To Mervas (4 page)

“I'm like the boy,” I moaned. “I just cry and cry – ”

I tried to laugh a little, but it wasn't possible. Instead, my laugh turned into a bawl, a long bawl growing out of my mouth like a plant, the stem of a plant. I couldn't breathe; it felt as if my bawling would suffocate me. It was a sea of sound filling every part of me; I ran from the table, threw myself on the balcony door, and tore it open. My sister was right behind me, yelling and pounding her fists against my back; she held me, and I felt the cramping subside; I could breathe again.

“It hurts so much,” I sobbed into my sister's hair. “Everything hurts so much. I'm crashing to the ground. Every bone in my body is breaking.”

We let go of each other quickly, my sister and I. We weren't used to
that kind of intimacy; it made us uncomfortable.

From then on, I slept at home most nights. I made myself watch television and read the paper, tried to pretend that this was me, that this was my life. Outside, summer was in full bloom, but I took no part in it. There is a particular kind of white-hot anguish, a daylight anguish that can scorch you, make you thin and transparent like rice paper. That's how I felt that summer. Seeing a wasp could mortify me to the point that I ran all the way home and crawled into bed struggling with the white-hot feeling. I scarcely had the courage to live.

Some days I couldn't make myself visit the boy. I'd remain sitting in the kitchen or the hallway for hours, incapable of moving. Sometimes I called my sister.

“I can't make myself visit him,” I whispered into the phone.

Then she'd come over and accompany me to the hospital. Or take me to the bus stop. If she set me in motion, I could keep going on my own.

But there were other obstacles, obstacles that had to be overcome. There was the very smell of the hospital. You had to submit to it. When I'd lived there, I must have gotten used to it; I guess I'd reeked of it myself. But now, the distinctive odor bothered me. It filled me with its order and regime. It's a very particular smell, and you can sense it most inside the bathrooms, an odd brew of cleanliness and decay, topped off with rubber and ointments. Shivering, I'd allow myself to be filled with it once more, even though I'd rather have escaped. But I'd make it through the corridors and up to the ward. Stopping at the nurses' reception desk, I could already hear the boy crying in his room, his tired, cracked cries mixing with the music box endlessly chiming “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” I'd take a deep breath, and go in to see the nurse, if she was there.

“Did he have a – ”

“Oh no, everything's fine.”

I didn't want to utter the word
seizure.
It was one of those harmful words no one was allowed to say. The nurses knew about it too, they made deliberate and complex efforts to avoid saying it. But the doctors used the word dispassionately, as if they were trying to normalize it.

“We can't say for sure if he's been damaged by the latest series of seizures,” they'd say.

What to them was simply a field of knowledge was for me nothing but suffering: penetrating anxiety, and deep terror. Most of the time it seemed as if they couldn't see the great difference between them and me: to me, the boy's condition would never be an interesting subject; it was a nightmare.

Most difficult was his crying. It never ceased; it was a saw slowly cutting through time. It was sawing through the bones, every bone in his body, and every bone in mine. The seconds got stuck in its path, bone shards, sharp as spears. His crying was hoarse but loud, somehow finding its strength, its source, somewhere inside his small infant body.

In the beginning, when I asked if he was in pain, no one could give me a straight answer. They said he wasn't supposed to be in pain. That there was no obvious reason he would be in pain. That they'd done everything they could so he wouldn't feel any pain.

“If that's the case, why is he crying?” I asked.

But with time, I learned not to ask. I learned to sit next to his crying, to watch over it and hold his tormented little face under my gaze so that he'd be sure to know I'd never leave him, ever. I wanted his pain to become my pain, wanted to share this unbearable, difficult, unfair thing with him, it was to become my fate too; I'd make room for it in my life.

“I think I know why he's crying,” I said once, during morning rounds.

“Is that so,” the ward doctor said, turning away from his colleagues for a moment to look at me.

“I think he's mourning his life,” I said. “He's crying out of grief.”

An awkward silence followed, and I immediately regretted what I'd said.

“Well, that's possible,” the doctor said. “I guess you could look at it that way.”

The boy had brown hair and brown eyes. A nod, a greeting from the nonexistent father. Actually, it was a beautiful little face, in my eyes perfect. But with time this face more and more came to be obliterated. Little by little, it drowned in its own absence. During the first months, when I sat and more or less stamped his face within me, it was as if I understood that I had to bear witness to its existence, that I had to recognize its every detail and every last expression because later I would have to live with only the memory of having seen it, the memory of its existence. And then I would know that beneath the expressionless, vacant mask that illness had set on him, another face lay hidden, a wonderfully beautiful, living face had existed but was invisible.

Eventually, they operated on the boy and he stopped crying. The twitching in his arm also disappeared. Now he was a still and silent bundle. My child was a still and silent bundle with human eyes, and I could finally bring him home.

I often think about the boy these days. Ever since Kosti's letter, he has occupied my thoughts. I think I was afraid of remembering before. But that didn't protect me; it probably made me even more scared. I was walking around as if asleep, and all the animals on the savannah know that sleepwalkers are easy prey. I know that the boy is one of the roads
leading into the dark city, one of the roads that dissolve in there. I'm now walking down that path trying to recall my time with him, to remember how it was when I took him home. I was a mother then, because I gave up everything else in my life for him; I can see that now, afterward.

But he wasn't like other toddlers, my child. He never learned to sit or stand, never laughed or flailed his arms around when I leaned over him in his crib. He just was; he lived only through that strangely solitary gaze. His presence was without gesture or sign; it was more like a condition, a state of soul. And I allowed myself to disappear into it. I lived with him in a space that cannot be measured in minutes or years. It was a kind of eternity, like timelessness inside time itself. Sometimes, I can discern the shadow specter that used to be me, moving around in this apartment where I still live, moving around the child who was trapped inside his own body and refused to participate in life. I still have a few objects and a couple of photographs to confirm the actual existence of that period of time. But I don't know; it's as if they're not proof enough.

Incomprehensibly slowly, the boy did change. He developed and regressed at the same time. As his face increasingly faded and seemed to grow remote, he finally learned how to sit, and even to stand up. At preschool age, he could almost walk. With great effort, he could force first one, then the other leg forward, take one step, two steps, three. But most of the time, he was falling. He fell and hurt himself and cried, then fell again. But I still thought I caught a glimpse of triumph in his eyes when he took his first steps on his own. It was a victory over a heavy, unyielding world, one I think he experienced consciously.

Actually, the first six, seven years with the boy weren't so difficult. When he was still a small child, I could keep him on my lap, rock him, and sing him songs. When he was sad, I could comfort him, at least part of the time, and the few words he learned were enough for us; they were
the important words in a world we shared. And for us, there was no other world.

As soon as we got to move home, what had been a despicable hospital transformed into a good and safe place. All our visits there comforted me, the checkups and the follow-ups, because in the hospital, people regarded my child as almost normal; they played with him and joked around, they even called him by his name. In some way, they created a context where I became a mother among mothers and he a child among children. Doctors, physical therapists, radiology staff, and nurses – they all related to the boy as if he was real, and they made it possible for me to feel the same way. He was a boy, a little boy. Sebastian. Yes, his name was Sebastian. I don't know why it's so hard for me to think of his name; I always think about him as the boy. Perhaps names carry some kind of promise, and I'd named him Sebastian in the maternity ward, when he'd just been born. This was before I knew anything about his illness, I lay gazing at his amazing little face and thought: Your name is Sebastian.

When he was around three years old, he spent the days in a special needs day-care center, because I had to go back to work. I found a part-time position in a museum and was completely content there even though what I really wanted to do was research and excavations. I was responsible for the museum's collections, and if nothing else, it gave me the opportunity to use my organizational skills. The job was a healthy kind of normality, a kind of plaster, filling in all the cracks and holes in my life.

No one could predict what would happen with the boy when the time came, but around twelve, thirteen, he entered puberty. Suddenly, pimples covered his increasingly swollen nose, and the smell of sweat that surrounded him was acrid, like that of a feral animal. He also started growing rapidly. His feet, his hands, his whole body grew. I felt he was
growing away from me; it became very complicated to be his mother. I was quickly transformed into a hollow mother cocoon that had become too small and stayed on the floor with his toys. I felt insufficient, but I knew I had to keep going. He was completely helpless, and his dependency didn't decrease when he became sexually mature. Rather the opposite. Suddenly, powerful urges that his half-sleeping body would never be able to satisfy raged through his body with full force, yet out of his reach.

It happened so fast. One day, he was a head taller than I. But when he walked, I had to support him. Crutches and walkers were too complicated for his uncontrollable body. Sitting still so much of the time and taking so many medications had also made him bulky; he was incredibly heavy and I barely had the strength to hold him upright. He could pronounce about ten words that I understood, and he had a series of gestures and sounds I'd learned to interpret. Sometimes he knew when he had to go to the bathroom, but most of the time, he didn't notice the signals his body gave him, didn't know what to do with them. It was as if a vast no-man's-land separated his consciousness from his body. He was lonely somehow, inside his own body. When he was younger, I'd been both his consciousness and his body. Now everything was becoming much more difficult. I couldn't assist him enough; he'd been trapped by his corporeal limitations.

I know they would have found a place for him in a home for the severely handicapped if only I had asked. But I never did; I never even inquired about the possibility. The boy and I had a pact. He was my lot in this world, my duty. He was assigned to me, and I to him.

Mom sits on the couch, her face patchy red from being beaten, her arms and hands scratched. She stares vacantly before her. Her frizzy hair looks like foam around her narrow, tired face.

On the floor is a mess of books, knickknacks, potted plants, pillows, clothes, and toys. The window curtains are torn into shreds.

The only sound in the apartment is that of children crying. The twin boys, who haven't yet learned how to stay away and keep silent, have been spanked with the rug beater. Next to Mom on the couch is my older sister. She puts her arm around Mom's stiff shoulders, and cries softly. I'm sitting on the floor with my little sister on my lap. I am not crying.

It is evening. Dad has been visiting the “Exception,” as he calls the place.

“Have you finally learned what a strayed wife's home looks like?” his thin lips ask, still trembling with rage, before he leaves us.

I go out to the kitchen. He has opened all the cupboards and swept all the glass and china from the shelves. First, I gather up anything that's not broken or just slightly chipped and put it on the table. Then I sweep the floor and put the shards in a piece of newspaper. Finally, I mop until no trace of broken glass remains on the floor.

A cold insight woke me early this morning, long before dawn. I suddenly realized it would be completely crazy to travel to Mervas. I must have been living in some kind of dreamworld since I got Kosti's letter. I now feel ashamed of my own childishness, my madness. If those thoughts of Mervas appear again, I'm going to call the psychiatric ward and ask them to lock me up for a while.

Kosti is calling me again. Once more, he wants to throw me off course. But this time I'm going to keep going in my own tracks; this time I'm not going to listen to his siren calls. I am old. I feel my life will soon be over. I don't have the strength to live anymore; I've already been through too much. For years, I've struggled to accept the truth of that fact.

Growing old has been much harder than I'd imagined. Since I've never cared very much about the way I look, the way other women do, I didn't think I'd care particularly about things like wrinkles, getting a potbelly, and gray hair. But I did. It was devastating. My body fell apart and suddenly became my great source of sorrow. It became a wound that wouldn't heal, but instead grew larger and deeper. To undress and sink into the bathtub became painful; I tried not to let my gaze linger anywhere on my body, but I could still see, of course. The fine, pathetic
pubic hair, which insisted on growing on my thighs instead of covering the mound, disgusted me. So too did the patchy, blue-veined legs. It was all too sad. Like being forced to watch your house fall into decay without being able to do anything about it. Like watching a plant wither. At once, my whole life seemed so wasted, as if I'd neglected to live it while I could. It hurt me so much to realize this. It caused me so much agony that I started hiding like a young girl when I had to undress. The very air wasn't allowed to see me, neither was the light of day, barely even darkness – I had to hide my nudity at all costs. For some time, things went so far I started neglecting my hygiene; it's quite difficult to keep clean without removing your clothes, so I hardly ever washed. Nor did I buy any new clothes, and I let my hair grow unkempt. Finally, I could sense that I smelled bad. I could smell it in my bed, and when I returned to the apartment after being out, my smell greeted me, stale and sickly sweet, putrefied. That's when I made up my mind. I was supposed to be old. I was allowed to grow old. It was natural and obvious and nothing to grieve over, I just had to adjust to the new order of things. The threads of life had simply grown thinner, the weave had become sparse and brittle, and that's what was visible in my body, that's what my body was trying to tell me. The notion was almost liberating. I decided to allow life to run its course and told myself to stop hoping and fantasizing, to stop dreaming about change, mercy, and love – all those things that human beings cling to and refuse to let go. Now I was going to devote myself to concluding things, to folding up and sealing the past.