Wild Woman

by Marina Sur Puhlovski

  Well, now you’re in a position to grasp at what’s allegedly been caught, which upsets you and keeps you awake, you wait day and night for the moment when you’ll see him again and catch that something in the corner of his departing eye, your stomach knots when you unexpectedly run into him in your neighbourhood, and you immediately think it’s no accident, you are the reason why he’s here, although it’s a busy street, and so an ordinary hello becomes an event of universal magnitude that you take to bed with you and all atremble dissect it down to the smallest detail, looking for hidden messages that work in your favour, what he said, how he looked at you, was he flustered, did he turn around to look at you, and by morning you’ve gone completely crazy, your chemical make-up has changed, you’re incapable of judging, of separating the wheat from the chaff, ready to eat the chaff as if it were wheat, until it poisons you to death. That’s what happens if you fall in love with love, with the possibility of love, with the perfect setting, the kind found in books that men don’t read, like in The Witch of Grič, for instance, whose instalments I still keep in the storage compartment of the sofa, if you fall in love with the unreal, which will never be confirmed by reality, because it can’t be. Because it doesn’t belong to it.

  There’s also the other side of things, hidden behind the visible, the other story, which unfolds before your eyes, the other one’s story, which you don’t know, because you know only your own story, you imagine the other’s only in relation to your own, beyond that the other’s is empty and you imagine yourself filling that void, just as I imagined it when I ran into him in my neighbourhood and he was flustered. He even blushed as if he had been caught on a secret assignment, following me, as if we didn’t see each other at uni, where we could have settled everything, but didn’t, as if he hadn’t simply said hello and moved on, but rather had taken advantage of the opportunity.

  He’s shy, the nineteen-year-old idiot decided, dancing home to dream of the future, while he rushed off to a small afternoon party at a nearby flat, to his thirty-five-year-old mistress, he later confessed, who had a tail at the end of her rump, a stunted tail; imagine, she’s got a tail several inches long, he said with a mocking laugh, taking demonic pleasure in somebody else’s deformity, I should have left him as soon as he said that, it was so indiscreet, and he loved it.

  But I didn’t. Something inside me prickled, something went dark, something shrank and went cold, and then finished up with a sheet thrown over it, like unused furniture that’s covered to protect it from the dust. I started building my room for the unspoken, un-discussed comments I kept to myself, afraid that talking about them would force me to draw conclusions. And then to act accordingly, which was the hardest to do, which was why these comment rooms were created in the first place, so as not to have to act. Until the room filled to bursting point, and life boiled down to one single comment, ending with the word: enough!

  At that time, we were still only sending signals, it was all still innocent, I was at home going crazy, my tonsils inflamed and I had to stay in bed, feverish, sweating, aching, taking caramelised sugar for my sore throat, our next encounter at uni ruined, an encounter that would resolve everything, I felt sure, after that encounter in the street, when he had blushed to the roots of his hair. I’ve been dying for two days, feeling more and more miserable, more and more desperate, with only books to keep me company, and then Flora appeared, my blood sister; there’s a party at Ria’s tomorrow night, she says (Ria and she attended the same courses), he’s been invited, too, she says, it’s Ria’s doing, she says, she’s being generous because she’s given him up. And, anyway, she’s interested in somebody else who’s coming, she says... Ah, Ria, that red-headed, scrawny witch with the imposing nose, dragging around some pretty-boy whose eyes can’t get enough of her and she doesn’t know what to do with him because the pretty-boy is dumb, and even his good looks don’t help; plus, she has a strange brother who’s already been in prison, and he isn’t even eighteen yet, I mused; it gives me the chills just to think about the future that’s descending on me; I’m a mess.

  That was three o’clock now, and I had to get better by seven, I decided; a bath, do my hair, make-up, I had my work cut out for me, I jumped out of bed with a temperature of thirty-eight, by the evening it dropped a whole degree; I never recovered so quickly in my life as I did that day when I had to worry about my own ruination, I muse now, seeing myself in the dining room all those seven years ago, when it was still a kitchen, before I moved the kitchen to the pantry, and traded in the kitchen cabinet for two rustic-style cupboards – ready to go to the bash. In my brown maxi dress, with its patterned details in the same colour, tailored to flatter me, not the opposite, as it eventually transpired, you’d think the devil had personally stepped into the story...

  Everything worked out well, as I had imagined, the dancing, the groping, the gazing into each other’s eyes, time stopped. At eleven in the evening he walked me home, that was my curfew, and on the way it started to snow. Out of the blue, after a warm day, so early, we were surprised by the big wet flakes of snow that melted as soon as they touched the ground, and I looked up at the sky, shielding my eyes with my hand; I didn’t see anything around me anymore, it was quiet, solemn, taking me outside of the world, to a place where everything was possible, where miracles happened. He took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders, because anyway I had a cold and had forgotten my cardigan at Ria’s, I was just in my dress. At the door he kissed me, a wet kiss, I could smell his saliva, and I didn’t mind. I died of happiness.

  IV.

  There’s something wrong with that boy, my mother said, worried, two months after I had brought him home to introduce him to my parents so that he could come to the house and visit me. He isn’t just my boyfriend, he’s a colleague from uni, we have the same interests, books, the same plans for life, I explained to my mother, my feet weren’t on the ground, I was on cloud nine, thrilled to have found a soulmate, with whom I was in love, because there were plenty of guys around for the physical part, but to find a kindred soul, mused the virgin who had yet to be penetrated and whose sexual life was therefore a matter of fantasy.

  Her body was still untouched, there was just a bit of groping, he was not in a hurry, he said, and I even less, I was afraid of being deflowered, which, they said, hurts, tears you until you bleed, they said, so what kind of pleasure was that, I secretly wondered, to be torn and bleed; others had already tried it on with me, but to no avail, each time I’d run away. Actually, one time I did set out to get it done, the deflowering, just to get it over with, like an operation, I’d heard that the best for that were slightly older guys, who were well-worn, rather than young guys bursting with energy and wanting to explode inside you... God help me!

  And I found just such a forty-year-old, with a square head streaked with grey, good-looking in a way that meant nothing to me, because I didn’t care, but tall, straight-backed, a good body, a tennis player, an oil expert who’d travelled the world, a picture of experience. He literally offered me his services like a surgeon, he would do it so that it didn’t hurt, he said, there was nothing to worry about, he’d done it before. And it would be in a wonderful setting, at his friend’s villa in the woods, with a fine meal, drinks, then the bedroom, everything nice and gentle and civilised, like in a fairy tale, though fairy tales didn’t include that part, except metaphorically, and it meant nothing to the body for the simple reason that you couldn’t eat or drink a metaphor, you couldn’t seek refuge in it. And once we’ve finished with that first part, you can’t imagine the pleasure that awaits you, he promised, oh yes I can, I thought, because I’d tried it on myself when I entered puberty; we know what’s what, I mused, but obviously kept it to myself, it was private, I was the object and he was the instrument that would work on it, that’s all. If I was satisfied, he could continue to provide his services, he said, nuzzling me like a cat, it was the first time that I noticed the cat in him, one that would make short work of you if you were a mo
use, but since I wasn’t, he played up to me. And he told me about a student he had serviced when she was at uni, and it calmed her, he said, liberated her from any kind of drama with her peers; it’s you I have to thank for graduating, she told him when they parted, my jaw literally dropped listening to him talk about this robotic idyll as the ultimate consolation, and I discarded it in advance.

  Still, I went with him to the villa, it belonged to a lawyer friend of his who looked sick, floundering in a mouse-grey suit that was too big for him, his face like a crumpled sock, white as wax, stretching a smile that seemed servile, especially as he kept agreeing with everything you said, you were always right, and it was with that smile that he walked us to the room upstairs, raising the glass in his hand as if toasting us, and when we came back downstairs he was there waiting for us, nodding at a job well done, except it had been a fiasco... I had undressed and laid down on the bed, he had undressed and laid down next to me – when I saw all that hair on his chest and arms and the signs of fat on his body, I didn’t let my eyes stray any further – and he started to massage my breasts to help me relax, because I was all tense, and then he pressed his hairy body against mine and I cringed. I can’t, I won’t, help, I’m leaving, I screamed my head off, I sat up, hugging my knees, closing myself off. He hovered over me, Just try it, you’ll see you’ll enjoy it, we’re already half-way there, he said, trying to reason with me and, as I later came to understand, for my own good, but it didn’t work because I just wanted him to disappear, to evaporate, to not be there, to never see him again, not even casually in the street.

  Because a few years later – during which he disappeared as if wiped off the face of the earth – his lawyer friend, standing at Republic Square, at the place where Zagreb’s trendy sophistos hang out from noon till two, and where you can inspect them like cattle at a fair, informed me with that same stretched smile that he had died, a heart attack, they said, and he said, I didn’t know he had a heart problem, he never mentioned it. It’s possible it was something else, he stressed... And then added something that shocked me, that he’d been a spy, a Russian spy, which was discovered only after his death, just so I knew. He suddenly turned serious when he said these last words, there was no smile. He looked even sicker and more miserable, floundering in that mouse-grey suit of his.

  I didn’t understand why I needed to know that, or even what I had learned except that it was something from another planet, from another part of the universe, outside my own reality, which I believed to be the only reality, strong and indestructible from the outside, destroyable only from within, following clearly set rules. So I left that particular story outside somewhere, and locked the door. Because spies didn’t walk around my world and people weren’t killed like in the movies and books, in my world you looked out into the radiant distance, where a miracle would happen and the expectation of that miracle remained strong, even when the ground under my feet turned into quicksand.

  V.

  What’s wrong with him, what, I accost my mother because her words are eating away at me, I want her to say that everything is fine, that she gives me her blessing for the person I think is the one, the person I’ve been saving myself for, because somebody had drummed that into my head – that there is that one and only you have to save yourself for – somebody, maybe her, books, the church, no, not the church, because I don’t go to church, we aren’t allowed to go to church, but the church still inhabits my mother, she went to church for years, she had virtually lived in the church before she got married, before the war, and I guess she spontaneously absorbed its ideas, one of which was to save yourself for the right one, in other words for your husband, because only he can be the right one. And from the church, through my mother, this idea spilled over into me.

  I sing his praises to my mother, he’s polite, he’s a gentleman, he holds my coat for me and pulls out the chair, if he sees me shivering from the cold he’ll take off his jacket and give it to me, leaving him to freeze, he always chats with her in the kitchen before we retreat to my room, and I remind her that he is somebody I can study with, that we are interested in the same things, the same books, that we’ve been together for three months now and he still hasn’t touched me, he’s waiting for me to be ready, that’s how much he cares about me, I want to tell her, but I don’t, I don’t want to embarrass either of us, not her or me.

  I still don’t know about the woman with the tail, he’ll tell me about her later, about the radio journalist whose needs he satisfies, I realise, whom he’s met through Leon, another journalist, a family friend, I still believe that I’m the only one. At least since the girl he’d been with before me, the girl who left him, Dunja, her father died while they were together, he said, and her father was all she had because her mother had died long before. He went with her to visit her father in the hospital, practically every day, they brought him lunch because the hospital food was terrible. Then one day her father’s bed was empty; awful, that bed, already made up for the next patient while her father was lying in the refrigerator down there in the basement, he said, she didn’t even cry or go to see him, she couldn’t, but when they left she threw his lunch into the bushes, he said, pretending to throw something, obviously impressed by the gesture. After the funeral she moved in with him and his family, because she was afraid to be alone in her flat, he said, but their place was cramped, I had already seen that for myself, a living room, bedroom and kitchen, you could barely call it three rooms, so it was a tight squeeze. That was in the spring, and in the summer she went to the seaside, but he stayed behind, he had to study so he could get his high school diploma in the autumn, because he had failed the summer term; she had passed. During her summer vacation she fell in love with a musician at a dance, confessed everything to him when she got back, all tanned and happy; he was a guitarist and singer and she immediately married him, he said wistfully, but not unhappily, it didn’t surprise him. Guys like that are attractive, he said, especially at the seaside, in the summer, he said, when it’s all about the body, I thought to myself.

  But the odd thing is, he said, that now he again has a girlfriend with a dying father, I thought it was odd, too, although my father has been at death’s door forever, and even odder, I found, was that his own father was retired, like mine, but on a disability pension, not an old age pension like my father, and it was so little that it was hardly worth mentioning, so his mother had to hold down two jobs, like mine.

  My mother is an office worker during the day, and types at night. His is also an office worker during the day, but she sews at night. She isn’t a seamstress, but she makes things for whoever needs something, colleagues, neighbours. The only work the husbands can manage is household stuff. And even then, only shopping and cooking, not ironing or cleaning, that’s beyond them. Both help the wives with their work, my father puts carbon paper with the typing paper before she rolls it into the typewriter, and then sorts out the number of typed copies for delivery, and his father hems the clothes, and both are pitiful.

  That’s what I was thinking when I saw his father Frane hunched over in the living room armchair, cross-stitching some of the clothes – that he was pitiful. My father didn’t look so pitiful to me because I was angry with him, I fought with him and hated him and told him it was his fault that he was sick because he drank, but when I saw his father, I realised that mine was pitiful, too. But I didn’t ask myself what I was doing in this house which was just like mine, where the mothers slaved away and the husbands were sick, whether it was their fault or their fate didn’t matter, and where you felt bad so you got out; no, I felt at home, I was glad we were so alike and I saw this similarity as an argument to use against my mother – the man I chose was the right person.

  She had already met them, Danica and Frane, and she liked them, they are good people, our kind, they were struggling like us and had nothing, she said, she had no complaints about them, they were fine – but their son wasn’t.

  Why not, I jumped on my mother, I wa
nted to hear her arguments, so that I could knock them down, because every argument can be knocked down, and my mother knew it, so she didn’t give me any, because that would have been the end. Because what she knew, what she sensed, what the angels had whispered in her ear, would turn into fear, into a foreboding, a constant worry, a desire to protect her daughter from anybody who could take her away, into her own bad experience that she’d passed on to her daughter, it would be anything but the truth she felt in her heart – that this man was going to destroy me. Or at least would try to.

  But like all stupid twenty-year-olds I had decided to get my way, because you’re indescribably stupid when you’re barely twenty and haven’t yet experienced anything except in your imagination, based on the stories you’ve read in books which you see as real, though they’re not, and you project yourself into the story as if it’s going to be yours, but you haven’t had life’s robotic principles instilled in you for some sort of protection, principles based on logic, on controlling bad karma, bad karma can’t be avoided but its blade can be blunted if it is not too extreme, so I extract my mother’s arguments out of her like a dentist pulling teeth, which he will then throw away.

  It’s not normal to flunk every single grade in high school and then pass them all privately, says my mother, embarking on a battle she has lost before she started, so she doesn’t wage it openly, face to face, loud and clear, no, she does it in passing, while doing something else, she tosses the words out in passing, over her back, in the kitchen, the heart of the house, where, as usual, we’re talking, she throws them into her daughter’s gaping jaw because the daughter is now a beast – and it’s also not normal to study for two years and not pass a single exam, I’d think about that if I were you, she says, already defeated by the resistance she’s meeting.