Читать книгу Baba Yaga Laid an Egg - Dubravka Ugrešić - Страница 8

‘Bring me the…’

‘What?’

‘That stuff you spread on bread.’

‘Margarine?’

‘No.’

‘Butter?’

‘You know it’s been years since I used butter!’

‘Well, what then?’

She scowls, her rage mounting at her own helplessness. And then she slyly switches to attack mode.

‘Some daughter if you can’t remember the bread spread stuff!’

‘Spread? Cheese spread?’

‘That’s right, the white stuff,’ she says, offended, as if she had resolved never again to utter the words ‘cheese spread’.

The words had got altered. This enraged her; she felt like stamping her foot, banging her fist on the table or shouting. As it was, she was left tense, fury foaming in her with a surprising buoyant freshness. She would stop, faced with a heap of words, as if before a puzzle she could not assemble.

‘Bring me the biscuits, the congested ones.’

She knew precisely which biscuits she meant. Digestive biscuits. Her brain was still functioning: she was replacing the less familiar phrase digestive with the more familiar congested, and out of her mouth came this startling com bination. This is how I pictured it working, perhaps the connection between language and brain followed some different route.

‘Hand me the thermometer so I can give Javorka a call.’

‘Do you mean the cell phone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you really mean Javorka?’

‘No of course not, why ever would I call her?!’

Javorka was someone she had known years before, and who knows how the name had occurred to her?

‘You meant Kaia, didn’t you?’

‘Well, I said I wanted to call Kaia, didn’t I?’ she snorted.

I understood her. Often when she couldn’t remember a word, she would describe it: Bring me that thingy I drink from. I usually knew what her thingies were. This time the task was easy: it was a plastic water bottle she always kept at hand.

And then, she began coming up with ways to help herself. She started adding diminutive words like ‘little’, ‘cute little’, ‘nice little’, ‘sweet’, which she had never used before. Now even with some personal names, including mine, she would add them. They served like magnets, and sure enough, the words that had scattered settled back again into order. She was particularly pleased to use words like these for the things she felt fondest of (my sweet pyjamas, my cute little towel, that nice little pillow, my little bottle, those comfy little slippers). Maybe with these words and phrases, as though with spit, she was moistening the hardboiled sweets of words, maybe she was using them to buy time for the next word, the next sentence.

Perhaps that way she felt less alone. She cooed to the world that surrounded her and the cooing made the world seem less threatening and a little smaller. Along with the diminutives in her speech the occasional augmentative would jump out like a spring: a snake grew to be a big bad snake, a bird into a fat old bird. People often seemed larger to her than they really were (He was a huuuuuuge man!). She had shrunk, that is what it was, and the world was looming.

She spoke slowly with a new, darker timbre. She seemed to enjoy the colour. A little crack showed up in her voice, the tenor became a touch imperious, with a tone demanding the absolute respect of the listener. With this frequent loss of words the timbre of her voice was all she had left.

There was another novelty. She had begun to lean on certain sounds as if they were crutches. I’d hear her shuffling around the house, opening the fridge or going to the bathroom, and she would be saying, in regular rhythm, hm, hm, hm. Or: uh-hu-hu, uh-hu-hu.

‘Talking to someone?’ I’d ask.

‘No one, just me. Talking to myself,’ she’d answer.

Who knows, maybe at some point she was suddenly unnerved by the silence, and to chase off her fear, she came up with her hm-hm, uh-hu.

She was scared of the dying and that is why she registered deaths so carefully. She, who was forgetting so many things, never missed mentioning the death of someone she knew, either close to her or distant, the friends of friends, even people she had never met, the death of public figures that she heard of on television.

‘Something has happened.’

‘What?’

‘I am afraid it will be a shock, if I say.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Vesna’s died.’

‘Vesna who?’

‘You know Vesna! Second floor?’

‘No, I don’t. Can’t say I’ve ever met her.’

‘The one who lost her son?’

‘No.’

‘The one who was always wearing all that make-up in the lift?’

‘Really, I don’t.’

‘It only took a few months,’ she’d say, and snap shut the little imaginary file on Vesna.

Her neighbours and friends had been dying. The circle, mostly women, had shrunk. The men had long since died, some of the women had buried two husbands, some even their own children. She would speak without discomfort of the deaths of people who hadn’t meant much to her. The little commemorative stories made therapeutic sense; relating them she fended off the fear of her own dying, I suppose. She evaded, however, any mention of the death of those nearest to her. Her close friend’s death was followed by silence.

‘She got so old,’ she said tersely a little later, as if spitting out a bitter morsel. Her friend was almost a year older than she was.

She threw out all her black clothes. Before, she would never have worn bright colours; now, she was forever wearing a red shirt or one of two blouses the colour of young grass. When we called a taxi, she refused to get in if it was black. (Call another cab. I’m not getting into this one!) She tucked away the pictures of her parents, her sister, my father, which she used to keep in frames on the shelf, and set out the photographs of her grandchildren, my brother and his wife, pictures of me and beautiful pictures of herself from her younger years.

‘I don’t like the dead,’ she told me. ‘I’d rather be in the company of the living.’

Her attitude towards the dead changed, too. Earlier they had each held their place in her memories, everything was set out in a tidy manner, as in an album of family pictures. Now the album was disintegrating and the photographs were scattered. She no longer spoke of her late sister. On the other hand she suddenly began mentioning her father more often – who was always reading and had brought books home, and who was the most honest man on earth. Yet she was compelled to bring him down a peg. The memory of him was permanently tainted by the greatest disappointment she had ever known, an event she would never forget, and which she simply could never forgive him for.

The source of the memory was altogether disproportionate to the bitterness with which she spoke of it, or so at least it seemed to me. My grandparents had some good friends, a married couple. When Grandma died, these friends looked after Grandpa, especially the wife, Grandma’s friend. My mother once happened on a scene of tenderness between the woman and my grandfather. Grandpa was kissing the woman’s hand.

‘I was sickened. And Mother said over and over: “Take care of my husband, take care of my husband!”’

It is highly unlikely that Grandma said anything of the kind. She had died of a heart attack. This pathetic plea – Take care of my husband, take care of my husband! – had been inserted into my dying grandmother’s mouth by my mother.

There was one more image that overlapped with the ‘sickening’ scene of the hand being kissed, and this was an image that my mother could not easily dismiss. When she was in Varna for the last time, Grandpa asked Mum to take him back with her, but she – drained by my father’s protracted illness and the gruesome throes of his dying, and then finally his death – feared the burden of the obligation, and refused. Grandpa spent his last years abandoned in a home for the elderly.

‘He tucked a little towel, my gift to him, under his arm, turned and went back into the house,’ she said, describing their last encounter.

It would seem that she had smuggled the towel into this last image. We always brought a pile of gifts every summer for my mother’s Bulgarian relatives. It wasn’t just that she liked giving things to people, she also liked this picture of herself: she would come back from the Varna she had left so many years before, feeling like the good fairy after distributing the gifts she had brought. I wondered why she had inserted that towel into the farewell scene with her own father. It was as if she was lashing herself with it, as if the towel he tucked under his arm was the most terrible possible image of a person’s decline. Instead of undertaking the grand, sincere gesture, which would have meant jumping through troublesome and time-consuming bureaucratic hoops with little guarantee of success, she stuffed a towel into Grandpa’s hand!

Her need to taint her dead was something new. These were not feasts but snacks, focused only on details, which I was hearing for the first time, and, indeed, she may have fabricated them on the spot to hold my attention and confide a secret she had never told a soul. Perhaps the fact that she was in possession of information relating to the dead gave her a glow of satisfaction. Recalling her late friends, sometimes, as if she’d just then decided to take their grades down a notch in the school records, she’d add importantly: I never took to him; I never liked her much either; They didn’t appeal to me; She was always stingy; No, they were not nice people.

Once or twice she even made as if to taint the image of my father, who was, in her words, the most honest man she’d ever known, but for whatever reason she relented, and left him on the pedestal where she herself had placed him after his death.

‘You weren’t exactly crazy about him, were you?’ I asked cautiously.

‘No, but I did love him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was so quiet,’ she said simply.

Dad was, indeed, a man of few words. And I remember my grandfather as being a quiet man. It hit me for the first time that both of them were not only quiet, but the most honest men Mum had ever known.

It may be that with this tainting of the memory of the dead she was easing her feeling of guilt for things she hadn’t done for them but might have, her guilt for what she had let slip by. She camouflaged her lack of greater attentiveness to the people closest to her with a hardness in judgement. She simply seemed afraid of caring more for others. At some point she had been scared of life just as she was scared of death. That was why she held on so firmly to her place, her stubborn coordinates, and shut her eyes to the scenes and situations that moved her too deeply.

Onion should always be well sautéed. Good health is what matters most. Liars are the worst people. Old age is a terrible calamity. Beans are best in salad. Cleanliness is half of health. Always discard the first water when you cook kale.

It may be that she had asserted things like this before, but I had paid no attention. Everything had got smaller. Her heart had shrunk. Her veins had shrunk. Her footsteps were smaller. Her repertoire of words had diminished. Life had narrowed. She uttered her truisms with special weight. Truisms gave her the feeling, I suppose, that everything was fine, that the world was precisely where it should be, that she was in control and had the power to decide. She wielded her truisms as if they came with an invisible stamp of approval, which she smacked everywhere, eager to leave her mark. Her mind still worked, her feet still moved, she could walk, though only with the help of a walker, but walk she did, and she was a human being who knew for a certainty that beans are best in salad, and that old age is a terrible calamity.