Their da wasn’t having it but.
He turned to their mum. “I tried to reason with them, didn’t I, Feargus? Thirteen dead, I said. A whole lot more injured. Thirteen innocent people murdered—’n’ you won’t put pen to paper?”
“I tried to plead wi them. It’s true, I said. The world press has got hold of it, sure. Like in October ’68, I said. All them foreign journalists, cameramen, witnessed it, captured it, have put the English to shame . . . Wasting my breath but, I was, love—”
“Liam’s right, Bridget. Hardly anyone signed. The boys at the Hibs did, but not the ones at the ground. For all their songs, for all they wave the tricolour, all ye got was: naw, mate—ah widni want any bother wey the polis—”
“Ye wouldn’t’ve credited it, love,” their da said. “Thirteen dead ’n’ they were scared they’d get in trouble. Well, it’s the last bloody time they’ll see me. If you’re Irish, ma arse! Green white ’n’ gold, ma foot. That’s the last buckin time I’ll go anywhere near that friggin shower—I’m tellin ye!”
Way he said that last bit made Liam look at Sean.
Aye—
Sure enough—
Ye could tell from the look on his face: wee bruv knew he’d be a long time waiting, if he was waiting for their da to take him now.
[NETHERLANDS]
SANNEKE VAN HASSEL
Pearl
Again I hold her tight. The water in the river—a plastic bag slips downstream. Weightless, it billows up. If I knew how, I’d offer a sacrifice. I stand on the embankment. So often thought about getting into the water myself. I clasp the rail, then I hold her tight, carefully slide her in. I spread my arms and then . . . nothing. She is not there.
We call her Pearl. J’s keen on that. I don’t like oysters but it reminds me of a photo of Nastassja Kinski: pearls in her ears, a damp, promising look. For a long time I copy her, the same wisps of hair at my temples, pearls for my birthday.
I get pregnant at a time when I can’t get anything off the ground. Even the basil on the windowsill refuses to grow, no matter how much care and food I give it. I glide through the factory, crossing the warehouse with an order list in my hand, having boxes piled onto pallets and taken off again. J and I keep meeting as if by chance. He borrows coffee and stays the night. We have no plans, only encounters. And then I get pregnant; my body is pregnant, I follow.
The first month is staring out of the window together, his hand on my belly. Spring. Chestnut buds swell, the carillon chimes, seagulls shriek over the water. I enjoy the way the three of us lie together in bed, the endless Sunday mornings. On Queen’s Day I buy blue children’s rain boots.
J comes less often. I miss the drink, far more than I thought I would; it’s not something my friends talk about, but I miss it. After two glasses of wine it’s always been much easier to have J around, to tolerate his restiveness. At parties I’m tired, the conversation growing hazy and me top-heavy over an oven full of charred puff-pastry appetizers.
Sometimes J drops by to mop the floor, to whitewash walls. He puts up a hook in the hall for the stroller. One morning when I order apple tart with my coffee at Lindeman, he’s furious: “For God’s sake, Ka, you’re not allowed cinnamon. It’s bad for the fetus.”
I take another bite to see that agitated look of his one more time.
The Maas flows away from me toward the Hook of Holland. Rippling water, in perpetual motion. What is the smallest particle? A molecule? Is it miles away already, swallowed by the sea? Or is it still around, does it split? Can water dissolve? Is it moving or being moved?
My belly is a balloon full of water. J detaches himself: now it’s visible, now you can manage alone. No more sex—virtually incest, he says. My hand slides across his stomach, downward; he won’t allow it. I want to feel his prick grow hard, his hands on me, to prove we’re together. He abandons the bed. I let my hand slip between my legs, thinking of him, moist, making it last as long as I can. I’m getting better at sex with him without him, one hand stroking my breasts that have never been so full, the other descending. Longer and longer orgasms, fantastic but confined to one spot. He alone touches my whole body.
And in me grows Pearl, kicking me with the question: will I love her? J says hardly anything now, comes in, pours a drink, studies the contents of his wallet. At work I send cake boxes to a chicken-feed factory and fish-and-chip trays to a beer wholesaler.
The summer drags on into September. October is rain. As I walk my belly cramps up and I have to sit down. In November she washes out through my uterus. J arrives an hour after the birth and looks proudly into the aquarium, the plastic crib, where Pearl is lying. She sleeps a lot. The first few weeks of her life I have nightmares. I see myself dying in all the blood, dream I’m in terrible pain and no one believes me. Many have gone before you; it’s good, it has a purpose, my dear, it’s nature’s way. Something causes you so much pain at the start that you can’t help loving it—is that how it works?
The second week J drinks from my breasts. He sucks carefully, more carefully than Pearl. I provide, utterly dazed, wanting to die, turn to stone, like those statues by Rodin, or was it Camille Claudel? After that, J stays away for ten days.
I spend November in bed with Pearl. For a long time I feel torn open, don’t dare push when I’m on the toilet. Tiles flash white. I see my feet, ask them if I’ll ever be whole again. Some men prefer making love to a childless woman.
My first day back at work. J babysits and arrives late, he’s got no jobs on the books, which makes him angry. After an hour of baby photos with colleagues the boss asks to see me. Restructuring makes me surplus to requirements; if I go without protest they’ll give me a “settlement”—half a year’s salary.
My winter with Pearl. The unwashed bedcover (there’s only me to do everything) and the days that pass unnoticed. Single friends cheerfully cycle two toddlers to school in all weathers while I lie in bed, Pearl like a frog on tiny hands and feet, and imagine myself up to the elbows in suds with BBC News on TV. Sometimes I read. About Marina Tsvetaeva, who was alone with two children. Her lover went to the front lines, one child died of malnutrition and meanwhile she wrote astonishing poetry.
Again I stand by the river and hold her tight, stroking the doll in my arms. What have I done to deserve such a perfect doll? Such light blue eyes, such soft hair and pale-pink feet. I used to get dolls from the girls next door, but never this lifelike. “Children, time to come in . . . Dinner’s ready.” Play stops and you leave your doll lying there. Back the next day and she’s still in one piece, the pouting lips, the hinged eyelashes.
J stays away all through February. I forget, I forget. First a bottle, then a diaper change. She hardly ever cries, just lies there in silence with a huge apple-juice stain on the sheet. Juice from three days ago. The first Sunday in March he’s back: “You slob,” he says and cleans the toilet. In the kitchen I cry, a pigeon takes a bath in the gutter, and I calm down.
He stays the night and I fantasize that he’s my lover. Take Pearl out of the wicker basket and lay her on the big mattress where we made love shortly before. Briefly, unnoticed, we have sex. J, half asleep, comes and then goes on sleeping.
I hunt through my old college books for heroic role models from literary history, becoming absorbed in confessions by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. The head in the oven, tea towels under the kitchen door. Poets of despair, stylizing for all they’re worth. Sometimes I read a story by Colette; she perseveres in love, despite the ragged edges, the insoluble tensions.
By the door the mail piles up. I sit at the table leafing through a Praxis catalog: shiny kitchen taps, electric barbecues—things that don’t feature in my life but needn’t be at all expensive. Pearl lies on a mattress on the floor; J rolls a cigarette. He’s come over for a cup of coffee, tells me about a job in South Rotterdam. He needs to put in a bid, recruit Pol
es, unearth batches of tiles. I’m so tired, I want to sleep by a garden lamp from Praxis that burns all night.
J jumps up: “Look at that child!”
In two strides he’s at the mattress and he tugs the potato knife I was using to screw a candle into a candlestick yesterday out of her hands.
“Dammit, Ka, that’s not a toy.”
I look up from the garden lamps. Pearl cries. I stiffen. Shut my eyes for a journey through a mountainous landscape, fleeing in a carriage with a masked coachman.
Sometimes it seems as if the river is standing still, a mirror of the frozen moments in my head. In the cold, hard surface I see myself, changeless. After the morning with the potato knife J checks up on me, with unannounced inspections. I let him in; I don’t want to disrupt the father-child relationship. Just seeing his hands on her is enough to recall his hands on me.
J counts how many diapers there are, how many jars are empty, makes shopping lists. He doesn’t intervene; people ought to look at him first, since he’s the father and from day one chiefly absent. I don’t tell him that, and I do tell him by not letting anything go right.
A swan dives below the surface, swims three meters, its long neck outstretched. Comes up, shakes its head, paddles on, after the plastic bag. I stand by the river. Pearl is six months. I get no farther than our street. When I go shopping I buy as much as I can, stocking up in case J comes over. I manage to brave people’s looks. I’m not afraid when they ask me how old she is. I calmly work it out, my smile a grimace, stuck to my face as if glued. Even when the greengrocer holds out an apple to her and she turns her head away. “She’s tired,” I say. I walk along the embankment with Pearl. People are moved. Such a pale young mother; such a fragile daughter. She has a deadly serious look. “An old soul,” some say. My little Tibetan sage, an albino variant.
That Tuesday evening. Again I hold her tight. I’ve been sleeping badly lately because Pearl keeps waking up, with short, blood-curdling screams. I put her in the bath, so she turns rosy, gets in a good stretch tonight, leaves me in peace. I fill the bath with the thin jet from the shower, adding some oil that J has brought. It comes in a yellow bottle and it smells of babies, the way we want them to smell.
Pearl lies on the mattress in the living room. I check the water is the right temperature and then go downstairs to fetch her. She lies quietly waiting with wide-open eyes and looks at me calmly. Pearl can seem very resigned; I’ve sometimes looked into the bathroom mirror for an hour to see whether anything of that shows in my eyes. I lift her up, the small body of a young dog. She hardly moves, in some kind of half-sleep perhaps, or holding herself so much like a doll to avoid being a burden to me.
I let her slide from my arms into the bath, like a spoon in a soup plate, gradually, with dignity. Her head drops backward. Her hair spreads out, very light and fine. I step away and turn off the lights. A gentle evening sun shines through the top window onto the bathwater.
I close the bathroom door and take my raincoat from the hallstand, although no rain is forecast. I pull the door shut behind me. Straight ahead, to the river—two streets to cross and I’m there.
TRANSLATED FROM DUTCH BY LIZ WATERS
family
[FINLAND]
MARITTA LINTUNEN
Passiontide
The first thing I saw was round, domed shapes: golden brown and pale yellow, smeared with egg whites and sprinkled with sanding sugar—dozens of little buns scattered before me.
My eyes then focused on the baking tray, which rested against a table leg, then on the egg mug, and finally on the rolling pin; the latter two lay on the floor in front of the oven. There was a discolored spot on the floorboards near my left shoulder: a shattered egg.
I took all of this in without understanding any of it, and then drifted off into a deep sleep once more. I woke up again, after an indeterminate period of time, to the same view.
I slowly inhaled and exhaled. It was rather drafty.
There was a crackling and buzzing sound from above my head, and then weak voices broke through the static.
A vein was throbbing at my temples. It produced, in short pulses, a blinding pain, which flooded first to the top and from there to the back of my head.
I raised and lowered my eyelids as if I were exercising.
I felt the floorboards against my bare stomach. I felt heat radiating from my left and a chill flowing past my right side.
Image by image, the scattered pieces were coming together.
Gradually, I recalled Miliza Korjus singing “Warum” just as I was about to put the second baking tray in the oven. They were taking requests on the radio. I liked to have it on in the background, more for the sound of people talking than for the music. The babbling portable radio on the kitchen table hailed back to the sixties, a little teak-cased companion.
It was good to have it in the kitchen: it produced human voices on demand, sweeping away the silence.
I recalled trying to hum along with it, when my hands suddenly went numb. The oven door opened on the wrong side, the dish cabinets flew for a moment against the opposite wall, and my back hit a sharp corner of the kitchen table.
I knew it had been Tuesday evening. The boy had called the day before and let me know that he would visit during the Easter break after all. He would come on Saturday, on the afternoon train.
Living alone, it was often difficult to start even small chores without someone else visiting. It was nice to clean, change the curtains, and for the first time in a long while bake for someone else, to plan meals for two. These days, the boy only rarely had time to visit.
My shoulders tensed with the cold. I must have left the living-room window open.
As I lay on my stomach, I realized that I could only move my right hand.
I could raise my head, turn it from side to side.
Feet—I could see that they were still there. That was all.
The crackle of static above me died away, and the voice of the radio announcer broke the silence in the kitchen:
The Maundy Thursday service will be broadcast from the Porvoo Cathedral.
Judging by the light, it was evening. Thursday evening. I counted out the hours, again and again, in disbelief. I felt like a fist was clenching around my heart.
Two days and nights had vanished into oblivion.
I moved my right hand, and felt it hit something rough, followed by a light blow to my shoulders. The broom. It had fallen out of the open cleaning closet to lie near me.
I seized the broom and strained with the last of my strength—the handle only just reached the power switch on the oven. I pushed as hard as I could: the switch moved, the light blinked off, and the overheated electrical appliance made a series of loud clicking sounds.
At least I wouldn’t die in a fire. I might be able to get something to eat by dragging it in front of my face with the broom, but there was nothing to drink. Still, I might well survive until Saturday evening; I was in fairly good shape for a seventy-year-old. Unconsciousness would come before that, though.
My body shook with the cold. A wind was blowing in from the living room, and judging from the clatter of the roof tiles, it was storming outside. The oven had, until now, kept the kitchen warm, but now the chill from the living room spread throughout the entire house.
Take, eat; this is my body, which is given for you. Drink of it, all of you; this cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.
Each time, the priest emphasized the word “you.”
I didn’t go to church regularly, but now I fervently wished that what they taught there was true, and that I figured into the plan as well. That some invisible force knew what was happening on this street, in this small cottage, in this tiny, cooling kitchen.
The words of a hymn came fro
m above me as I fell into a stupor.
The station broadcast classical music throughout the night.
Concertos, ballet, solo songs, arias.
I got sick of Beethoven’s symphonies and the booming timpanis. I wished that the radio would get sick of them too, perhaps develop a malfunction. I would have preferred to lie there listening to the quiet hiss of static: the dead white noise of space.
Now it wasn’t the cold that was making me shiver, but a fever. I only got thirstier after eating half of the closest bun.
The dry crumbs made me cough. It all felt unbearable: my shirt had rolled itself up into a ball under my chest, and my bare abdomen was soaking in the cooling urine that had spread under me. I’d gotten used to the acrid smell, but the fever chills continued unabated. They attacked without mercy—shook me awake every time I was drifting off to sleep. Disturbed dreams melded together into strange realities that threatened to ensnare my mind. The radio was my only compass: it dragged me back into the here and now, told me what time it was, and made me realize that I wasn’t in a sunlit backyard pouring juice for a boy eating buns. It reminded me that the periodic screeching from above wasn’t caused by swallows after all, but by my groaning tin gutter.
As dawn came, I struggled toward the spattered remnants of the egg. I stretched out my neck until I thought it would snap out of place. The tip of my tongue touched the egg white, and I lapped at it like a cat sampling desiccated jelly. I could only reach a few drops.
To pass the time, I read the only piece of writing that I could see from the floor: “Lemon Juice & Glycerin, citrus-scented hand lotion.” I knew the ingredients by heart in both Finnish and Swedish. The words on that bottle of hand lotion drifted like a mantra through my muddled, fever-sick mind. Every now and then, I repeated them aloud.
Hearing my own voice, I knew I was still alive.
At some point I came to, startled from my sleep by the silence and the light streaming in from the window.
Best European Fiction 2012 Page 24
