Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. The Myths series brings together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include: Alai, Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Michel Faber, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Klas Östergren, Victor Pelevin, Ali Smith, Donna Tartt, Su Tong, Dubravka Ugrešić, Salley Vickers and Jeanette Winterson.
Contents
At First You Don’t See Them…
I: Go There – I Know Not Where – and Bring Me Back a Thing I Lack
II: Ask Me No Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies
III: If You Know Too Much, You Grow Old Too Soon
At First You Don’t See Them…
You don’t see them at first. Then suddenly a random detail snags your attention like a stray mouse: an old lady’s handbag, a stocking slipping down a leg, bunching up on a bulging ankle, crocheted gloves on the hands, a little old-fashioned hat perched on the head, sparse grey hair with a blue sheen. The owner of the blued hair moves her head like a mechanical dog and smiles wanly…
Yes, at first they are invisible. They move past you, shadow- like, they peck at the air in front of them, tap, shuffle along the asphalt, mince in small mouse-like steps, pull a cart behind them, clutch at a walker, stand surrounded by a cluster of pointless sacks and bags, like a deserter from the army still decked out in full war gear. A few of them are still ‘in shape’, wearing a low-cut summer dress with a flirtatious feather boa flung across the shoulders, in an old half-motheaten Astrakhan, her make-up all smeary (who, after all, can apply make-up properly while peering through spectacles?!).
They roll by you like heaps of dried apples. They mumble something into their chins, conversing with invisible collocutors the way American Indians speak with the spirits. They ride buses, trams and the subway like abandoned luggage; they sleep with their heads drooping onto their chests; or they gawk around, wondering which stop to get off at, or whether they should get off at all. Sometimes you linger for a moment (for only a moment!) in front of an old people’s home and watch them through the glass walls: they sit at tables, move their fingers over leftover crumbs as if moving across a page of Braille, sending someone unintelligible messages.
Sweet little old ladies. At first you don’t see them. And then, there they are, on the tram, at the post office, in the shop, at the doctor’s surgery, on the street, there is one, there is another, there is a fourth over there, a fifth, a sixth, how could there be so many of them all at once?! Your eyes inch from one detail to the next: the feet swelling like doughnuts in the tight shoes, the skin sagging from the inside of the elbows, the knobby fingernails, the capillaries that ridge the skin. You look closely at the complexion: cared for or neglected. You notice the grey skirt and white blouse with the embroidered collar (dirty!). The blouse is worn thin and greyed from washing. She has buttoned it up crookedly, she tries to unbutton it but cannot, her fingers are stiff, the bones are old, they are getting light and hollow like bird bones. Two others lend her a hand and with their collective efforts they do up the blouse. Buttoned up to her chin, she looks like a little girl. The other two smooth the patch of embroidery on the collar, cooing with admiration, how far back does the embroidery go, it used to be my mother’s, oh, everything used to be so right and so pretty. One of them is stocky, with a noticeable bump on the back of her head; she looks like an old bulldog. The other is more elegant, but the skin on her neck hangs like a turkey’s wattle. They move in a small formation, three little hens…
* * *
At first they’re invisible. And then all at once you begin to spot them. They shuffle around the world like armies of elderly angels. One of them peers into your face. She glares at you, her eyes wide, her gaze a faded blue, and voices her request with a proud and condescending tone. She is asking for your help, she needs to cross the street but she cannot do it alone, or needs to clamber up into a tram but her knees have buckled, or needs to find a street and house number but she’s forgotten her spectacles… You feel a pang of sympathy for the old lady, you are moved, you do a good deed, swept by the thrill of gallantry. It is precisely at this moment that you should dig in your heels, resist the siren call, make an effort to lower the temperature of your heart. Remember, their tears do not mean the same thing as yours do. Because if you relent, give in, exchange a few more words, you will be in their thrall. You will slide into a world that you had no intention of entering, because your time has not yet come, your hour, for God’s sake, has not come.
PART ONE
Go There – I Know Not Where –
and Bring Me Back a Thing I Lack
Birds in the Treetops Growing by My Mother’s Window
The air in the New Zagreb neighbourhood where my mother lives smells of bird droppings in summer. In the leaves of the trees out in front of her apartment building jostle thousands and thousands of birds. Starlings, people say. The birds are especially raucous during humid afternoons, before it rains. Occasionally a neighbour takes up an airgun and chases them off with a volley of shots. The birds clamour skywards in dense flocks, they zigzag up and down, exactly as if they are combing the sky, and then with hysterical chirruping, like a summer hailstorm, they drop into the dense leaves. It is as noisy as a jungle. All day long a sound curtain is drawn, as if rain is drumming outside. Light feathers borne by air currents waft in through the open windows. Mum takes up her duster, and, mutter ing, she sweeps up the feathers and drops them into the bin.
‘My turtledoves are gone,’ she sighs. ‘Remember my turtledoves?’
‘I do,’ I say.
I vaguely recall her fondness for two turtledoves that came to her windowsill. Pigeons she hated. Their muffled cooing in the morning infuriated her.
‘Those repulsive, repulsive fat birds!’ she said. ‘Have you noticed that even they have gone?’
‘Who?’
‘The pigeons!’
I hadn’t noticed, but sure enough, it seemed that the pigeons had fled.
The starlings irked her, especially their stink in the summer, but in time she reconciled herself to them. For, unlike other balconies, at least her balcony was clean. She showed me a messy little spot near the very end of the balcony railing.
‘As far as my place is concerned, they are filthy only here. You should see Ljubica’s balcony!’
‘Why?’
‘Hers is caked all over in bird shit!’ says Mum and giggles like a little girl. A child’s coprolalia, clearly she is amused by the word shit. Her ten-year-old grandson also grins at the word.
‘Like the jungle,’ I say.
‘Just like the jungle,’ she agrees.
‘There are jungles everywhere these days,’ I say.
Birds are apparently out of control; they have occupied whole cities, taken over parks, streets, bushes, benches, outdoor restaurants, subway stations, train stations. No one seems to have noticed the invasion. European cities are being occupied by magpies, from Russia, they say; the branches of trees in the city parks bow down under their weight. The pigeons, seagulls and starlings fly across the sky, and the heavy black crows, their beaks open like clothes pegs, limp along over the green city swards. Green parakeets are multiplying in the Amsterdam parks, having fled household birdcages: their flocks colour the sky in low flight like green paper dragons. The Amsterdam canals have been taken over by big white geese, which flew in from Egypt, lingered for a moment to rest and then stayed. The city sparrows have become so bold that they wr
est the sandwiches from people’s fingers and strut brazenly about on the tables in outdoor cafés. The windows of my short-term lease flat in Dahlem, one of the loveliest and greenest of the Berlin neighbourhoods, served the local birds as a favourite repository for their droppings. And you could do nothing about it, except lower the blinds, draw the curtains or toil daily, scrubbing the splattered window.
She nods, but it is as if she is paying no attention.
The invasion of starlings in her neighbourhood apparently began three years earlier, when my mother was taken ill. The words from the doctor’s diagnosis were long, alarming and ugly (That is an ugly diagnosis), which is why she chose the verb ‘to be taken ill’ (Everything changed when I was taken ill!). Sometimes she would get bolder, and, touching a finger to her forehead, she’d say:
‘It’s all the fault of this cobweb of mine up here.’
By ‘cobweb’ she meant metastases to the brain, which had appeared seventeen years after a bout of breast cancer had been discovered in time and treated successfully. She spent some time in hospital, went through a series of radiation treatments and convalesced. Afterwards she went for regular check-ups, and everything else was more or less as it should be. Nothing dramatic happened after that. The cobweb lurked in a dark, elusive cranny of the brain, and stayed. In time she made her peace, got used to it and adopted it like an unwelcome tenant.
For the last three years her life story had been scaled back to a handful of hospital release forms, doctors’ reports, radiological charts and her pile of the MRIs and CAT scans of her brain. The scans show her lovely, shapely skull planted on her spinal column, with a slight forward stoop, the clear contours of her face, eyelids lowered as if she is asleep, the membrane over the brain like a peculiar cap, and, hovering on her lips, the hint of a smile.
‘The picture makes it look as if it is snowing in my head,’ she says, pointing to the CAT scan.
The trees with their dense crowns growing under the window are tall, and reach all the way to my mother’s sixth-floor flat. Thousands and thousands of little birds jostle for space. Close in the hot summer darkness we, the residents and the birds, evaporate our sighs. Hundreds of thousands of hearts, human and avian, beat in different rhythms in the dark. Whitish feathers are borne on gusts of air through the open windows. The feathers waft groundward like parachutes.
Some Of The Words Have Got Altered
‘Bring me the…’
‘What?’
‘That stuff you spread on bread.’
‘Margarine?’
‘No.’
‘Butter?’
‘You know it’s been years since I used butter!’
‘Well, what then?’
She scowls, her rage mounting at her own helplessness. And then she slyly switches to attack mode.
‘Some daughter if you can’t remember the bread spread stuff!’
‘Spread? Cheese spread?’
‘That’s right, the white stuff,’ she says, offended, as if she had resolved never again to utter the words ‘cheese spread’.
The words had got altered. This enraged her; she felt like stamping her foot, banging her fist on the table or shouting. As it was, she was left tense, fury foaming in her with a surprising buoyant freshness. She would stop, faced with a heap of words, as if before a puzzle she could not assemble.
‘Bring me the biscuits, the congested ones.’
She knew precisely which biscuits she meant. Digestive biscuits. Her brain was still functioning: she was replacing the less familiar phrase digestive with the more familiar congested, and out of her mouth came this startling com bination. This is how I pictured it working, perhaps the connection between language and brain followed some different route.
‘Hand me the thermometer so I can give Javorka a call.’
‘Do you mean the cell phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you really mean Javorka?’
‘No of course not, why ever would I call her?!’
Javorka was someone she had known years before, and who knows how the name had occurred to her?
‘You meant Kaia, didn’t you?’
‘Well, I said I wanted to call Kaia, didn’t I?’ she snorted.
I understood her. Often when she couldn’t remember a word, she would describe it: Bring me that thingy I drink from. I usually knew what her thingies were. This time the task was easy: it was a plastic water bottle she always kept at hand.
And then, she began coming up with ways to help herself. She started adding diminutive words like ‘little’, ‘cute little’, ‘nice little’, ‘sweet’, which she had never used before. Now even with some personal names, including mine, she would add them. They served like magnets, and sure enough, the words that had scattered settled back again into order. She was particularly pleased to use words like these for the things she felt fondest of (my sweet pyjamas, my cute little towel, that nice little pillow, my little bottle, those comfy little slippers). Maybe with these words and phrases, as though with spit, she was moistening the hardboiled sweets of words, maybe she was using them to buy time for the next word, the next sentence.
Perhaps that way she felt less alone. She cooed to the world that surrounded her and the cooing made the world seem less threatening and a little smaller. Along with the diminutives in her speech the occasional augmentative would jump out like a spring: a snake grew to be a big bad snake, a bird into a fat old bird. People often seemed larger to her than they really were (He was a huuuuuuge man!). She had shrunk, that is what it was, and the world was looming.
She spoke slowly with a new, darker timbre. She seemed to enjoy the colour. A little crack showed up in her voice, the tenor became a touch imperious, with a tone demanding the absolute respect of the listener. With this frequent loss of words the timbre of her voice was all she had left.
There was another novelty. She had begun to lean on certain sounds as if they were crutches. I’d hear her shuffling around the house, opening the fridge or going to the bathroom, and she would be saying, in regular rhythm, hm, hm, hm. Or: uh-hu-hu, uh-hu-hu.
‘Talking to someone?’ I’d ask.
‘No one, just me. Talking to myself,’ she’d answer.
Who knows, maybe at some point she was suddenly unnerved by the silence, and to chase off her fear, she came up with her hm-hm, uh-hu.
She was scared of the dying and that is why she registered deaths so carefully. She, who was forgetting so many things, never missed mentioning the death of someone she knew, either close to her or distant, the friends of friends, even people she had never met, the death of public figures that she heard of on television.
‘Something has happened.’
‘What?’
‘I am afraid it will be a shock, if I say.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Vesna’s died.’
‘Vesna who?’
‘You know Vesna! Second floor?’
‘No, I don’t. Can’t say I’ve ever met her.’
‘The one who lost her son?’
‘No.’
‘The one who was always wearing all that make-up in the lift?’
‘Really, I don’t.’
‘It only took a few months,’ she’d say, and snap shut the little imaginary file on Vesna.
Her neighbours and friends had been dying. The circle, mostly women, had shrunk. The men had long since died, some of the women had buried two husbands, some even their own children. She would speak without discomfort of the deaths of people who hadn’t meant much to her. The little commemorative stories made therapeutic sense; relating them she fended off the fear of her own dying, I suppose. She evaded, however, any mention of the death of those nearest to her. Her close friend’s death was followed by silence.
‘She got so old,’ she said tersely a little later, as if spitting out a bitter morsel. Her friend was almost a year older than she was.
She threw out all her black clothes. Before, she would never have worn bright colour
s; now, she was forever wearing a red shirt or one of two blouses the colour of young grass. When we called a taxi, she refused to get in if it was black. (Call another cab. I’m not getting into this one!) She tucked away the pictures of her parents, her sister, my father, which she used to keep in frames on the shelf, and set out the photographs of her grandchildren, my brother and his wife, pictures of me and beautiful pictures of herself from her younger years.
‘I don’t like the dead,’ she told me. ‘I’d rather be in the company of the living.’
Her attitude towards the dead changed, too. Earlier they had each held their place in her memories, everything was set out in a tidy manner, as in an album of family pictures. Now the album was disintegrating and the photographs were scattered. She no longer spoke of her late sister. On the other hand she suddenly began mentioning her father more often – who was always reading and had brought books home, and who was the most honest man on earth. Yet she was compelled to bring him down a peg. The memory of him was permanently tainted by the greatest disappointment she had ever known, an event she would never forget, and which she simply could never forgive him for.
The source of the memory was altogether disproportionate to the bitterness with which she spoke of it, or so at least it seemed to me. My grandparents had some good friends, a married couple. When Grandma died, these friends looked after Grandpa, especially the wife, Grandma’s friend. My mother once happened on a scene of tenderness between the woman and my grandfather. Grandpa was kissing the woman’s hand.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths S.) Page 1
