Wild Woman

by Marina Sur Puhlovski

  And the aunt was up there smiling, I think, I never met her but I imagine her, who knows why, to be a thin, shrivelled old lady, with warts on her face, curly hair and a raspy voice, happy to make a fool out of her brother who had never appreciated her and was now getting his comeuppance. He hadn’t even managed to save her from dying, which she had hoped he would, and he might have received his inheritance had he succeeded, he, not her nephew who had tried from the beginning, but to no avail.

  The neighbours rushed over to the pyre, too, Adam continues, they were afraid that if the flames spread to the orchard they would engulf their houses, somebody even called the police, who arrived when it was all over. The fire was extinguished but everything was destroyed, only the ashes remained, he says; they wrote up their report, told us that we would have to pay a fine, but his father just rubbed his hands, nodding. We’ll pay it, with pleasure!

  Adam falls silent, looking morose, he doesn’t see me anymore, he takes his glasses off and starts cleaning them with the tail of his checked shirt, which he wears loose, all the while rolling his faded blue eyes. He’d probably set out to sail the waters of his dashed hopes, hopes that had been real to him, I think to myself, until he was suddenly thrown overboard, like on a sinking ship, and now he’s drowning, trying to swim to shore.

  That night I let him keep his hand on my knee longer than usual, just to comfort him for his loss, and he withdrew it himself when he didn’t need it there anymore, and I realised why he was born half-blind – he’d been short-sighted since childhood, since childhood his eyes had been barely visible behind the thick prescription glasses, since childhood those glasses had been a burden, he was always afraid that they would break and he wouldn’t be able to see anything... he knew what he would see when it happened and he refused a priori to look at it. With others, their sight deteriorates with experience, but he didn’t need any experience, it was as if he was born with experience. I know people who fight such a crappy fate, they step half-blind across Persian carpets, but he didn’t and wouldn’t, he wasn’t here to overcome his miserable fate, he was here to live it, an endless loser.

  He left as day was breaking, taking the first bus home, because it was Saturday. I didn’t walk him to the bus; I’d stretched out on the sofa while he was still numbly sitting there, and was already half asleep when he said he was leaving, rose to his feet and walked out, the old parquet creaking under his heavy step, and then I heard the door slam shut. Left on the table was an ashtray full of cigarette butts, an empty bottle, glasses with dark blue stains and smelling of wine, and leftovers of cheese and salami that would go bad, I thought, opening and immediately shutting my eyes, pulling the big black-and-white scarf off of the back of the armchair to cover myself and tucking my feet under the dog’s warm body.

  XXI.

  I make a decision to pack some underwear, a change of clothes, a few basic items of make-up in a plastic “Adidas” travel bag on the spur of the moment, at six this morning when the bells of St. Blaise tolled; Hail Mary, said the bells, and Tanga yowled, and my husband walked into the house calming her down, be quiet, it’s just me, stroking her soft silky fur, probably glancing nervously at the living-room door to see if I would appear. Because we didn’t sleep together anymore, he still slept on the sofa in our room, but I had removed myself to the sofa in the little room, a useless act of protest.

  I did not get up and have a go at him, I just listened to him step into the dining room, carefully open the door, and sneak into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water, he never drinks out of his hand like me, that’s the only way I can get my fill of water, just as he never eats food out of the serving bowl, only on a plate, thank you very much, I’m not a pig, not that one can tell from the outside, I think to myself. Then, making a noise as he put his glass in the sink, he tiptoed away, accompanied by the dog that would join him in bed because it had divided loyalties. He’d take off his clothes, socks and shoes, sprawl out on the sofa in his undershirt and shorts and sleep until at least noon, when he would get up to eat and then go back to bed again because he’d had an exhaustingly sleepless night. Except this time I won’t be waiting for him in the dining room itching for a fight, with eyes as small as a mouse’s and a mouth like a sad clown, looking ugly, which I’m not, no this time I’ll simply disappear, I decided. Once he’s asleep I’ll pack quietly and take the bus to my mother’s in Plitvice, I decided; this time he can wait for me when he finally wakes up, he can feed and walk the dog and wonder where I am while he’s making sandwiches, because there’s nothing for lunch.

  But then comes the evening, and the night, and I’m still not there, I imagined the scene in my mind, and he can’t even run away because who’s he going to run away from if nobody’s at home except for the poor dog that needs to be taken care of, so he sits and waits, listening for the sound of the key turning in the Werther lock, for the creak of the door hinge, wondering when, when I will come back, imagining who knows what. Maybe I’m with another man, though that’s hard to imagine because he’s had me focussed on him as if he chained me to him, and yet, and yet, there’s every reason for doubt, maybe something has happened to me, maybe I was run over by a tram or a car, he thinks in despair. The TV is on, and probably the light as well, to dispel the darkness inside him, but I know it won’t, the flat becomes eerie when you’re waiting for somebody and you don’t know where that person is, when things are uncertain, the flat becomes a prison.

  Now I’m the one who’s free and he’s the one in prison, I think to myself vengefully, covering the streets in long strides, going from my street to Primorska on the left, towards Ilica, the high street, because you can also take the road on the right, towards JNA Street, which has no shops but is lined with chestnut trees, I used to go that way to high school and later to uni, it was always a nice walk, it felt like being in the countryside, that street was a gift from heaven, special somehow. In Ilica, on the other side, everything is different, shops, traffic, crowds, the tram stop for Republic Square, the city centre, branching out from there in all directions. Opposite the tram stop is what we call Britanac – British Square, with its marketplace, and what with summer coming, it’s now a riot of colours with all the fruits and vegetables that have just come into season, the flowers releasing their fragrance into the air, it even wafts over my way as I wait for the number two tram to take me to the bus station on the other side of town.

  As I walked out the door I kept hoping I wouldn’t run into anybody – I was born here and we all know each other – because I don’t want to have to even say hello to anybody, let alone be asked even the simplest question, like how are you, how’s your mother, when is she coming back from Plitvice. But that’s exactly what happened when Dragica, a neighbour from Primorska Street, whom my mother knew from before the war and had now become her friend, emerged from the marketplace across the road. She was pale and covered with yellow freckles from brow to chin, I’d never seen so many; her permed hair was dyed the same colour. Tottering under the weight of her shopping bag stuffed with vegetables and leeks and lettuce almost spilling out of it, she crossed the tram tracks and walked over to me at the tram stop. She automatically put her shopping bag down and stood next to it, hunched over, as usual.

  Before the war she worked in a factory and lived in a small room with no water and no toilet, more often hungry than not, until Matek appeared who brought her a bread roll every morning for breakfast, and later she married him; he was a good plumber, hard-working, not a drunk like most of them, and they had a son and sent him to school to become an engineer. And everything would have been hunky-dory, as they say, if that son hadn’t married a girl, with a slight limp, who worked in the factory, and then had fallen in love with somebody else, somebody whose skin was so clear and glowing that she looked as if she bathed in milk, a pretty girl in a cold sort of way, her blond hair always in a bun and a silk scarf around her neck, because she hailed from more refined pre-war circles. So he divorced his wife and married her,
as a result of which his ex fell ill, stomach cancer, which you get when you have trouble digesting, people say, and that sounds about right to me, but Dragica couldn’t abandon her poor ex-daughter-in-law who was virtually on her deathbed, and so she took it out on her son. The ex-daughter-in-law treated her cancer by eating macrobiotic and organic food, which was imported from the West, along with its contamination, and it was expensive so her ex-mother-in-law, now working part-time making costumes for the theatre, bought it for her.

  I was friends with her niece Dora in high school, until we were caught in the supermarket stealing chocolate that was meant to be a present for Mother’s Day. As we were being taken away, Dora whispered that she wanted me to take the blame – we had put the chocolate in my bag, so the evidence was on me – but just then her mother walked in to lodge a complaint about some bowl she had bought... Talk about coincidence! Now she would see her daughter and daughter’s schoolmate being hauled off on charges of theft. I whispered back to Dora that I wouldn’t take the blame, figuring that two were less guilty than one, because the blame would be shared, that two would fare better than one, especially because of her mother, and she never forgave me for it and I never forgave her. After that fall-out we still saw each other, though not often, and so the first thing I asked was how was Dora, and she said that Dora was fine, she was about to finish her chemistry studies and was planning to marry her boyfriend. Then she asked me about my mother, how was she, when she was coming back, saying that she missed her, that she and Matek had nobody to play cards with in the afternoon once a week, and she had nobody to have afternoon coffee with once a week, and then I asked how her ex-daughter-in-law was doing and heard that she had recovered, completely, she said, the cancer had gone, not a trace of it left. My goodness, that’s a miracle, I said, and I really thought that, even if in an uninterested way, because her cancer was hardly my business. I was saved from further conversation by the number two tram loudly trundling to a stop in front of us. My neighbour Dragica picked up her shopping bag, contorting her face into a smile, it was that kind of a face, and told me to say hello to my mother. I will, I said, staring at her flaky eyelashes, so light and red along the edges of her eyelids, like an albino’s.

  I managed to grab a seat on the tram, which I always take as a victory, especially when it’s crowded, like this morning, because it was a Saturday and the tram was full of peasant women who’d come in from the surrounding countryside and now, having sold their goods at the markets, were going home, pushing their way onto the tram with their empty baskets, oblivious to everyone, travelling through town with their bags on their lap, so that I barely noticed the vacant seat. As soon as I sat down, I plunged into my own world, like Alice into the rabbit hole, a world that had been turned on its head, I plunged into my muddle of a life that had trickled through my fingers, something I refused to accept, as if this mess would clear itself up by itself, as if it were a dream, not reality. Everything was clear, everything was settled, everything was in its place, roughly speaking, anyway, because you can always correct the details, and then suddenly everything was all over the place, like a cake that collapses in the oven. But life isn’t a cake that you can choose not to bake and so avoid failure, life makes you do things, you have to try even when you’re not sure of the outcome, you always have to hope for the best. I was running away from home not to create more of a mess, but to clear it up, to make my husband understand what was waiting for him, where all this was going, to make him come to his senses, as they say, so we could continue from where we had started, despite his illness, which we’d put aside, just as the doctor advised, the best doctor in this part of the world and beyond: don’t think, let go, live the life you have, nobody knows how much time one has on this earth, but for as long as you do, for as long as you live, it’s forever.

  And then, in the reflection of the tram window, I suddenly saw a cat, a Cheshire cat, like the one in Alice in Wonderland, I remembered it from the Disney movie, the cartoon, when I was a child; it was fat, soft, striped like a prison uniform, only in pink and blue, with a waving luxuriant tail, always grinning, moving, disappearing and reappearing, removing its head and putting it back on, and it told me that I was crazy. I’m crazy, too, it said, just so I didn’t think it was discounting itself, everybody is crazy, it chuckled, and then disappeared until only its grinning white teeth were left. And then the teeth turned into the moon from which they had emerged.

  The Cheshire cat is right, I thought, standing in front of the ugly bus station, so ugly that it was like the beginning of the end of the world, with its dilapidated reality, a grimy ruin, like in films, black, grey, dirty, covered with graffiti, reeking, pigeons wading like drunks through pools of oil, an old lady staring at the red vomit on the ground that resembled a sprawling lobster, she stared as if she couldn’t get enough of it – we’re all crazy because we’re all unreal, no foothold anywhere, I mused. Except in art, except in books, I corrected myself, passing through the supposed reality of the bus station as if in a dream, as if it were a picture to which I didn’t belong, I belonged to the imagination not to this wretched self-enclosed reality, I belonged to miracles I could imagine, because I am myself a miracle, I comforted myself. The books know.

  I haven’t told her I’m coming, she’s my mother, I’m always welcome, she’s always happy to see me, and she knows everything, I don’t have to explain anything to her and she doesn’t criticise, she knows that life sets unavoidable traps. I don’t even know if there’s a place for me to stay, I’ve never visited her there, I couldn’t because I had my husband to take care of, but I know that her room on the ground floor of the hotel is for staff, and that it’s just a bit bigger than our little room, but square and dark, she had said, because she never asked for anything.

  It probably has two beds, I thought, stepping off the bus into the sharp, unpolluted air of Lika, a planet of forests, light, dark, coniferous, deciduous, trees wherever you looked, and roaming among them wild animals, like bears, for instance. You can run into a bear when you go out to buy cigarettes, my mother said, although she didn’t smoke but somebody else who did went out to buy cigarettes and saw a bear on the road, and since my mother, unlike me, was chatty, she asked everybody questions and never forgot a thing. If I had stepped onto the bus with the idea of the end of the world, I now stepped off it into its possible beginning, not even a three-hour drive from end to beginning, from death to birth; in my mind I was jumping up and down with joy, free at last, I sang voicelessly, because that’s what I’m like when I find myself in nature, even if it’s just for a moment. Because happiness doesn’t last, exhilaration quickly cedes to disconnection, you’re on the outside not on the inside, you’re not a forest, you’re not a forest animal and you will never be one, you’ll just look at this paradise knowing that you’ve been expelled from it, but your body remembers.

  But now my travel bag was on the ground, between my legs, where I’d put it while inspecting the hotel across the way, the biggest hotel in Plitvice, built horizontally to complement the forest, and I knew my mother wasn’t there but they’ll know where she is, I decided, picking up my bag by the handle. Suddenly there was a pat on the back of my shoulder, a slap almost, I dropped my bag, and, half angry, whirled around. But my anger disappeared upon seeing the smiling face of a virtually toothless old man, his mouth a dark pit, almost bald, with white strands of hair combed over his barren skull, his dimmed eyes sinking into the web of wrinkles on his face, and a moustache just like the beggar’s in my street, young somehow, like his red puffed-pillow-like cheeks... Srećko, the park’s agronomist, an engineer of horticulture, in his fifties like my mother, though he looked both a hundred years older and a hundred years younger, a child or an old man, I couldn’t make up my mind, I was arguing with myself and consequently, as happens, with the whole world. And my mother’s “client”, of course.

  He was from Herzegovina, considers himself to be a linguistic expert, my mother told me, and his speciality wa
s placing accents on words in written texts, which drove everybody crazy – it was a constant battle.

  Some ten years earlier he had lost his job in Plitvice – a bureaucratic stitch-up, my mother said he had told her, and instead of looking for another job, he sued to get his old one back and wound up in a ten-year-long legal suit, forsaking work for that entire period because he expected to win his case. He did nothing for ten years, but during that time, when he was still young and in possession of his teeth and his hair, he managed to obtain what he needed from a network of people whom he regularly visited, day after day, taking a little something from each of them. A place to sleep here, lunch there, somewhere a dinar, elsewhere just a few words, an hour or two to warm himself up with a shot of brandy in the winter or cold lemonade – again with brandy – in the summer, and so he lived to hear the court ruling that he was to be reinstated in his old job, where he remained. That’s where he met my mother and became her “client”, because she gave him a shoulder to cry on – apart from his unhappy love life, because he wanted to get married, but he wanted a young wife and such women eluded him, there was also his battle to receive monetary compensation for those ten lost years, a battle he was yet to win.

  There was something almost ceremonial about the way he brought me to my mother, as if presenting her with a personal gift, here’s your daughter, he said, putting down my travel bag, waiting to see her reaction, proudly crossing his arms over his chest. Then, since my mother had already eaten and I insisted that I didn’t want any food, that I’d have dinner later, he accompanied us to the staff hotel, carrying my bag as an excuse. On the way, he offered to take me for a walk along the lake and to the waterfalls, he’d show me everything, he said eagerly. We’ll see, I said, bristling at the mere possibility, and then finally, before departing, he invited my mother and me to dinner, lamb roasted on a spit, at the Lika House, before you leave, he said to me. His treat, of course.