Night as It Falls

by Jakuta Alikavazovic

  I’ve only opened this box once. I pulled out a poem at random, a poem about a man being tortured. They had set a pigeon in his mouth. A live pigeon. He didn’t mean to, but he ended up grinding his teeth. His body itself played a part in the grinding. Someone laughed and one couldn’t be sure if it was one person, or two, or the whole world. When I slid the paper back in the box, I realised that I was laughing, too.

  Paul was at a loss for words. Then, in horror, after a minute, he started laughing. It was uncontrollable, sharp, like a cough: a bodily revolt. He couldn’t stop. A nightmare.

  Exactly, said Amelia.

  She had sold the box to the highest bidder. Albers had helped arrange the sale. There were still people who remembered Nadia Dehr, who felt she had a particular position in a particular context, in a particular era, and it hadn’t been hard to get rid of it, for a tidy sum, far tidier than she could have imagined. Not so much to make money, in any case, as to protect herself from what it contained, the naked truth. And to spite a mother who had abandoned her. She would never know what she had written during nearly four years of war but the very thought of it was unbearable. She herself could never have endured it. She was convinced that abstaining – her form of revenge – was the wise thing to do. She was convinced that would be how she’d save her own skin.

  She was starting to doubt it.

  *

  And all that while, all those months, those years when her mother and others like Susan Sontag and Juan Goytisolo were digging themselves deeper into the hell of a besieged city, into the hell of words that nobody wanted to hear – during this time when her mother was slipping scribbled lines into her box, or tending to victims, or, on the airport runway, pulling white sheets over hunks of meat that hid contraband arms, flouting embargoes right under the noses of the blue helmets not seeing anything or pretending not to see anything, the blood slowly soaking the sheets, a universal code for wounded or dead, a fully formed language everyone shared – during those months, those years when her mother was slowly ceasing to write and beginning to act, or perhaps lying limbs akimbo, head blown apart, in a pit – where was she, little Amelia, with flyaway hair and wide-gapped front teeth? Sometimes she was with her father, but their relationship had always been strained. He was an impatient man. I loved him but he never seemed to care whether I loved him or not. He wasn’t bringing me up to be his wife, Amelia said, a line that would lodge itself uncomfortably in Paul’s memory until he got to meet the man many years later – a line he would finally feel like he understood, only to realise, later, after coming across a particular novel, that he was wrong. Those words, coming out of Amelia’s mouth, didn’t mean what he’d presumed. Rather, having nothing to say about her father, or not wanting to say anything about her father, she had simply relied on one of her tricks, one of her sleights of hand: a quotation.

  Yes, where was she as a child? The simplicity of the question belied the difficulty of its answers. Paul knew exactly where he had been – always in the same place, waiting to be done, planning his way out, the most logical and realistic one being the one that scared him most (studying), but as usual with Amelia a few words were never enough, silence was never enough, images had to be invented to pull together something that had always been scattered. Everything and nothing. Amelia remembered her childhood as a story in which some parts, important ones, might have been told to her in a foreign language or in her sleep. Cause and effect erased – whispered into her ear while she was dozing in her bed or sitting in a guest room waiting for her father to come get her, or stretched out on a long velvet bench, in a pile of coats.

  She remembered long nights when people forgot her and long afternoons spent staring at a piano, a chess problem, or worse, a puzzle: it was a lonely existence that drove her insane, drove her to stuff one or two jigsaw pieces into her mouth, to chew on them methodically before spitting the unrecognisable things into her hand just to avoid having to complete the picture; she remembered being so alone that when she went to school on Mondays her head felt in another place, she felt like an outcast, greeting her friends in a hushed voice and feeling almost surprised that they said hello back. I’m actually here, she realised. Now the week can start. She became most present on Fridays, she reached a sort of maximum density of being, but then dissolved so thoroughly over the weekend that she would start questioning her own existence. She had to start existing again two days later. She was an only child.

  She was a child amongst adults, whose only reason for being was to see and remember things that otherwise would have been forgotten. The names of birds, of mammals, of trees; of stars and minerals and their properties; the sentences whispered over the phone so she wouldn’t hear them; lines and stanzas and entire poems even if she didn’t understand what they meant at all; the names of medicines and their side effects, the ingredients of lipstick tubes, the agglomerations of syllables that were not so much names as designators of the food dyes, preservatives, acidulants, and artificial flavourings of candies which deteriorated into doubtlessly poisonous numbers and letters. She got horribly bored, to the point of insanity, and all the same she never stopped taking in these memories. There was no worse loneliness than that of a child kept in a world of adults.

  She was obsessed with children. Everywhere she went, she insisted on asking if there would be children – how many, who they were, what they were like. The moment she entered one of those huge apartments her family always visited, she started searching for them, hunting them down, greedy for contact – finally, a counterpart, someone like her. Held hostage in a world not meant for their size, where door handles were too high, countertops out of reach, books too heavy, glasses too large – finally, there would be someone she could look in the eye, with skin as soft and perfect as her own, skin that wasn’t even ten years old – incredible, when she came to think of it now. We fought wars and suffered impossible loves. When we were together, everything shifted slightly and started to make sense. I was obsessed with other children, drawn to them. I got very upset when it was time to leave, like I was an animal that couldn’t migrate with all the others.

  When there were no children and she was alone, a horrible torpor came over her, and she fought against it by exploring these apartments of vast darkness and bursts of laughter, as she darted into unknown lands, forbidden rooms in which she discovered jewellery boxes, lingerie drawers, relics of every sort gleaming in the shadows. Everything was ethereal, everything was the scene of a past crime that had never been noticed, much less solved. She was naive enough, unthinking enough, that she started getting high. Sniffed acetone and stain removers and nail polish, permanent-marker ink and pens, and even some mineral spirits since she liked the name; she breathed it all in deep, until her head was spinning. Huffed paints in the artists’ studios, especially the metallic tones, and turpentine as well, never mind that she had never been shown how to do so; being lonely forced her to learn. Sat down on the icy rims of bathtubs as the vapours of solvents and removers carved walkways and emergency exits within her brain, passageways by which she could escape the mortal boredom of a childhood without other children.

  Sometimes she started small fires on the tiles, in the bathtub. She tried on fancy lipsticks and then attempted to melt down the lipstick bullet so she could erase all trace of her crime; she broke open thermometers so she could watch the mercury swirling in the sink, swirling, then escaping into the city. She set small puddles of antiseptic on fire, got high, glided though these wild laboratories, wallowed in this chilly voluptuousness, this supreme eroticism, these enamel surfaces and mirrors that ensnared her, as in some modernised myth where the divine lover would appear in the form, in the features of an impeccable bathroom, in smooth, hard, unchangeable beauty – in appearance. I still carry these neutral spaces within me – but as soon as I try to revisit them, that neutrality I’m reaching for turns into anguish, mute terror. Steel-jaw traps, love-children of what is human and what isn’t, what is human and its opposite, a new stage
of the species, dissipating in the impersonality this had forged out of nothing – and now there’s nothing left but a faint whiff of medicine and smoke, a young girl asleep in a bathtub.

  Where were they? Where? Some of these apartments, some of these houses had a child’s bedroom. But the children were nowhere to be found, and she wandered through what, in their absence, had become just as forbidding as it was welcoming. The teddy bears watched her, the floral-pattern quilts watched her, the tiny slippers and the doll’s houses watched her – as did the dolls, their eyes constantly fixed on hers, ravenous for her hide. The styrofoam solar systems trembled in a draft that she didn’t feel, the spheres turning slowly until Jupiter’s red spot, its one round eye, zeroed in on her forehead, her face. No children anywhere, and everything stared at her until she beat a hasty retreat. She backed out of these rooms without any idea of whether they were empty for the night or forever – where were the children? Mysteriously gone, but none of the grown-ups seemed to care, she heard their gales of laughter and their conversations about art, money, the ups and downs of the stock market which for some of them were the ups and downs of their own lives; then they lowered their voices and they talked about the non-aligned countries, about dissents and wars. She, having retreated to the bathroom, regained her composure. On her knees under a sink, her nose in a bottle of detergent, she took her revenge for the absence of children on herself.

  The summer of the first conflicts, which would lead less than a year later to the longest siege of a major city in the modern world, her mother had taken her on vacation (on vacation, Amelia had repeated incredulously) to this land that was soon to break apart, a fracturing that her mother would soon internalise, a fracturing that would in turn engulf her. A few months later, Yugoslavia as it had been known no longer existed. They stayed on the Adriatic coast, in one of those chain hotels that was all the rage at the time, a hotel with hallways tiled in a green verging on black, where she was especially charmed to see how the lights made her cast at least three shadows. The room overlooked the swimming pool, which itself overlooked the sea. Everything was identical, endlessly reproduced empty cubes.

  It was obvious her mother wasn’t very happy. The reason wasn’t entirely clear to Amelia, considering that the two of them had the entire hotel to themselves – it felt like her father had booked the whole place for them, as if to apologise for his absence. Around noon, that time of day when she was forbidden to go outside, she took the elevator to the top floor and tried all the door handles, from the first room to the last, a bit disappointed that all of them resisted her efforts. She didn’t understand how they had the run of the hotel but, somehow, not the rooms themselves. She didn’t understand how the hotel could be anything other than the sum of its spaces; as she floated all alone in the pool, she counted the balconies, every one identical, to figure out where she was sleeping, and she always lost track unless she saw her mother come out. In the afternoons she loved watching the increasingly sharp, increasingly long angles of the railings’ shadows along the walls. Her mother barely smiled. But she had promised Amelia that children would come, that children were on the way, and so she waited and did not protest, did not complain, out of fear that her mother might change her mind and tell them all to turn back.

  That summer, Nadia Dehr had three dresses that were identical in every way except for their colour: pink, powder blue, pistachio green. She changed between them on a whim: sometimes she left the table between one course and the next, abandoning her daughter and her plate in the huge, deserted restaurant, only to come back in a different dress – different and yet the same – leaving her to wonder if this wasn’t some sort of code, not unlike signal flags on naval ships. But a code for who, for what? The hotel was preternaturally empty. As I splashed about, the sun reflecting on the water created hypnotic shapes, rings, sideways figure-of-eights. I heard, Get out of that water, there’s so much chlorine, you’re going to poison yourself. I was heatsick and lonely, seized by sudden fits of terror and frustration, and my mother tried to calm me down by telling me, flatly, as though addressing the idea of her daughter rather than a real girl: Be patient, the children will come soon. The children did not come. She spent long hours on the front-desk phone, her brow furrowed; she didn’t speak much, sometimes didn’t speak at all, as if she was waiting for the person on the other end of the line to pick up a receiver hanging off its hook, forgotten, as the sun went down.

  Amelia caught a fever, the balconies multiplied, their railings seemed to dissolve. Still no children anywhere. She sometimes glimpsed them here or there, hiding when she got close, disappearing up stairwells, through doorways. Her mother tried to say something with her pink or blue or green dresses, which sometimes seemed to be all three colours at once. That was how she communicated with the children, how she instructed them to avoid Amelia – and now I have to deal with this, too, Nadia Dehr complained as she poured aspirin packets into the tap water. Amelia was hallucinating. A secret was being kept from her – a secret she couldn’t solve in the ever-changing number of balconies, in the sun’s reflections on the water, in her mother’s dress and the way her earrings sparkled, which had to be a sign, too, rather than mere chance. Was the deserted hotel really empty? The infinite sequence of vacant rooms, their beds, their pillows, their black screens of unplugged televisions. I heard or thought I could hear the pounding of music upstairs or the creaking of footsteps downstairs.

  One night she woke up, terrified by voices. Was she scared that she had somehow managed to conjure them up? But I wasn’t dreaming, there was no question it was my mother next door, laughing, for the first time that week or that summer or maybe both. Fevers have always dilated time, and blurred all points of reference for me – or was that simply an effect of childhood?

  She was laughing with a young, brown-haired man, then she thanked him for the assistance he had offered (she declared it as if she were a nation unto herself ). He replied with something Amelia didn’t understand, and her mother said, The worst is yet to come. He seemed unconvinced, seemed to be waving away her words, and my mother kept going, Next time? There won’t be a next time, you’re coming with me to Paris. She was right, there wouldn’t be a next time, but she was wrong, he didn’t come with us to Paris. He woke me up at dawn, took me in his arms and carried me to the balcony. I’m trying to remember his face and I can’t, at best I can see a version of my own, of my mother’s, some sort of family resemblance. Don’t say anything, don’t scare them away – the children are here, I thought – the sun hadn’t risen and the light was new and grey, for the first time that week or that summer. Down below, a doe and a fawn, both of them pinkish brown, about the same colour as the sandstone slabs, were drinking from the pool, their heads lowered, gently and earnestly. I didn’t say a word, I didn’t scare them off, but my heart did twinge at the thought that they were going to die from it, from this chlorine-poisoned water, this water poisoned just for my swims, since nobody else had been in the pool that summer.

  That day, they began arriving. The refugees – women and children, displaced by something that was happening up north. The hotel had been requisitioned. War was what she thought she had glimpsed through doorways, in stairwells. And war was what had slept in the empty beds.

  Her mother, on that last day, finally started playing. She checked every room, from the top floor down, dragging Amelia behind. Some doors opened, others didn’t: the war was only just starting. The ones that did open revealed suitcases packed in haste, their contents spilling out on the beds, and glassy-eyed women frozen mid-gesture as if they had been stricken by sudden amnesia and were now wondering what it was they were holding – in this case, a coat hanger – and why they were holding it. Sullen children who didn’t look at Amelia or her mother gripping her arm as she looked for this man who had come, who had been so helpful, whom she had bought a plane ticket for on an airline that soon would no longer exist or perhaps had already stopped existing. Amelia didn’t care, she wanted to meet the
children who, all together, it seemed, had made their way down and were now jumping into the pool. A torrent of displaced children pelting down on the water’s surface in underwear and shorts – nobody had actual swimsuits, there hadn’t been time for that. Ten, twenty, fifty children cannonballing like small birds with a death wish, impelled by a herd instinct, then climbing back out only to dive in again with such violence that huge waves slopped over the pool’s sides; children of different ages, boys and girls, who just hopped joylessly on top of each other, their bodily impacts muffled by the water, splatters across the pinkish slabs, a streak of blood on wet skin. Her mother hadn’t been playing, after all; she barged into the rooms the same way the children hurtled into the water, looking for a man she would never see again. She filled her suitcase with those three dresses that had done their duty. Amelia didn’t care. She was looking for her swimsuit as the children had finally come, and she absolutely had to go and play with them, right now, while there was still water in the pool, otherwise she would never be able to – but her mother, already in her travelling outfit, navy trousers and twotone shoes, yanked away her swimsuit and towel.