Wild Woman

by Marina Sur Puhlovski

  XX.

  The doorbell rings, who is it, I ask, dragging myself to the door, the dog barking behind me, but I already know who it is, of course, it’s Adam, who can be relied on to come the minute my darling disappears, so that we can be alone.

  How come you always know when I need you, I say, kissing his cheek; he shuffles in, like a convict dragging a ball and chain, he is clearly dragging something, but it’s invisible, because addiction is heavier to drag around than a ball. His whole life has been as heavy as a ball and chain, at least seen from the outside, and how else can you look at it except from the outside, you can’t penetrate another person’s inner soul no matter how hard you try, you can only guess, and inside that gaping darkness behind these guesses are ghosts that even the person himself won’t penetrate, at least not in his lifetime.

  And now I need you, too, he says mysteriously, because, of course, I know that he needs me in a way that I don’t need him, we both know it, he needs me for a particular reason, something’s happened.

  I take him into the hall, where I’ve been sitting because that’s where I have the TV, the background sound of the world; my hair hangs in limp strands, like the day, I’m in my house clothes, a washed-out black track suit with worn knees, my face is grey, like the day, and I’m exhausted, because waiting for my vanished husband is killing me.

  I look awful, I say, but he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t see what I think he sees, the scruffiness and the fatigue, no you don’t, he says, your eyes just look smaller, like a mouse’s, he says, that’s because I haven’t put make-up on, I smile, but I like it that way, he says.

  He’s not yet drunk because he’s come here from work where he can’t drink, but he is tipsy. On his way over he must have downed two brandies or a beer, or both, because he’s already a bit stiff and sniffly, the way my father used to be when he drank but wasn’t yet drunk.

  He recently got a job at a bank, again through one of his father’s clients, being the good tailor that he is he makes suits for politicians and directors, and also drinks with them, so he used his connections to find a job for his son, for he didn’t know what to do with him anymore.

  Adam first started studying law, then dropped it and switched to literature and philosophy, then dropped that, too, although he still doesn’t know why. Wicked tongues would answer that it was probably because he wanted to drink, not study, which wouldn’t be far from the truth, but there was no answer to why he wanted to drink to the detriment of everything else. Maybe it was drink that kept him in this world, because who knows what keeps us here and why we ever came. Not everybody comes into it to be successful, some come to fail and fulfil their destiny through failure, as if they’re paying a debt, and that is their peak achievement, I once thought when I saw him sitting on the terrace of a café, waiting for me because he was early. He had come early on purpose, so that he could sit there on his own, drink and stare into empty space, at least that’s how it looked, but people who stare into empty space are themselves empty, and he’s not, he’s a cup spilling over, a cup full of himself. When he stares into empty space he is staring into his own amazing, astonishing, fascinating self. He delights in himself. And drink keeps him to himself, it protects him from society whose demands steer you away from yourself and into the obligations and duties of work and marriage, into acquiring things, into situations where you have everything and everybody except yourself, that being right and socially desirable. That’s where he parted ways with the rest of the world, I realised, he couldn’t be of use to society so he harmed himself, because society does not forgive. My father drank within the protective embrace of his family and, like most drunks, he never dragged anybody into his drunkenness, except for his parents, them he couldn’t avoid. When he realised that nothing would come of his studies, his father tried to find him a wife, he took him to his rich friends in Podravina to marry him off to one of their daughters who would inherit land and a fully furnished house that was just waiting for a young newlywed couple to move in and begin to fill it with offspring. But he would sit there like a log, showing no interest in any of the marriageable girls, just drinking and waiting for his father to drive him home and put an end to this nonsense. He had affairs, but only casual ones, for a night or two, never an official girlfriend, and after so many years, chasing me had become almost as routine as saying Hello, I would tease him; because he kept swearing he was serious, but I would just smile and lift his hand off my knee.

  In order to live the way he wanted, sitting at a table with a glass at hand, wallowing in himself, he needed money, a pile of money, he needed, as the fairy tale goes: “table, deck yourself” (with all and sundry), “ass, spew forth gold pieces from your rear” and “cudgel, out of the sack” (to defend the table and ass from thieves); in other words he needed a miracle, because you can’t earn a pile of money, and when you have to earn it you don’t have time to spend it, so what you have is nothing, he would say, constantly looking around to see if it would appear somewhere. Not in a bag that somebody lost and he found, as my father hoped, no, in a less imaginative form, say, in the form of an inheritance, like in a nineteenth-century novel, where that was precisely what they were waiting for. The grey streak in his thick blond hair confirmed that such a thing was not inconceivable, because anyone with a grey streak, it was said, would one day have so much money they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

  Then something shifted in just that direction – his father’s sister appeared; she owned a big estate in Podravina and on the property were curative springs, so she marketed the water and, combining medicine with religion, founded a kind of sect to compliment the idea of health, and raked in a stack of money. This woman, who marketed the health of both body and mind, now fell ill herself but she did not resort to her curative waters and religious books and prayers to get better, no, she came to seek help in Zagreb, with its hospitals and doctors and science, she came to her brother.

  Adam was ready to jump in, because this unmarried aunt was his only living second-degree relative; he had lost three uncles at the end of the war, they’d been killed as presumed Ustashas. They were simply liquidated, Adam told me, one was run over by a car, the other was thrown off a train, and nobody knows what happened to the third because he disappeared after they carted him away from home and he was never found.

  Adam was preparing to write a novel about his uncles as soon as he got rich and had some peace and quiet; he needed complete freedom to be able to write. Not something he had sitting in the bank every day, settling loan requests and wondering, while serving customers in his thick-lensed glasses, how he had ever wound up here and how he could get away, without having to face the Podravina brides whom his father kept arranging for him to meet in the belief that an unmarried man was a failure. At the end of his working day, when he was released from that prison, all he could do was drink and bemoan his fate in the form of his father, who had never understood or asked what he wanted, but rather had always high-handedly doled out advice about keeping a low profile, because it could save his life. And his father would sing a song about patience, diligence and perseverance, the three foundations of life that provide the basis for everything else, but the message would go in one ear and out the other, and he would do the exact opposite. As a result, and as his father had warned, he risked winding up on the street, despite the protection of his mother. She was ill now (emphysema) and depended on his father, too ill to help him, as she had when he dropped out of law school to study philosophy, against his father’s wishes. That’s a waste of time, he said at the time.

  This was the situation at hand when his extraordinary aunt appeared, with bowel cancer and a well-run estate of curative waters worth a fortune, and no one to leave it to except her brother, thought Adam’s father. Or to me, Adam reckoned, because, as he said, such a fortune was too late for his father whose fate was sealed and life coming to an end, whereas with that kind of money his own life could flourish, take a new turn, away from this swamp of a ba
nk where I’m already turning into a frog, he moaned.

  An underground struggle began in the house to win over this sister/aunt of crumbling health, to see who would get into her good graces, the father or the son, the brother or the nephew, who would do more to please and help her, so that she would make out a will in favour of the one or the other, rather than die intestate, because then his dead uncles’ children and grandchildren would also appear as heirs, and that meant that the whole fortune would have to be divided up, making it worthless.

  Adam’s self-sacrifice for his aunt proved to be greater than anybody could have imagined because he agreed to everything, not only did he give his room to his aunt and move into what was basically the pantry, not only did he keep her company and comfort her in her pain, but he also helped her when she had to empty her bowels, he washed her and he washed her bed pan, he changed her clothes, and he took unpaid leave from the bank so he could do all this, which even his father accepted as appropriate. He wasn’t disgusted by her old, disintegrating body and its excretions, or by the stench of illness and the unholy sights of the body, which is how I saw it, even though I had long experience with illness, had seen all sorts of things and knew that imagining these horrors was worse than having to face them in someone close to you, when you see what real helplessness is and when everything becomes natural. He also had another reason for hoping that things would work out in his favour, and that was that his aunt was extremely well-read, she read not just religious but also secular books, she knew Dostoevsky and Tolstoy by heart, and for years had done a lot of her own writing and had brought those notebooks with her in a big wooden chest.

  You’ve now got your treasure chest, you finally found it, I joked with Adam, not because Adam believed in these writings, which he never even glanced at, but because they were his guarantee of success. He was counting on having a spiritual kinship with his aunt, on the power of such closeness; he already had a blood connection, demonstrably the strongest, and now he also had this spiritual one, which gave him an advantage over his father. Because his aunt never got along with her brother, ever since they were children he had always thought of her as a little too excitable, and her preoccupations crazy. And he didn’t change his mind even when she proved to be an adept businesswoman and made a lot of money.

  Unlike me, that crazy woman is a success, he said, slapping himself on the forehead, thinking how Adam had inherited that crazy side of the family, but without a sense for business, he was just unlucky that way.

  When his aunt’s health showed some improvement, he returned to work, and that was the last I knew until about three weeks ago, when he dropped by. Again my hair was lank, my eyes as small as a mouse’s, my clothes shabby and my face grey, but we talked as we’re talking now, always about the same thing – why was my husband disappearing and what was he doing when he was gone, because we couldn’t understand what he got out of his disappearing act, except making me angry. He’s crazy, I guess, was Adam’s conclusion.

  I told him how I had recently gone out to look for him and spotted him through the glass window of the café Dubrovnik, sitting there on his own, alone, I said, and when he saw me walk in he got up and guiltily ran down the stairs to the bathroom, as if that would save him. But it didn’t save him because I went down after him, dragged him out of the toilet onto the square outside, grabbed both his arms and shook him and for the umpteenth time asked why, why, but there was no answer. He just shook his head and sighed as if he had done something terrible, he hadn’t wanted to, but had done it anyway, he couldn’t help it.

  At least if I had caught him with another woman, I would have understood, I said, I would have been able to deal with it, but this is enough to drive you nuts. That’s probably why I take it, because I can’t understand it, because I’m waiting to understand it so that I can deal with it, I thought to myself.

  You’re eating yourself up for no reason, he’s not worth it, Adam said, and we went over the story all over again, hoping to find something that would lead us out of the labyrinth of my husband’s life, into which I’d strayed and now couldn’t find my way out. And we remembered the myth of Theseus and Ariadne who gave him a ball of thread to unroll when he entered the labyrinth, so that he could find his way back, because, according to the myth, how you enter is how you shall leave. It sounded simple if you had an Ariadne to give you a ball of string, but if you didn’t, then you knew how you’d enter but you’d never get out, was the depressingly logical conclusion we reached, after which we fell silent.

  Both of us light up, filling the air with smoke rings that disappear as soon as they form, something that’s always amazed me, because though these otherwise invisible shapes look permanent, they’re not. Everything is like this smoke, I say, we’re like this smoke, I say, we appear only to disappear, we disappear only to appear, the principle is the same, only the forms are different, including us, for a second. So much seriousness over something that isn’t really a form, I say, it’s constant change, change as such, so much senseless drama, I say. We want to keep something that can’t be kept, and even though we know it, we still want it, we still hope for it, we still stick to our idea of permanence, which doesn’t exist, I say. He understands, he agrees, he’s enjoying himself, he always has something to say that opens up the conversation, and opens me up, maybe he would enjoy himself more if I didn’t stop his attempts to kiss me on the mouth instead of the cheek, but he enjoys our talks, which are just ours, because we don’t share them with others.

  There is a bottle of wine on the table, of course, Pharos, I spare no expense when it comes to wine; I pour it into two slender wine glasses etched with white wreathes, they were my mother’s, the only two left. There are also some things to nibble on, a bit of hard cheese that you can always find, this time it’s Trappist, one of the better cheeses, and some salami, pickles and bread. I put the cheese and salami on a platter, uncut, so that we can slice them as we eat, the pickles are in a plain yellowish bowl and the slices of bread in a white porcelain dish painted with blue flowers and nested in a basket. It looks nice, that’s something, at least.

  He goes on to tell me what happened, his aunt died, he says. Died, I ask, surprised, wasn’t she getting better? It was what they call an end-of-life rally, he says, a kind of remission, only false, because after that she died in such excruciating pain that it was horrible to watch. And now you’re rich, I ask, but not aloud, because it’s wrong to mention money when talking about pain. He’s quiet, he sniffles, he frowns, as if he can see his aunt, she suffered, he says, shaking his head, in spite of all her saints and prayers and faith; they heaved a sign of relief when she died. Nobody should die like that, you should just go to sleep, he says, falling silent again; something bad is coming, so bad that he can’t get it out.

  Where is she buried, over there or here, I ask. Here, he says, in the family grave, and it was at the cemetery, he says, at the funeral, that a man appeared, a younger man, with slicked back hair, in a black suit, holding a hat, they thought he was one of her clients, but it turned out he was her husband, she’d married him a year and a half before, secretly, obviously. He took his marriage license out of his pocket to prove it, and then the will, in which she left him everything, the property, the money, everything, as a kind of insurance against the family even thinking of challenging the marriage. In the will, which she wrote before she came to them for treatment, she bequeathed to him, her nephew Mr. So and So, because she also had other nephews, her books and the chest of writings that she’d brought with her, as the most important part of her legacy, instructing him to read through and edit these writings, so that they could be published, Adam says, watching me trying to keep a straight face, but I couldn’t hold back my laughter, I was about to burst.

  She left you her religious books and papers, I shriek with laughter as he looks at me in astonishment because he doesn’t find it funny, he had washed his aunt, cleaned off her shit, read to her by her bedside for days, a bit of Crime and Punis
hment, a bit of the lives of the saints, and all that for nothing, he said between his healthy white clenched teeth, wanting to break because he felt duped.

  But how did she know that you’d be interested in all that before she even came here, I ask laughing, I just can’t stop, it was too ridiculous...

  She knew because I once spent the summer with her when I was a boy, and even then, I would sit in the shade, reading all day, I discovered my first book, Ben Hur, in her house, and that’s when I realised that this, this is what I wanted, I wanted the life you find in books, not this life in reality, the life you find in books. That’s how she knew, he finishes, still ultra serious, smoking, exhaling as if wanting to let out his soul.

  What did your father say, I ask, half-smiling to myself, not to him, because the story with his father seems serious, unlike his own story, which isn’t even close.

  And then I hear what his father did, the man with the narrow face, pointed moustache and stiff bearing, always in a suit, always looking down on people, we called him the “uptight gentleman”, the gentleman tailor duped by life – he went into the room that Adam had turned over to his aunt, where she’d kept her things, including the books and the big chest with her writings. He stuffed the books into a plastic bag as if they were utterly worthless, Adam says, I tried to save one or two but he stopped me dead in my tracks with just one look, he says. He dragged the bag into the courtyard and emptied it, then came back for the chest, pulled it noisily into the courtyard, with us following behind, he says, my mother, brother, his wife and son, because we had just returned from the funeral. I tried to tell him that that was my inheritance and he had no right to it, and that I’d at least like to read some of it, but I might as well have been talking to a wall, he says. The notebooks flew out of the chest onto the books and all over the courtyard, and I ran to collect them but he had already scooped them up, making sure he had all of them, that’s how bloody-minded he was, he says of his father. Then he lit a match and set them on fire until it looked like a funeral pyre, and he stood right next to it, stony-faced, watching the rising flames, looking up at the sky, enjoying it.