“The worst part is, now I don’t even know what we’d do with it.”
“Will you come back from Switzerland if you find money?”
“Come with me, if you don’t trust me.”
“What for? You could escape on the way.”
He almost laughed then, but his face wouldn’t cooperate.
“But if you don’t find any money . . .”
“What?”
“Don’t go killing yourself.”
He looked at me.
“Don’t kill yourself. You promised me something.”
Something came over him again, so he hugged me, like a sister or something similar. I wasn’t sure what we were, even though we were having a baby together. His shoulders shook.
“Okay, okay,” I said, my throat tightening. “Let’s keep this civilized.”
28
THE LAST DAY of the conference. She was sitting at the bar of the empty hotel café, gazing out at the street through the window. I’d already noticed her at the conference, when she introduced herself and said where she was from: memories came rushing in, and I felt a thrill, which scared me for a moment because I’d pulled my life together, but this also energized me—perhaps I’d pulled my life together a little too well.
I sat at the bar, leaving a chair between us; the café speakers were singing, Father, change my name . . .
“I heard where you’re from at the conference. I’ve been there.”
She eyed me before saying, “Really? Whereabouts?”
I told her.
“Yeah,” she said as she glanced at her phone. “That’s not far. Although it’s a little different.”
“I was there after the war. It was different from everywhere else.”
“That’s for sure,” she said, granting me another look.
You’re pretty and you know it, I thought to myself. I shook hands with her, and we introduced ourselves.
She flashed me a smile, followed by a slightly ironic gaze as if saying: All right then, let’s see what you have to say. I almost asked something along the lines of when had she started working for the pharmaceutical industry, but then I thought, That’s not why I came over.
Lover, lover, lover, come back to me . . . We shot each other glances during the chorus.
“Can you say something to me in your language?”
She smiled. “What do you want me to say?”
“Have a drink first, please,” I said, feeling we were slowly moving into the game, “this will be challenging.”
She ordered a martini.
I said, “Talk to me as if I’m another woman.”
She gave me a startled yet amused look. She thought I’d said I was a woman.
“That’s what I want you to say to me in your language,” I added.
She instantly looked offended. “You want to talk to me as if I were another woman?”
“No. No. I’m just asking you to say the words. There was a moment when a woman who speaks your language asked me for that, to talk to her as if she were another woman, a woman I’d meet years later, here in Washington. She wanted me to talk to the woman about her, just as I’m doing now with you. With you, not with her, see? I didn’t do what she asked me to.”
She gave me a harsh look, but there was something touching about this for her. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted to hear it. Where you come from reminded me.”
I didn’t know exactly what I wanted anymore. I wanted anything, as long as it involved her.
She searched inside herself, and then said, “You ran away?”
Looking at the upside-down liquor dispensers, I remembered my younger self. When I thought about the past I always, not knowing how this was possible, saw myself as a kind of clown in trouble, trying to wriggle out of it, to extricate myself. And I always felt sorry for myself, and for the others. I shook my head between a yes and a no.
“Fine,” she said. “First you say something in my language, all right? I’ll teach you.”
“Okay.”
She said, in her own language, I’m a shithead who shows up and then vanishes.
“I need to say this in a serious voice?”
“Just don’t laugh. Or say it with a smile, or a fake smile, whatever.”
That, I don’t know why, made me serious.
I said it, and she corrected me a few times, shaking her head, repeating it.
I’m a shithead who shows up and then vanishes.
Then I said it with a smile, and apparently I did it right. While I was saying it, I felt shivers down my spine, a slight cooling, as if a distant wind had swept over me. I didn’t know what I was saying, but I saw I was becoming part of her story.
Then she said, “Talk to me as if I were another woman.”
She repeated this in her own language.
This rocked me. Unexpected. I’d forgotten I was hitting on the woman. Something was coming back to life, impossible feelings without promise, dead feelings. A tinge of sorrow. Something chaotic about who I am. The misery of my existence, I thought. I ordered a whisky. So did she, flashing two fingers to the waiter. Taking her glass, she said, “I have to go out for a smoke.”
I watched her through the wall-sized window—the architect of this hotel really had a thing about glass. My whisky was quickly disappearing in the blur of excitement, and I noticed that she, too, was drinking her whisky restlessly as she smoked. She knew I was watching her, and she turned toward me and shot me a quick glance. I felt the attraction, knowing there was somebody else in her eyes. I wondered what I was supposed to say in her language. It was getting dark, the streetlights were already on. I went out and suggested we go to a better place, not far from there. Her eyes narrowed, as if they were looking at an impostor, and then she said, “All right, let’s drink!”
We walked silently to the bar and were already at the entrance when I asked her, “Whose words were those?”
“A phantom’s.”
“Something happened?”
“Yes. You vanished.”
We sat near the wall in a dim corner of the bar, surrounded by waves of chatter and Tom Waits’s voice coming from the loudspeakers. She ordered us two double whiskies and water, and then she told me, “Okay, you want to talk to me as if I were some other woman. Or about some other woman. It’s hard to understand what you want. But I’ll talk to you as if you really were somebody else. And besides I don’t know you. And besides all you want is sex.”
“No, it’s not like that. You are—”
“Don’t pretend you’re interested in me now!” she hissed, as if I could ruin everything with a lie.
I paused, taking a sip of whisky.
Yes, a lie would take us back to reality, I thought, which seemed a bit unusual.
“All right. I’m interested in . . . all of this. Our conversation. This world. In general.”
“This world? In general?” she said with a big laugh.
I felt the warming glow of the alcohol, now we were sailing away and floating in an interspace, as both of us were here because of somebody else, and it was open, like the entrance to a house of shadows. Waits’s voice creaked like rusty hinges.
“It was the biggest love event of my life,” I said, simply cutting to the chase.
“The biggest love event . . . Wait, that’s not really how you say it, right?”
“If I said that it was the love of my life, that would, I don’t know . . . There are too many movies on the subject.”
It looked as if she were still thinking about my phrasing. Then she took another sip, held the glass close to her face, and gave me an inquiring look, which was pleasant. The question is always who is looking and do you desire that body, because a long look implies body.
“It wasn’t love?”
“It was . . . with slim chances for success.”
“Success?” Her smile became twisted. “Yes, I also wanted successful love with you. Successful love is what I was after, that’s true.” She leaned her forehead on her palm like a tipsy version of Rodin’s The Thinker. “But you knew this. And despised it in a way.”
“Success?”
“Success and love, the mix. The only thing I don’t know is where the contempt was coming from, but . . . I saw it . . .” She made a brief pause. “The bottom line is that, in a way, you didn’t believe I was real. I was a function, a good match. Pretty, successful. I fit all the criteria. See? Merely a sum of highly rated traits. And maybe I really was that, maybe that’s how I really look in my world, how I present myself . . . Yes, you made me think.”
“I was privileged,” I said. “History was kind to me. An American appearing after the Fall of Communism. You arrive as someone who was right, and that’s clear now. An incredible situation—you talk, and it goes without saying that you’re right. And all around you are losers. Likable losers. Such gullible trust, it gets to you, you know? You kind of feel like a god . . . And then, you came along. So beautiful, and without any pathetic artificiality. You know what I’m trying to say? To find beauty without having the feeling you’re looking at a shop window, that’s hardly even possible nowadays. And that’s what gives life its disgusting taste. You were above that.”
She raised her chin and, with her eyes closed, tilted her head first to one side, then to the other, as if relaxing her neck muscles.
“I wasn’t above it,” she said. “That’s just your imagination, you darling prick. I was a part of it and that’s why you despised me. You didn’t even believe I loved you. But you, on the other hand, were even less reliable. A love event, you say. Yes, well-phrased. But now . . . I have the feeling there’s a big story behind this, because you vanished, not only did you run away, but you totally vanished. I can see that by the way your jobs keep failing. Maybe I wouldn’t have loved you so much if you hadn’t vanished. That redeemed you in a way. Now everything is summed up in you. My supposedly successful life where there is no happiness, except when I lie to people like myself. When I show them pictures from my trips. That is, when you think of it, the closest I get to happiness, lying to people who do the same to me. . . . While we’re at it, let’s take a picture, let it be known that I had a nice time with a good-looking black guy in America and my life didn’t end.”
She hugged me, held out her smartphone, and snapped a picture. This part surprised me a little. Good-looking? I hadn’t heard that in a while.
“Back home I’d never be saying all of this,” she continued, smiling and caressing my cheek. “I sometimes dream of you appearing, neither alive nor dead, naked and suntanned. A hole opened up and everything has been falling through it.”
The conversation was growing weirder, but I didn’t mind.
“The problems began when everything became real,” I said. “While we were lovers, we were on the outside, the world couldn’t touch us. Just two people who’d met. There was nothing else. Just us.”
“Charming, this love life of yours, darling. I’d rather not talk about everything I’m hearing. . . . But I wanted something from you, a kind of future. I don’t know why I chose you, when it was so obvious that you were unreliable. I guess I’m not as normal as I present myself to others, after all. Hey, the future is what I thought about, and that sure as hell was the wrong thing to do, because it kept me from enjoying myself. You had much more fun than I did, I saw that. I overanalyzed everything.” She looked at me as if I were someone who understood. “I keep losing. I must be doing something wrong.”
I ordered fresh drinks. The bartender asked the customers from time to time, particularly the women at the bar, if they wanted him to play a song off YouTube, and now he asked Lorena that.
She went behind the bar, her movements were much more relaxed than they had been before—the alcohol didn’t make her totter; she was growing more graceful.
“This evening,” I told her when she came back to her seat, “I must say is so wonderfully hopeless, in a good way.”
Ever since . . . I stopped loving you, she was singing the YouTube song in her language.
She translated a few lines: My sense of taste is slowly coming back, as if after being sick.
“It was so erasingly beautiful. We erased a whole world and, for a while, we hovered . . .”
“Oh, I love you,” she said.
We kissed at the corner of the bar, our tongues full of alcohol, a sour taste of tobacco, exciting, whorish, rotten, European. Everything spun around.
It’s good while it spins, I thought.
I woke up in her room, alone.
I think, I feel I recall, that she kissed me silently while I was still sleeping, before she left to catch her flight.
I think she said: “Goodbye Michael, goodbye Oleg.”
29
THE TWO OF THEM, one in a yellow trench coat, skinny, one in a black overcoat, sandy-haired and broad-shouldered, stood in front of the bus that was boarding children and women, and everyone was embracing their loved ones, until they saw each other again, after all of this ended.
The one in the yellow trench coat stayed behind with his son, who was taller and stronger than him. The one in the overcoat, the sandy-haired one, was left alone.
They waved, the one in the yellow trench coat, and the one in the black coat with the golden-yellow hair.
One little girl was looking at the man in the overcoat; another little girl was looking at the one in the yellow trench coat, the color of fallen leaves. Both girls waved.
Until the first bend in the road.
An actor, who was famous from TV, was riding with us on the bus, and that caused a sensation. He entertained us over the microphone, singing songs, and we knew the excursion would be fun.
The actor later got off the bus to talk each time we were stopped. Because he was a TV star and they were not allowed to kill him, someone said.
Why not? He also caught the last bus.
Him? No way.
I remember Sobotka’s Viktoria. I remember Jasmina, too. She was the older one, I just said I didn’t remember her. They kept her for the examination—that’s what they called it at first, an “examination,” so I thought there was a kind of doctor there. We waited, and she got back onto the bus with bad eyes, they fit her badly, like they were about to drop out. Later, when the bus moved on, her mother was sobbing and cursing, and then she quieted down, and later she stood up and said, ˝Listen closely, everyone! Whoever says a word about this, I will damn him to hell! Do you understand what the word ‘damn’ means? Just so you know!”
“What does she mean?” I asked my mother, and she said, “Nothing much.”
She was lying, as always.
She often told me a person shouldn’t tell the truth. That was because I didn’t know how to make things up. I was very bad at the whole making-things-up thing. It’s really strange, how it all turned out in the end, that I was the one who wrote a book, and not the others who were better at making things up.
My mother lied whenever she had the chance, not to deceive someone or to sell something—not that—but to hide. That’s what she meant. To hide between words so they can’t make you out, so they can’t see you and know what you think and who you are, because it’s dangerous if they know you, that’s what she thought. She always told me to lie, and I didn’t know how, so since she was always telling me I should lie, I was even worse at making things up, so she kept saying I was that way on purpose, I was telling the truth on purpose and embarrassing her with the truth and putting her in awkward, if not dangerous, situations. “This will end badly, with your stubbornness, when you don’t know how to lie and don’t want to, I see perfectly well that you don’t want to,” she said. “Well can’t you see, dumbass
, that everyone lies? How will you survive in this world that way? How am I supposed to leave you in this world if I don’t teach you how to tell lies?” She said these sorts of things all the time, even at the hospital when her end was near.
And she left, and I stayed, like this, defective.
And the actor from the bus acts in America in a sci-fi series. Really. I saw him playing an alien with head thingies and pointy ears. This suddenly dawned on me as I was channel surfing, I didn’t recognize him straightaway. I was just watching the series, not sure exactly why; the production wasn’t exactly A-list. Then I realized the alien was him and I thought to myself: maybe everyone from that bus has turned into aliens, myself included, it’s just that my head thingies aren’t visible in this dimension, but sometimes I feel them. The only problem is that I’m not fit for acting of any kind, since I don’t know how to lie. Which still doesn’t mean I’m telling the truth, as my mother used to think. Because as far as I can tell it’s impossible to tell the truth. There’s always more. And more. It’s a similar situation with lies, only the direction is different, and in the end, I realized, if you really go by the truth, it can also seem made up, which makes me happy for my mom—that in the end people perceive me as someone who is making things up, as if what I’m saying isn’t real. What my mother feared turned out to be so useless, because I speak and don’t make things up, but this doesn’t count as real, which, when I understood this was the case, gave me a certain freedom to tell the truth even more, at least until they sent me to see a psychiatrist. So I told him the truth, too, and so on, right until I realized that the house exists—this distracted me a bit—I don’t know why but I felt distracted by the house existing, and I had to make sense of it. That’s why I came here and almost, not on purpose, created chaos the first day as if I had come to start some kind of revolution, so even today those fans, who were usually chanting club songs, come to the house where my cousins, the evil clowns, live and yell at them and call them assholes. And I spend my time at Sobotka’s place with Slavko—I can’t call him my father anymore now that I’ve seen him—but anyway, I spend my time here cooking for him and wonder—Why did I come, what am I doing, what am I looking for? I can’t leave until I figure this out, so I keep my thoughts quietly to myself, because I’m interested in the truth, not in what the old hags are saying, that I came here to look after Slavko because I’m still a stranger, always have been, and don’t know how to feel as if I belong here, nor do I feel comfortable, and that is, I think, the problem with the house that bothers me in my very essence as a stranger, that the house really exists here nearby, right around the corner, and I don’t know how to be a host, so I no longer, after that first day, go by the house. I haven’t gone near it since then, and now I have to work out what this means. Will I now leave for once of my own volition, not driven away like before? It’s up to me to stop reproaching myself for having no home, to stop thinking about loss—because I thought about it even when I wasn’t thinking, in my own ironies that countered everything in the bitterness of my laugh, and it wasn’t freedom, nor was it a new life; it was the continuation of the old denied existence, a life of nonexistence, the vacuum left by the family, the vacuum of everything never experienced on the tail of a decrepit house and a stolen world and place. And it both ended and didn’t end, because the bitterness that used to be my pleasure remains, but now it’s beginning to bother me, so I stand here and wonder whether to go to a house where there is nothing—it’s all in my head—and I think to myself, When I leave again, whichever road I take, I will leave clean of the old story that coiled itself up into unhappiness. So I stay here at Sobotka’s place, in someone else’s house as usual, and cook cabbage every day and answer the phone when they call from the north, because they are the only ones who call on the landline, and I talk to Viktoria. She thinks I’m ordinary and our talks are ordinary, and she’s a lesbian, she was just sorry to tell Sobotka. Well how come you’re a lesbian, wasn’t Jasmina supposed to be one, I tell her, and then she pauses briefly and says that Jasmina isn’t a lesbian, and she is, and she didn’t tell him that, though it’s stupid, she says, but there you go, somehow I didn’t. I don’t know him very well, Viktoria says of her father, I would have told him if I’d gotten to know him better, now maybe I won’t even get the chance, since they hurt him so badly. So she asks me if there’s any point in her coming, and I say not unless you have to. Stay where you are, dear lesbian, this will not be a comfortable place for you, and you can inherit the house that exists and Sobotka’s sculptures, they are really good, I’ll take pictures of them and send them to you, and I did.
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