LITMIR.BIZ

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stops us seeing what’s behind it. However hard I try, it just closes me out further. His last words before going to bed – ‘My grandson will follow in my footsteps’ – were meant as nothing more than a sweeping platitude, but they only make matters worse. As I stood in front of his grave, a sudden, perfect image of his teeth came to me. He was always either complaining that they hurt or picking food out from between them as he spoke. I noticed some people, only a few, on the other side of the grave tearing up. Others felt obliged to keep a respectful distance from the body. He’s gone. He’s now a man who’s passed. That’s that. Like a horse trotting through a town and no one even remembering the clatter of its hooves. I hug my husband and our baby smiles at the graves. I thought about my mother-in-law opening up the house to air it out. Throwing away her dear husband’s spectacles, smelling him on the backrest of the rocking chair where he used to doze. My sweet little mother-in-law. Cooking for herself, from now on, with the same pans she used for his fried eggs and porridge. Giving her husband’s socks away to the neighbours who have the same size feet. While they lower him down in his coffin, I see her going from the bathroom to the bed, I hear him speak, cough, snore. I see her nightgown revealing her dark purple nipples and swollen ankles. My mother-in-law covering her mouth with her hand, clinging to her husband’s bedpan. My mother-in-law in slow motion, an elderly woman gasping for air after sliding a door shut or closing a skylight. She tells the family that her husband squeezed her hand tight just before he died, but that the doctor said it had only been a reflex reaction. It was then that I felt close to her for the first time.

      Now I’m speaking as him. As him, I think of her and my mouth goes dry. I don’t know what she’s doing lying on her back in the thick, light grass, tossed aside like a piece of junk. She’s wearing the same shirt she had on yesterday. Pink, sleeveless. The same black trousers she had on last week. He sees everything: I recognise every piece of clothing in her wardrobe by now, he says to himself. She has wellies on even though it’s not raining. She wears flared skirts to give herself curves, but they disappear as soon as she puts on denim shorts. She ties her hair up in a tight bun like an imitation classical ballerina about to walk on stage. I know her positions off by heart. She sits hunched over, her head hanging between her legs. Or she lies down, like now, as if someone’s just dumped her there and forgotten about her. She eats with her hands, straight from the pan, but only when she’s alone. She winds handkerchiefs around her neck like a Burmese woman does metal coils. Her bra straps show. I can’t smell her and I can’t tell if she’s breathing heavily. I don’t know what it feels like to touch her back. I’m missing the details. The closest I came was the time I drove my motorcycle up to her front gate, but the sound of the engine scared her and I had to drive off. Did she look at me? Does she ever think about me? Her eyes are what intrigue me most, not knowing exactly what colour they are. I’d say they’re grey, but sometimes they seem closer to the colour of hay. What would it be like to have her eyes fixed on mine? I know she has broad shoulders and her fingers are slender. I know she almost never laughs, that she walks with such large strides it’s as though she’s marching in a military parade. She doesn’t smoke. Or at least I’ve never seen her smoke. She doesn’t listen to music, at least not in the late evening just before nightfall when I stop by after work, my mouth already dry half an hour before I mount my motorcycle and put on my helmet. Half an hour before knowing that I’ll see her sitting on the swing with her baby, blonde like her. Frail and long. Throwing him up into the air and grabbing him clumsily on the way down. Though once she missed. I’ll see her cry, see her fury in the way she holds her mouth. I don’t know her name or her age. I don’t know anything at all. I heard her singing opera in a deep baroque voice once and it’s obvious she wasn’t born here, but where was she born, and when? If someone had told me this story at work, I wouldn’t have believed it. A man like me. The person in charge of the X-ray department at the city’s health clinic. A radiologist who graduated from the public university, class of ’83. Married with a daughter who’s different, who has special needs. An easy-going guy, a man of the house. Born and raised in the city closest to here. A man who spent all his childhood and teenage years in the same flat in the same region in the centre of the country. Spellbound by a woman who wears flared skirts and spends her afternoons sprawled out like an amphibian on her lawn. I see her for as long as the slowest speed of my motorcycle allows. Those few fatal seconds. I think about her and heave with desire. A man like me, not particularly good, but not the devil either. A man like me who enjoys running his fingers through his wife’s soft hair, who makes love to her slowly, respecting her moods and her menstrual cycle, and only when our little girl’s asleep. A sharp, fun guy who doesn’t overcomplicate things. And now the hazard lights are on and I’ve pulled up on the side of the road. I’m hounded by this dryness in my mouth, knowing that on my way home I’ll pass her front gate and see her there among the flowers. Those images that will then last the ten miles separating her from my house. Furious images stuck to my palate. Her among the thorns, a dream-like orange vision, and me a crazy fox on the roadside. The farms and animal pens pass by, first I hear clucking and then I see the chicken coop. The same people as always say hello with their hands in the earth or on a cow’s udders or holding some shears up in a tree. This familiar setting with its farm equipment, cow dung, poultry houses and hunting dogs is spoilt by the image I drag home with me like a piece of rubbish. The image that grows inside me, causing chaos. The horror of this desire. Wanting to skin, to flay, to escape what pursues me. I wave to my beautiful wife who’s pulling up weeds with her garden gloves, but the image continues to follow me when I park and go inside. An aura expanding. My tree, insipid and leafless, becomes voluptuous. And she’s with me when I hold my daughter in my arms. Even when I put food in her little mouth and bathe her. And beyond. Far beyond. Today at dawn I cried for her on the kitchen floor, pounding the tiles with my fists and longing to have her finger bones, her hips, the flesh of her buttocks here with me. I fooled myself believing this was the lowest I could go. An image poisons you: the eyes of an owl, and just like that, it’s too late. I push her up against the wall, undo her bun with my teeth and strangle her with my kisses.

      What would you like us to do with your ashes? she asked her husband when his lungs were giving out. Eh? he replied, his hearing almost gone. Do you want us to bury you, dear, or scatter your ashes? She had to shout. I don’t care, he answered. He wasn’t interested in leaving final instructions about that or anything else. My mother-in-law, who carried on washing her husband’s trousers when he was gone, relived his death day after day. Her house was a big block of solid concrete with a view of the open fields of dry pasture and corn beyond a row of vegetable gardens. The paved path leading to it was dirty, the air tainted with carcinogenic smoke. Someone was burning copper cables to resell. The moles dug deep holes in what was also their land, turning it into a minefield. My father-in-law used to say definitive action needed to be taken by putting gas bottles at the entrance to their homes: the Shoah of moles. She went on cooking for two, changing the pillowcases, mending his underwear that was torn at the crotch. In the morning, still awake from the night before, I’d go by with the buggy and see her sitting there, in a daze, her head inside a bell. She lived in her body as though it were an infested house, as if she had to tiptoe through it trying not to touch the floor. The only time she was at peace, she said, was in her sleep, when the spirit scatters. But she had serious difficulty sleeping and used to sleep-walk. Once she strolled through the village in a nightie shouting Fire! Another time she used a shoe as a phone and conversed with God by means of it. This was when she wasn’t doing the hoovering at four in the morning. I saw her breakfast consisted of white bread that had been left out in the kitchen for days. She didn’t check the expiry date on the medication she started taking the day of the funeral. She didn’t scare away the flies or remove the eggs they’d laid in the jar of homemade chestnut jam. She watched the fingers bringing the bread to her mouth as though they belonged to someone else and she choked, because time doesn’t pass for the person who’s left behind. It’s a perpetual limbo. Like a wet shirt, clammy against the body, something that doesn’t go away, that won’t come unstuck. And although her life partner had never been one to spend long hours embedded inside her, entire afternoons, summers, clinging to her, nor days in the countryside entering her, satiating her; although he didn’t even consider whether or not she got aroused (she was that hollow, that bare), he’d been her companion nevertheless. Instead of a vagina, he thought his wife had a stone in the depths of a cave. He always imagined her covered in the little shawls she embroidered. He got used

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