Читать книгу Wild Woman - Marina Sur Puhlovski - Страница 10

What’s wrong with him, what, I accost my mother because her words are eating away at me, I want her to say that everything is fine, that she gives me her blessing for the person I think is the one, the person I’ve been saving myself for, because somebody had drummed that into my head – that there is that one and only you have to save yourself for – somebody, maybe her, books, the church, no, not the church, because I don’t go to church, we aren’t allowed to go to church, but the church still inhabits my mother, she went to church for years, she had virtually lived in the church before she got married, before the war, and I guess she spontaneously absorbed its ideas, one of which was to save yourself for the right one, in other words for your husband, because only he can be the right one. And from the church, through my mother, this idea spilled over into me.

I sing his praises to my mother, he’s polite, he’s a gentleman, he holds my coat for me and pulls out the chair, if he sees me shivering from the cold he’ll take off his jacket and give it to me, leaving him to freeze, he always chats with her in the kitchen before we retreat to my room, and I remind her that he is somebody I can study with, that we are interested in the same things, the same books, that we’ve been together for three months now and he still hasn’t touched me, he’s waiting for me to be ready, that’s how much he cares about me, I want to tell her, but I don’t, I don’t want to embarrass either of us, not her or me.

I still don’t know about the woman with the tail, he’ll tell me about her later, about the radio journalist whose needs he satisfies, I realise, whom he’s met through Leon, another journalist, a family friend, I still believe that I’m the only one. At least since the girl he’d been with before me, the girl who left him, Dunja, her father died while they were together, he said, and her father was all she had because her mother had died long before. He went with her to visit her father in the hospital, practically every day, they brought him lunch because the hospital food was terrible. Then one day her father’s bed was empty; awful, that bed, already made up for the next patient while her father was lying in the refrigerator down there in the basement, he said, she didn’t even cry or go to see him, she couldn’t, but when they left she threw his lunch into the bushes, he said, pretending to throw something, obviously impressed by the gesture. After the funeral she moved in with him and his family, because she was afraid to be alone in her flat, he said, but their place was cramped, I had already seen that for myself, a living room, bedroom and kitchen, you could barely call it three rooms, so it was a tight squeeze. That was in the spring, and in the summer she went to the seaside, but he stayed behind, he had to study so he could get his high school diploma in the autumn, because he had failed the summer term; she had passed. During her summer vacation she fell in love with a musician at a dance, confessed everything to him when she got back, all tanned and happy; he was a guitarist and singer and she immediately married him, he said wistfully, but not unhappily, it didn’t surprise him. Guys like that are attractive, he said, especially at the seaside, in the summer, he said, when it’s all about the body, I thought to myself.

But the odd thing is, he said, that now he again has a girlfriend with a dying father, I thought it was odd, too, although my father has been at death’s door forever, and even odder, I found, was that his own father was retired, like mine, but on a disability pension, not an old age pension like my father, and it was so little that it was hardly worth mentioning, so his mother had to hold down two jobs, like mine.

My mother is an office worker during the day, and types at night. His is also an office worker during the day, but she sews at night. She isn’t a seamstress, but she makes things for whoever needs something, colleagues, neighbours. The only work the husbands can manage is household stuff. And even then, only shopping and cooking, not ironing or cleaning, that’s beyond them. Both help the wives with their work, my father puts carbon paper with the typing paper before she rolls it into the typewriter, and then sorts out the number of typed copies for delivery, and his father hems the clothes, and both are pitiful.

That’s what I was thinking when I saw his father Frane hunched over in the living room armchair, cross-stitching some of the clothes – that he was pitiful. My father didn’t look so pitiful to me because I was angry with him, I fought with him and hated him and told him it was his fault that he was sick because he drank, but when I saw his father, I realised that mine was pitiful, too. But I didn’t ask myself what I was doing in this house which was just like mine, where the mothers slaved away and the husbands were sick, whether it was their fault or their fate didn’t matter, and where you felt bad so you got out; no, I felt at home, I was glad we were so alike and I saw this similarity as an argument to use against my mother – the man I chose was the right person.

She had already met them, Danica and Frane, and she liked them, they are good people, our kind, they were struggling like us and had nothing, she said, she had no complaints about them, they were fine – but their son wasn’t.

Why not, I jumped on my mother, I wanted to hear her arguments, so that I could knock them down, because every argument can be knocked down, and my mother knew it, so she didn’t give me any, because that would have been the end. Because what she knew, what she sensed, what the angels had whispered in her ear, would turn into fear, into a foreboding, a constant worry, a desire to protect her daughter from anybody who could take her away, into her own bad experience that she’d passed on to her daughter, it would be anything but the truth she felt in her heart – that this man was going to destroy me. Or at least would try to.

But like all stupid twenty-year-olds I had decided to get my way, because you’re indescribably stupid when you’re barely twenty and haven’t yet experienced anything except in your imagination, based on the stories you’ve read in books which you see as real, though they’re not, and you project yourself into the story as if it’s going to be yours, but you haven’t had life’s robotic principles instilled in you for some sort of protection, principles based on logic, on controlling bad karma, bad karma can’t be avoided but its blade can be blunted if it is not too extreme, so I extract my mother’s arguments out of her like a dentist pulling teeth, which he will then throw away.

It’s not normal to flunk every single grade in high school and then pass them all privately, says my mother, embarking on a battle she has lost before she started, so she doesn’t wage it openly, face to face, loud and clear, no, she does it in passing, while doing something else, she tosses the words out in passing, over her back, in the kitchen, the heart of the house, where, as usual, we’re talking, she throws them into her daughter’s gaping jaw because the daughter is now a beast – and it’s also not normal to study for two years and not pass a single exam, I’d think about that if I were you, she says, already defeated by the resistance she’s meeting.

The daughter is shocked, they had told her mother these things half-jokingly, as something completely unimportant; did he finish high school, yes, did he enrol in university, yes, did he travel around Italy for two years, yes, so how was he supposed to pass his exams if he was travelling in Italy, he’s still young, he’ll catch up, anyway you were the best student in your school and look at how you wound up, a clerk and a typist, I don’t spare my mother a thing, look at how many geniuses flunked their year and were the worst students in their school, it takes talent to resist established thought – where did I pick up these stupid phrases, I wonder today, when I have to pay the price for them – now that he’s with me you can be sure he’ll pass his exams, we’re already working on it, I reel off the words in defence of the man who is right for me, the man I haven’t slept with yet, he’s not yet my lion, but I’m defending him like a lioness.

At the same time, I remember, it occurs to me that he never told me anything about his time in Italy except that he stayed with a cousin from Split, who lives in Rome, not a word about all the wonderful things he saw, about the amazing architecture, about the paintings and museums, about Michelangelo or the pope, that’s ancient history, he said putting an end to the conversation, and I guess he hugged me and said I was beautiful so who needed Italy? I admire him for having travelled at all, when I haven’t, for having seen things, when I haven’t, for having experienced things, when I haven’t. I don’t even have a passport. The other thing that went through my mind was how it was strange that he couldn’t speak a word of Italian even though he spent two years in Rome and other places in the country, and that Leon, whom I’d already met, with his goatee, eagle-eyes and mocking smile, had said to me: if he saw Italy, then I’m the pope, to which I took mortal offence and went on the attack, saying what kind of a friend tells such lies. That’s Leon, he said, he likes to provoke.

He didn’t learn the language, what he did was look, he said, Italy is for looking, for getting drunk on culture, not for wasting time on learning the language, and if I had any doubts they were quashed by his parents, Danica and Frane, who confirmed those two lost years there, two serious people crushed by life who certainly wouldn’t lie. And later it was also confirmed by Renata, his married cousin from Rome, when she briefly visited Zagreb and stayed for lunch. A beautiful, elegant woman, obviously rich, and wearing designer clothes.

Now, when I remember them talking about Italy in that cramped living room, crammed with furniture, where the sofa bed was pulled out for the son at night, and then folded back again in the morning, where the father sewed the hems, coughed and watched television, and the mother worked the sewing machine, like my cousin Julia, or peered smilingly from the kitchen where she cut clothes using Burda patterns – I see that they were stiff, that they exchanged confused glances, that they were constrained, and that they used few words because they hadn’t been taught how to lie or how to deceive people, they are the ones who had been deceived, but they did it all the same, they did it because they had to, because they were forced to by their one and only son, of whom there were both afraid.