calming.
Matilda did not sense Lilit’s nervousness – self-calming was the decisive factor in every activity.
thanks, says Lilit to Neva. take care, she repeats and gives Neva a quick, casual hug.
Neva nods. They’re being stared at from the other side of the road by chunky security men and when Lilit gets in the car, she is struck for the first time that so far she has paid surprisingly little attention for the question of who stole her knickers from the rubbish bin and smeared them with blood – the possibilities seem too endless, and there is no obvious one. Perhaps excessive reflection on this would also include a kind of exaggerated self-centredness, ascribing too much importance to it. The intimacy the gesture contained could, after all, be referential; maybe in the thought patterns of this person it occupied only a symbolic place; it had gained content from elsewhere, maybe it was even more a case of signs, of signalling – the guards were also nosing around the woods near her container, every morning the security men saw her with Neva.
Lilit looked in her mother’s ceramic bowl, which contained crystals of every possible colour and size. Lilit wanted to resignedly reach for the yellowish crystals that were nearest to her – on the label in her mother’s fancy handwriting it said “citrine” – but her mother overtook her. She pressed into her hand a small bag with tiny black beads. “Obsidian” said the label.
this is what you need, said her mother uncompromisingly.
oh, really, why that precisely? In an unexpected longing for visibility, Lilit reached for the old, now mostly transcended formulaic structure of conversations with her mother, the consequence of the grievance felt by an abandoned child; how could she not feel aggrieved, who wouldn’t? In fact, yes, this was about a general sense of hurt, which Matilda of course had foreseen, it nagged at her now and then beneath her trembling right eye, but no, she wouldn’t have decided any differently. Leaving her with Leon … maybe that was the additional or even crucial unacceptable moment, a gnawing sense of being doubly weighed down that in her childhood sucked Lilit in under the torn cover of the heavy, mite-infested patterned eiderdown from the early Eighties that Leon had got from his mother, with whom he had little contact and not even when Lilit was a child did he try to make it more regular.
well, obsidian protects … safeguards you from everything bad, says her mother. Expectation makes Lilit’s stomach contract. now the times are like they are, Matilda continues, now there’s a lot of bad stuff …, isn’t there? Lilit finds it hard to acknowledge the weight of disappointment that has pushed her solar plexus into her gut.
lilit! On the psychiatric ward Trdina is waiting for her in front of the lift. His grey eyes flash darkly above his mask. i’ve been calling you … can’t you be a bit more punctual, how many times do we have to talk about it? come on, hurry up, come with me. there’s going to be trouble with spider. he’s not eating. he’s pulled the drip out of his arm a couple of times, we’ve restrained him, but …
Upon hearing Trdina’s words, Lilit feels a strange twisting deep in her gut. She changes into her uniform, slips on a mask, disinfects her hands and puts on a visor. While following Trdina’s rapid steps towards Spider’s room, she keeps unconsciously running her index finger over the obsidian bracelet that the evening before her mother fastened on her wrist and which, in spite of a certain self-disdain, she has not removed.
5
The vampire stands at the window and looks out onto the street, which is bathed in the orange glow of the street lights. With his white hand, beneath the skin of which the reddish veins are visible, he’s holding the heavy milky-green curtain at the side of the window. The curtain is in reality only a narrow strip of material tied to a curtain rail, it can’t be properly moved, it can’t be used to cover the window – there are shutters and blinds for that. Both. For it is very dependent on the weather which of the two it is better to use. In sunny but cold weather, the blinds are more useful, but at night you can’t sleep without the shutters. Uncle was very particular about such things.
this just for decoration? says the vampire without real interest.
my uncle chose them, says Nace.
When he awoke during the night and the vampire was standing by the wall next to the window, watching him, Nace was at first surprised; in his half-awake state, he was convinced he was being visited from the Slovene other-side by Ignac, who in the night hours enters the brains of his brothers, but when he opened his eyes he suddenly recognised the blond streaks and his chest turned to stone; Franc – Nace was convinced it was him, he remembered him from the black-and-white photographs from the late 1930s, which as a boy he discovered in granny’s attic – had evidently decided to return to home territory. He had suddenly realised that he needed Nace, yes, precisely him. Without him, his charismatic young face would be worn away by time, which it does to people. It would first carve lines and then wrinkles into it. They would slowly deepen until the vampire – Franc – shrivelled like a dried-up bean. He would be lying somewhere in a ditch or cave, forgotten. Yin without yang.
At this, Nace unwillingly remembers the freezer – in the end, he had stuck the runt of the litter, that with its skinny bent legs unsuccessfully tried to get to Morana’s teats, at the back of the top shelf of the freezer and in front of it placed a frozen chicken, four Carniolan sausages, the last cuts of Mihevc’s game and some fish fingers.
step on its fucking head, what’s wrong with you, Mihevc had been saying to him for a good half hour before this.
Nace was standing behind his uncle’s house, his telephone in his hand, and the day-old pit bull was helplessly writhing in front of his boots.
you planning on feeding it? you can only use one like that for bait and you’ll spend a lot of effort on it. come on now, step on it, what the fuck is the matter with you? do i have to fucking deal with you as well …
oh, nace, sighs the vampire. what times we are living in.
When a vampire appears in your room in the middle of the night like that, it gets to you, of course it does. Especially when it’s a vampire that is known to you, familiar actually, even though you’ve never met him before. You didn’t know that he’d become a vampire, there was never any talk of that in your family, but suddenly, when you wake and look at the wall and say him standing there, you recognise his gloomy, murderous face.
The vampire is rummaging around Nace’s bedroom, which still contains a number of his uncle’s things: a cheap globe, a collection of shells, glasses, curtains, some bad oil paintings (landscapes, still lives and such) hanging on the walls covered with painted wallpaper.
okay, okay … in fact it’s alright that you left it as your uncle had it, he had it like this, didn’t he? that, for instance, you didn’t shoot that, did you? The vampire gestures towards a stuffed pheasant, clinging to a gnarled branch fixed to the wall, its feet thickly covered with glue.
Nace shakes his head. The vampire goes on rummaging.
franc …, Nace says soon after, unable to tolerate further this aimlessness and the fact that every time he breathes in his nostrils sting: … you’re franc, aren’t you … can i call you that?
The vampire moves his head indeterminably: it’s all the same to me. there’s no need to address me formally, he adds languidly.
okay, says Nace.
For a moment, the bedroom is permeated by silence, like a poisonous mist it falls on the yellowed blankets covering Nace’s bed.
i’d like to know why … how this could happen.
how i became a vampire?
Fragments translated by: David Limon
