Читать книгу A Handful of Sand - Marinko Koscec - Страница 7

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Christmas was designed as a punishment for those who don’t experience a sense of unification with God’s love, or their own love. It’s supposed to be the culmination of cheerfulness and hope for an even more cheerful afterlife which they’ve been beavering away for all year, a sentiment now represented by baubles and angels dangling from a dead conifer. I can’t decide what makes Christmas more unbearable: the warm putrefaction of this year or the usual soppy snowflakes.

That evening I dropped in to see Father. I could see from the street that it was dark in the kitchen, which was enough to trigger the darkest forebodings. I rushed breathless up the stairs. The TV set suffocated the living room more than casting it in a bluish light. It took a few seconds for me to make him out on the couch: one hand hanging to the floor, his head thrown back, and his mouth wide open. From up close it was clear he wasn’t breathing. I was stunned and my heart felt as if it would break. I grabbed him by the collar, shook him, and he opened his eyes. He gazed through me for an instant and then choked up, gasping for air. This happened to him from time to time–he would stop breathing when he fell asleep. But never before had he so staunchly, so pedantically, staged a respiratory shutdown.

I gave him his eye drops. His cataracts were growing diligently. Sooner or later he’d need an operation, but for the time being he brushed the prospect aside. The good side of it was that his impaired vision didn’t bring any major disadvantages; there were no longer any particularly precious sights for him in this world.

When I told him I was moving out, exactly fifteen months ago, he didn’t have any objections. Or if he did, he didn’t dare to state them. If he’d had a sliver of lucidity left, he would have seen what his condition had done to me. It had penetrated me to the core and turned me into a black hole. But he just kept on going, perhaps aware of what he was doing to me but powerless to prevent it. Unable to help himself and to accept my attempts to help him. No one can help anyone. That’s easily said, and I knew it all those years; but still I let myself be fettered, remaining in the embrace of his sorrow. As we know, time heals sorrow. His responded well to the treatment, was tamed, and grew over time into our own domestic monster.

Mother died in the summer of ninety-one when I was eighteenth, less than a month after Father’s appointment as a minister in the Government of Democratic Unity. That came about due to the Reconciliation: ex-Communists and Catholic conservatives alike welcomed a Jew in the cabinet so they could demonstrate their inclusiveness. He himself didn’t give a damn about reconciliation and the blossoming of democracy. He was already weary, preoccupied with his untimely ageing. But the offer flattered his vanity and he accepted the position like a medal awarded at retirement for sufferings endured. It’s safe to say that no one remembered his time as minister, and the Jewish bit was a half-truth at best. Religion was never mentioned in our family, let alone practiced–his ‘Jewishness’ and my mother’s nominal Orthodox Christianity existed purely on paper. That was almost the only thing I ever agreed about with my parents.

After all, I didn’t consider them capable of any sensible conversation, nor did they show even the semblance of a desire to comprehend where I was at. We lived under the same roof but on different planets. At least up until the day when Father, eavesdropping on my phone conversation, learnt that I’d lost my virginity. I was fourteen. I heard that, he growled, dashed into the room wild-eyed and laid into me with fists and feet. Mother didn’t lift a finger or say a word to stop him. When the ‘lesson’ was over, she took my head in her lap and stroked it until I’d cried my very last tear. Then she quietly closed the door behind her.

Still, her death probably would have well and truly crushed me if Father hadn’t made it there first. It was already hot and sultry in the morning, that July Sunday. Around four in the afternoon, I heard a smashing of crockery in the kitchen and then a despairing Oooh, oooh. Father was kneeling on the tiled floor, his face grotesquely twisted. Between the palms of his hands he held my mother’s face; unlike his, it was calm and almost serene, more beautiful than ever.

A face so different to mine that people viewed us innumerable times in disbelief: her soft, fair hair, blue eyes and milky complexion, and me downright swarthy. She had especially large, doe eyes. At forty-four, her beauty was fully intact and easily interrupted ministers’ conversations, turned heads 180 degrees, and caused nervous grimaces in other women. Allegedly it was the cause of one broken marriage and a broken skull before she married Father. He, in turn, was a striking man with austere features, of lean yet athletic build–an esteemed architect, broad-minded and cultured; although sixteen years her senior, he probably had no trouble hunting her down to put in the showcase among the other trophies he had won. He thought highly of competitions.

And then, all at once, she lay there on the kitchen floor, and he above her, with horrible cries which couldn’t bring anything back. By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late. The clot had whisked her away. Now she lay on their double bed, and he didn’t stop hugging her, and choking on his tears and cries for help. The scene dried up my tears within a few minutes. I shoved him out and spent the evening with her alone, then I showed in the coroner and the woman we paid to do her up. I spent the night there by her side, following my father’s uneven breathing in the living room and wondering if it too would cease. My mother’s mouth hung slightly open. I was obsessed by the ghastly thought that, if my vigilance slackened for just an instant, the flies circling up near the ceiling would get inside her. In the morning her mouth still looked completely alive, as if it was about to tell me something important she’d been thinking of all her life.

I had to make the arrangements with the undertaker, choose the coffin, look after the epitaph, the wording on the wreath, the obituary notices in the papers and the details of the funeral protocol, as well as take care of catering for the condolence bearers, all by myself. The very mention of these things made Father’s eyes flow. However, he was only seized by hysteria one more time: when they were carrying Mother out of the house, like a log wrapped in a sheet; he fell to his knees and clung to the coat of one of the medics, a boy my age, whom I stared at in astonishment, wondering how he could have chosen such an occupation. Over time, Father calmed down and spent most of his time staring out the window. For him it was like Jim Jarmush’s window drawn on the prison wall, not one intended for looking out of.

It hurt to watch him diminish like that, both mentally and physically. He became bent and wrinkled, ridiculously small for the couch which was his prison; he devoted his days to the window and in the evenings hovered in the grey zone between the TV chat show and dozing off. For several months they took him to work, a bit like they cart away domestic rubbish. He resigned before the end of his term of office and before reaching retirement age, ‘for health reasons’. But these weren’t just of an emotional nature because all the ailments which had already been gnawing at him now gained momentum. Diabetes, gout, high creatinine levels, prostrate problems, painful joints, cardiac arrhythmia, a duodenal ulcer, insomnia, corns and cataracts: he was a gerontological showpiece. But he contributed to all that himself with intensive concentration, which he could direct depending on the acuteness of the problems and above all by groaning. With every step he took in the flat, and also when he went out to walk in the courtyard, he let out the sound of his suffering, such that until I moved out I was able to follow his every step as if he was carrying a beeper. Just recently he admitted that he groaned on purpose, self-therapeutically, in the hope that things would hurt less. Since pain can’t be seen, it’s easier to live with suffering if you hear it. Whatever.

Apart from shuffling to the corner shop, for years now he’s only been leaving the house to go to the Health Centre (is the sarcasm of that term intentional?) and the cemetery. He trudges back with his bags as if from martyrdom, groaning three times louder. When I cooked for him he only stabbed listlessly at the food, and the slightest criticism made him get up from the table, offended: This is the death of me, can’t you understand that?! He’d never been of the jovial kind. No frivolities interested him, not even spending time with friends. When Mother died, the rest of humanity passed away for him too. To those who phoned with words of encouragement or just with a conventional enquiry as to his health, he always replied with the same To be honest, I’m not well and never asked anything back. Oh, how many times did that honesty make me want to get up and strangle him just to cure him of his misconception that being honest like that was the best he could do, in fact the only thing he could do, for himself and others.

I never stopped missing Mother, but at the risk of sounding harsh, I also missed her when she was alive; a mother with human blood in her veins, whom you wish to confide in. Sometimes I feel the need to go to her grave, light a candle and sit for ten minutes. Not that I feel more of her presence there, but it’s soothing.

I never let my sorrow break the surface–because of Father more than myself. I felt that he hung from me like a thread. Today I know that was mistaken because he’s essentially been dead all this time. The fact that he can still take a few steps, and groan, doesn’t mean anything. I sought in vain for something to at least reanimate him a little. No antidepressants or psychotherapy, no pensioners’ excursions or stays at rheumatic clinics, not even his favourite pastries mother used to make or my quasi successes in life could evoke even a semblance of liveliness in him. At the same time, however dead he was, he cried out from the depths of his unconscious to share his suffering with me and for me to be part of it. It didn’t overly concern him that his need was also a hand dragging me into the grave. But I couldn’t muster enough self-respect to decide that it wasn’t my problem any more. And so, on the threshold of my own life, I became a mother to my much-lamented father.

Yet I couldn’t replace Mother or do anything for him. We’d lived alongside each other for so many years, separated by a vast sea of silence. I had pangs of conscience, but I gradually gave up trying to contrive words. All of them were destined to fall into a deep well. He didn’t even try and pretend that what I said meant anything to him, to wipe that nothing-matters-any-more look off his face for at least a second. We both knew very well how much harder it would be for him if I wasn’t around. So ever more often, when I left the study to check how he was doing, I would just stand at the door. He’d raise his eyes and we’d look at each other in a silence no words could unlock.