Wild Woman

by Marina Sur Puhlovski

  The daughter is shocked, they had told her mother these things half-jokingly, as something completely unimportant; did he finish high school, yes, did he enrol in university, yes, did he travel around Italy for two years, yes, so how was he supposed to pass his exams if he was travelling in Italy, he’s still young, he’ll catch up, anyway you were the best student in your school and look at how you wound up, a clerk and a typist, I don’t spare my mother a thing, look at how many geniuses flunked their year and were the worst students in their school, it takes talent to resist established thought – where did I pick up these stupid phrases, I wonder today, when I have to pay the price for them – now that he’s with me you can be sure he’ll pass his exams, we’re already working on it, I reel off the words in defence of the man who is right for me, the man I haven’t slept with yet, he’s not yet my lion, but I’m defending him like a lioness.

  At the same time, I remember, it occurs to me that he never told me anything about his time in Italy except that he stayed with a cousin from Split, who lives in Rome, not a word about all the wonderful things he saw, about the amazing architecture, about the paintings and museums, about Michelangelo or the pope, that’s ancient history, he said putting an end to the conversation, and I guess he hugged me and said I was beautiful so who needed Italy? I admire him for having travelled at all, when I haven’t, for having seen things, when I haven’t, for having experienced things, when I haven’t. I don’t even have a passport. The other thing that went through my mind was how it was strange that he couldn’t speak a word of Italian even though he spent two years in Rome and other places in the country, and that Leon, whom I’d already met, with his goatee, eagle-eyes and mocking smile, had said to me: if he saw Italy, then I’m the pope, to which I took mortal offence and went on the attack, saying what kind of a friend tells such lies. That’s Leon, he said, he likes to provoke.

  He didn’t learn the language, what he did was look, he said, Italy is for looking, for getting drunk on culture, not for wasting time on learning the language, and if I had any doubts they were quashed by his parents, Danica and Frane, who confirmed those two lost years there, two serious people crushed by life who certainly wouldn’t lie. And later it was also confirmed by Renata, his married cousin from Rome, when she briefly visited Zagreb and stayed for lunch. A beautiful, elegant woman, obviously rich, and wearing designer clothes.

  Now, when I remember them talking about Italy in that cramped living room, crammed with furniture, where the sofa bed was pulled out for the son at night, and then folded back again in the morning, where the father sewed the hems, coughed and watched television, and the mother worked the sewing machine, like my cousin Julia, or peered smilingly from the kitchen where she cut clothes using Burda patterns – I see that they were stiff, that they exchanged confused glances, that they were constrained, and that they used few words because they hadn’t been taught how to lie or how to deceive people, they are the ones who had been deceived, but they did it all the same, they did it because they had to, because they were forced to by their one and only son, of whom there were both afraid.

  VI.

  His parents will leave the apartment so that what has to be done can be done, he has seen to that. I don’t ask him anything, I’ve got my own problems, my own fears of all sorts of things, I wish I could call the whole thing off. But it’s too late now.

  We arrive at the flat while they’re still packing, searching for this and that, and everybody feels awkward. Except, maybe, him. He’s irritated that they’re still there, scowling as he sits in father’s armchair and lights a cigarette. His father is asthmatic, so smoking is confined to the balcony, but not now, now he’s the boss. He’s pretending to browse through the newspaper. I’m sitting on the sofa with the green slipcovers that still haven’t lost their shape. I’m sitting there all tense, my legs pressed together under the maxi that had sealed my fate. At least this part of it. I hear them moving around the apartment, in the hall, the bedroom, the bathroom, talking softly, whispering, I can sense a growing fear, but I don’t understand it because they’re in their own house.

  They never go anywhere, as if they were stranded in this flat, on some kind of rock, up on the third floor with no elevator, his father can barely gasp his way up, he wheezes so loudly that you know he’s coming even before he reaches the door. And when he walks in, he coughs for a long time, in the cramped hall. Everything in the place is cramped, all the rooms, even the balcony, where you can’t even fit a chair. The bedroom would be spacious if it weren’t stuffed with furniture, a huge double bed with an ottoman at the end where they sit to put on their shoes, along with walnut wardrobes, heavy and dark, as if designed to make life difficult, to cast a pall over it, even in your own flat. As if life outside weren’t hard enough, with all its demands, shakeups indignities, political pressures and constant evil. In nice weather even this dark room would be brighter if you could open the window, but you can’t. Nearby is a leather factory and it stinks of carcasses, of skinned animals, the smell is enough to make you faint. The two of them sleep here at night as if they were in a prison, and the son sleeps here during the day, when he takes an afternoon nap. I will not let myself be led into that room, the execution will take place in the living room, on the sofa.

  His mother, looking distraught, bursts into the room, saying she’s looking for her brooch, she left it somewhere, and slowly she moves around on her square legs. She’s one of those women with broad hips but narrow, drooping shoulders, and she’s still pretty, although in a doll-like way, and although she’s old, she’s already in her forties. I draw that kind of heart-shaped face on scrap paper when I’m on the phone and the conversation is boring. It’s always faces, in profile or en face, with the eyes, nose, mouth and hair, finishing with the neck. I rarely draw bodies, and if I do they are slim, like a model’s. Her nose is exactly like the ones I draw – small and straight. And her mouth is like what I draw, too – full, the lip-line heart-shaped, not too big. She’s got high cheek bones, which is what makes for her regular features. Her eyes are big and blue, the deep blue of a summer sky, which her son has inherited, and with their dark lashes they look fabulous, they don’t need any make-up. Her dark hair contrasts with her milky white skin, skin like her son’s. It really is milky white, like in books, but I don’t really like that. For instance, I’m blond and olive-skinned – that’s a better combination. She looks surprised, like a three-year-old who doesn’t understand why everybody is searching for him. That surprised look is heightened by the freckles on her nose and cheeks; her son has them, too. But his nose is bigger than hers, he’s bigger in every way, a head taller than she is, scrawny, angular, built like his father.

  She’s all red from searching for the misplaced brooch, she’s looked on the bookshelf, in the tin box of threads, in the shell-studded box on the television stand, in the kitchen, where on earth did I put it, she asks herself, her eyes flitting like a bouncing table-tennis ball from the kitchen to her son in the armchair and back again. I offer to help her look, but she decides to stop, I can do without the brooch, she says, though I see that she needs it to close the brown woollen jacket she’s wearing over a light blue blouse. Maybe it’s in your room, I say, but she waves away the idea with her white, freckled, plump hand, saying she’s already looked there, and smiles at me dolefully as she walks out, as if paying her condolences.

  She was supposed to live in a villa in a leafy suburb, as the wife of an officer, but instead of a life of good fortune and plenty, the war came, changing everybody’s plans, mostly for the worse, which was her case because the officer died of typhoid at the very outset of the war, although some fared better, like those who lazed around the villas confiscated after the war. She didn’t tell me the story of the officer, her son did, and according to him he was the one who lost out, who was short-changed, as if he’d have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth if she’d married the officer, as if he’d been created in that never-achieved marriage, and then mi
stakenly wound up with this poor excuse of a father, who wouldn’t even let him smoke in his presence. And whose coughing pierced his ears all night long. He didn’t say it as crudely as that, but I got the point, that he’d been robbed of the wealth that should have been his. And in which he had revelled in advance. And so now, though he couldn’t even afford a little Zastava 500 car, he saw himself sitting behind the wheel of a silver Lincoln Continental, wearing a custom-made suit, with a Rolex on his wrist, in New York, of course. These stories of his made me explode with laughter, I dubbed him Lincoln Continental, but he just nodded, swinging his crossed leg – it was never still – saying, you’ll see. And he’d light another cigarette on the ember of the old one. But when I asked him when he was going to earn all that money for a life that would give him a Lincoln Continental and a Rolex, he’d just repeat that I’d see, and nod at the wealthy future he already saw as his. Then his father came into the room with his shiny bald head, his hat in his hand, his dark green loden coat dancing around him, saying that he would be back in two or three hours and we should take care. The son jumped up and almost pushed him out of the room, closing the door behind them, and they began arguing in the hallway. I heard their voices but not the words, and I didn’t feel like listening. There was the sound of the front door finally closing and he came back into the room.

  It was nothing like what Steve – the forty-year-old I had chosen to deflower me – had promised: tender and painless and afterwards lovely, no, it was painful and bloody and anything but lovely, but at least it was over and done with.

  VII.

  We live now like two butterflies flying over a meadow of flowers, fluttering here, there and everywhere... Lectures at uni in the morning, and once or twice a week the cinema in the afternoon, usually the one near my house that shows art films, Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, then we’d see friends from uni, couples like Petra and Filip, or just people like Adam, who had joined our crowd. We see each other every day after lectures, there are endless conversations in pubs – when you become a world-famous writer which, of course, you will – we philosophise, laugh, drink, all in clouds of smoke, because we all smoke a lot, we are together everywhere, in his apartment, in mine, holding hands, arm in arm, embracing, darling, sweetheart, honey, a kiss on the eye, on the cheek, on the mouth, on the chin, under the chin.

  In the street we run into a poet, he’s our age, wearing a black, broad-brimmed Bohemian hat, with a black beard that I scan for any remains of food, it’s so thick it’s bound to get some stuck in it, I say to myself, he’s grown it because he’s going bald. He stops us, he wants to read us a poem that he pulls out of his pocket, alright, says my beloved, as long as it’s not long. He reads the poem as if he’s on stage, performing in front of an audience, full of himself, and we smirk, it’s good, old man, says my one and only, patting him on the back, while the poet looks at me goggle-eyed, as if he wants to grab me.

  There’s a lot of flirting going on. Adam flirts with me, too; strange that people from the Podrava region should call their son Adam, I think when I learn that he’s from there, a rural boy, that his father is a tailor and mother a midwife, that they moved to Zagreb from Bjelovar five years ago so that he and his brother could get an education, and that they’re still building a house to which we’ll be invited once it’s finished. Whenever he gets a chance, he puts his hand on my knee, and I immediately remove it. I don’t get angry, I giggle, I like being twenty years old, having a boyfriend and an admirer, and I get along better with Adam than with the others, sometimes better even than with my own darling, whom I love more than anything... And from talking I move on to just enjoying his presence, his mere existence, being together, without any demands except that he be with me. And so in the evening I often doze off on his lap, I lie down on the sofa, my head on his lap, and drift off to sleep.

  He’ll wake me up before he leaves, because we’re at my place, in my little room next to the kitchen, where I moved from the bigger room next to my parents’, because my father is in there dying, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Anyway it suits me to have so much space separating me from them, the kitchen, the hall, it’s like being on the other side of the world. Of course, they come into the kitchen, shuffle around in their slippers, creak open the door, take glasses and dishes from the kitchen cabinets, pour water, say something to each other, but then they leave and we’re on our own again. Mind you, not for long enough that we can do anything, they’re too close by for that and you never know when they’ll burst into the kitchen, maybe even say something through the closed door, usually it’s to ask if we need anything, if we’re going to eat after all that studying, my mother has been known to come in with lemonade as a pick-me-up, though she does knock first, just in case, but we’re not really up to anything, we’re happy the way we are.

  When he leaves, when I walk him out, laughing, kissing his mouth, his nose, his eyes and his ears, so that he can feel my kisses all over, I pull out the sofa, make my bed and go to sleep, all happy. At night I fly over my city, I simply leap off the pavement and fly. It’s wonderful to soar over the houses, the roofs, waving my arms like wings, my heart almost bursts with the joy of it, it’s better than flying on a magic carpet, like in Scheherazade, which I imagined when I was a child, better than anything I’ve ever known, even if it is only in my dreams, because, honestly, what’s the difference?

  The only thing it’s not better than is being in the heavenly forest I dream about before the wedding. At first I’m somewhere down below, above there’s a clearing, greener than any green I’ve ever seen, sunnier than any sun I’ve ever seen, emanating something that makes me feel as if my lungs are expanding, a feeling I’ve never had before, it’s like some kind of magical breathing, and it’s all here laid out for me, it’s all mine, it’s all waiting to embrace me, and it’s merely the road to something even more perfect, to the woods at the end of that clearing, to the heavenly forest.

  As soon as I enter it, I know it’s heavenly, it tells me so, there’s no doubt about what kind of a forest this is, it’s incorporeal, and yet with a body, with the bodies of the trees, the bushes, the grass, but there’s nothing hard, nothing sharp, nothing to prick you, nothing to hurt you, the way there otherwise is in nature, which is magnificent to look at, but don’t lie down because it will attack you.

  When we’re not at my place then we’re at his, lounging on his living-room sofa after lunch. His father Frane nods off in the armchair, which is where he does everything anyway, reads the newspaper, hems, coughs, drinks his coffee, watches television, whatever’s on, he likes the news, we’re not interested in that, or in politics generally, we don’t even read the newspaper, except for the last page, for its humorous column, but his mother never sleeps, she sits down for a bit, washes the dishes and then tackles the sewing, because the clients will be coming later in the day.

  We don’t sleep either, we just enjoy lying next to each other, side by side. Standing on the table are glasses of red wine with the wedges of peach inside, and when they soak up the wine we eat them with a fork as a treat; only soft, ripe peaches are good, they dissolve in your mouth, and we move to the balcony, where we can smoke, to finish the wine. We’ll stand next to each other, our elbows resting on the railing, and look down below, or off into the distance, feeling full, languid, floating through life like a cottonwool cloud, and he’ll tell me how a sparrow once fell off the balcony, the little bird hadn’t learned to fly yet, and down below was a cat waiting for it with open jaws, and it polished it off in a second.

  In the evening we’ll go to the cinema. Or to a nearby restaurant, on the edge of town, where he lives, where his local friends go, where I don’t really like going, I’d rather be with our friends from uni; his crowd is too mixed for my taste, and they’re all men, one is hunchbacked, he always sits on the arm of the chair otherwise you can’t see him, he works at the telephone exchange, another is some sort of former football star, a dubious character, they call him Blacky, the third is an
actor who’s never sober and tried, unsuccessfully, to make an actor out of my darling, because he’s supposedly talented, and because when you’re an actor you can earn enough money to buy yourself a Lincoln Continental, but he flunked the entrance exam, so that was the end of that. And he could have also been a painter, his mother Danica told me when we were discussing all of her son’s talents, showing me a watercolour he did when he was ten and they had framed.

  Then it’s summer and we go to the seaside for a week, to Omišalj, the two of us, with Flora and her boyfriend Boris, whom she’d picked up at Ria’s, but she mysteriously vanishes, probably because she’s busy being a sorceress and casting her spell, I now think, but at the time I’m amazed that she can disappear like that, people here don’t just disappear, except when they die. The lads are in tents down below and us two girls are in the little hilltop town above, staying with a friend of my mother’s in a narrow, stone house. The friend’s mother, dressed all in black, her braided hair wreathed around her head, makes sheep cheese in the cellar, then puts the yellow rounds of cheese on the shelf to dry, they smell to high heaven, and she sleeps in the adjoining space. My mother’s friend and her daughter sleep in the room above that, and we’re in the room above theirs, which has a double bed, a wardrobe, a chest, and everything is ancient, huge, the room is so full you can barely move in it, but we love it.

  The village is on a hill, and after dancing at the seaside hotel down below every night, my darling walks me back up to the house. On the way, we always stop and sit on the bench to make out, which we did that night, too, when I took off my sandals because they were pinching me, and when we finished, we continued on our way, with me barefoot, which I didn’t notice until I got to my room, even though I’d been walking on an unpaved road laid with stones.