Baltimore (6 page)
Authors: Jelena Lengold
“Close your eyes and try to imagine the following scene: On your right there are only women, and on your left, men. There is an empty space between them… do you see them? Do you have an idea what they’re like, what they look like, what they do?”
I saw them. Quite clearly. It was the first picture that came to me, as stupid as all the other first pictures that come to me while talking here with her, but I had no alternative but to admit:
“The women. They’re like those ancient statues, wearing togas, or whatever those dresses are called, the ones worn over one shoulder. Their hair is gathered up in a bun. They’re beautiful, tall, they seem proud, some are holding jugs and, all in all, they don’t move around very much. They look like they’re posing. They’re smiling. They’re timeless. Their beauty is everlasting. I know they spent a long time making themselves pretty for this scene, spreading scented oils on their bodies, bathing in special spas and fussing for a long, long time over their perfect hairdos. Their dresses are in gentle pastel colors, pale pink, peach, these dresses almost blend in with the color of their skin, something like that… they have long, perfect arms….”
“And the men?”
“They have their backs to me, almost all of them. They’re terribly obsessed with their work and worries. They’re wearing dark suits. They look, I guess, like people from the present. But I don’t see any of their faces. Only the backs, collars, ties, glasses, a lot of hand motion, folders and papers being moved from one hand to the other, a kind of undefined murmur among them, some sort of haste, but not cheerful… they’re not aware of the women standing across from them. They don’t even know they exist. But even if they did know, it wouldn’t matter because they’re doing something that is much more important.”
She had this sad look on her face. And it’s no wonder. I too would have that same sad expression on my face if anyone were to tell me this.
“What would you say to these women? Is there something you would like to let them know?”
“Hmmm… I would tell them… you’re very beautiful. I’m in total awe of your beauty. And I envy you. I would like to be like you.”
“Really?” she asked, “why would you want to be like them?”
“No, actually, I would like to look like them, but on the other hand, I would still want my life to have some meaning. They’re only there to look pretty. I need something more.”
I knew this was bullshit. At first I blurted out, in haste, something I truly believe. Or something I thought I was supposed to believe. Or something someone once told me I had to believe. Damn it! I know what she’s trying to say. She’s trying to say that this is an ideal image of a woman I picked up as a child from my mother. I’m familiar with the babble.
“All right. Is there anything you’d like to say to those men?”
I’d prefer not to. Really. Not to them, or anyone else for that matter. That’s what I wanted to say to her. But this was not an option. This hour had to be endured regardless of the amount of humiliation it entailed.
“I don’t know…. I’d tell them they were boring in those suits of theirs. And that they should take a look around, look up from those piles of paper.”
But this was also bogus. Everything was bogus. And I no longer knew how to get out of it. I’m not lying to her. I’m not even lying to myself. It’s more complicated than that. Someone else is lying to me and forcing me to lie. It’s not true that I think men are only interested in work. Why then did I arrange this scene in such a way? Why?
“Look at me,” she said, and I realized I had lowered my head practically between my knees and that I was holding my face with my fists. “At what point did you switch roles with your mother? When did you start worrying about her?”
“Why do you think we switched roles?”
“Remember the small and the big elephant….”
“I remember the elephants.”
“When did it happen?”
“Who knows, probably a long time ago. I worried about her health. I worried about whether she would find a job. We would go together to look for a job for her. She was sick a lot. I would visit her at the hospital. But these things happen to everyone. It’s not something she could have avoided.”
“Correct. But maybe she shouldn’t have allowed you, as the child, to worry about such things?”
“It was difficult for her. When she divorced my father, there were so many things to worry about. Then that man came along and, I guess, for her he represented some sort of a solution. But, he didn’t like me. And he didn’t want me in his house. And so I stayed there only for a short time. Shorter than planned….”
“I know. We talked about that.”
“I know we did. You’re the one taking me back to it.”
“No, I wasn’t taking you back to that.”
I didn’t say anything. A sadness, completely different from anything I had ever felt before, began to rise within me. I could see my mother’s face suddenly withdrawing from me at an inconceivable speed, and had I done what I really wanted to do at that moment, I would have probably run over there, after that face. But I remained seated. And the face continued to withdraw. Until it became a little dot in my mind’s eye.
“All right,” I said, “I know I’m not exactly her dream come true. I know that. I’m not, in any way whatsoever. But there’s nothing I can do to fix that.”
“And how do you feel knowing you’re not her dream come true?”
“Above all, it makes me sad. Why can’t I be her dream come true? What’s wrong with me? What I mean to say is, there must be something in me that could make a mother proud?”
“And what else?”
“It also makes me angry. Because I know she would never, ever, even under torture, admit to the things I’m saying to you now. She would never admit that I’m a complete disappointment to her. She would say it was all in my head. She would say she was very proud of the things I’ve accomplished in my life. But, you see, it’s like this: her entire being emits ‘I don’t like you and I know you realize I don’t like you, but till my dying day I’ll act as though I don’t know that you know, because this way I’m punishing you even more.’ Something like that. I don’t know if you can follow me.”
She just nodded. She was following me. And how? I always knew exactly when she was following me. I continued:
“Not long ago, I tried an experiment on her. She had reupholstered her sofa and chairs, choosing a new color. I came to her place. As soon as I entered the door, she asked me if I liked it. I didn’t really, but that wasn’t important. In any other situation I would have said it was okay. Because, if she liked it, then it was really all the same to me, do you understand? That’s what people expect from us: when they buy new shoes or a new dress, all you should say is that it’s great. These are the little white lies that make life easier. But, she never did this with me. She never liked the things I chose. She was always certain I wouldn’t make the right choice, unless she was there to shop with me. She only liked the things she chose herself. And that’s why, when she asked me about the sofa and chairs, I suddenly got the urge to say what I really thought. I said: ‘Listen, I’m not too thrilled about the color, but if you like it, that’s fine. This is your home and it’s important that you like it.’ You should have seen the expression on her face! She was so offended! She was so shocked! For the rest of the afternoon, all she did was talk about it, making me rethink my opinion again, and again, and again, so that I might come to the conclusion that I do like her sofa and chairs after all. And when I still wouldn’t admit that I liked them, she became openly aggressive and said that, in her opinion, burgundy is a morbid color for an apartment. And you should know that many of the things in my apartment are burgundy, no less. There you go… just once, just once I did what she had been doing all her life and she couldn’t stand it.”
Outside, someone was persistently trying to start his or her car. I know a lot about cars. That’s probably one more thing my mother wouldn’t approve of. I knew what was wrong by the sound it was making. I recognized the whrrr, followed by a click, and then nothing; I wanted to shout to the guy outside that the problem was in the starter, and that he needed to replace the brushes, and in the meantime, if he wanted to start the car, that he should bang on the starter with some kind of a rod, really hard, so that the brushes come in contact with what they’re supposed come in contact with and strike a spark.
“What’s happening?” she asked. “Why are you so quiet?”
“I’m tired. Suddenly, I’m extremely tired.”
Then I told her how I met this girl who was adopted and how, for some reason, I feel terribly sorry for her.
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?! Her real parents simply abandoned her when she was just a baby and she lived in a hospital for a year, until some other people came to take her. And do you know what she does now? Let’s say the two of us are driving somewhere and she says she needs to stop and buy some cigarettes. Before getting out of the car, she always says, as if joking: ‘You’ll wait for me? You won’t leave, will you?’ The first few times she said this, I didn’t react. But then, on one occasion, I stopped her and said very seriously: ‘I won’t leave and I won’t abandon you. I don’t abandon people.’”
“Like they abandoned you?”
This was a low blow. We were talking about someone else, not me.
“Who abandoned me?”
“Your mother abandoned you,” she said softly, but very clearly.
There was no mistake about it. I didn’t misunderstand her or anything like that.
“Why do you think that?”
“You told me yourself. Between that man and you, she picked him.”
There was nothing more to be said here. I knew, better than she did, that it was the truth. And still, I was as surprised as if I’d been told I was the one who was adopted, and not that other girl. As if I’d suddenly been told I was an alien, or something like that.
See what’s ahead of me now? Years and years and years. During which I’ll know she had abandoned me. Dinners during which I’ll know she had abandoned me. Birthdays during which I’ll know she had abandoned me. Conversations during which I’ll be pretending I didn’t know she had abandoned me. Or, will I pretend to be bad at hiding the fact that I know she had abandoned me? Which one of us will be better at pretending that we don’t know what we know? And how long could this go on?
I could’ve cried, of course. That’s something a person can always do. But somehow, I feel like this now also falls under the repertoire of those bogus things that had lost their meaning. Only a week ago, I thought I knew how things stood, roughly, anyway, and now, I’m back to knowing nothing, without hope of ever finding out. I didn’t have any time left to ask her anything, and besides, I think the question would be too complicated for this period of the day. In other words, if I’ve been fed lies all my life, if I answered with lies, and if everything in my life up to now was a lie, then damn it, do I even have anything sincere to offer?
I know exactly what she would say. “Is that your real question or are you asking something else?”
Shit! At one time, I was the one who liked to relativize things.
Better that you hear it from me now than later, from one of them. I’ll look like I was hiding something, as if it were something important. I think they exaggerated and made too much of it.
Anyway, it has to do with the time I didn’t speak for almost three months. All right, maybe it was closer to four months. But no longer than that.
It all started out as a joke one evening while we were playing cards at home with our friends. However, no one knows that during a card game, I also play that little gambling game with myself. For example, I say to myself: if I lose, in the next five days I’ll get hit by a bus while crossing the street. And then, naturally, I fight for my life. No one really wants to be hit by a bus.
I was winning almost to the very end. That was when the game took an amazing turn and my husband was dealt a really good hand. I covered my eyes. They laughed and cracked numerous cruel jokes at my expense. People can be unusually cruel during a card game. They’re capable of sending you to your death. Of course, they were convinced that I would soon raise my head and suggest a rematch, or that I would offer them a cold beverage. But, as far as I was concerned, there wasn’t going to be any more talking. I have nothing to say to people who don’t value my life whatsoever. That’s understandable, right?
They tried everything to make me laugh. At first, they even had a tiny chance of succeeding. I remember having to make a small effort not to laugh and focusing on my own gloomy thoughts, in order to remain in the same position. My hands over my eyes. Elbows on the table. Their giggles, which were slowly turning into boredom. If only they would forget about me, I thought.
After a little while our friends got up to leave.
“Are you going to see us out?” they asked.
It still seemed like a good joke, the silence.
They left and I didn’t budge an inch. Good manners suddenly didn’t seem important anymore.
During the next few hours, my husband tried everything he could think of to get me to talk. He tried to win me over by being sweet, hugging me, making funny faces, dancing the Kazachok, marching in front of me; then he became angry, and again went back to being nice, but the grip of silence only grew stronger. I thought: Why can’t a person decide to be silent for once? Why is that so unusual?
And so we went to bed without me uttering a single word. I did all my usual evening chores in silence. I did the dishes, watered the flowers, turned down the bed, removed my make-up, showered, disconnected the phone, set the alarm clock, and got into bed.
I fell asleep in an instant, like someone who has been sleeping on their feet for some time, only they weren’t permitted to rest their head on the pillow. It was a good night’s sleep, without dreams, without waking up, without nightmares. It was the kind of sleep I used to have as a child, when I wasn’t troubled by all the things I needed to do the next day. I wasn’t ready to fully admit it to myself at the time, but somewhere deep within I knew: I wasn’t going to do anything tomorrow. Except for the things I need to do for myself and the things I find absolutely pleasing.
The next day, my husband woke up before me, which was out of the ordinary. I heard running water in the bathroom, and then he opened the refrigerator, made tea, took a cup from the cupboard and for a little while longer made all these usual morning sounds which were, I guess, supposed to wake me up. But, I was already awake and perfectly aware of the fact that I didn’t want to get up and that I didn’t want to go to work. Besides, who really wants to do that? Such things are done mechanically, because we have to, and not because this is something we want to do. On the contrary, I wanted him to leave for work so that I could slowly get out of bed and take a walk by the river. I wanted to be quiet and to think, and the fact that the very thing I considered to be perfectly normal was being made out to be extraordinarily odd, made me determined to finally start behaving as I see fit. This was one of those moments of unusual clarity of thought that comes early in the morning. That is to say, all my life I’ve wanted only two things: to be completely passive and to be silent. Of course, I always did the complete opposite of this, so much so that there were years during which I would completely forget about what I wanted. But this morning, everything came back to me, appearing in our window in the form of a perfectly clear, blue sky. It was one of those idyllic spring days. A perfect day, I thought, for starting a new life in which I will no longer make an effort to do anything.
My husband, however, didn’t see things in the same light. Not on that morning, at least. First, he began calling to me from the kitchen, and then he came into the bedroom, stood by the bed I was lying in and, a little annoyed, announced the time.
This information meant nothing to me. I knew I wouldn’t be going to work. Not that day, nor any day in the future. Never, in fact. I didn’t like it, the morning rush through the traffic lights, the climb up the stairs, the faces waiting for me at the office, that cluster of meaningless papers and the pile of unpleasant news. No. I will no longer have any part of it. Watching the sky is much nicer, I said to myself.
He simply couldn’t believe that I didn’t want to get up. He brought me tea, sat on the bed, and for the first time, looked at me with real worry.
“Are you ill?” he asked.
He touched my forehead. Then he looked at his watch, and at me again.
“What do you want me to do?”
He rested his head on my chest. I was sorry he didn’t understand. I caressed his hair.
“Tell me what’s wrong. Please.”
He sat there for a few minutes, with his head on my chest, his hand on mine, and I almost hoped that he would join me, that we would doze off together, untouched by the outside world. But then he looked at his watch again.
“Is it that time of the month? Is that what’s wrong?”
He got up, wavering, and then finally said:
“All right, I’m going to work now and you try to get it out of your system. I’ll call you as soon as I get there.”
The days that followed could have been even better if the people around me hadn’t been so intent on making me talk. It didn’t matter that I did all the usual chores, went shopping for groceries, cooked dinner, brushed my hair, dusted. Each morning, after my husband left for work, I would go to the park, carrying a book.
Sometimes, I would sit in the park crocheting a curtain and watching the children play. They could have been wonderful spring days if only they had let me be.
To them, all these very normal human activities weren’t proof enough that I was living and that I existed. My mother came over every day. She would sit by me and cry. I would crochet in my sofa chair, or watch a movie on television, or read, do the things all ordinary women in the world do, and she would stare at me and cry. I would be peeling potatoes or carrots and she would be choking with tears next to me, as if I were already dead and buried. It seemed like refusing to talk was the cruelest thing you could do to your loved ones.
This was so strange to me and completely beyond my comprehension, and I didn’t know how to help them. Silence had descended upon me as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and to me, the more they tried to pull me out of it, the more they became unusual and estranged.
One day, they brought home a doctor who took my pulse, listened to my heart, and examined my pupils. He waved some little lamp in front of me and moved his forefinger from side to side. He too tried talking to me, but his words didn’t even enter my range of hearing. My mind was able to separate, better than ever before, the important from the unimportant, people I should hear from those who mean nothing to me.
“We’ll put you on sick-leave,” said my husband after the doctor had left, “or else you’ll lose your job.”
As if that was even important.
For a little while after, it seemed like they understood. My mother came over regularly and she didn’t cry anymore, nor did she try to talk to me. Sometimes she would just sit next to me and hold my hand. She would give me a kiss on the forehead, then my cheek, and then quickly turn away.
My husband still spoke around the house sometimes, but that too was becoming less frequent. Our life slowly took on a new form, the way people adapt to all new situations. One night, he cautiously moved his hand towards me, not knowing whether this silence also meant that we weren’t going to be making love. But, of course, silence was just silence and nothing more. It wasn’t aimed against anyone. Even silence can endure a hug.
After that night, we began making love again, in silence and in a slightly different way than before. But, to some extent, our bodies were closer than ever. It was just our flesh and us. And a deep silence in which we swayed back and forth.
During those days, I thought I had finally found a good way to live. I’ll crochet many curtains, read many books, scrub my stove until it sparkles, bake the most unusual cakes, and no one will ask me unpleasant questions.
Friends gradually stopped coming over, and to my great relief, my world was reduced to a very small circle of people. The doctor, however, still came to see me from time to time. He would listen to my heart and then go into the other room and whisper something to my mother and my husband.
It seemed like my life was going quite well. I read novels, dictionaries, and cook books with equal passion. Now, in the silence, words revealed their full beauty, and thoughts, the thousands of thoughts that lay wasting away on our shelves for years, suddenly revealed their full meaning. I could see the people who, in their silence, wrote these books hoping that someone, in some other silence, would read them. I could sense when their thoughts faltered, and when the passion of writing seized them with ease and then carried them through the next few pages.
One afternoon, however, the doctor came, bringing with him some sort of an injection. For weeks now, he had been treating me as if I were some kind of an object and not a human being, even though he wasn’t willing to admit to it. He sat next me, opened a metal box, filled the syringe, and placed my arm on his lap. For an instant, I thought about pulling my arm away, but that would be the end of my passiveness. And I enjoyed it so much. So, I left my arm there, to see what would happen.
Without even looking into my eyes, he took a ball of cotton, rubbed the part of my skin where the vein appeared and stuck me with the needle.
It was only then that he looked at me. He didn’t say anything, but I could clearly see the triumph in his eyes: “You wanted silence. Now you shall have it.”
This, of course, was a contemptible way for them to cut short what was one of the most wonderful periods of my life. For some reason, which I definitely can’t seem to comprehend, they consider you normal only if you live contrary to all your needs. And this is what they demonstrated to me, towards the end of that summer, in a banal, obvious, and rather brutal manner. The people I believed loved me. I thought they understood and that they would never force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I thought they would allow me to live my life with the intensity and pace that suited me. Instead, they tricked me and brought me this doctor and his needle, after which silence lost its beauty and meaning.
It wasn’t the same after that. And I was no longer in the place I wanted to be, but more and more in a hazy hospital room in which the silence was constantly interrupted by someone’s screams, sobs, the sound of tapping heels, screeching wheels, sirens outside the windows, early morning chatter of cleaning ladies who displayed their conviction that I was but a mere object, even more than that doctor. While changing my sheets, puffing my pillow, pulling me up, they would continue the conversation they began in the previous room, then open the windows and leave without even glancing at me, happy there was only one more room left at the end of the corridor.
This no longer resembled what I wanted. I didn’t like the solutions they were offering. I could have stayed in this room and let them give me those injections. I could have gotten up and tried to escape, but then I would no longer be just a woman who didn’t talk, but a fugitive from the hospital. And finally, I started talking again.
“I’m so happy,” my mother said, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m so happy you’re well again.”
“I’m happy too,” I said.
Happiness. So, from now on, this is what we’re going to call the deception we would continue to live in. We’ll end my sick leave and start from the beginning.
As we all hugged with excitement and while they were telling me how much they missed me, their eyes were sending me a message: Don’t you try to escape from all the shit or we’ll drown you in it. We talked and talked and talked, like people who hadn’t seen each other in a long time.