Читать книгу Die, My Love - Ariana Harwicz - Страница 9

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 to loving her as though she’d been born that way. And she got used to being loved that way. When she saw her husband’s washed corpse she was shocked because before it turned to ash, it had the shape of a body born in the autumn of 1940. And it, and his pedantry, his monologues from the head of the table, his laughter from atop the tractor he drove, all ended up locked in a pinewood coffin. As did the little secrets, the visits to the local brothel, the time his roving hand found its way under the skirt of a secondary-school student on the bus and it was the talk of the town. In it, too, went the heroic exploits from his time in the navy, the deaths he tracked with marks in his groin, the game of cards in a train carriage at the age of thirty-two and the time he made her laugh so hard she wet herself and had to hurry off to change. It was a run-of-the-mill wake, a quick goodbye. An excellent father and husband, said the guests. Better than excellent. The procession then made its way to eat at the inn where the dead man had been a regular. He was there every lunchtime, drinking his beer and his aperitifs, telling witty tales of his time on the front line. The guests remembered him as a man among comrades, but his widow revealed that he used to sit for hours in the semidarkness of the living room facing the lit-up tree. And it wasn’t so much my father-in-law’s death that affected me, but rather the loss of his words, In all my born days, his turns of phrase, Well, I happen to be rather good at that, and his thick, spit-filled tone. So much screwing around, so many memories of bravery from the war, so much debauchery, but in the end no one really had anything to say about him.