Dry Season
Page 27
‘Are you cold?’ the stewardess asked in her navy blue suit. She reminded me of the receptionist at the hotel.
I stroked my head, an empty, almost mute feeling, and turned to her, as if I only now understood what she meant. No, I’m fine. When she left with a smile, I wrapped my arms around my body. The aunt had said that it would be easier for me from now on, I would feel lighter, no matter what had happened. She understood that what I had done was not intentional; everyone else thought it was intentional. My ex-husband – especially my ex-husband – my father, a few friends, relatives, and my mother. Even she condemned me, although from beneath the water’s surface she must have seen that I didn’t cross that line in the pool on purpose; I simply lost the ground beneath my feet. A moment, two moments, and you don’t know where you are anymore. Especially if you have a child in your arms. So I can shake my head, like I did just now with the stewardess. It wasn’t that I preferred my orgasm over my son; there was no window, no chair by the window, no snowflakes, and no teddy bear flapping in the air – no lover, in other words, as my ex-husband claimed. I wasn’t as crazy as that; maybe I was slightly more crazy, but not in such a cinematic way.
My father later asked me if I had done it to get revenge on my mother. After all, she too had swum into the pool. The only difference was, she had swum in on her own; it hadn’t occurred to her to involve anyone else in her madness, although personally, I wouldn’t have objected. I would have put on my swimsuit, just as my son put on his swimming trunks, and followed my mother in, just as my son followed me in. A moment before, I would be screaming intolerably, just as he screamed. I don’t remember anymore what it was about; I suppose he wanted something, some trifle, and I wouldn’t let him have it. I just wanted him to be quiet, to disappear even, to vanish into the sky like Remedios the Beauty – although that happened somewhere else, in a different book. My mother, probably, had had the same wish, when I was a child, even a teenager; in this we were completely alike; all we wanted was to sew, to draw patterns on translucent paper, but they didn’t let us. I suppose that’s why we looked for silence at the bottom of the pool.
Where was my ex-husband at the time, or my father? I don’t know and I don’t want to know. In fact, I have always claimed that I didn’t know what happened after I stepped into the water. Later, still wearing my swimsuit, a little out of breath, with gleaming beads of water on my body, I just picked up the receiver and called for an ambulance. In an almost calm voice, I said they needed to help me pull the body of a three-and-a-half-year-old boy out of the swimming pool. Before the woman on the other end asked me for the address, she was silent a while.
I too was silent. When my father arrived – I don’t know who called him, probably the neighbours – he shook me a few times by the shoulders; I will never forget his cold hands on me, nor his mute face when he saw, when he realized, that I had completely closed up, that there was no longer a way out; my ex-husband, meanwhile, when we were finally alone, when the red lights of the ambulance had quieted down and I had taken off my swimsuit, went so far as to pull my hair, a painful, passionate pull, but all the same, a pull of despair, of alarm, and partly too of horror that I was capable of anything like that, and only when I screamed at him to let go of me, that I didn’t understand why he was being violent, only then did he release his grip. He shoved me away, as if rejecting an animal he had shot in the forest. At first he thought he wanted this thing, but when he got closer to the body on the ground, it was all over for him. At night I dragged myself into my son’s room and said I had to give him something to drink. The shadow of the skinny man with the Adam’s apple once more, and now for the last time, pulled my arm. He twisted it like he was crazy, I suppose because he wanted to stop me from ever again drawing eucalyptus leaves on paper, I suppose because it suddenly occurred to him that he too was to blame for everything that had happened. Did he not lift up my skirt, once, on a balcony, remove my nylons – or maybe I had already removed them myself, I’m not sure anymore – and make a child for me that I didn’t want? But my mother, too, had never wanted me; all the same, she persuaded my father that they should go and take me from the orphanage.
I was following the stewardess’s navy blue shape with my eyes, until she stopped, stared at me, and again said something. But the only thing that came out of her mouth were snowflakes. That’s how I knew she must be good at love-making, at opening her mouth wide when they put their big, wet thing inside her.
‘Are you all right, are you all right, a glass of water, a glass of water?’
I relaxed my grip around my body and, without answering, turned to the round window. I would have jumped through it if I could. It wasn’t that I desired this return to old, crowded Europe, where almost every passer-by felt the need to say to my face, ‘that’s the old woman who went out with a black fellow’ or ‘look at her, she’s still horny,’ but I also could not stay in Africa. The aunt, counting stars and goats, said that my cleansing demanded that I go back. If I wished, I could return to their yard one day, but for now I had to face my father and, if I could, my ex-husband, and I had to swim in that fateful pool one more time. Despite so much time having passed, I had to remember what happened, why I then left my son’s room almost untouched, although I did go there to listen to the music he would have listened to as a teenager; why I eventually started hanging a grown man’s shirts in that room, even though later in my story he entered a psychiatric hospital; why I carried that photograph in my travelling bag, where I found the same sort of face, with a high forehead and stringy hair, narrow shoulders and powerful thighs, dressed in red corduroy; and last but not least, why I hoped that with Ismael I could get back what had gone away and could never be?
I got up and made my way along the narrow aisle, past the rows of passengers, to the lavatory. The receptionist was nowhere to be seen; if she had been close by, I would have asked her, how do you know when somebody’s dead and not just badly hurt? – she would certainly have known; when does the body get that crooked, unnatural pose, the sign of a kind of absence, or presence, depending on how you look at it? But since she was not there, I locked myself in the loo, sat down on the toilet, and pulled a cigarette and lighter out of my bra. Never before had I smoked like this, but there’s a first time for everything. Like telling a story. Like murdering your own child. But did I really murder him? Did I really pull him beneath my belly in the water, even though he must have been grabbing at my swimsuit and breasts? Did I really hold him there until not only his arms but even his little fingers were drooping, until the lotuses too, those dark, veiny lotuses, were still. I do not know, but the court, especially when they heard the story about my son’s later outbursts and attempts at suicide, declared me insane.
There was a knocking on the door; the woman with the snowflakes in her mouth must have called for help to get me out of the loo, but I went on quietly smoking. All my life I’ve played the madwoman, if only to gain five minutes so I could re-colour the expanse of a leaf to the end. But when I got there, they said it was pointless, my botanical motifs did not reflect nature. My son is dead, even if I still insist he is alive. To prove them wrong, I went to Africa – in my mature years, to be sure, but I didn’t have the courage before, nor the awareness that time was running out, that I no longer had everything in front of me – and there I found a lover. Somebody might say that I invented this trip too. Maybe I did. Maybe it’s true that I never stood on the opposite side of the street, never slept in the hotel, never followed the white dog in the rain, never rented the house, never visited the gold mine, never moved the goats around the yard, never slept under a tamarind tree with my armpits exposed, but despite everything, Ismael’s writing was still lying in my yellow bag. I touched it before I went to the loo.
‘Ana...’
The voice that was calling to me from the other side seemed real. A voice that came from a warm, slender body. I closed my eyes and imagined for a moment that my grown son was s
tanding outside. The one I had pushed under my belly in the pool when he was a child. And when I pushed him under, all that I was thinking about was my mother’s expression on the surface of the water. It was, in fact, the smile of a rag doll. Not until she had drunk her fill of water could she go back into her solitude.
I opened the door and stepped into the volume of the plane.
THE AUTHOR
The Slovene writer Gabriela Babnik, born in 1979, received her master’s degree from the University of Ljubljana in 2010 with a thesis on the modern Nigerian novel. Dry Season (Sušna doba), which was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2013, is her third novel. Her first, Skin of Cotton (Koža iz bombaža, 2008), earned her the Slovene Book Fair award for best literary debut, while In the High Grass (V visoki travi, 2010) was shortlisted for Slovenia’s prestigious Kresnik Award. A new novel, Intimate (Intimno), is due out in late 2015. Her other works include a short story collection, Nocturnal Landscapes (Nočne pokrajine, 2014), and three radio plays, one of which, based on her first novel, was nominated for the 2011 Prix Italia award for best adaptation. She also publishes literary criticism, commentary, and interviews and in 2013 received Slovenia’s Stritar Prize for best young literary critic. She divides her time between Slovenia and Burkina Faso, where part of her family lives.
THE TRANSLATOR
Rawley Grau, originally from Baltimore, has lived in Ljubljana since 2001. His translations from Slovene include the novel The Succubus by Vlado Žabot (translated with Nikolai Jeffs), the prose collection Family Parables by Boris Pintar, the play Scandal in St. Florian’s Valley by Ivan Cankar, and essays by Aleš Debeljak. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Janez Ramoveš, Andrej Rozman Roza, and others. Most recently, he has translated (from Russian), co-edited, and annotated the book A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the nineteenth-century poet Yevgeny Baratynsky.