You knew Lilli well.
I nodded. Maybe he could sense from the aura around my forehead that I was thinking of his kitchen love affair. He felt closer to me than I did to him, he leaned forward to be embraced. I remained stiff, and he straightened up again. His umbrella swung as he drew back, then he stretched his hand out as a greeting, keeping his arm bent. His hand was wooden and dry. I asked:
What did Lilli look like.
He forgot the umbrella and it slid down to his wrist. At the last moment he caught it with his thumb.
Inside that wooden coffin is another one made of zinc, he said. They welded it shut.
He merely raised his chin, keeping his eyes lowered, and whispered:
Look over there, the fourth from the right, that’s Lilli’s mother, go to her.
I went to the woman dressed in black, whom he had called Lilli’s mother and not his wife—in keeping with his kitchen affair. She had shared him with Lilli for nearly three years. She quickly offered me one yellow cheek and then the other. I kissed them far to the side, halfway on her black headscarf. She, too, realized who I was:
You knew, didn’t you. An officer, and he didn’t know any better.
I was thinking of the kitchen. What was she thinking of. When the mourners filed past, Nelu threw his white sweet peas onto the coffin and a clod of earth after them. At the very least I wanted to knock the clod of earth from his hand before it hit the coffin. He nodded to me. I can’t say what Lilli’s mother felt at that moment.
Lilli might have listened to you. It’s better if you go now.
Her hatred had slipped out into the open. He sends me over to her, and I go. She blames me and sends me packing, and again I go. What did the two of them think they were doing, why didn’t I say:
Listen, I’ll stay as long as I want.
A number of velvet shoes with embroidered leaf-patterns stood on the ground. They belonged to Lilli’s relatives from the village. Their white stockings were soiled at the toes and at the heels. Behind them was Nelu. He whispered:
Psst, got a light.
He held the cigarette in his cupped hand, the filter peeping out under his thumb.
You’re not supposed to smoke here, I said.
Why not, he asked.
You seem nervous.
Aren’t you nervous.
No.
Come off it. These things get everybody all shaken up.
What things, I asked.
You know. Death.
I thought you were assigned to Italy. I didn’t know Canada was in your department.
Are you crazy.
Tell me, how can you stand it all, the fresh earth and everything.
The exchange was fast, we were talking too loud. A walking stick rapped against my ankle, and an old man in velvet shoes said:
Good God Almighty, is nothing sacred. If you two want to quarrel, at least don’t do it here.
My heart was thumping inside my head. I took a breath in order to change my tone, and said, as if I were sweetness and light itself:
We’re sorry.
I walked off, leaving Nelu standing there. The earth had still not settled on one of the other graves in Lilli’s row. A new wooden cross and beside it a plate, smeared with food, and I simply couldn’t believe that I had apologized for Nelu as well as myself.
You give the dead food to take on their way to heaven, to distract the evil spirits. On the first night, the soul sneaks around them, past hell, to God. Lilli’s mother will give her a plate too. During the night, the cemetery cats will enjoy a feast on her rectangular mound of soil. The echo of my steps on the paved path was louder than the spadework at the grave. I held my hands to my ears and started running toward the gate. If I didn’t want to understand Lilli’s love for the old men, it was because . . .
A bus was waiting at the entrance to the cemetery gate. My father was sitting asleep at the wheel, with his face buried in his hands—despite the fact that he’d been dead for years. Since his death I had frequently spotted him sitting at the wheel of a moving bus or one that was parked. The reason he died was to get away from Mama and me; he wanted to go on driving undisturbed through the streets, without having to hide from us. And so he just keeled over right before our eyes and died. We shook him, his arms swung limply back and forth and then went rigid. His face drew taut against his cheekbones, his forehead felt like vinyl—cold, with a coldness that shouldn’t occur in humans, it’s too unforgettable. I kept caressing his brow and prying his eyes open so that they’d roll back around, so that the light would enter and force him to live. But every touch seemed indecent. I kept tugging at him while Mama turned away as if he’d never belonged to her at all. His keeling over showed us exactly how a person can shun help, how a person can simply decide to grow cold like that, with utter disregard for anyone else. From one moment to the next, he had unhitched himself from Mama and me and left us to ourselves. Then the doctor arrived. He laid Papa on the couch and asked:
Where’s the old man.
My grandfather is at his brother’s in the country, I said, they don’t have a telephone and the postman only comes once a week. He won’t be back until the day after tomorrow.
The doctor wrote the word stroke on an official form, stamped it, signed it, and left. With his hand on the door, he said:
It’s hard to believe—your husband was in great condition, but his brain just switched off, like a lightbulb.
A glass of sparkling water, which the doctor had requested but not drunk, was standing on the table, fizzing away. When he keeled over, Papa had brought the chair down with him. Now the backrest was lying on the floor and the seat was vertical. It was upholstered in a reddish-gray houndstooth check. Mama tiptoed into the kitchen with the glass of water, glancing back at the couch as if her husband were taking his afternoon nap. She didn’t spill a single drop. From the kitchen came the one brief sound of a glass being set down. After that she came back into the room and sat down at the table where the glass had been. And then there were two people in that room who weren’t fully alive and one who was dead. Three people who for years had been lying every time they referred to themselves as “we,” or said “our” about a water glass, a chair, or a tree in the garden.
Since then, whenever I met my father in the streets, he seemed as unfamiliar as he did lying on the couch. I saw him everywhere, even at the entrance to the cemetery. All the buses throughout the country looked alike, they all had the same worn steps, the same rusty fenders, and at least half a year’s accumulated dust on the roof, fine as flour. I peered in through the windows and suddenly saw the backrests of the vacant seats turn into passengers, and the windshield break out in little freckles, as Papa called the squashed bugs that dried in various shades of red and yellow. I saw women wearing white stockings and embroidered shoes and men with pinched faces and walking sticks—all Lilli’s relations. Her father came from a valley in the hilly region, a mere wisp of a village, where the plum trees were drenched with blue and the branches sagged. The driver had to wait until Lilli was at last completely covered by earth. Lilli’s soul would soon be in the care of the cemetery cats, but it would take half the night before the driver would return his farmers with their overtired faces safely to their plum trees.
While I was going to the girls’ high school in our small town, and still living with my parents, I used to enjoy meeting my father for his last ride of the day, when he ran the empty bus back to the depot. In the near darkness of the streets, as the bus rattled along on its way, we felt no need to talk. The seats, the doors, the hand straps, the steps, every single part was loose, but somehow the bus as a whole held together. Every evening, after a long day’s driving, Papa would tighten up the most important screws and tune the engine for the next morning. Riding to the depot, he would honk as he turned the corners and sail through the red lights. We would laugh when we had a close shave, when the lights of a truck passed within a hairsbreadth. As soon as we reached the depot he’d let me off at
the big iron gates. I’d walk on and he’d take the bus inside, since he still had things to do. An hour and a half later he would show up at our house.
One evening a bug flew into my eye while I was walking home along the avenue. I stopped under a streetlamp, pulled down my lid and held it to my lashes. Then I blew my nose. It was a trick my grandfather had learned in the camp. I must have done it right, because when I was done the fly was caught in the corner of my eye, and I was able to wipe it away. But my eye was watering, and I needed a handkerchief. At that point I realized I’d left my bag in the bus. Papa wouldn’t see it, he never thought of anything but the engine. So I turned back.
I entered the depot from the side. I knew my way well enough, but not in the dark, so I kept to the main building, where an ornate shaded lamp was burning beside the loading dock. I quickly found the bus. In the grass next to the front wheel I saw two empty wicker baskets. And inside the bus, on the seat next to the driver, I saw a braid of hair bouncing up and down. Then I made out cheeks, a nose, a throat. My dad was kissing the throat. He was sitting beneath a woman who was arching her head up as if she wanted to climb her own neck all the way to the ceiling. Her back was bent like a reed. I knew the woman, we had gone to the same girls’ school. She had been in a different grade, but we were the same age. For the last three years she’d been selling vegetables in the market. Her braid went tossing back and forth until finally my father pulled her mouth to his. I wanted to run away like the wind, and at the same time I wanted to keep staring at them forever. A swarm of flies hung around the shaded lamp like a swatch of gauze. The poplar outside the depot looked like a real tree up to the eaves, but there the gutter cut off the light and it became a black tower, swaying and rustling. But the crickets were even louder, and nothing cut them off, from the grass all the way up to the sky, so that I could see Papa’s open mouth but not hear him. I lost track of how long I had been watching or how long the sin lasted. I wanted to make it home on time, to beat him there by a decent interval. The shortest route led through a hole in the fence behind the main building.
Farther away from the depot, the buildings along the avenue seemed to dissolve in the light of the streetlamps. The thick, whitewashed tree trunks shimmered and reeled, or was it me not walking straight. After what I’d seen, I could no longer allow myself to be frightened of the night lurking among the trees. And besides, I knew that even during the day, when the sun was glaring, the white gravestones in the children’s section of the cemetery would reel exactly the same way as the whitewashed tree trunks were doing in the moonlight. I knew that, because the boy I had made the dust snakes with was lying in the cemetery behind the bread factory. In the heat of the dog days, when children had to stay indoors, his stone looked as drunk as the avenue did at night. The markers around him tottered and swayed, especially the portraits on the gravestones, the ones showing children with soft toys and pacifiers. The boy with the largest gravestone was sitting astride a snowman.
Before I was born, my parents had had a boy who turned blue in a fit of laughing. He never became a real son, since he died before he was christened. My parents had no qualms about releasing his grave plot after just two years. It wasn’t until one day when I was eight years old and a boy with grazed knees was sitting across from us in the tram that Mama whispered in my ear:
If your brother had lived, we wouldn’t have had you.
The boy was sucking candy molded in the shape of a duck, it swam in and out of his mouth, outside I saw the houses rising through the windows as we passed. I was sitting next to Mama on a hot wooden seat that was painted green—sitting there in place of my brother.
We had two pictures of me from the maternity home, but not a single one of my brother. One picture shows me on a pillow, next to Mama’s ear. In the other I’m in the middle of a table. With their second child my parents wanted one picture for themselves and one for the gravestone.
I was too old to be frightened of the whitewashed tree trunks on the way home from the depot. But I felt more degraded because of my father than I had in the tram because of Mama. I’m better than that girl with her braid, I thought, why doesn’t Papa take me. She’s dirty, her hands are green from all the vegetables. What does he want with her, she has a good husband. I see him in the mornings on my way to school. He’s young, he lugs those heavy baskets for her from the bus stop to the market, while she just carries a plastic bag. Besides, she has a child, who patiently passes the time in the back of her stall, underneath the concrete roof, playing with a grubby stuffed dog on an upturned wooden crate. Fool that I am, I even bought an armful of horseradish from her the day before yesterday. She dropped the money into a large apron pocket over her belly and stroked the child’s hair. She knew who I was, she must have been thinking about her sin. A fresh cold sore was blossoming on her upper lip, it never occurred to me that she had caught it from Papa. His own was fading, it had been a vivid crimson two weeks earlier. You couldn’t tell by looking at her how happy she would have been to leave the child and his grubby plush dog at home in order to have some fun with my father come evening.
Papa showed up at home carrying my bag over his shoulder, he placed it in front of me and asked:
Since when have you been so careless.
Who’s calling who careless, I asked back.
He pretended not to hear, sat down at the table under the bright light and waited for his food. He cut the salami into pieces thick as a finger and ate four red-hot peppers he’d brought with him, probably from her. It’s possible he even paid for them. And to top it all off he ate six slices of bread and a handful of salt. That long braid must be a real drain on his energy. Maybe the gas fumes in the bus got his blood pumping to his heart too fast, and that made him feel spunky, like back during the war. My grandfather had once shown me a small picture and said:
That’s his tank.
And who’s that, I asked.
Lying in the grass next to my father was a young woman, barefoot, her shoes flung far apart at the base of a shrub. Dandelions were blooming between her calves, her elbow was bent and her head propped on her hand.
A musical girl, Grandfather said, she played his flute. During the war your father was after anything with a slit that didn’t eat grass. Later the letters never stopped coming. I tore them all up so your mother wouldn’t see them. I was amazed how quickly he married her. She wasn’t so much to look at really, but she put a bridle on him, and had him where she wanted from the get-go.
I rode to the depot with him ten more evenings, counting each trip on my fingers. I grabbed his arm, his knee, but he just kept his eyes on the road. I touched his ear, he smiled at me, then looked back at the road. I placed my hand on his, on the wheel. He said:
I can’t drive like this.
On the last trip I offered him a pear I’d already taken a large bite out of, so he wouldn’t have to struggle with the thick, yellow peel. He chewed and smacked his lips, the juice frothing around his teeth, and swallowed with an absent look in his eyes. Papa liked the taste, but I was only eating to entice him. When I couldn’t stomach any more and he turned his mouth to take another bite, I said:
You can have the rest, I’ve had enough.
He could have asked why. He was honking as he turned the corners because he was looking forward to his woman with the long braid. He was sailing through the red lights, not to give us something to laugh about but because he was in a hurry to see her.
When he reached the depot on that last trip, he once again opened the bus door at the gates with a flourish that was part of his sin. He’d eaten the rest of the pear, including the core, and tossed the stalk through the door before I could get out. Now he was ready for forbidden flesh.
After that I stayed home in the evening. At least he might have asked whether I wanted to come along just one more time. I’d used up all ten fingers, but I could easily have started over. Maybe cigarettes would have worked better than my hands or a half-eaten pear. I could have taught him how
to inhale the smoke into his lungs; Papa just puffed the smoke out through his mouth—in fact, he only smoked because the foreign cigarettes made him look smart. And since he couldn’t afford them, he rarely smoked at all, but smoking somehow fit him. While he was taking the bus in for the night, I would pick a peach from the pitch-black trees along our fence and plop down on the garden bench. I’d listen to the crickets chirping a song about a bus that changed into a bed in the evenings, intimate and sinful and just for two. Actually for three, since that was the secret I was eating and swallowing.
When I came home from my last ride, after the pear had failed to get me anywhere, Mama asked:
Have you been crying.
Yes, I had been.
There was a dog prowling around the garbage cans, he followed me from the avenue all the way to the bread factory, I told her. Mama said:
It’s in heat and you scared it.
All you think about is being in heat, I yelled: it’s nothing but skin and bones and it’s half-dazed with hunger.
My heart turned so hard, it would have struck her dead if I had thrown it. My tongue dried out, that was how much I hated her when she added, without a trace of shame:
Ah, so that’s why I heard that howling outside.
Outside, as always in dry summers at dusk, there was not a single dog to be heard, nothing except the chirping of crickets, from the ground all the way up to the sky. Mama was simply dressing up my lie with my being scared of a dog in heat. She was lying to keep me from blurting out that it was my father who was in heat, and that I could have made him scared if I had wanted.
How often have I had to lie or keep my mouth shut to protect the people I love most—at the very times I could stand them least—to keep them from plunging headlong into some disaster. Whenever I wanted my hatred to last forever, a feeling of disgust would soften it up. With a hint of love on the one hand, and a heap of self-reproach on the other, I was already surrendering to the next hatred. I’ve always had just enough sense to spare others, but never enough to save myself from misfortune.