Best European Fiction 2013

[HUNGARY] MIKLÓS VAJDA Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame

She stands in the kitchen, in a kitchen, not our kitchen, not the old kitchen, not any of our old kitchens, but her own kitchen, an unfamiliar one, not mine, and she cooks, stirs something. She is cooking for me. That’s another new thing, a strange thing. But there she stands, repeating anything I want, anywhere, whatever I happen to want most, at the time I want it. I am still here: she is not. And there are things I do want. But even if I didn’t want them she would carry on coming and going, doing this and that, entering my head, calling me, talking, listening, now in delight, now in pain, thinking of me or looking at me, ringing me up, asking me things, writing to me as if she were alive. I am insatiable: I am interested in all that is not me, in what is private, in affairs before me and after me, in her existence as distinct from mine, and I try to fit the jigsaw together, but nowadays, whatever she is doing—and I can’t do anything about this—is always, invariably done for me, because of me, to me, with me, or on my behalf—or rather, of course, for me.

At this very moment I want her to stand there, in that kitchen, stirring away. Let’s have her cooking one of those dishes she learned abroad, let her make a caper sauce to go with that sizzling grilled steak. But I often have her repeat a great many other things too: for example, I have recently taken to observing her secretly from my bed as she slowly removes her make-up at the antique dressing table with the great gilded antique silver-framed standing mirror before her, going about her task in a businesslike manner, applying cream with balls of cotton wool, her hands working in a circular motion, efficiently, always in exactly the same way, pulling faces if need be, puffing out a cheek, rubbing her skin then smearing it with, among other things, a liquid she refers to as her “shaking lotion” and which dries immediately so she looks like a white-faced clown. Then she wipes it off and I fall asleep again. The room is full of mirrors, each of the six doors of the built-in cupboard is a full length mirror.

My bed is there in her bedroom: my own bedroom is being used by the German Fräulein. Sometimes I wake late at night just as she enters from the bathroom, wearing her yellow silk dressing gown, and I hear her as she applies creams and lotions for the night before going to bed, as she moves around, gets comfortable, clears her throat, and gives a good sigh before falling sound asleep, her mouth open, contented, exhaling loudly, exactly the way I catch myself doing nowadays.

Or I am watching her at eleven in the morning as she steps into the car, fully made up, elegantly dressed, wearing hat and gloves and high-heeled shoes, as she throws back the fashionable half-veil, pulls out of the garage, turns in the drive, takes the left-hand lane—the traffic is still driving on the left—and sets off from our Sas Hill villa in the Buda hills into the city center to do her shopping before meeting her friends in the recently opened Mignon Espresso—the first of its kind in Hungary—or at the Gerbeaud patisserie where she might go on to meet my father who sometimes strolls over from his office to talk over their plans for the next day or whatever else is on their minds. Then they come home together and eat. Or I see her in Márianosztra, or possibly, later, in Kalocsa, at the end of the monthly visiting time, led away by a guard armed with a submachine gun, out of the hall that is divided in half by a partition of wire netting, leaving through double steel doors, overlooked by enormous portraits of Stalin and Rákosi, and I catch a glimpse of her as she is shepherded away in a procession of prisoners and guards, and she freezes for a moment, conscious perhaps of me looking at her, to look back over her shoulder, sensing me standing there, staring at her. The guard’s flat cap is covering half her face but her slight squint, her nod, her faint smile, and her suspiciously shining eyes tell me more than she could say to me in the fifteen allotted minutes in the presence of the guard.

Never in my life have I seen her cry. She did not cry when my father died, nor when her sister died. She cannot, she could not, perhaps she never wanted or allowed herself to give direct expression to intense feeling, not in words and certainly not in wild gestures. When either of us was going away on a longer trip she would embrace me and give me a light, brief kiss while gently patting my back by way of encouragement, then drawing a little cross on my forehead with her thumb. That’s how we parted in December 1956 at the Southern Terminal, both of us in ruins, like the town itself, silently, crying without tears, since we both knew we would not see each other again for years, maybe never. Nor did I ever hear her sing or hum. Or, and this is another scene I often conjure, the telephone is ringing there, at her home in New York, and she looks at me in confusion, pleading with me once again silently rather than in words to answer it again because she has difficulty, particularly on the telephone, in understanding the language. Most of the time, of course, the caller is Hungarian. She hardly knows anyone here who is not Hungarian. Nowadays I have her pull this pleading face time and again, as if repeating a scene on DVD; I torture myself with it, it is my punishment. I always regret it but once or twice I rebuke her rather sharply for not having in all that time learned the language properly. But no sooner have I said the words than I am already regretting them: I don’t know what has made me say them, made me want to lecture and criticize her, what makes me want to assert my independence, to push her away from me time after time. It’s some obscure, as-yet-inexplicable urge I have to prod her where she is most vulnerable and often I am unable to resist it. I see she resents it; that I have hurt her; that it saddens her, that it makes her suffer, and that she closes up, but, wisely, accepts the latest rebuke, generously adding it to the rest. Perhaps she understands this instinctively better than I do. Even in the years before prison I was subjecting her to these low tricks; she bore the pain, but maybe, at that time, she could inwardly smile at the thought that her biological destiny had presented her with such a difficult adolescent. Very quickly though we’re back to the usual way of doing things. Her patience, her calm, her seemingly endless wisdom in understanding, spring from a source deep within her. But she will never be more demonstrative than this. There are no sudden embraces, no pet-names, no uncalled-for affectionate kisses, no light laughter, no playful teasing, no letting-one’s-hair down, no messing about.

Nor was there ever. I myself lack the capacity for at least two or three of those. We live in conditions of withdrawal and reserve, which is not the same as living in solemnity or dullness or indifference, nor does it exclude—not by any means—warmth, kindness, solicitude, gaiety, and a sense of humor cloaked in delicate irony, something I am particularly fond of. I have instinctively grown used, to some degree at least, to seeking what was missing in her in others: ever since I was born I have received generous helpings of them from Gizi, my godmother whom I adore, and, in her simple, modest way, from Fräulein too. Later I look for these qualities in girls, in women, with wildly varying results. But all in vain, since anything you were not given by your mother, indeed anything she did actually give you, will not be found anywhere else. That is my definitive experience. I have been feeling closer to her recently, ever since she died in fact. For a long time I believed she was a simple soul: that she lived by instinct alone, was prejudiced, was incapable of articulating her feelings, impressions, and passions, or only doing so when she was forced to and absolutely had to take a position on something. Then I realised I was wrong. She had a complex, rich, many-layered inner life, consisting not only of immediate feeling but of the tastes and ways of thinking traditional to her family and class. Over and over again in my head I replay the most memorable things she said, examining and analyzing them, and I always come to the same conclusion. Her opinions were thought through, never spur-of-the-moment or improvised, but properly considered and, when called upon, she could present excellent, concise arguments for them. She had outstanding moral judgment, impeccable taste, and her understanding of human character was all but infallible. She was not a snob but open and kindly, never condescending even in the genteel role of “madam,” as she was to the servants for example. She was no blue-stocking, of course, but was reasonably well-read. It was thanks to her that I was introduced to Balzac and Dickens in my early adolescence, at a time when I was still reading Karl May and Jules Verne. In her later years she enjoyed reading Churchill’s memoirs. She had studied at a girls’ grammar school in Arad, her Transylvanian hometown, and, after the Romanian occupation, when her family—a fully Hungaricized landowning family of ancient Serbian origin, some of whose members played important roles in Hungarian history—fled to Pest, she studied the violin with Hubay, as long as they could afford it, which was not long. The photograph of the long-haired, slender, beautiful teenage girl passionately playing her violin—if one can go by such evidence—seems to indicate that she was deeply imbued with the love of music.

When the money ran out, she told me, they presented the violin to a poor, blind child genius. In view of that, it’s surprising that she never showed the least interest in music later. Might she have taken offence at the hand fate had dealt her? Not one concert, not one visit to the Opera. The program of classical selections on the radio at lunchtime on Sunday—it was always on while we were eating—represented the entire musical diet of the family. Maybe that was because my father had absolutely no interest in music. From childhood on I would pick at the keys of my godmother’s wonderful Steinway grand—a present from the Regent Horthy—and was strongly drawn to music, but year after year they kept rejecting my plea for lessons, dismissing it as a passing, infantile fancy. It was the only thing they ever refused me. Even today I can’t forgive them for it.

But what I chiefly desire is to have her tell me stories: I want her to answer my questions, to annoy her by making provocative remarks, to correct her, instruct her, occasionally to cause her overt pain, to punish her, to let her know that she is my intellectual inferior, to confuse her and mock her and, immediately after having done so, somehow to convey to her how helplessly mortified I feel, to show that I know I have hurt her; but I can’t quite say it, cannot quite bring myself to apologize, not even to mention the thing that continues mournfully to rattle around inside me like a sheet of newspaper caught on the railings. Not even when she appears to have put it all behind her. Even today when I dream of those things as have passed between us, I experience such a sharp pang of conscience that it feels like a pain in my chest and I wake up in a sweat. But she is capable of retaliating, not out of revenge, but in self-defence, and she can upset me too as when, for example, I ask some question about the family and she retorts: fat lot you cared about the family back then! What did her aristocratic ancestry—which is mine too, by the way—the aristocracy of which at a certain time in my life I was so deeply and genuinely ashamed, those historical names, matter to me then.

I wasn’t even interested in the legendary patriotic general who was executed by the Habsburgs with twelve others at Arad in 1849. And grandmother, who was a baroness, she couldn’t help it, what was my problem with her? Today, grandfather’s ornate family tree, hand-painted in bright colors on parchment with all the coats of arms going back six generations, hangs on the wall of my flat along with pictures of other famous ancestors.

Right now she happens to be cooking, cooking for me in that kitchen, and as she does so, she is half turned to me, in a slightly demonstrative pose as I see it, while merrily chattering on, a pose in which there is no little pride. Her tall slender figure is an elegant exclamation mark in the humble kitchen: see! I can cook! She wants to prove—she is always trying to prove something—that she has learned to cook, and not just any old way. Before, she could manage—when she had to—a soup or two, semolina pudding, an omelette, a slice of veal, a bit of French toast, and not much more. She tied a green-and-white checked apron over her cream-colored silk blouse, her string of pearls (a cheap yet pretty piece of bijouterie, the real thing having vanished into the Soviet Union), her smart beige herringbone skirt, her stockings, her elegant, narrow but, by now, not-too-high-heeled shoes.

She wore these things until it was time for bed (having discarded the apron of course), wearing the same clothes she wore to the office, not even removing her shoes, which is the first thing I do as soon as I get in, here, as I do at home. Or rather there, as at my home. She can’t understand why the shoes bother me.

Slippers are for wearing only at night before bed, or on waking up. During the day it’s so non-soigné, she says, Hungaricising the words to sound: unszoányírt. I hate this verbal monstrosity with its German prefix and French descriptor domesticated for home use: it looks even worse written down, something like a mole cricket.

I had heard it in childhood from her sisters and my cousins. It must have originated in Arad, presumably inherited from a series of German and French governesses. Naturally, I tick her off, not for the first time, gently but with an obviously annoying superiority, and tell her how many different ways there might be of conveying the same idea in Hungarian, so there is no reason to use a foreign word, especially not one so horrible. She is offended, of course, but does not show it; I am sorry, of course, but I don’t show it. We fall silent. We often find conversation difficult in any case or stick to small talk. We are not particularly talkative people, either of us. Not with each other, at least.

The veal with caper sauce turns out to be perfect. I had never tasted it before. Back home whole generations had grown up never having heard of capers. I must have eaten one last when I was a child, when it shimmered in the middle of a ring of anchovy, like the eye of some sea creature: that’s how I remember it. The flavor is familiar and yet entirely new. She is watching me to see how I react to her cooking. Do I like the capers, she asks. I don’t let her take pleasure in it: so what if you can get capers in America, you can get anything here we can’t get at home.

Occasionally you can get bananas at home now, I answer on the spur of the moment with Lilliputian self-importance, and there were oranges too just before Christmas. One had to queue up for them, of course, I add for the sake of objectivity. Really? she asks in a slightly disappointed voice. In my opinion she should feel cheered by this. Could she have forgotten what a banana or orange means to us there? We carry on eating. I sense that the caper sauce, the grilled veal, and the whole baked potato in aluminium foil was a long planned-for surprise, one of many, intended for me. It’s a real American thing. Later she lists all the other dishes she can cook, just you see. And it turns out that in her free time she sometimes bakes cakes too, for Hungarian acquaintances, and acquaintances of acquaintances, bakes them to order, for money. So far I had known only—and that was because she told me in a letter—that she occasionally babysat, chiefly for Hungarians but also for some American families, and that she’d had some amusing evenings with naughty children who did not speak Hungarian, who might, for example, lock her into the bathroom for hours. Most recently she made ten dollars baking a huge Sacher torte, she proudly tells me. She buys the ingredients and calculates her fee, which, it seems, is the going rate in Hungarian circles, makes up the bill according to the cost of raw materials and often delivers the cake directly to the house. It sometimes happens, she tells me, giggling, that strangers offer her tips. Does she accept them? Of course, why not? I have to take a deep breath. These earnings, taken together with the modest income she has scraped together, have paid for the parcels of clothes, chosen with exquisite taste, that would arrive at my home on the Groza Embankment, and later for children’s toys and clothes at the flat in Vércse Street. And clearly my airfare too, as well as the ample pocket money she has been giving me while here in New York, come from the delicious torte as well as the soiled diapers. The People’s Republic had, somewhat unwillingly, allowed me five dollars of hard currency for my three-month visit. It is my mother who keeps me; a rather disturbing feeling at age thirty-four. She bakes four or five different sorts of cake, following the recipe in the book of course, and all eminently successful bar the caramel-topped Dobos layer-cake, she tells me.

Caramel is hard to handle. She pronounces it kaahraahmell, with wide open “aahs,” not long, in the regional Palóc mode, but quite short, like the German “a.” This irritates me no end, I don’t know why. It has been aah, aah, aah all the way—aahkaahdémia, aahgresszív, aahttitúd, right down to kaahpri (capers) and kaahraahmell—ever since I can remember. And maahszek too, the colloquial word for semi-private undertakings. This time I don’t stop myself pointing out that this is not a foreign word, but a Hungarian portmanteau, combining “ma,” pronounced “muh,” from magán (private) and szek from szektor (sector). It is a form of what we call an acronym, I add; adds the conceited, repulsive litterateur, her son. She does not answer. She has no counter-argument. She carries on saying maahszek and aahkaahdémia.

We eat. As a child I used to enjoy watching her as she adjusted the food on her plate with great topographic precision, shifting it here and there with careful, tiny, sweeping movements of knife and fork, like the director on the set of a film, arranging the shots and instructing the cast before rolling the camera. She pushes the meat to the right side of the plate, the garnish being neatly separated and ranged on the left. Turning the plate one way or the other is common, an unspoken taboo. She cuts and spears a small piece from the meat, loads the appropriate amount of garnish on the round back of the fork, and so carries it to her mouth. This is a far from simple operation, as may be demonstrated now, since the caper seeds would drop from the fork were they not perfectly balanced there and flattened together a little, if the speared piece of meat or potato did not block their escape route, and if she did not lean progressively closer and lower over her plate with every bite so that they might find their way into her mouth all the sooner. When the garnish includes peas, which means that only a few peas succeed in remaining on the curve of the fork behind the meat, that is to say leaving a surfeit of peas on the plate, she is forced to consume extra forkfuls of peas only. But she has a strategy for coping with that too. Using the knife she spears a few peas that will support a few slightly squashed ones behind them.

I have seen others deploy this technique but while they shift and prod the peas about, creating a mess on the plate, she manages to eat them in an undeniably elegant and distinguished manner. It is all done with great skill and grace. She divides the meat, the garnish, and the salad so that everything disappears from the plate at precisely the same time, every piece of meat with its due portion of garnish and vice versa. She never leaves any food on the plate. Nor do I. She has lived through the meager rationing and starvation of two world wars, I only one.

Any sauce or juice left on the flat dish, however runny, is conveyed to her mouth with the fork. One simply can’t imagine her using a spoon. She leans forward and makes rapid spooning movements with the fork, turning it up a little so there’s still a moment before dripping and thus she can safely steer it into her mouth. This spectacular technique requires close attention and speed: it demands a lot of time and energy, but it works. She turns the obvious pointlessness of it into a display of elegance. I eat the same way myself, ever since being allowed to dine with the adults, as did the German Fräulein, the whole act having made a great impression on her. But to the two of us it is like a private second language, and while we often make mistakes, it is the equivalent of a mother tongue to her, it is what she grew up doing, quite possibly never seeing any other way of eating, only this. My father, whose education had been under quite different circumstances, ate differently. That which could not be speared, he swept into the hollow of the fork and stuffed into his mouth. If sauce remained on the plate and he liked it he was quite happy to spoon it up, if he didn’t like it he simply left it. If there were no guests he would dip his bread in, sometimes on the end of the fork but sometimes with his hands! He was allowed to. He was the only one. In my first days at the university canteen I was laughed out of countenance as I was unmasked as a trueblooded bourgeois leftover from the old regime when, out of habit, I started employing my mother’s technique. The class-alien aspect of the art must have been painfully obvious, a blind man could see it, you didn’t have to be a Marxist-Leninist to recognize it. Ever since then, when it comes to eating, my strategies are somewhat eclectic, though lately, since I have been dining alone, I have fallen into decadent ways; she out there, on the other hand, alone, is almost certain to have continued using her fork to spoon the sauce till the day she died.

Silence. She clears the table. She starts on the washing-up while I watch, she having refused my help. Her hair still looks chestnut brown and though this is merely a matter of appearances, there is no gray there. Her face is animated, refined, gentle, very beautiful, her eyes warm though she will soon be sixty.

I understand why in the thirties the Budapest tabloid press referred to her as “one of the most beautiful women in town.” The ritual of the nightly removal of makeup—though, of course, I am not watching this from bed now as I used to but walking up and down behind her, chatting to her, recounting what I did with my day in New York—is quite unchanged right down to the “shaking lotion” and the same old movements, it’s only the lovely antique mirrors that are missing.

The face that looks back at her from the cheap mirror now is still a feminine face, all attention: she can still take delight in life, is still curious, still wants to see everything. There is no trace in her of the expression you catch on other déclassé immigrants, the cynical hanger-on’s don’t-blame-me look. She has not walled herself in, become a solitary, she has not been distorted by the enormity and the harsh bustle of the alien world that now surrounds her. She is just the same as she had been in prison when sharing a cell with eight others. Having made subtle enquiries and going by what is around her, I know she is alone, though I had hoped she might have a man in her life. There is no way of asking her this directly, as it is something we never speak about. Grandmother brought up her three girls, she being the youngest of them, to avoid even the most harmless romantic literature, even that in which the attractive, and in every respect impeccable, young suitor makes so bold as merely to touch the innocent maiden’s hand in the long awaited last chapter, at the point of engagement. She would glue the last pages together or simply cut them out with scissors, believing such episodes to be unseemly. My mother addressed the issue in less radical fashion, in the way that best suited her: it simply didn’t exist. My sexual education at home consisted of a single short sentence that I first heard at the age of about four or five when the words first issued from her lips at a time when I lay in bed with some infection, possibly influenza: You are not to play with your pee-pee. That was it. My father said even less. He said nothing. So I became an autodidact in the subject.

Her circle consisted of a few relatives and female friends, all Hungarian, two of them quite close to her. I suspect, I sense, I see, since she practically radiates it, that she lives entirely, exclusively, for me, and that this, for the time being, is as certain as can be. She wants to show me, to buy me, all she can of America, all that is possible to show or buy, whatever is obtainable in intellectual or material terms.

That is because I have chosen to remain there, because I chose not to come with her. That is why she scrimped and saved, that is what she was preparing herself for all her life here. Almost as soon as I arrived the first thing she did was to take me to a medium-range department store and, bearing my tastes in mind, equip me with several suits of clothes, from top to bottom, the way she might a child, that is to say her son, whom she has now had on loan for three months. There were certain items of my own clothing that I had to throw out: she absolutely insisted on that.

There is another photograph of her, some thirty years back in Színházi Élet, a magazine for theater lovers, showing her playing patience with Gizi Bajor, the actress. Gizi is dealing out the cards while she looks on attentively, smoking, turning the signet ring with her thumb the way she used to. And there it still is, miraculously, the golden signet ring, next to her engagement ring: she doesn’t take it off, not even while washing up. When I was a little boy I desperately wanted to have one of those. Engraved into the deep-red ruby, under a five-point crown, a tiny knight-on-horseback galloping to the right holds high his sword, a moustached head, bald save a single wisp, obviously a Turk’s, impaled on it. Patiently and wisely she would explain to me time and again that I couldn’t have one because it was not mine to possess, because even my father didn’t have one.

It hurt me, infuriated me, it brought me out in a fever: I simply couldn’t accept that I was unworthy of it. I, I alone, unworthy! When I could get anything else I wanted! It was the first time I felt the limits of my world and I couldn’t understand it, couldn’t get used to it. Yet how fine it would be turning it round on my finger while talking, as she did! To answer questions in so careless a fashion!

Several years, some eras later, I upbraid her on account of the ring. Before the gimnázium is nationalised in 1948 and I am still at the Cistercian school—but have become an avid consumer of the works of Hungarian novelists, poets, sociologists, and historians, most of whom are outside the Church-approved curriculum, and am fervently committed to the cause of equality—I get embarrassed by my mother, not just to myself but before others too, precisely on account of the signet ring she is wearing, which I see as an emblem of feudalism.

She spends her evening removing, at my stubborn insistence, the embroidered five-point crown above the monogram from the remaining items in her trousseau such as tablecloths, napkins, bed linen, towels, kitchen cloths, and dusting rags, and she does it silently, willingly, with a glum expression. Then, something I really haven’t anticipated happens: I have to identify with the onetime envied, later despised, signet ring. The dictatorship itself so to speak pushes it on my finger, as I too am a “class-alien.” Now I fear for her and try to persuade her to remove it because she could get into trouble wearing it. She won’t listen to me. She has worn it all her adult life, she will not disown her family, she is not ashamed of her ancestors, she tells me rather sharply. Pretty soon, in November 1949, they arrest her on a trumped-up, patently absurd charge of panic-mongering.

“Who are you fucking, you stuck-up whore?” asks her first interrogator at the notorious security headquarters building, 60 Andrássy Avenue.

There are things to take pride in and wonder at in the little kitchen. For example there is a never-before-seen gadget, the electric can-opener, and next to it, hanging on the wall, there’s a square-metersized piece of thick, perforated pasteboard, painted white and framed with red insulating tape, from whose holes hang, at a convenient distance from each other, a set of useful hooks accommodating a variety of kitchen utensils. It is a brilliant example of American practicality in offering solutions so blatantly simple that it takes your breath away.

She had seen it somewhere, put the scarlet border round it, fixed it to the wall all by herself, and it is so handy and saves so much space. I don’t recall in our previous life, or lives, rather, ever seeing her with a screwdriver or hammer in her hand. Now she is the owner of pliers, chisels, files, a range of screws and keys, measuring tapes and insulating tapes, keeping them all in a professional-looking toolbox, proudly setting them out and recounting what she fixed with what.

We move into the living room, though she uses the English term with a little apologetic smile, since she could hardly call it a salon, the word we used to refer to the spacious sitting room in the Buda villa of my childhood. This small space is dark even in daytime, darker than the whole inner-tenement apartment. With a peculiar— and to me entirely unfamiliar—giggle and twinkle in her eyes, she lowers her voice and tells me that, through the window overlooking the tiny yard, she can see into a neighboring apartment where the occupier, in fact the janitor, a corpulent black man—just imagine,

Nicky!—right by the open window, even with the lights full on, there on the sofa, regularly, ahem, caressing himself! You can even hear his heavy breathing! That’s why I have to keep the curtains drawn, even in the daytime. There are a couple of engravings on the wall in slightly clumsily fixed ready-made frames. In terms of furniture I see two ancient, much worn, and in every respect dissimilar fauteuils that might charitably be referred to as antiques, and two, just as dissimilar, also mock-antique little tables, as well as a spindly baby-sized chest of drawers on barley-sugar legs, matching the rest only by virtue of imitation. These she has purchased, piece by piece, as and when opportunity afforded, from a thrift shop, that is to say a store where are sold all kinds of cheap things abandoned or passed on by gentlefolk for charitable purposes. Some ornaments on the table, a few minor antique items of bric-à-brac, of silver, copper, and porcelain, a photograph in a silver frame, a lovely old ashtray; most of them Csernovics and Damjanich family relics that I had brought from home on request. They obligingly made themselves at home here, as if, indeed, coming home. There are vases on the tables and, as has always been the case, there are flowers in them. The style is familiar: these are obvious signs of her refined taste, obvious only to me of course. I myself lived with her beautiful antique furniture, on Sas Hill, right to the end of the war. She used to collect the tiny bits of polished dark-brown veneer that had flaked or fallen off them and keep them in a tin cigarette box: from time to time a skilled joiner would come and glue them back on with surgical precision as if they were missing pieces of a jigsaw, and there the furniture would be: repaired, impeccable, brilliantly glossy and majestic once more. Let such things be about her even now, however cheap, however fake, if only to serve for atmosphere, as compensation for the world that was once hers, so she may feel at home. This desire has crossed the ocean with her, it and she are inseparable companions, they are what she is, like her past, like her ring, like those capers balanced on the back of her fork, like the aahkaahdémia. And all this moves me, though I don’t, of course, show it.

[TURKEY: GERMAN] ZEHRA ÇIRAK Memory Cultivation Salon

Laura Zwist arrives punctually and in an especially good mood for her appointment at the Memory Cultivation Salon. As always, she comes on Friday at two o’clock for her appointment. And as always, she carries a small packet with fancy little cakes. Exactly six months ago, on her seventieth birthday, she received a year’s membership from her girlfriends for this unique Salon. She takes care not to miss any of the twelve appointments, one per month, and looks forward greatly to each one. Today is the halfway mark. That’s why she wants to celebrate with her Memory Cultivator, Frau Merk—because Laura’s convinced that one should take every opportunity to make hay while the sun shines. Besides, she managed to remember something very special today; and she also brought Frau Merk three red poppies. These rest in her tote with the little cakes. And an especially sweet little cake is what she popped into one astonished young mouth on her way over.

It is a sunny early summer afternoon and quite warm, but a cool breeze is blowing. Inside the small shop in the middle of a quiet street downtown it’s as quiet as ever. There isn’t a single neon light to cast an ugly glare on one’s skin, but rather a pleasant radiating glow, a slightly golden warmth and cosiness. The salon and its lamp are in a room at the back, separated by a white curtain from the front entrance and reception area, and even more comfy still. Laura’s gaze falls first on the round bistro table in the middle of the well-appointed room. Coffee stands ready to be served. She glances out the two adjacent windows onto the tidied green of the back courtyard with its chestnut trees. Then her eyes move to the honey-colored floor of the corridor and the whitewashed walls. She finds particularly lovely the pictures by Jan Vermeer hanging there, framed behind glass on one wall, with a few by Hieronymus Bosch opposite them. The bookcase that takes up the entire fourth wall is filled with carefully chosen literature such as the novels of José Saramago and Ernst Weiß, which Laura has borrowed in the course of the past year and come to appreciate. And several volumes of poetry stand there as well, out of which she and her Memory Cultivator read aloud from time to time.

Other than a high, narrow glass case where old-fashioned yet tasteful dishes are arrayed, there is the bistro table with three comfy leather armchairs around it and a stereo on the little table near the deep red velvet couch.

As usual, indeed more or less automatically, the two women sit down at the table immediately upon exchanging their opening pleasantries. They pour themselves coffee and, while Laura opens the packet of pastries and arranges the goodies on a plate, Frau Merk settles the three rather wrinkled poppies into a vase and says in a low whisper that outdoes the powdered sugar on the littles cakes in sweetness: “Today’s the halfway mark, I’ve chilled a small bottle of sparkling wine, dear Frau Laura—after coffee we’ll toast to us and to your memories. Many thanks for the flowers. I love poppies, especially these deep red ones with the black. The blossoms look like lingerie, don’t you think? And when I sniff them I think of something made for feeling, not for telling, you understand?”

Frau Merk smooths her dark hair off her brow toward the back of her head, though its shortness doesn’t really allow for smoothing, and certainly not for shaking. Nevertheless, she moves her head the way girls with long manes like to, the way Laura herself used to love to do when she was young. Lovely girl, long hair, the apple of the men’s eyes.

Rattling the coffee spoon in the cup, Laura attempts to banish this image from her mind.

Frau Merk—who for certain reasons prefers not to be too informal with her customers, only allowing herself to be addressed by her surname, yet making fairly free with the first names of others—is considerably younger than Laura. Barely forty.

After numerous and varied jobs, which she pursued listlessly for some time, she’d settled determinedly on self-employment. On an impulse, not knowing what awaited her, she opened this store some three years ago, with this ad:

That’s how it had read in the classifieds of a variety of serious magazines, on the local pages of the newspapers she deemed most promising, and on the fliers she distributed. On the reverse, nothing more than the telephone number of her shop, which she called the “Memory Cultivation Salon.”

Frau Merk has accumulated many clients, mainly elderly women. For her, elderly means that these people are rich in experience and brimful of memories. She pays herself a by-no-means low but nonetheless affordable hourly wage; after the salon’s overhead there is enough left to live comfortably. Most of the customers come once a month for two or three hours. Fifty to a hundred euros is what Frau Merk charges an hour, though the price is determined by her level of affinity for the client. She gives special rates to a few of the customers, the ones who can’t pay much. But the best and most affordable option is, of course, the purchase of a membership.

Today Laura is wearing an elegant velvet suit that she knows Frau Merk finds particularly pleasing. It is of a simple cut, and black, and with it she wears a dark red blouse, just the thing to go with the poppies. Frau Merk notices right away, of course, and pays Laura not a few compliments. As usual, they tell one another about the events of the past month that they deem worth mentioning, assure one another of their friendship, praise the weather, and do not neglect the little cakes. And, at last, they come to the point: with the well-chilled sparkling wine Frau Merk has poured into simple but lovely glasses, they toast the half of the year that’s over, as well as the half that still awaits them.

Finally, they settle in on the velvet couch. One leans on the left, the other against the right armrest. Laura tucks her legs beneath herself and makes herself comfortable. Frau Merk sets an ashtray between herself and her customer, who, in turn, immediately lights up a cigarette which she draws at quite pleasurably while bobbing her head up and down, and begins: “You see, Frau Merk, blowing this sort of smoke ring was something I could do even as a young girl. Rarely, though, do I manage to blow a small one through a large one. It’s not at all easy, not everyone can do it. I happened to meet a man a long time ago who taught me how, after I was bold enough to ask him outright.”

Then Laura demonstrates how well she can still manage it. A little group of smoke rings escape her lips, which twitch open and shut like the mouth of a fish, and float directly toward Frau Merk’s face. Frau Merk blows them back toward her with quiet puffs, and the rings dissolve.

“Laura, today is the first time you’ve done that for me here. I didn’t even know you knew how to make smoke rings like that.”

“Yes, on the way over here I vividly recalled who’d taught me. The man was named Alfredo. I only met him once, but it was wonderful for a young girl like me, simply wonderful. It was on some Friday or another, I think it was Father’s Day, when I’d just turned fifteen. My parents, some relatives, and I had stopped for a bite to eat at a popular local café during a day’s outing. Everyone was still eating and talking animatedly. So I was able to go to the restroom and smoke a cigarette without anyone noticing.”

Laura paused for a moment and explained with a giggle: “My parents were very sweet but a little strict, you know. If they’d even suspected me of smoking they would have been flabbergasted.”

Then she returned to her story.

“For that reason I didn’t want to stay away too long, and so I smoked rather quickly. After peeing, I stood in front of the mirror with the nearly finished cigarette in my mouth and watched myself puffing away. Then amid the sound of flushing, I heard whistling and giggling from the men’s restroom beyond the thin wall. I examined the wall and quickly discovered a little hole next to the mirror. It was so small that a finger could have just barely fit into it, but it was still large enough to look through. I blew the last puff of my cigarette into it and heard someone on the other side curse. I waited with bated breath, curious. After a short silence, suddenly a whole series of little rings of smoke came floating through the tiny little hole. The last itsy-bitsy one flew—as if directed by the hand of a magician—through the next-to-last, bigger ring. I was very impressed and absolutely had to be able to do that myself. So I positioned myself right in front of the hole and said, ‘Hello, could you please teach me to do that?’ Well, I wasn’t exactly shy, and more than that: I was curious. I said through the hole that I’d go into the restaurant’s garden, and asked whether perhaps we could meet at the rear of the house. I’d have a cigarette behind my ear so he could tell who I was, and he should do the same. The man answered, audibly amused, that he would be glad to. And his laughter gave me the guts to go to this small, secret meeting.

“I told my parents that I wanted to walk around outside until they were through. So I stepped outside and around to the rear of the house. Leaning against a small shed, I only waited a little while before the man showed up with a cigarette behind his ear. I was startled because he was much older than I’d expected. He smiled and rubbed the eye that must’ve been the target of my smoke. He gave me his hand and said his name was Alfredo, I told him my name, and because I was rather impatient, I didn’t even ask why he had been looking through that hole in the wall. I wanted to keep him in a good mood so he would hurry up and teach me how to blow smoke rings. I quickly lit up my cigarette, even lit his, and urged: ‘Okay, let’s go, hurry and teach me how I can make those rings. I haven’t got a lot of time and I absolutely have to learn how.’ The man looked very nice and he could easily have had a daughter my age. When he looked at me brazenly and said, ‘Well, big girl, is it fun to sneak a smoke in the john?’ I just answered him very cheekily, ‘Well, Uncle Freddy, it must be fun to sneak a peek at girls through a hole in the wall!’ We laughed.

“That sort of peephole was the first he’d ever encountered in a restroom, and who wouldn’t have been curious? ‘You would have looked through it, too, I think,’ he said with a very friendly grin. And he was right. I admitted as much, and we got right down to the business of smoke rings. It took ten minutes, and I needed a number of cigarettes before I could manage halfway decent rings, and I got a little lightheaded from all the smoking. But then, when I was more or less able to manage it, the man asked me—can you believe it?—asked me outright for a kiss. He even said I certainly would not regret it. I kept thinking: ‘Eyes shut, get it over with, just like blowing a smoke ring through a little hole in the wall.’ Because the man was so likeable and good-looking to boot, and it seemed harmless to me, I let him. I just hoped he didn’t have bad breath and would get it over with quickly. I stood up stiff as a poker right in front of him and closed my eyes. I thought he’d press a kiss onto my lips like you see in the movies, smush around a bit, and be done. But when he held me lightly by the shoulders and just as lightly pressed me back against the wall of the small shed and began to smooch with me at length—intensely, wonderfully—I wished he’d been teaching me to kiss these last ten minutes, rather than how to make smoke rings.

“First the man had opened my not too unwilling lips with his, ranging with his tongue deeper and deeper into my mouth. I was somewhat taken aback, but I liked what he was doing. He played with my lips and my tongue, explored the entire space of my mouth. I imitated what he was doing and found a great deal of pleasure in my new discovery. He must have noticed this, and became more insistent. I had closed my eyes and was hoping he would never stop. The man tasted good. Not like peppermint candies or anything, no he tasted like much more. The taste of ‘I want more and more’ spread throughout my mouth.

“On the one hand, Alfredo’s kisses were like a form of anesthesia, on the other hand they were delicious slaps waking me up, as if I’d been a sleepwalker. I was uninitiated in that sort of kissing, and hadn’t the least experience with such an active tongue.

“Now I was even more lightheaded, and my knees had gone wobbly. Man oh man, I thought aloud, and in my befuddlement even said thank you. All out of breath, I held onto his arm. I’d become quite dizzy, and I noticed he’d kissed awake something inside me. But I immediately felt ashamed. I believe my ears had turned all hot and red. That sort of kissing was something I’d never experienced before, and something I’ve never known since.

“Good thing I was standing against the wall of the shed, and that he still had hold of me. Otherwise I probably would have fallen over in my delirium of astonished pleasure.

“Certainly, the kissing had only lasted a few minutes. But it seemed like I’d been swimming for hours, that’s how exhausted I was—though I also felt satisfied and excited and taller by several centimeters.

“Since then I have kissed many men, dear Frau Merk. I am still waiting for those sort of Alfredo-kisses today. Back then, when the man had finally let go of me and was looking at me silently but inquiringly, I felt like a small child caught with my hand in a honey jar.

“I heard my mother calling for me and flinched. The man took a big step backward and gave me his hand. ‘Pity,’ he said, smiling, ‘I would have enjoyed practicing more ring-blowing and kissing with you, Miss. You have a talent for kissing, Halfpint.’

“‘Yes, a real pity,’ I said, and honestly meant it.

“We never saw one another again. I never told anyone about it, either. I thought of Alfredo often. But gradually, his image went blurry in my memory. Sometimes I thought I had only dreamed it all, but when I make smoke rings like these, I remember him again. And I know it wasn’t a dream, just dreamlike.

“Do you know, Frau Merk, why I thought of it today, of all days? When I stepped out of the bakery with the packet of cake in my hand, I saw a fifteen-year-old boy leaning against a wall, smoking. He looked at me with a wink and made smoke rings, yes, several tiny rings blown through a larger one.

“I must have stared at him openly because the handsome boy said in a rather tauntingly impudent tone of voice, ‘Well, Granny, can’t believe your eyes, eh? No one can match me.’ I don’t know what came over me, but since no one else was around, and I felt as cocky as a fifteen year old, I handed him my packet of cakes, took the unfinished cigarette out of his mouth, and asked him just as impudently what he’d give me if I could match him. The boy must have been dumbfounded, and said ‘Hey, Grannykins, you’ll never be able to match this.’

“‘And what if I do?’ I asked him. ‘If I do, then I get a kiss.’

“The boy made a face as if to say eww, eww. I closed my eyes, took a drag on the cigarette, concentrated hard, and blew a big ring, opened my eyes and puckered my lips in dreamy memory of Alfredo’s kisses and sent several small rings right through it. My God was I happy that it worked. I hadn’t done it in so long. Lucky try, I thought, and looked at the boy with a triumphant smile.

“The boy grew uneasy and shuffled from one foot to the other and said with a wagging head and sheepish voice, ‘Man oh man that’s cool, where did you learn that?’ I thought he would turn and run away, but he must have been too nonplussed for that and I was fast enough to claim my prize. Without further warning, I held him by the shoulders and kissed him lingeringly on the lips. Greetings from Alfredo. The boy still held tight to the packet of cakes that I’d pressed into his hands. He was motionless, but nonetheless I sensed what he was thinking: Old woman. French kissing. Nasty business. I didn’t kiss badly, mind you, but the poor boy was shocked anyway, perhaps even slightly revolted. He looked at me with enormous eyes. I quite calmly took the packet of cakes from his hands, told him to wait a moment, opened it quickly, and took out a particularly sweet tidbit. I held it under his nose and the boy opened his mouth quite automatically. He chewed on it with quick bites, visibly relieved. When he’d swallowed all of it, I asked him, ‘Well, what do you say?’ He shook his head in disbelief, mumbled, ‘Thanks,’ and ran away.

“‘I thank you, my boy,’ I murmured after him. Looking all around, as if I had done something forbidden, I took off. But I felt good nonetheless and couldn’t help but think of Alfredo. Yes, dear Frau Merk, as if bewinged, I made my way to you today.”

The Memory Cultivator had listened attentively to Laura, enthralled, and had smoked several cigarettes, all the while bobbing her head again and again in amusement. “Such a lovely memory,” she said, smiling. “That is truly a very special memory, suitable for our celebration of this halfway mark. Let’s toast to it with another glass of sparkling wine. I think our heads, both of them, have gotten quite warm, so that we’re in urgent need of something cooling, dear Laura.”

She brought the tray over to the velvet couch. On it stood a silver wine bucket cooling the bottle of sparkling wine and two glasses. She poured the bubbling liquid. The two women clinked their glasses a second time.

“One thing you still have to tell me, dear Laura,” said Frau Merk after the first few sips. “Did this special kissing experience so influence you that you flirted with other older men in order, perhaps, to experience something like it again?”

Laura drank her sparkling wine in one swallow and said with gleaming eyes:

“Oh yes, it was just as you say, my dear. And I had wonderful kisses from many men who were several years older than I was. But nothing like those Alfredo-kisses. They were always lovely and always different. No one person, I think, kisses exactly like another. In such kisses there’s always an interplay of souls, or of distinctive, individual thoughts. They are unique each and every time—the bodies that belong to these heads that are kissing with their mouths, experiencing something special. And that, dear Frau Merk, is why I think I’ll never ever experience an Alfredo-kiss again. Unless I were to run into him again. But even if that were to happen, I can’t imagine that I’d want to kiss a ninety-year-old man the way I did back then. No, that will remain deep within me as an especially lovely memory.”

Frau Merk smiled, patting Laura’s shoulder. Then she stood up and went to stand in front of the bookcase. “I think it would be appropriate today to read each other a few poems out of this volume. It’s called Die lieben Deutschen. Frau Merk took the book from the shelf and handed it to Laura. The book was small but rather heavy. “645 Fiery Poems from Across Four Centuries” was written beneath the title.

Then she said, “Dear Laura, I’ll loan you this little book; and as a farewell, I will read you these lines.” As she spoke, she pointed to a poem by Kurt Schwitters on the back cover of the bound volume, and read with sparkling eyes:

[PORTUGAL] DULCE MARIA CARDOSO Angels on the Inside

To my friend Anabela, who gave me this title We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. It was little more than a footpath. Very steep. The dirt was hard and faded. Hardly anyone ever took that path, but it was our mom’s favorite route. We were coming back from the river. My brother on the right and me on the left, with our mother in the middle. Our mom was proud of us, more than she was of anything else in life.

The water was cold, even though summer was well underway. Above the most uneven parts of the river bottom the water turned white and bubbled noisily because of the strength of the current. The bubbles were so big that it seemed you might walk across the river stepping from one to the next. If we’d been able to do it, we would have arrived at the village we could see on the other bank in no time. It took hours in a car. Our car was old and the roads were in bad shape. We rarely went anywhere. Everything was too far away.

Our mom laid out my towel and my brother’s on the flagstone and put our picnic basket in the shade of the umbrella pine. Our towels were identical, except for the color. Mine was orange and my brother’s was blue. Both had white stripes. Our mom always bought us the same clothes and toys, or at least similar ones. I was a bit taller than my brother and had started to grow hair on the hidden parts of my body. Other than that, there didn’t seem to be a big difference between us.

The flagstone was a little bigger than our lean bodies as we lay out in the sun, side by side. We always brought a wooden stool for our mom to sit on in the shade of the pine tree. She never did anything. She looked out at the river and the trees, at the sky and the village on the other bank, as if she were seeing it all for the first time. Our mom didn’t like to talk. Sometimes she sang.

We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. Our mom’s singing smothered the sound of the hard soil as it was crushed by the leather soles of our sandals. Wild roses grew along the side of the path. Sometimes daisies. But there were always rocks and broom shrubs.

As soon as we reached the river, my brother and I would take off our sandals, T-shirts, and shorts and run toward the water. Our little feet trod a path full of pebbles and thistles as if it was nice and smooth. We weighed too little for the pebbles and dry thistles to hurt us.

We could test out the water by going in just up to our knees. We had to wait to go swimming until we finished digesting our food. We never disobeyed. Since we had lunch at noon, we had to wait until three o’clock. With our feet submerged in the muddy river bottom, our legs as thin as twigs, we yelled as loud as we could, the water’s freezing today, it’s really freezing, ah, the water’s colder than ever today. We said that every day.

Our screams broke through the tops of the trees and rose up to the clouds, then stayed up there yelling back down to us. Our mother said it was the echo. We imagined that an echo was another one of those animals that we’d never seen, but which lived up in the mountains surrounding the river. Just like wolves and snakes, the echo never allowed itself to be seen. But it made itself heard. It would even laugh with us. In a disjointed sort of way.

We also used to yell Dad, we’re already at the river, or, we’re going to launch a boat, Dad. We thought that the echo would get these messages to our dad.

Our dad was a technician at the dam, and every day he left the house early in the morning with a lunchbox in hand. He returned at the end of the day with his brow furrowed, as if he’d spent the day staring at incomprehensible things. He’d sit down on the best armchair in the house, and our mom would take off his shoes and serve him a glass of wine.

My brother and I liked to make up stories about the dam. Our dad was always the hero and he always defeated the horrible outlaws attacking the dam. We were sure that our dad had a gun hidden in his lunchbox. We invented a number of ways of obtaining the gun, but we never dared to put any of our plans into action. We didn’t know if we were more afraid of handling the gun or of the possibility that it didn’t exist.

The river flowed down to the dam and was the fastest way to get to it. However, nobody could take that route. Our dad had to drive through the mountains to get there and back every day. But the river ran directly to him and we were always awestruck when we looked down in the direction that it flowed. Even after it became hidden from view, down where there was a bend in the river, we knew that the water didn’t stop until it got to the dam. My brother and I wanted to go down to that bend and then on to the next and the next, we wanted to go past all the bends in the river to see where all that water was going, to see the dam and all the dammed-up water. But our mom never left our spot. She spent the afternoon sitting on the wooden stool, and we had to stay close by. We weren’t allowed to be out of her sight.

While we waited for our food to digest we entertained ourselves by building boats, which we launched in the water so that the river would carry them down to our dad. We’d make designs or write little notes that we hid inside them. We launched a boat, Dad, we’d yell, we launched another boat. But our dad never received any of the boats, nor did he ever hear the echo repeat what we yelled. The echoes and the boats break apart or run aground before they arrive at their destination, our dad would tell us when he got home. It seemed impossible to us that this could be the case every time. Lying on our beds, before we fell asleep, we blamed the horrible outlaws who attacked the dam for the disappearance of our boats. And on the next day we went back to making boats, yelling, we launched another boat, Dad.

Our chests expanded and collapsed whenever we yelled, but with or without air inside, our ribs were always visible. Our bodies still hadn’t taken it upon themselves to grow. There was no way that the spurt our mother talked about was going to happen. It won’t be long before you have a growth spurt, she’d say, it won’t be long before I’ve got two men in front of me. But our bodies seemed to be deaf, and remained little.

We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. At certain points, the path became so narrow or the curves were so sharp that we could no longer see the way ahead of us. Since we already knew it by heart, this didn’t prevent us from continuing on. Me on the left side, our mom in the middle, and my brother on the right. Far enough apart that we weren’t touching one another. It was easier to walk this way, with some space between us.

We would have willingly gone without lunch, but if we didn’t eat, we couldn’t go to the river. Our mom used bay leaves in her cooking the way other women use salt. Our dad would say, dejectedly, even in the eggs, woman, you even put bay leaves in the eggs. But our mom kept frying a bay leaf in oil before she cracked the eggs on the edge of the cast-iron stove. The eggs, more than the excessive use of bay leaves, really intrigued me. The yellow sphere always in the middle, the fragile shell that served as its packaging, the transparent part that turned white over heat. It was all inexplicable. A real mystery. The kind of mystery that nobody has any interest in solving.

I spent a lot of time watching the hens. I tried to discern their knowledge of geometry by looking at their heads, especially their eyes, though they didn’t even know the word. Indifferently, the hens kept pecking at whatever there was to peck at in the backyard, making haughty movements with their necks. Their indifference didn’t bother me, since I considered them infinitely wiser than me. Aside from admiring their knowledge of Geometry, as demonstrated by their production of eggs, I admired the dignity with which they allowed themselves to be caught for slaughter on Sundays. The hens would scuttle around the backyard while our mom’s hands pursued the one she’d chosen. I never understood how our mom chose, out of all the hens, the one that would be sacrificed. I also never asked her. As soon as the chosen one was caught there was a strange silence. Our mom would hold the chosen one by the wings, letting it dangle. The chosen one rarely shrieked or struggled.

We hated our mom for a time. We didn’t yet know that the greater violence isn’t what occurs after she’d chosen the hen. Or even the choice itself. The greater violence occurs before, well before, and it’s this violence that makes the choice possible, or necessary. We hated our mom for a few seconds. No more than a few seconds. We still felt everything in a provisional sort of way.

Later, when I learned geometry at school, I didn’t like it because it was all so abstract. Physics was more practical, but it didn’t interest me either. I especially disliked the problem of the inclined plane. I disliked the guarantee that a heavy body placed on an inclined surface will stay in motion indefinitely and continually accelerate. I disliked even more the explanation that heavy bodies have the tendency to move toward the center of the Earth and only with effort are able to move away from it. The truth is I never liked school. I never accepted the fact that everything can, should, or has to be explained. Explained and communicated.

At three o’clock we’d run into the water. My brother’s body became essential for all my mischief. Just as mine did for his. We liked to topple each other over. The more contorted we were when we fell, the better. Sometimes we smacked against the rocks on the river bottom and hurt ourselves. We also liked to race. Neither of us was a great swimmer, but we liked to believe we were. We asked our mom which of the two us was the better swimmer. You both swim well, was the answer she always gave. It was the same when we drew pictures and wanted to know which one looked the best. I like one just as much as the other, they both look very nice. As much as we insisted, we never got any other answer.

In the middle of the river, where we could no longer touch bottom, there was a tree trunk stuck between two rocks. It was like some kind of unattainable goal, as close as it may have been. We were forbidden to venture out there. Because of the current, our dad used to tell us.

Only once the skin of our fingers turned wrinkly, our lips turned purple, and we couldn’t stop shivering would we return to our towels, laid out on the flagstone. We’d keep quiet as we felt our hollow, pulsating chests warm up from the heat of the air and the heat of the stone. As soon as we were dry we’d head back into the water. On those summer afternoons, time took longer to come to its end. And this I knew well.

We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. I carried the picnic basket, which was the heaviest item, and my brother carried the small wooden stool. Sometimes my brother would start slowing down, without noticing it. Our mom would call it to his attention, and the three of us would be side by side once more.

A car is a heavy body. The Opel Kapitan that the doctor owned was undoubtedly a heavy body. My brother and I liked that white Opel Kapitan better than all the other cars we’d ever seen. Even counting the ones in newspapers and magazines. There wasn’t a single kid who didn’t come over to the car whenever the doctor parked it on the street. We admired its brilliant chrome and held our breath so that we wouldn’t fog it up. We’d run our fingers along the body. But lightly, since we were scared to scratch it. We’d peer inside it, marveling at the big, fancy steering wheel and the dashboard, which had three chrome gauges with numbers and symbols that looked like they controlled complex machinery. The seats were worn down and the stitching in the napa leather made very precise furrows in it. The headlights were round and hypnotic. It was a model from 1959, but so treasured that it felt brand new.

The motor of the Opel Kapitan made a growling sound that we all recognized. As soon as the doctor turned the key, the trademark growl of the Opel Kapitan could be heard for miles around. But on that day when, as we rounded one of the sharp curves of the path, we saw the Opel Kapitan taking up the entire width of the pathway, there was nobody at the steering wheel and nobody in the car. And nobody else anywhere near it. The Opel Kapitan was imposingly all by itself. Yet, nevertheless, it was moving. But no growl. Not even a single clicking noise. The Opel Kapitan was moving, and that heavy body was bearing down on us.

On that day the doctor had been called to attend to our neighbor, who awoke unable to remember where or who she was. While the doctor tried to discover the cause of our neighbor’s illness, the Opel Kapitan inexplicably bore down on us.

We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. At certain points the path became so narrow or the curves were so sharp that we could no longer see the way ahead of us. Since we already knew it by heart, this didn’t prevent us from continuing on. Me on the left side, our mom in the middle, and my brother on the right. Far enough apart that we weren’t touching one another. It was easier to walk this way, with some space between us.

Our mom was also a heavy body. Even my brother and I, despite being really lightweight, were heavy bodies. Only with great effort could we move away from the center of the Earth, walk away from it. And the more tired we were, the greater the effort. When the Opel Kapitan inexplicably began to glide down the path, my brother and I were very tired from the walk up the hill and from playing in the river. Moreover, we became paralyzed when we saw that our beloved Opel Kapitan had chosen, of its own accord, to come find us. Advancing indefinitely, continually accelerating. It would take a superhuman effort for my brother and I to get out of the way of the Opel Kapitan, the beautiful Opel Kapitan, brought to life of its own free will, and also taking up the entire path in front of us, facing us. Close. Ever closer. Fast. Ever faster.

When my mom pushed me to the side, I don’t know if I lost my balance or if it was her body on top of mine that made me fall. Our mom only had time to throw me to the side and protect my body with hers. I could see my brother, still standing in the middle of the path, the wooden stool in his hand, wearing a blue t-shirt and brown sandals, and the puffy shorts that we both hated, my brother, just a little taller than the glittering chrome of the Opel Kapitan. My brother, staring at the Opel Kapitan in front of him.

We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. Our mom’s singing smothered the sound of the hard soil as it was crushed by the leather soles of our sandals. Wild roses grew along the side of the path. Sometimes daisies. But there were always rocks and broom shrubs.

The Opel Kapitan stopped suddenly before touching my brother. It simply stopped. No squealing of brakes or anything. As if it had forgotten the way things are. Or as if my brother had made it stop with some sort of machine-directed, targeted hypnotism. The beautiful Opel Kapitan, stopped by the eyes of my brother, who was still standing in the middle of the path, with the wooden stool in his hand, wearing a blue T-shirt and brown sandals, and the puffy shorts that we both hated. My mom’s body off to the side, on top of mine.

We got up, and our mom went over to my brother, took the stool from him, and held her hand out to him. Almost reverently. My brother allowed himself to be led away from the front of the car. I waited on the side of the path. We went around the car and continued up the hill. It wasn’t much farther to our house.

We never spoke about what happened that day when we were coming back from the river, going up the path we always took. We went on behaving as if nothing had happened. But everything was different.

We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. It was little more than a footpath. Very steep. The dirt was hard and faded. Hardly anyone ever took that path, but it was our mom’s favorite route. We were coming back from the river. My brother on the right and me on the left, with our mother in the middle. Our mom was proud of us, more than she was of anything else in life.

Many years passed. Perhaps all this didn’t occur exactly as I’ve said. But I’m certain that the day was coming to an end. And that the river water flowed gently.

[LATVIA] GUNDEGA REPŠE How Important Is It to Be Ernest?

Spring, summer, and now autumn have passed, but Ernest is still living in the cabin in the woods. They had agreed that they would live apart for a while.

“You’re not thinking straight,” Maije had said to Ernest almost every day. For several years. Three years. Day by day he grew more and more miserable, and finally he calmly agreed, yes—okay, let’s live apart for a while. Who knows, maybe Ernest would learn to think straight and everything would change. Maije says that everything, absolutely everything is determined by one’s thoughts. Even the illness that will cause one’s departure from this world.

Now here he is. And he doesn’t even know if he thinks at all.

He has put away sufficient firewood, piled it up in lovely decorative rows to last him all winter. Because who knows if Maije will ever come back. And he thinks—he hasn’t even given her a thought. The house is like any house. It’s not important. Why do people bother to erect these walls around themselves only to suffer from isolation in the end? Everyone needs a home; everyone needs a home—so preached not only Ernest’s grandma, but also his mama, his first wife, and Maije too. Perhaps you really do need one. But then you shouldn’t complain that you need so many other things besides. Day after day. On and on. Endlessly. More and more. Yes, long, long ago he just happened to buy this cabin, but he’d neither longed nor hungered for it, he simply liked it. The spruce forest, the cowberry patch that he’d since turned into a javelin throw and track, the smell of the nearby bog, and the people who for some unknown reason had decided to live a life or part of a life together. Maybe children had once been born there. Yes, that’s how it usually happened. Though children also liked little houses, toy blocks, and towers. Ernest’s children were born in the city, because Annette, his first wife, had found the country terribly depressing, and even he himself had only come here to escape, until now. Now it is different. Ernest doesn’t pour new wine into old wineskins.

Nature, nature. To hell with nature. For Ernest it’s no cataclysm, no book of revelations, he doesn’t need to get close to it, or keep his distance from it either; he doesn’t need to race to the sea to be energized by the force of the wind, or cry out against self-destruction while sitting among the moss. He himself is nature. On occasion. No need to salivate for it. Yes, rabbits, dormice; yes, cranes, whose call makes you want to take off for hell-knows-where; yes, red clusters of cranberries and a spider’s macramé; yes, copper sunrises on the silken trunks of birch trees, fine, fine. Titmice chirp chirp in November’s unrelenting dampness, clamminess, fire—in place of a woman. No, nothing like that, none of the predictable reasons for living in the forest, no special desire to commune with nature. In any case, nothing extraordinary, nothing that would be worth mentioning. In general, there are very few things that Ernest wants to discuss. Well okay, maybe there was that one time when lame Juris brought back the liver he’d cut out of some beast he hunted down. Juris had fired up the wood stove, hopping on one webbed foot like a ballerina, flipping over that bit of game, fat crackling, his face as happy as a Catholic’s at Easter, but it was only liver, after all. Fine, he’d eat it, had to eat it, but why all this bullshit talk about peppering, tenderizing, how a stag’s differs from a wild boar’s. Lame Juris, of course, knows all about it—so let it be. Then the two of them drank reddish-black wine as thick as motor oil, and soon thereafter you couldn’t shut Juris up. He launched right in on the subject of art. A potter, he was. That’s it. Now, Ernest likes his neighbor, and he likes pots, and he likes wine and a full stomach as well, but all his life, all his short thirty-nine-year-long life, Ernest has known that life is much more beautiful than it seems to be for Juris, Maije, Annette, Mama, and Grandma—more than for the majority of people, or so it seems. Then why so much angst about it? Why?

Because you don’t think straight.

Ernest, grumbling, had spent the entire autumn creating a clearing in the woods to set up a little javelin throw and track there. For Maije. If she should come back and want to practice. Maije is a javelin thrower. That, you see, is really something. And the fact that he now likes his women with muscular legs, women who can run faster than he does—that really is a miracle. Before Maije he had only liked fluffy, soft, small sugared cupcakes of women, the kind you want to take in hand and protect from the pitfalls of the world, but—look who he ended up with! Maije.

Eating that liver had offended Ernest’s imagination. Despite the fact that he wasn’t picky. He could survive on pea soup, fried eggs, and stale bread for days, but as he and lame Juris ate, the thought hit him that the two of them were dining on Prometheus’s liver. Who knew what his neighbor was really feeding him—or out of what sort of animal the liver had come. Ernest suddenly felt so sick to his stomach that he chased lame Juris home. Another year, another winter. Yes, yes. Go with God, go with God, the one and only. It was good that Juris listened to him. Ernest cleared the table, flung open both the door and the windows to air the house, but he still couldn’t rid himself of thoughts about eating. About Maije. No matter how much he liked her, no matter how much he liked everything that made up Maije, Ernest couldn’t stand how the woman talked with her mouth full. For example, he remembered how he couldn’t take his eyes off the red tomato slice rolling around on her likewise red tongue, slithery slop being bitten into by small, sharp teeth, but through which, incredibly, flowed the twittering streams of Maije’s voice. As if the voice was an independent phenomenon, as if it had no connection to the gluttonous human being through whom it flowed. It was incomprehensible. The sucking of chicken bones, the chewing of eelpout skin amid laughter and happy chatter. A human voice in a beast. That was Maije.

Now, out of nowhere, thoughts of sex popped into his head. How blushingly lovely and alluring were Maije’s curves, her peaks and valleys… how wisely and well she had been created in the most perfect proportions. And what a symphony of fragrance, by God! All this despite the fact that, when making love, Ernest felt totally alone, felt himself being rough-hewn into a merciless, solitary concreteness. Nothing to complain about, he liked it, it was good, glory be, but Maije had filled his ears full of nonsense about how it was supposed to be some kind of cosmic flight, with myriad explosions of light within light, and it had occurred to him that she was enjoying it more than he was. Was that so? No, it wasn’t true. Ernest hadn’t been thinking straight. About the warm flesh in brothels, about the sense of fucking. But now there was nothing. Neither the valleys nor the cosmos. He wanted his Maije dreadfully.

Spattering raindrops, the wet autumn hobgoblins were now creeping in a gray mass across the windowsills, so the windows had to be shut. Before he latched the door, Ernest heard an angry snarling in front of the cabin. Having turned on the outside lights he went to see what was up.

It was like this. A few steps from the door there was a dog with his paws clamped firmly into the ground, chest thrust aggressively forward. An irregularly shaped head, with prominent cheekbones and round, sulfur-yellow eyes. Ernest knew for a fact that the dog’s ancestors were Asiatic mastiffs: it was purebred—a Turkmenistan Alabai. Lame Juris had often told tall tales about a cutthroat dog who now and then was seen roaming the neighborhood hunting for rabbits and other fresh meat. He had bitten or frightened or something the child of some distant forest resident. Such foolishness. The dog was like any other dog. It was just the animal’s bad luck to have had an irresponsible master, and now he was all alone in the world. The same as Ernest.

“Hello Pavlov!”

The dog lowered his ears and, straightening his forelegs, stretched slightly forward. His cropped tail twisted into a letter shape. A low growl.

“Don’t bother putting on a show! When you’re in a stranger’s yard, you ought to keep your mouth shut!”

Annoyed, Ernest went back inside, latched the door, and sat down by his woodstove. A drop more of the oily wine, and the day would be done. Was this one of those days that Ernest had every so often, when he felt like his body was the body of the entire Universe, not just one discrete form in a cabin in the woods, the body of someone who had been separated from his loved one? Probably not. But on those days he felt happy. And he knew what the feeling meant. That not one of his cells would disintegrate into dust, that he was himself but at the same time the Universe, which included not only Africa but Russia too, not only wars and starvation but also stars and nebulae, and what humanity knew as “existence.” But he had made the mistake of telling Maije about this feeling from the start. And what did the woman say? Well, what could the woman say? She laughed and accused Ernest of being enormously conceited.

“Oh, is that how it works? And on what part of your cosmic body is my own little microbe existence to be found, oh Father of the Universe?”

Maije was being coquettish, which wasn’t at all becoming. All that was missing was for her to throw herself into Ernest’s lap and begin to fool around.

When she left him, Maije had scoffed, since Ernest was the Universe, he could neither lack anything nor need anyone—he was already everything, so how could anyone abandon him? That’s how it was and how it had remained.

Yes, Ernest had always known that at any moment something decisive and significant might happen. He learned to be vigilant and patient, and he’d had some successes, but he couldn’t, even by force, be made to feel at peace. This constant waiting for a revelation got on his nerves, and he would short circuit from time to time, hissing like a bouquet of sizzling snakes, until the tablecloth, the table, and finally the whole house caught on fire… well, in his imagination, anyway.

“Please take me to the Mediterranean!” she had begged. “Please? Please! Please.”

That too. So they went, they went.

“Brooding, Ernest, is a sin. You’ll never become a yogi if you’re always so sullen.”

Ernest shrugged this off. “I’ve never wanted to be a yogi!”

Two weeks in the scorching sun completely killed his desire, but this brought with it the fear that he was hurting Maije’s feelings. Ernest bought her a handful of pearls, telling himself off for being a tourist all the while, but Maije really did seem to relax, become calmer, more tender toward him.

“When you give me gifts, I feel important. Like you’re investing in me.”

Ernest shrugged once more.

“Do you really expect to win me over with this sort of attitude?” Maije asked again, as they were flying home.

“Win? What would I win?”

“Stop answering my questions with questions! What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

“I was just asking myself the same thing.”

Ernest thought—if it could be called a thought—that it wasn’t right to live to the fullest, all systems go, just for one’s own pleasure, just to feel good about oneself. Scratching and poking around inside him, there was some ancient—even sacral, it seemed to him—beast, some sort of ermine that kept reminding him that Ernest wasn’t the most important thing in this world. There are bread trees and baobabs, tigers and queens, incarnations of Buddha, clairvoyants, thinkers, women giving birth—just like there are leaves fallen by the side of the road, hops, and marsh tea.

“You’re not thinking straight! You can’t accomplish anything, precisely because you aren’t the most important thing to yourself! Believe that you’re magnificent, and then you’ll be magnificent!”

“Idiot,” he had said aloud. How dreadful.

But one could make just about anything seem real, if one could get a certain number of other people to attest to it. Even better if they were influential people. What would Ernest do within such a reality? But then, isn’t he already living in one?

Ernest pulls the remains of the fried liver out of the garbage and throws it out into the clearing in front of the cabin. Pavlov immediately pounces on it. Like Maije, Ernest thinks. He feels a sharp pain. The cosmos shouldn’t feel pain.

He conjures up apple blossom season and a light breeze. And Maije, almost nude, starting to run through what had once been the cowberry patch. Maije’s javelin soars and soars and they both can’t wait for it to touch ground. Splendid.

It’s her javelin that now pierces his chest.

“Pavlov, come and have a drink.”

In the nighttime light the dog’s cautious and vigilant eyes flash; he licks his own nose with a long, rosy tongue, and then enters the kitchen, shaking his thick, shiny coat. For a brief moment the two hesitate. Ernest and Pavlov. Then Ernest folds up a blanket for the dog and places it in front of the door.

“Good boy. Here we are—us two. Both alone in this world.”

Ernest reaches out and scratches Pavlov behind his ear. The dog tenses up, but Ernest sees a tiny movement at the end of his tail. Friends.

Before falling asleep, Ernest thinks about his aversion to so many things. And he feels guilty about that, guilty with all his heart and soul. But what can he do about it? He avoids shifty men and superficial women, he’s always given all the things that he finds repulsive a wide berth, because he doesn’t want to collect stones in his heart, but now look at him, he’s arrived at his cabin in the woods. He, alone with a bloodhound.

“You’ve consolidated all your assets in this one little cabin. Everyone else is going crazy about property.”

He falls asleep with Maije’s words sounding in his head.

The morning lies on Ernest with a dog’s weight. Pavlov is licking his face.

Snow is sprinkling outside, the titmice are chirping, everything is as it was before, but Ernest now senses that something has changed. It’s true that he wasn’t awake when the decisive moment arrived, but it had arrived nonetheless. From where? And how? Through his nostrils? Perhaps his mouth had fallen open while he was sleeping?

He opens the door and looks all around, slowly and carefully. Ernest and the cosmos. Just think of the scale of it. The stars in their proper constellations have done their job; all he has to do is find a home for Pavlov. Maije would say that he was now thinking straight.

Someone is running toward him from the woods. A slender figure with flowing hair.

Pavlov snarls threateningly.

Ernest, arms joyfully extended, freezes on the threshold.

By the time he’s tied up the dog, Maije has stopped breathing. She no longer has a face.