Читать книгу Die, My Love - Ariana Harwicz - Страница 7

My first memory of the baby outside me is from the porch of my house. Night is falling and so it begins: the decline, the anxiety, the descent into an altered state. I’m afraid of the harm I could cause the newborn, that’s why I’m sitting here in the wicker chair counting fireflies or the cries of animals. I don’t join the others at the table when they call me to eat – leftovers, still, from the Christmas holidays – or sit with them when they’re gathered by the fire the way they are now. I hear forks entering mouths and food being swallowed as I begin to lose my mind, though I don’t know if that’s really what’s happening. No one does. Not me, not my man, certainly not any doctor. My mother-in-law is addicted to doctors, I need only sneeze and she’s ready to call one. She loves them, idolises them. I bet she gets wet even saying the word. I don’t know what she thinks they can do about her ruined pancreas, though. My mind is spent, it’s lost on the river bank. When I finally go in, the food will be cold on the counter and there’ll be a note in his writing saying ‘Enjoy your dinner, I love you’. By the end of the night, I’ve built up so much rage that I could drink until I have a heart attack. That’s what I tell myself but it’s not true. I couldn’t even down half a bottle. My days are all like this. Endlessly stagnant. A slow downfall. Now my mother-in-law is serving dessert, the spoon scraping the bottom of the bowl. Pears baked in brandy, or covered in chocolate. They no longer ask why I don’t sit with them. Why I don’t share the bed, or the table, or the bathroom. Sometimes I go out to kick at the air, and even if I saw my in-laws spying on me through the window I wouldn’t stop. I’ve already counted three fireflies and there must be more. From out here, I can see it everywhere and that’s why I don’t go in. Death is present in the fire, in the carpet, in the curtains, in the stuffiness of the old furniture and the silverware. In the flowerless vase. Death seeps out of the umbrellas piled up near the door. I lie down and get up so many times that I don’t know when I did what. The baby’s so small he gets lost among the sheets, like a tiny fish. Everyone will wear black, even the children. The night is scaring me. I’d put Glenn Gould on in the background to make myself feel better but classical music sends my husband to sleep. It knocks me out, darling, he says. The fact that my father-in-law died in his sleep doesn’t help. The sky is like a velvet stage curtain that 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.