Best European Fiction 2013

[UKRAINE] TANIA MALYARCHUK Me and My Sacred Cow

I hated my cow and she hated me.

Even though we were like two peas in a pod: both of us crazy.

We competed with one another in mental abnormality, and the cow always won because she was the better runner. She had four legs, and I only have two.

Take this, for instance: we are walking across the village, it’s high noon, the sun burns, the skin on my nose is peeling, the cow, black as tar, cautiously wobbles in front of me, now and then prudently glancing back, trying to assess my mood. I say to her:

“Bitch, now that it’s all over, will you explain to me why you ran off into the woods?”

Daisy glances at me with a large black eye and doesn’t say anything.

“Have you given a thought to how I feel?” I’m beginning to raise my voice. “You saw me reading a book. And the book was very interesting! Had you read even one book in your life, you’d know how it feels: when you’re reading and some stupid cow you have to watch runs off into the woods!”

Daisy hopes that I’ll blame the gadflies.

“What about those gadflies? They bite me too. Do you see me running off into the woods?”

We’re passing the Volan household. Lyuba Volan is standing at the gate—a large deaf-mute girl, who’s always getting raped in the pasture by her younger brother. She roars with laughter, and it makes me shudder.

“You know how much I wanted to kick your ass?” I continue. “A lot! But you run so fast I can’t keep up! Wait till we get back to the barn—then I’ll get you. I’ll get you, believe me! With a broomstick! That’ll teach you!”

We’re passing Kamaykina’s house. I’m hurrying the cow along because I’m scared to run into her—the old senile woman who’s been after me for the past two years. Daisy’s mother once knocked down her haystack while I was reading Hugo’s Les Misérables.

We pass yet another house. Ours is coming up next. It’s right next to the store. The store sells nothing but apple-flavored sparkling water, Turkish chewing gum, and matches.

“I’ll kick your ass alright! Like there’s no tomorrow!” The cow glances at me anxiously with a large black eye and lowers her head as if she’s going to graze.

“Don’t even try to make me feel sorry for you! I’ve pitied you before, for all the good it’s done!”

Grandma’s gate is wide open. Secured with a brick. Daisy will dive in and drink from a bucket under the ash tree, even though I’ll yell to Grandma to give her some pesticide instead of water, because she’s already managed to fill her gut at the puddle near the compost heap. Daisy will stare at Grandma sorrowfully, as if I hadn’t tended her but tortured her with a hot iron rod. And I’ll yell to Grandma to give her a taste of a whip, or to hobble her legs, or to tie her by the neck because she’s mad.

Daisy slows down, hesitates. The gate is a few feet away. I can see the Basilyovskys’ yard from here. A tall thin mother and her three girls, their hair as red as mouse fur, are sitting on the staircase of the brick house waiting for an old aunt to die.

“Come on now, don’t worry. I won’t beat you too hard.”

Daisy makes a radical decision and picking up her pace, passes the gate and in an instant gallops away.

“You bitch!” I yell, running after her. “Come back! Where do you think you’re going? You won’t get away from me!”

The cow knows exactly where she’s going. She’s going to the store. Before I can manage to call her a bitch one more time, she enters its wide iron doorway and disappears into the stony coolness.

Once upon a time the store was the village elementary school. My grandma went to first and second grade there. Then she quit because she had to tend a cow. What’s happening is deeply symbolic. Daisy ran into the schoolroom to pray for the redemption of all of Grandma’s previous cows, especially the one on account of which she remained illiterate.

Auntie Ant sits at the store counter. She’s an aged saleswoman, who thinks it’s a matter of honor to remain in the empty store till the very end. She eyes my cow melancholically, and the cow pleadingly eyes Auntie Ant. If I hadn’t come in right then, Auntie Ant would surely have said to the cow: “Hello! How can I help you?”

“Daisy! Come home! I promise I won’t beat you,” I say wearily. And, “Hello, ma’am,” I address Auntie Ant. “How about slaughtering this cow? You’ll finally have something to sell.”

Auntie Ant is delighted, but quickly comes to her senses:

“Wouldn’t your Grandma mind?”

“We won’t tell her. I’ll say that the cow has been taken to the insane asylum.”

At last we two crazies come home. Grandma anxiously peers out of the gate.

“What took you so long?” she asks, and lets Daisy drink the cool well water out of a bucket.

“Better give her some pesticide!” I cry out defensively.

Daisy rubs her neck against my grandmother’s thin torso. Just like a dog.

“My sweet baby,” Grandma pets her. “Tired? Would you like some water?”

“I am very tired,” says Daisy. “And she’s the worst of all,” Daisy nods in my direction, “How she torments me! When will her parents finally come get her?”

My parents will come in a few days. In a little while. I have to be thoroughly scrubbed before school. Especially my feet. And I have to be rid of head lice. They have to buy me notebooks and textbooks. So they could be here any minute now. Bitch.

Lyuba Volan hasn’t always been a deaf-mute. She fell from a cherry tree as a child, when the owner of the tree caught her red-handed. She had such a scare she hasn’t spoken since.

But some people say that she was born with no upper palate and has never spoken a word.

She wears long ragged skirts and walks barefoot in all seasons. To save on shampoo, her mother always crops her hair close to her skull. Lyuba is in a perpetual state of regrowing her hair. When she has her period, she’s splattered all over with blood. Her younger brother Vulan rapes her daily in the pasture, and she laughs eerily. Sometimes, when it’s over, Lyuba hugs him and kisses him on the forehead. Meanwhile, I keep an eye on Lyuba’s cows. If anything happens to them, Lyuba’s mother will order her son to lash Lyuba with a whip, and he will gladly do so.

Lyuba is his brother’s first woman. Soon he will become her first and only gynecologist: to save money, he’ll give her a home abortion.

She roars with eerie laughter, and sometimes I think this is her way of smiling.

The Basilyovskys, the tall thin mother and the three red-headed girls, sit on the staircase of a brick house and wait for their ancient aunt to die.

When she dies, the house will become theirs. They have no other place to live. Meanwhile, the four of them live in an old summer kitchen next to the house. They, especially the red-headed girls, are anxious to move into the luxurious quarters, mossy and moldy, just like the old aunt herself. They will jump on the mildewed embroidered pillows, sleep on the chicken-feather beds.

The youngest girl’s first words were:

“Auntie, when will you die?”

The aunt’s reply was: “I will die, child.”

The girls take turns bringing food and drink to the old aunt’s quarters. They quietly enter the room, stand next to the bed, and keep silent for a while, hoping that the aunt will not wake up.

Their aunt has lived through the whole century.

Every day Mother Basilyovska takes the train to Kolomiya. She works as a security guard at the historical museum. When the museum personnel don’t show up for work, which happens almost every day, Basilyovska locks herself up in the museum and doesn’t let anyone in. The occasional visitors—lovers of antiques, or the tipsy Polish tourists—bang on the door, plead with her to let them in (because it’s not a holiday and the museum has got to be open), and Basilyovska peeks out from behind a curtain, like a frightened ghost, like a sixteenth-century museum piece, and bobs her head, as if saying: “History is not available today, she is depressed, and I am only a Basilyovska, with three red-haired daughters and an immortal aunt.”

The young Basilyovskys have nothing to eat. They wear bright colorful dresses given to them by the villagers. They wear bows in their hair, but no underwear. Their noses always run, and the girls lick off the snot. Their legs are covered with mud up to the knee.

The Basilyovskys are so red-haired and their freckles are so bright that each of the girls reminds me of a large sunflower containing an elf with a dirty face.

When the cow got sick, Grandma started taking her out for an evening walk.

Daisy’s milk turned red and she mooed mournfully.

I am sitting at the gate, waiting for my parents to arrive. Grandma is walking Daisy in circles around the yard.

“Don’t just sit there, child. It’s getting late,” Grandma tells me. “I don’t think they’re coming tonight.”

“They may come late at night. It’s not so scary when you travel by car.”

“Or they may be busy,” Grandma keeps thinking out loud.

“Hard, so hard!” Daisy adds. “There’s blood in my milk.”

I’m waiting for my mom, and I’m scared. I imagine her pressing my head to her breast, then suddenly pulling back:

“Tania, your head is full of lice!”

I pretend that I’m shocked:

“What are you talking about? What lice?”

“The lice are prancing around in your hair like horses! How did you let it come to this?”

“Mom, I don’t have lice!”

“And what’s this?” She pulls a large chubby louse out of my hair. “Do you ever brush your hair? Do you even wash it? Where in the world did all of them come from?”

“Mom, all the kids around here have lice! It’s not my fault! They just leap from head to head!”

I am really nervous about my mom’s arrival. Some time ago she reacted like this when she discovered I had worms. I hid behind the barn and picked the worms out of my turds to convince her that I didn’t have them.

“Don’t leave me at Grandma’s for so long! Soon enough I won’t be expected just to take the cow to the pasture, I’ll have to milk it too.”

Grandma pets Daisy on the forehead, and slowly walks her around the yard. Daisy obediently shuffles back and forth.

“Gran, why are you dragging the cow around?” I yell from the gate.

“She wants to walk around a bit. You’re enjoying this, right?”

“Right,” says Daisy.

Kamaykina has a beautiful young daughter, Lyuda. At one point, she initiated the transformation of the local children’s library into a pool hall. The old portly librarian was forced to send some of the books to a library in a nearby village and to distribute the rest among the village children. That’s how I got The Adventures of the Elektronik and The Little Witch. So I felt really good about the pool hall.

Lyuda was a brilliant pool player. She also played the guitar and sported a tattoo on her left arm. She had a Kolomiya boyfriend who came to see her on a motorcycle. The wedding was planned for fall. At the end of the summer, she went to Tlumach with friends and jumped from the third floor.

“Don’t come near me. I’ll jump,” Lyuda told her drunken boyfriend, climbing onto the windowsill in the dormitory where they were staying.

Her boyfriend didn’t believe her and kept coming.

Lyuda broke her spine and became forever wheelchair-bound. The village union bought the wheelchair. Her boyfriend came a few more times, made sure that Lyuda would never walk again, and the wedding was canceled with mutual consent. The last thing he said to her was this:

“I love you, and will always love you. If you ever get better, let me know. Even if I’m already married, I’ll come back to you.”

And right away he married another woman.

Lyuda quit playing pool, but she learned to embroider and to go without walking. Her arms became her legs.

That’s when my cow, Daisy’s mother, knocked down Kamaykina’s haystack with her hoof. I lost sight of the cow because I was busy reading Les Misérables.

The old Kamaykina was immediately informed whose cow ruined her haystack. And right away she came by to pick a fight with me. I muttered something in my defense, but I had nothing to say to the last thing she kept repeating. She screamed:

“Who will pile up the hay for me now? Who will pile it up?”

And then there is Little Riding Hood, a boy of about eight years, who is always being sent to foster care by his mother, and who always escapes. The mother also escapes. A few times a year. To Odessa. With lovers. But she always comes back.

Little Riding Hood suffers from epilepsy. When you say something to him, he answers: “Wha?”

I go to the cemetery, which I call “the fruit and berry medley,” and Little Riding Hood follows me there. Everything I love most grows at the cemetery: huge wild strawberries, the size of a fist, sweet cherries, sour cherries, apples, pears, and plums of two kinds, yellow and purple. You can pick anything you want, gather it into the folds of your shirt, and then go for a pleasant stroll among the tombstones and study the inscriptions.

Little Riding Hood breathes down my neck.

“Little Riding Hood, I’m going to the cemetery. Are you coming along?”

“Wha?” says Little Riding Hood and takes a step away.

“You’d better watch the cows. They’ll kill us if the cows get into their vegetable gardens.”

“Wha?” says Little Riding Hood, and comes one step closer.

“Aren’t you scared to go to the cemetery, Little Riding Hood?” Little Riding Hood doesn’t know what to say. He wavers between “Wha?” and “I’m not scared.” Finally he says:

“I’m not scared. What’s to be scared of? When I die, I’ll lay there.”

“Maybe you won’t. By the time you die, there won’t be any room left for your grave there.”

“Why not?” Little Riding Hood dives indignantly into the bushes.

When Little Riding Hood’s mother escaped to Odessa yet again with yet another lover, Little Riding Hood went to the Beremyan lake, swam five feet from the shore, and drowned. His disease caught him in the water.

“Little Riding Hood,” the angels at the heaven’s gate asked him, “why did you go for a swim at the Beremyan lake? Didn’t you know that your disease might catch you in the water?”

“Wha?” Little Riding Hood replied.

“Watch out, Little Riding Hood. This isn’t foster care. You can’t run away from here.”

Little Riding Hood didn’t know what to say. He wavered between “Wha?” and “I will too if I want to!” Finally he said:

“I will too if I want to!”

Some pears are best left unpicked. They grow right out of the graves. These pears are large and juicy, they resemble human skulls. But I am not superstitious and can easily eat a dozen.

Suddenly I see Lyuba Vulan and her younger brother.

“Climb the pear tree,” the brother orders Lyuba. Lyuba roars with laughter and tries to kiss her brother on the forehead.

“Climb the tree, I’m telling you!”

Lyuba starts climbing. Right under the pear tree is the grave of Basilyovsky, the father of the three red-haired elves. Basilyovsky says to Lyuba:

“Lyuba, don’t climb the pear tree. You’ve climbed the cherry tree before, and look what happened to you.”

“Keep climbing! Move on!” Lyuba’s brother hurries her up.

Lyuba has climbed onto the first thick branch and is roaring with laughter.

“Climb higher,” her brother orders.

“Lyuba, don’t!” Basilyovsky persists. “Your brother is evil. He wants you to die. Or at least for your baby to die.”

Lyuba has climbed higher and reached the next branch up. She hangs over all of us and smiles. Her skirt flares up and I see that she is not wearing any underwear.

“And now jump, Lyuba!” her brother yells. “Jump down to the ground!”

“Lyuba, don’t jump!” I roar. “Don’t jump, no matter what!” Basilyovsky sorrowfully shakes his pear-shaped skulls in the branches.

“Jump, Lyuba, jump!”

“Don’t jump, Lyuba!”

“Jump, Lyuba!” Lyuba is getting ready to jump.

And that’s when my cow makes an appearance. Daisy. Her milk is red, and she moos mournfully. Soon she will die. But right now she knows whose side she is on.

Daisy bellows like a bull, shoots fire from her nostrils, stamps her hooves on the ground, and attacks Lyuba’s brother with her horns.

Lyuba’s brother doesn’t even have time to get scared, hurled as he is into Little Riding Hood’s freshly-dug grave.

Daisy waits at the grave for a few more minutes, watching Lyuba’s brother. Then she goes back to the pasture to graze the withered grass and moo mournfully.

“Lyuba, why do you listen to this freak?” I ask, helping Lyuba down from the tree.

“Because I love him,” Lyuba replies.

“Listen, you fell from the cherry tree, right? Or were you born without an upper palate? Is that why you are a mute?”

“I don’t have an upper palate.” Smiling, Lyuba opens her mouth to show me.

I give her my underwear.

My parents arrive on Sunday morning. They bring me chocolates and apricots. Mom presses me to her breast, then abruptly pulls back and starts yelling about lice. Just as I imagined.

“Mom, the people here are so miserable that they don’t worry about lice. Everyone has lice around here, even the chickens. How was I to stay away from them?”

In the evening, the parents are getting ready to leave.

“I am going with you,” I say.

“Stay another week. The cow died and Grandma is heartbroken. How can you leave her here all alone?”

Grandma sits by the summer kitchen, stares at my dad’s car, at the dog in the doghouse, at her lousy chickens, at the empty barn, and doesn’t say anything.

“I can’t stay here anymore!” I cry out on the verge of tears. “I just can’t! Who knows who else will die this week!”

“Stay,” Mom insists. “There’s stuff to eat here. There are pears and apples. The grapes will come into season in a few days.”

“Yes, child,” Grandma says, “stay. There’s this and that to munch on.”

“Wait for me,” I start crying. “I’ll go get my things! I’ll be back in a minute! I’m going with you.”

I run into the house and quickly gather my shorts and tank tops into a bundle. I grab my toothbrush, books, an outdated Soviet tape recorder, and some other stuff.

I hear my parent’s car, an old Zaporozhets, starting.

“Wait for me!” I run after them, almost breaking my neck. I come out just in time to catch a glimpse of their car disappearing in the distance.

“Why did you leave me here?” tears are rolling down my cheeks, like large peas.

Suddenly my cow Daisy appears. She bends her front legs and I jump onto her back.

“Go Daisy! Run after that car!”

Daisy gallops like a good horse. I am bouncing on her back, the wind tussles my hair and dries out my eyes. I look like a louse on horseback.

“Daisy, we can’t stay here! It’s a graveyard, not a village! I can’t help these people!”

The little Basilyovskys run out of their yard doing a little happy dance.

“She died! Our aunt died!” they yell.

“How nice,” I say to them and ride on.

“I’m ready for a snack,” Daisy tells me, turning her head. “I won’t catch up with the car unless I have a bite to eat.”

I tear off a piece of my thigh and toss it into Daisy’s mouth.

The parents notice us approaching their car. Mom says to Dad:

“Go faster! They’ve almost caught up with us.”

“I can’t go faster,” Dad answers irritably. “The gas tank is leaking.”

“Daisy! We can do it, sweetie! We can pass them!” I yell victoriously. “Turns out it feels really great not wearing any underwear! Come on, Daisy! We’re leaving them behind! We’re running away!”

“Oh, Tania,” Daisy giggles flirtatiously, “we’re so crazy! So crazy!”

[SPAIN: CASTILIAN] ELOY TIZÓN The Mercury in the Thermometers

Oh my sweet, sweet, sweet aunt from out in the provinces, my aunt of gauzy curtains always drawn, of lovely delicate needlework, treats from the confectioner just off the square, and missionary nephews in Africa, oh my dear aunt, with her parish Masses, her well-ironed petticoats, her balconies overlooking the main plaza with its convents and children dressed up for their First Communion, and the sun shines equally bright on children and convents, a small round table, little to eat, little to drink, much suffering, the little foot of widowhood, and the framed photograph of her treasurer husband in a factory where they made porcelain boxes, forty years of selfless, devoted marriage to Uncle Roque, that gentleman, oh my aunt, always on Sunday, so tiny, so hardworking, a merit badge, candied fruit, tidy cupboards, and rice pudding. Her eyes were always moist and she always seemed to be sniffling about something. Why? Nobody knew why. She was tidy. Sensitive to the cold. Smoke-colored hair. She survived on practically nothing, a grape, a tiny glass of mistelle, a sliver of cheese under a glass bell, on the mystery of her own age. She belonged to a congregation of the Sisters of Charity who organized benefit raffles and living nativity scenes. She was the only one who remembered the exact date of each one of our birthdays, and every year without fail she sent—by mail—a package to our house in the city, prepared with loving care, with something sweet and oily inside, a box of shortbread dusted with powdered sugar, or a whole selection of those little iced cakes called mantecados. After a few reluctant nibbles, they sat for months and months getting stale in the pantry, until suddenly someone got sick of seeing them there and tossed them into the trash can.

Oh, my sainted aunt, we had her address and we knew that she lived on that exact street, above that pharmacy, and one cold, sunny winter day we decided to visit her in her provincial home, and we showed up unannounced, and you didn’t seem surprised to see us and received us on the threshold, chewing on something small, my dear aunt, I think it was an apple, smaller than normal, half an apple, or even less, a third, and extremely round. So there you were, Auntie, among your spare, spindly furniture, gnawing on your strange fruit, just as if you were gnawing on your provincial existence, and quietly clucking your tongue. On the floor, the doormat said Welcome. We took turns wiping our feet. We exchanged kisses at the door. Come in, come in. And in we came.

Her house. This way. The hallway. Careful. Oh. We bumped into each other. We apologized. Doors opened and closed, doors that seemed, how to put it, like married life. Cushions embroidered with cats. The sound of clocks ticking. Chimes, ringing, tinkling, whirring, it was almost embarrassing to speak out loud, our aunt leading the way, we tiptoed along the hallway as if in fear of never arriving or of disturbing the air, of profaning it, and all the knickknacks danced happily around us as a sign of welcome, lace tablecloths, photographs, sideboards, china cabinets, mirrors, like dogs crowding around to sniff at our hands.

And one room led to another, and the ceilings slid smoothly backward, each moment more quickly, more slowly, with their heavy drapes and clustered chandeliers, switched on or off, there was a pedestal table in our way, we had to dodge it, and a gelatinous light flickering at the end of the hallway. Or at least it seemed that way to us. We had to push through that heavy rarefied air, thick with oxygen breathed in days gone by, with overcoat sleeves, terra-cotta pots, lichens, carnivorous plants, Malaysian jungles, conifer forests, islands of melted lead, volcanoes in eruption, what an odyssey. And after all that: a wingback armchair.

Here it is, said our aunt. And added, by way of explanation: All month I’ve been wanting to buy myself a pencil.

Everything there was on a reduced scale, the chair, the table, the books (there were none). The cat, curled up into a ball on the carpet, looked like a mouse. Floating inside a bottle, suspended, a dried sea horse. A cuckoo clock (tick) pecked away at the time (tock).

We went in, ducking our heads, to the room reserved for receiving nieces and nephews. We took up the whole three-seater sofa and still needed more room. Squeeeeeze in. Next, our aunt asked us about our health and the four of us responded in one voice that we were all well, very well. And would we like anything to drink, and we asked for coffee, coffee. Then our aunt disappeared from sight, swallowed up by the kitchen, and after a laborious rattling and banging and clattering she came back bearing a tiny toy coffee pot, trickling stream, our aunt dragging her feet along the hallway as if hauling a locomotive on her back, hunched like a cyclist, pedaling like a drunken soldier, gibbous, her face twitching with tics. She stretched a cloth atop the lace table mat. White. She ironed it with her edge of her hand. Taking her time. Next, she took out, from who knows where, a little cardboard tray with four sweets, some tiny, sticky egg-yolk confections named for who-knows-what saint, as she told us, and a bottle of thick, monastic liquor, from which she poured out a thimbleful of nothing, a shadow of color, into some minuscule glasses.

There we were, face to face with our aunt. Our aunt staring back at us. In her provincial house above the pharmacy. Without knowing very well what to say to us, what to do, how to survive. We breathed with difficulty. We forgot to fill our lungs with air. We stared at our knees until we got dizzy: enough already. And we were starting to regret a little having come to pay this visit. We Fierros are like that. An inconsistent bunch. We want one thing, then we don’t want it. We want something else. The same thing always happens to us.

The TV set’s paunchy screen, switched off, showed a curved reflection of the room with us inside it. Our aunt scolded us: “None of you ever remember your old auntie anymore,” she told us. And we—playing dumb—protested with our mouths full of marzipan cookies, well yes, well no, that the proof of it was that we were sitting right there on the three-seater sofa, the four of us together at that exact moment. We coughed. And, to banish any doubts, we held up our hands with our palms facing out.

Someone pointed to a painting of some fishermen hanging on the wall and our aunt settled the matter: “It’s a sailing picture.” Next question. We surveyed that cluttered multicolored mixture of planes, textures, surfaces, odors, and in the middle of it all: our aunt. Our provincial aunt. Dorotea Fierro. Seated with her back to the light. So far away. More remote than a lighthouse far out at sea. We located, after a certain effort, the teaspoons. We used them to stir the… coffee? We chewed the thick pulpy strands of candied pumpkin, called… angel hair? We swallowed the… liquor? After all that, we sat quietly, drifting in our thoughts, with a monastic flavor in our mouths, each one of us alone with ourselves, thinking about our own filthy lives.

Silence, as if an angel had passed through the room.

“Are you cold?”

“Hmmh?”

“If you’re all cold?”

“No, no. Not cold. What makes you think that?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, yes, very sure.”

“Ah, good. Because if not… ”

Our aunt sighed. Our aunt always sighed, with or without a reason. Throughout her whole life, our aunt, Dorotea Fierro, had done nothing but sigh and cross herself over everything and step out onto the balcony and wrap herself in the fine light touch of gray wool and attend burials and religious processions and do needlework with a honeycomb stitch and be the widow of Uncle Roque, that gentleman, and chew efficiently, in front of visitors, little pieces of fruit. She didn’t go out much. She only attended, on occasion, some choral and dance festivals. Our aunt said that she had no liking for buzzing about here and there for no reason, no, she wasn’t like one of those pious women who spend the whole day in church, competing to see who can pray faster, none of that, she went to Mass once a week, at most, thank you. Not her. She went from her house to the market and from the market back to the house. You wouldn’t get her out for any other reason. God is a very serious thing, not to be taken as a joke, said Aunt Dorotea, you must not try to wear him down, said our aunt, it’s not good to test God’s patience.

Other subjects. Age. The years. Time.

Oh, children, at my age the years fly by and time is unforgiving. We count coffins instead of birthdays.

Oh, she had been young once, too, what were we thinking, at one time she too had done some foolish things with her friends, like making prank phone calls to strangers or drinking carbonated beverages.

Silence.

That provincial city with its red cathedral. Black. Oblong. Slow. With towers that trembled against the watery sunset and gothic belfries filled with the sound of identical birds and amplified music. A cathedral that was not one but thousands, tirelessly repeated in the changing images on gaudy tourist postcards sold for a few coins at all hours, everywhere, along the damp archways and colonnades with drawings in schoolroom chalk and the echo of children’s voices scurrying downstairs, toward the river, which is always on the left-hand side as you go down, you can’t miss it.

And the cathedral grew and grew, enormous, it didn’t stop growing taller and crashing down upon its stones, high as a tide, curved and wet, awash in the green waves of its stained-glass windows and its murmuring masses. Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Its walls of living rock guarded, in an urn, the relics of some local martyr capable of working a miracle, of restoring eyesight to the blind, let’s say, and there they were, in the urn, the martyr’s tiny little bones.

And it smelled like wax (and a little bit like cocoa), the smell of the melted candles floated along the whole street, it permeated people’s clothes and slipped into the shops selling salted fish and pickles, it stormed the Athenaeum, where an usher sat snoozing between plaster busts, it crossed the gardens made not so much of trees and plants as memory and the past, it filtered beneath the doors toward the convent tables set with a still life composed of a white tablecloth, a loaf of bread, a jar of water, and the very whitest hardboiled egg, as if just freshly painted: supper. And the whole valley ate supper at the same time, the kitchens bubbling with spirited activity and conversations and not a soul in sight on the provincial city’s deserted cobblestone plazas, not one single passerby, the wind scurrying across them, hastening the flight of a newspaper page, a bandstand moaned with loneliness, nobody, only once in a while the sight of a cat’s sharp cinematic shadow flowing along the wall or the last old pious churchgoing woman hurrying home, God help us, coming back late from the doctor, having her blood pressure checked. And after a little while the lights of some balconies began to flicker and go out and the creaking of bedsprings was heard and the dream that pulled down the sleepers’ eyelids took possession of everyone and everything.

Our visit was drawing to a close. Our aunt stood up from her rocking chair, smoothed her completely white hair, as white as powder, and suddenly time pounced backwards like a lynx, and for an instant she was once again young Dorotea from the past, happy, tender, skittish, the young girl who was afraid of the mercury in the thermometers, with blonde braids and stockings, on her wedding day with Uncle Roque, that gentleman, and she was neither alive nor dead, the one who coddles us, who spoils us, who indulges all our whims and silly outbursts, who gives us presents, sticker albums and superhero comics, who teaches us to read and write and ride bicycles, who cures our cuts and bruises with iodine and saliva, be-cured-you-shall-of-frog’s-bad-spell-if-not-all-cured-today-tomorrow-good-and-well, who dries the tears we squandered on an unlucky love, who consoles us, who makes us laugh, who blows our noses and then, with a slap on the bottom, sends us back out to the garden, upsy daisy, go get some sunshine, to go play with our cousins. But first she squeezes us tight in her perfumed arms, which produces in us the bittersweet sensation of being hugged by a wild rosebush.

During a flashing fraction of a second, right there, before our bewildered eyes, accompanied by a delicious tickling at the base of the spine, everybody was young and exchanged kisses, our mothers, our cousins, that milkman who knew how to whistle through his nose, the music started to play in the garden, there was a party with little paper lanterns, someone offered a toast, someone brayed like a donkey, the revelry flowed round among the tables, firecrackers exploded, couples danced all night wrapped in the tenuous glow of the fireflies and then got lost among the trees in the back, extenuated and happy, no one had gotten sick yet, and even Uncle Roque, that gentleman, stepped up out of his grave laughing cheerfully and brushing the dirt off his suit.

He died. All that died. Buried. rip. A niche in the cemetery. A wreath of flowers. Rest in peace. A prayer for his soul. A flame that died out. Messy inheritances. Lawyers. Lawsuits. Battles between brothers and sisters. The land where the house stood was sold at public auction, acquired by a speculator, a pickaxe cut down the few remaining trees, and in the garden they put up a parking garage with a security guard. Today, our aunt, purblind, snoozes in a wheelchair, and we don’t even know if she recognizes us. Oh, mystery of time. The hands of time creaked on. The clocks’ soft tick-tock marked the time. We began to say our Good-byes. Good-bye to all this. We are ghosts of the past who have come to disrupt her routine. We realize this. It’s distressing. And one day, far from everything, solitary and dignified in a rest home, she will lay her head on her shoulder and it will all be over, dear aunt, because it just won’t do to try God’s patience.

We sat back down on the three-seater sofa.

Nothing else happened. A change of light. Then we learned that our provincial aunt had fallen in love once, for the first and only time in her life, and it had happened suddenly. It happened one afternoon when she visited the office of a homeopathic doctor, looking for a remedy for certain, shall we say, feminine, ahem, aches and pains. Let’s not get into details. The nurse opened the door to the doctor’s office, and there he was. The homeopathic doctor was a sad man, with a cough, with sunken shoulders and resigned hands which in that moment were stealthily shuffling note cards and fountain pens. The doctor turned his large lazy blue eyes toward her and greeted her by way of asking: “How are we doing?” He said nothing more. Four words. That was enough. Enough—with such a small thing a heart can tear and bleed. Our provincial aunt fell in love all at once, so that she wouldn’t have to repent it later on, and that very night she wrote it down in her diary, the diary that we inherited after her death in the rest home, oh my dear aunt, along with the urn containing her ashes, and that’s how we learned it. They exchanged glances. And he said: “How are we doing?” She committed the indiscretion of falling in love right there, standing up in the middle of the doctor’s examination room, in front of the nurse in her uniform, how embarrassing, body and soul, our Aunt Dorotea from above the pharmacy, hard to believe it, with her curved back, her dry skin, her facial tics, her muttered words, her little music boxes, her crocheted table covers, her silhouette like a chimney, her mantecados. To hell with the mantecados. Even those of us who are a bit ridiculous still deserve someone to love us. We all need a hand to close our eyelids when our hour comes round at last. For the first and only time in her life our aunt from the provinces fell in love with that homeopathic doctor, and it was a small love, homeopathic too, the minimum dosage.

After examining her, the doctor told her there was nothing wrong; it was just nerves. She returned home feeling relieved. Nerves, yes. That must have been it.

She saw him for the second and last time in the street, by chance, a few days later. He was standing in front of the window of a clock shop, and upon seeing her he tipped his hat in greeting. At his side, a young, pretty woman was holding a baby in her arms. She returned his greeting timidly, tilting her head slightly, then continued walking past with short little steps without saying a word. It was winter, the weather was quite cold, he was coughing. He had snow on his shoulders.

She was on the verge of succumbing. She sketched out a plan. She repented of it. The two of them were married. No, it couldn’t be done, what a foolish idea. Uncle Roque lay sleeping in the other bed. Don’t even think about it, no. In a small provincial town. In those days. Above the pharmacy. Everyone knew one another, everyone watched one another, it couldn’t be done. She carried that adulterous secret with her for the rest of her life. Without knowing why, she felt dirty. She wrote convoluted letters that she never sent. She ate apples. She repented. Because she wanted to do something for that tall man with a hat, and she didn’t dare to do anything more, she began to knit him a wool sweater, for the winter. Hospitals are chilly places. The war broke out and they hustled the homeopathic doctor up onto a truck and sent him off to the front, far away from there, among the living and the dead, and he never came back again. He came and he went. So much madness. The woolen sweater remained half knitted, with both arms still undone. It was not the moment to ask questions or seek advice. Unthinkable. It couldn’t be done. Not to her confessor, not to anyone. Uncle Roque lay sleeping in the other bed. No, nobody ever discovered that feverish passion. She buried it in the deepest possible place. Better that way. Nothing came to pass. Time passed. For years she tried in silence to kill off that feeling, to drown it, to murder it thoroughly so that she could go on breathing. Our aunt unraveled the sweater she had begun for that sad doctor with snow on his shoulders, and with the wool she knitted an oven mitt, which turned out to be more practical. She ate baked apples. She helped run charity raffles. She went to choral and dance festivals. She became cold, with weepy eyes. Life, meanwhile, passed her by, indifferent, with its exacting caravan of noises, annoyances, toasts, obligations, illnesses, nieces and nephews, trips, lunches, coitus, bills, presents, Christmas processions, Sundays, births, and deaths. And after all that: a wingback armchair.

A wall of time, impossible to knock down, separated them. There were the two of them, both disconcerted and too shy, she was alive and he was dead, like two pale actors on stage, beneath the spotlights, twisting their hands in silence, incapable of saying a word, and the fact of having renounced a dream that was perhaps beautiful and central—the magnitude of that sacrifice—gave their trivial existences a phantasmagorical radiance capable of converting them into epic creatures. Where was the love? Stretched out in a cold tomb? It came and it went. Nothing came to pass. A breeze. Upon the cuckoo clock thirty years (tick) passed by (tock).

Order exists and chaos exists. Medicines exist that cure imaginary sicknesses, minor disorders of the soul, infections of the spirit.

Clothes hanging in the bedroom armoire, her own and her husband’s. The clothes that they had bought together at sales and which would last long after both of them had died. And one of those dresses, chosen by herself, would serve as her shroud.

Oh, the mystery of time. Until one cold, sunny day in winter we decided to visit her in her house out in the provinces and our aunt welcomed us on the threshold gnawing on something small and vaguely startling—a live bird?—and her eyes slid from one side to the other like a polyp or ectoplasm. And one of us, it might have been me, pulled himself out of his stupor on the sofa, pointed with a nicotine-stained finger toward the shadowed window, and said emphatically: “It’s getting late.”

And then specified—I specified—more terrified, if possible: “Very late.”

And then, we all saw it, our provincial aunt, very startled, made an odd movement, as if a chill ran through her, as if she was snuggling into her woolen shawl, shrinking her frame until it acquired the exact shape of her future coffin.

Oh.

[BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA] SEMEZDIN MEHMEDINOVIĆ My Heart

Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.

I was getting ready for work, taking a shower, when I felt a dull, metallic pain in my chest and throat, and the taste of cement on my tongue. I stepped out of the shower with a feeling of indescribable fatigue and wrapped my wet body in a bathrobe. Sanja was just about to leave the apartment to go to work, but then she caught sight of me through the open bathroom door. I told her I wasn’t feeling well, I was going back to bed for a bit, this weariness would soon pass, and she shouldn’t hesitate to go.

She stayed. Wet, my hair dripping, wrapped in the bathrobe, I stretched out on the bed. And I felt increasingly worse. She brought me cold tea, which didn’t help, and then, having no choice, she called 911. After that, she stared out at the street impatiently, looking for the ambulance. I didn’t have the energy to turn onto my other side to watch her by the window. I looked at the sofa where she had been sitting. I felt suddenly uneasy because she wasn’t where she had just been. Then I looked at the photograph on the wall above the sofa…

Llasa. Early morning. A young Buddhist priest in a red robe had come out through a high wooden door in the wall of a stone building, and was now walking down a narrow cobbled lane, with a wisp of morning mist in front of him—a small white cloud, like a ghost that the priest was following. I let my gaze follow the white cloud above the cobblestones in Tibet.

Behind me, Sanja said: “Here they are.” Then she came back into my field of vision. She opened the door and looked down the corridor, then anxiously glanced back toward me. And then our room was filled with strangers from the emergency services, settling themselves briskly around me on the sofa. I had never experienced such an aggressive assault on my privacy. Quite uninhibited and sure of themselves, they looked around the room, glanced at me, admired the floral pattern of the coverlet I was lying on; strangers in my room. A girl in a blue uniform had just opened my bathrobe, so that I lay before them naked, and asked: “How old are you, sir?”

“Fifty.”

After the initial shock, there was peace.

I looked at everything around me without emotion, and so— without fear. And now that it is over, I remember the event as though I had seen it from a distance, just as though my mind had become separate from my body and had observed what was going on almost with indifference.

The shock did not come when the girl in the blue uniform said: “Sir, you’re having a heart attack!”

That’s when I felt calm. In films, when they are describing a critical state such as this, the picture is often left without sound, and sometimes they even make it slow motion. That is a technical evocation of the mind at work.

The mind behaves like a cold camera lens.

In my case, the shock had come at the moment when the ambulance arrived, especially when a bunch of strangers filled my room. This was something that happened to other people, not to me, and it was something I recoiled from. And here my fear of illness was expressed as fear of doctors and hospitals. I never went to hospitals, even as a visitor. And now, the girl in the blue uniform leaned over me on my sofa, and said: “You’re having a heart attack!”

My first thought: She’s wrong, it isn’t my heart. Then I thought: I know this girl from somewhere. I tried to remember where from, but now there were a lot of human hands above me, attaching me to wires, turning me to the left, then to the right, disturbing my train of thought. I could not remember where I had seen that girl before. Through her blue blouse, I saw the outline of her breasts, but this wasn't erotic in the least. She was looking at me anxiously, as though accusing me of something.

And one other optical impression: the bodies of all those people around me were unnaturally big, while my body had shrunk. What was it I was feeling? Weariness. Weariness from the pressure in my chest, which was making me breathless, which had become the same as weariness with life. And I thought: So, is this it? Is this death? At that moment, in fact, I began to see everything not just as a participant, but also as an outside observer. And I thought: It’s good, just let it all pass, I’m tired, I want to close my eyes and not remember. I want it all to stop.

The years I had lived through up to now were already too much.

On the way to the hospital, lying in the ambulance, my knee crushed by the weight of an oxygen canister, I watched the passing clouds, the green traffic signals that I had noticed up to then only as a driver. Through the back door of the ambulance, after we slowed down for something, I saw a sign on the façade of a brick building with the inscription LIBERATION BOOKS.

“What’s the name of this street?” I asked the girl in the blue uniform leaning over me to fix my headrest.

Was my mind turning anywhere, just to forget the pain in my chest? The young man sitting by my feet kept shifting the heavy metal canister that was lying on my legs. He shifted it so that the cold metal lay uncomfortably against the bone of my knee, and for a while that became the dominant pain in my body. That made me silently furious with the young man, who was, perhaps, scraping the oxygen canister against my knees on purpose, intending to deflect my mind away from my heart to a different problem.

Then I turned my attention to the tops of the trees lining the street. In the autumn, the leaves here take on such dazzling, sunny colors that even on a cloudy day one has the impression of a surplus of light. Was it a sunny morning? Or did the colors in the treetops give me an illusion of sun? I had always been disturbed by the thought of dying in a landscape where deciduous trees grew. There was something unconvincing, something obvious about that.

It was somehow indecent to die in the autumn.

It was kitsch to die in the autumn, along with everything else.

The ambulance stopped in front of the hospital. In the parking lot, the first image I saw from my horizontal position was this: walking between the cars toward the hospital building was a girl in the red hockey shirt of the Washington Capitals. She was looking up, towarda window, or at a cloud.

I had only ever been in this parking lot once before, when the wife of the poet F. was giving birth to their daughter. I remember that he had bought a new Toyota Camry that day, and asked me: “Would you like to drive it?” “Sure.” And I drove once round the parking lot. That was ten years ago. I can still remember the smell of the new car.

My oxygen mask began to mist up in the icy November air.

At the hospital entrance, I was met by a choir of smiling medical personnel. On my right, a nurse struggled to find a vein in my arm to take blood. On my left, two girls in green coats gazed and marvelled at the design of the coverlet I was wrapped in. at the same time, I caught sight of Sanja at the end of the corridor; a man (a doctor?) had just come up to her with some papers in his hand. She listened carefully to what he said and then began to cry.

The man was now leaning over me. He felt my pulse with cold fingers and asked: “How old are you?”

“Fifty.”

I want to go back to my apartment for a moment.

What is the answer to the question Who am I? While strangers are examining my naked body in my own room? And among them is that girl I know from somewhere. What fills me with unease and muffled shame is not the proximity of death, but the realization that my body, at this moment, is an object without emanations. My corporality is asexual.

What is more, the ease with which these strangers shift my body through space creates an impression of my own weightlessness. I am what is left over of me, my mortal remains, as I lie in my bathrobe, under which I am naked.

All I know about the body I know as a poet, and that is pretty selective, limited to those characteristics in which the body displays its abilities and strength, and not its weaknesses and shortcomings.

About the diseases of the body, I actually know nothing.

The mind draws logical conclusions on the basis of data accessible to it, and when the attack happened, while I was standing under the shower in the bathroom, I immediately connected the pain in my throat and metal taste in my mouth with an article I had read in Vanity Fair. It was an account of an attack experienced by the author (Christopher Hitchens, who was later diagnosed with cancer). In that description he says that he felt pain in his chest and neck, and felt something like ‘the slow drying of cement’ in his chest (I’m quoting this from memory, but I think those were the words he used to describe his state, which was what I was now experiencing). And when I came out of the shower, and the pain in my chest increased, I was convinced that I had cancer.

Later, the emergency services arrived, and the girl (a doctor in a blue uniform) leaned over me and said: “Sir, you are having a heart attack!” and my first thought had been: No, dear. This can’t be my heart.

My mind was so firmly convinced that my symptoms were like those in the description of Hitchens’s attack that I favored the account from his article over the official diagnosis. In any case, at one moment I thought: this is comical! I’m dying thinking about Christopher Hitchens!

It was comical: my reality, at such a crucial moment, was being explained by a columnist in Vanity Fair, who did not know I existed, and so could not know, either, that I was, perhaps, right now ceasing to exist.

“How old are you?”

“Fifty.”

This was a dialogue that kept being repeated today.

The number of years I had lived represented important information for the doctors. I had the feeling that, in this way, for the first time —in this long life—my time was being accurately measured. This meant that today all my illusions of youth vanished. We rationalize our experience of time, but beyond the givens of the calendar, we are not conscious of it. Because ‘in spirit’ we stay the same. ‘In spirit’ I was the same person I had been in my twenties. That’s how it is, probably, with everyone; it is a characteristic of our species. That is how we protect ourselves from death. Western cultures see man in his asymmetry and disharmony, so they separate him into a body that ages, and a soul that does not age. Apart, presumably, from Dostoevsky.

Reduced to a body lying on the operating table, I communicated the whole time with my eyes and through a meagre exchange of words with various people who were working on my revival. This was a surprising number of people—those who prepared for the operation, and those who participated in it. They all struck up conversations with the dying person, and my impression was that the body (i.e. me) did not offer much information, even on the operating table. Apart from my unpronounceable name, the only piece of information about me was this coverlet with the floral pattern à la Paul Gauguin, in which I was wrapped when I came here; everyone commented on it, interested in the cultural origin of the drawing on canvas, presumably convinced that the coverlet had the same geographical origin as me.

At one point the surgeon who was operating on me, not knowing how to negotiate my complicated name, brought his face close to mine and explained, slightly alarmed, that he would have to communicate with me in the course of the operation and for that communication he would need a name to call me by. He said: “I’ll call you Me’med. Is that all right?”

As for the coverlet, I don’t know exactly where it came from, other than that it was some South American country. Perhaps from the same country as one of the hospital staff who took such an interest in it. In any case, these people treated my origin with great sensitivity, although they did not ask, nor, I presume, did they know where I came from. From my accent they knew only that I was foreign.

Does this mean that we all suffer from a kind of anxiety about dying in a distant, foreign country, a world where we are not at home? This is the first time I see inside my body. On the left of the operating table there is a screen on which is projected an image of my cardiac arteries. What I see reminds me of a branching plant. One very thin, almost transparent twig had begun to grow and lengthen. Behind that growth was an unknown, delicate procedure that the doctor applied to my blocked artery, so as to break through the blockage and enable the normal flow of blood. Instantly, I felt indescribable relief. The same procedure was applied to the other artery: I watched as the branch grew before my eyes.

And that was all. The pain in my throat and pressure in my chest disappeared. The moment of liberated breathing was so refreshing that all trace of tiredness left my body. This made me want to straighten up, to get off the operating table and walk.

Full of oxygen.

The theater unexpectedly emptied, and for a short time I was alone. I heard a buzzing but didn’t know what was making the sound. A machine?

Then the room filled up with human voices again. None of them took any notice of me. They were discussing the previous night’s episode of a television series.

And they were laughing.

One girl, an African American, leaned over me and asked: “Would you like me to bring some water?’ a Latino lad came after her and, as though it were part of an ongoing conversation with her, said: “you must!”

I said: “Yes, please.”

And she answered him: “I can’t. I won’t!”

Someone else in the room was describing how he had spent half an hour that morning stuck in a lift. Finally the person responsible for the lift had appeared, and when they had freed him, he felt, he said, “like a Chilean miner who had just been brought out of the earth into the sun”.

I drank water out of a plastic cup. And I couldn’t remember when I was last that aware of the taste of ordinary, sweet water.

From the operating theater, lying on a narrow trolley, I went by lift to the ward. I was accompanied by two young people in hospital coats who didn’t seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere; they were talking, laughing, and easily forgot my presence. They could have been lovers. Beside them, I felt my primary characteristics returning to my body. When we entered the lift, it turned out that my height in a horizontal position was such that they had trouble fitting me into the moving box of the lift. And when the doors closed, I could feel them rubbing against my feet as we moved.

All the people I meet today disappear. They vanish without my having a chance to say goodbye. These two young lovers who had been chirruping and laughing in the lift, as they took me from the lower to the upper floors, they too went away without my noticing the moment of their departure.

In my ward, a new nurse settled me in the bed and said: “Lovely coverlet.”

I said I had brought it from home. She explained that I could by all means keep it here as well. Maybe she believed I had a childish emotional attachment to that rug.

Then I called Sanja, who had got lost somewhere in the depressing architecture of the hospital corridors.

If a line is drawn under Tuesday, the 2nd of November, 2010, this is what happened to me: as I was getting ready to go to work, I had a heart attack.

I was in the shower when I felt a dull, metallic pressure in my chest and throat, and when, soon afterwards, the ambulance arrived, the girl who examined me said, bluntly and without beating about the bush: ‘You’re having a heart attack.’ Under an oxygen mask, I watched Sanja on the sofa opposite the bed where I was lying surrounded by strangers. Her face was contorted with fear. They hurried to take me away, wrapped in the cover on which I was lying; they took me to hospital, and then I had an operation. And after they had installed stents in my blocked arteries, I was settled into a hospital ward. It all took a little more than three hours, but during that time my world was fundamentally altered.

After the operation, the doctor looked for Sanja, but she was not in the waiting room. When they had put me into the ward, I called her on her mobile. She answered, she was on her way. She came into the room, pale as pale, her face swollen with crying. That face expressed uncontrolled joy and an absolute sadness that had overwhelmed her. Something in her was broken. She had an irresistible urge to hug me, but didn’t dare for fear that an embrace might hurt. I asked her to sit on the bed, beside me.

“Where were you?”

“Outside the hospital.”

“It’s cold outside, and you’re dressed like that…” I’d only just noticed that—in her haste —she had just put a little jumper on over her T-shirt.

“I didn’t dare wait.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was afraid the doctor was going to come and tell me…”

“Tell you what?”

“…that you’d died.”

“It hadn’t quite come to that.”

“When I was giving them permission to operate, they asked—did I want them to fetch a priest?”

“What did you say?”

“I said there was no need for that, and that you weren’t going to die.”

“You didn’t tell them that a priest couldn’t reconcile me to God…”

“No.”

“You should have!” I said, joking.

She pretended to be cross (people were dying here and he was having a laugh!), then she slapped me gently with her open hand on my chest, then at the same instant remembered my heart and shuddered, she could have hurt me oh oh oh, she waved her hands in the air over me ohohohooo. Then we laughed.

I remember the rest of the day quite clearly as well.

When I was left alone in the ward, this is what I thought about: Of course I had been thinking and all these years I had been developing my attitude toward my death, but I did not expect that it could come as a consequence of my heart stopping. all my other organs could stop functioning, but the heart was out of the question. It was here, I thought, to beat for me, just as long as I needed it.

I called my son Harun. He was now in St. Louis. At the airport.

“How long is it till your flight?”

“Six hours.”

At midnight on 31 January 1996, on our way from Zagreb to Phoenix, Arizona, on our émigré journey to America, we had been at the St. Louis airport.

We were changing planes.

I remember rows of gray leather seats in the waiting room, and midnight travellers with Stetsons. In those days there were ashtrays on high stands beside the seats, and the stale air reeked of Jack Daniel’s. There wouldn’t be any ashtrays there any more. And now, as I chatted to him, I remembered a photograph from that journey. It was of him asleep, his head resting on his arms on a table in the airport cafe. He was thirteen then. I was thirty-five. He’s twenty-eight now. Almost as old as I was that midnight, when we were wearily waiting for the plane to Phoenix. How long ago was that? Fifteen years.

“I’m sorry, son.”

“What for?”

“That you’ve got such a long wait.”

“You’re comforting me, as though I was the one who’d had his heart stitched up!”

That textile image “stitched up” surprised me. As I thought about it, language became the only reality. I felt that every physical touch was freed of pain, and that was a nice illusion.

I’m really well, I feel cheerful, and it’s easy to forget I’ve had my heart “stitched up.”

Other than a dull ache in the vein they opened in my groin: in that soft area between my genitals and my thigh.

When I was lying on the operating table, at a certain moment I became conscious of that, that they were shaving my groin; a cold and quite disagreeable touch. At the time I didn’t know why they were doing that. If my problem is my heart, I thought, why are they shaving my private parts?

A cold razor blade scraping over my skin.

And the image of a man condemned to death, being prepared in the morning for the electric chair, came suddenly to my mind.

And then this. Today Sanja said that was it. No more cigarettes.

“If you want to go on living,” she said, “you have to stop.”

And it was high time.

“There’s a Bosnian, a doctor in Kentucky. I heard this story today. He had a heart attack, just like you, and while he was still in hospital, he asked his wife to park the car behind the hospital building. Then he’d go out, hide in the car and smoke a cigarette. Imagine! A doctor. His unfortunate wife refused to bring cigarettes, and she told his doctor colleagues about it.”

In America everything is geared to stopping you smoking. Of all the nations on the planet, they are the most resistant to the tobacco habit.

Nevertheless, one of the finest sentences about the cigarette and dependence on it was written by an American, Laird Hunt:

When you smoke, other people come up to you and ask for a light.

The next day. I thought about how the news of her son’s heart attack could affect my mother in Bosnia. In order to preempt any possible pain, I called her and explained that a rumor that I had had a heart attack was likely to spread through the Bosnian part of the world. I was calling, I said, so that my voice and cheerfulness would reassure her that this was not the case. She listened to me attentively, then there was a short pause before she asked: “So, how are you, otherwise?”

I clearly recognized her anxiety in that otherwise.

“Of all possible diseases, they hit on a heart attack,” she said. “The Mehmedinovićs don’t have them. No one in our family either on your father’s side or on mine has ever had a problem with their heart.”

So, that meant I was the first. Genetic degeneration had to start with someone; or else I—like all my relations—started out with the same heart, only I had carelessly filled mine with stuff that exceeded its capacity.

And when the call was over, I remembered a line of verse that I had last thought about perhaps in the late 1970s. It wasn’t remotely worthy, metaphysical poetry, but a rudimentary line by the forgotten Bosnian poet Vladimir Nastić that went:

I nearly swooned, Mother, like you, giving birth to me.

Sanja came this morning before eight o’clock. On her way to the ward, she had bought me a decaf in the hospital canteen. The decaf was sweetened with artificial sweetener.

It wasn’t coffee, it wasn’t sugar, nor was I myself.

And she said: “You’re looking well!”

I nodded affirmatively. Clearly I looked well, tied to the bed with all these cables so that I couldn’t move, or sit up, or get out of bed and walk around the room. But that didn’t bother me. I drank the coffee with great pleasure, just as though it was real coffee, with natural white sugar.

This morning a new nurse came. She said that it would be good for me to move, to walk around the room. I instantly dug myself out of bed, still plugged into hundreds of wires and with needles in my veins.

In the bathroom, Sanja carefully washed my whole body with a wet cloth.

Then I walked around the room. It was good to be walking again. This was what the experience of one’s first step was like. I was walking!

But afterward, I was sitting in my chair and suddenly straightened up, and at that moment I felt something burst in my right groin (where they had shaved my private parts the day before with a razor). At the same moment I saw a swelling appear. I pressed the button on my bed to call the nurse, who came quickly, and looked at the swelling with interest. She measured my penis, which was lying over the swelling, against the outside edge of her hand. She was concerned. She measured the pulse in my feet and hurried out of the room to find the duty doctor.

Very soon, instead of her or the doctor, a young man appeared, a technician with a strange plastic object. In the center of the square object there was a half ball, which he pressed onto the swelling. The ends of the surface into which the ball was set had holes with a paper string drawn through them. He tied the string round my waist. But he moved slowly, all the time reading the instructions for installing this plastic object whose purpose was, presumably, to read impulses, or messages sent by the swelling near my genitals.

And it wasn’t working.

He gave up.

He laid the plastic object down on the bedside cabinet, and left.

Was I now supposed to act like someone ill?

I didn’t want to.

No.

In Chekhov’s diaries there is a short note, a sketch for a story, about a man who went to the doctor, who examined him and discovered a weakness in his heart.

After that the man changed the way he lived, took medicines and talked obsessively about his weakness; the whole town knew about his heart, and all the town’s doctors (whom he consulted regularly) talked about his illness. He did not marry, he stopped drinking, he always walked slowly, and breathed with difficulty.

Eleven years later, he travelled to Moscow and went to see a cardiologist. That was how it emerged that his heart was, in fact, in excellent shape. To begin with, he was overjoyed at his health. But it quickly turned out that he was unable to return to a normal way of life, as he was completely adapted to his rhythm of going to bed early, walking slowly and breathing with difficulty.

What is more, the world became quite boring for him, now that he could no longer talk about his illness.

A young African had come to photograph my heart.

On his index finger—rather than on his ring finger, like most people—he had a silver ring with a square stone, that is, a combination of two stones: a large turquoise in the form of a tear was integrated into a black square of onyx. For the next half-hour, as I watched him work, I looked at that ring.

In order to photograph my heart, he used a hand-held scanner, and moved the cold, egg-shaped object over my breastbone, on the left side of my naked chest. On the monitor in front of him, was he focusing on the image of my heart? Or some other visual content? I don’t know, I couldn’t see what he was seeing. I always felt a bit dizzy whenever I heard my own heart. My hand sometimes falls unconsciously onto my chest, on the left side, just as I am falling asleep, then I become aware of my heart, and that wakes me up. and now, as that young man was recording me, I was seething with discomfort. At one moment he pressed the round scanner hard down between my ribs. This was a moment of utter bodily discomfort.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to make a bit of space between your ribs, so that I get a clearer image.”

I can easily handle pain.

But this wasn’t pain; this was separating the ribs right by the heart, this was far more than I was prepared to put up with. And that pressure between my ribs unleashed an uncontrollable fury in me. He had been scanning for half an hour already—had he taken any images? He said he had, but that it wasn’t enough. And I told him that for me what he had already recorded was absolutely enough, pulled my pajamas over my chest and crossed my arms over it for good measure, to prevent any further approach to my ribs.

It was as the young man, confused by my reaction, was putting away the instrument and leaving the room that Sanja stood with a decaf in a cardboard cup. She noticed my agitation and asked—what happened? I waved my hand, never mind, nothing, the examination took too long and that was why I was irritated. But then, I was put out by the expression on the young man’s face. While he was packing up his apparatus, I noticed a smile of mild revolt on his face. Did he think I was a racist? That was it! I could see it in his expression. That’s what he thought. He thought that I reacted the way I did not because I didn’t enjoy having him forcing my ribs apart, but because I had something against the color of his skin. I felt a need to talk to him, to put him right, but I knew that could only increase the misunderstanding.

So I didn’t say anything.

Nor did he.

He left without a word.

Then Sanja appeared with a decaf in a cardboard cup. She told me some of my friends were calling and wanted to visit me in hospital.

No, no.

They wanted to assure themselves that the heart attack had happened to me and not to them, which was human and normal, they wanted the confirmation that the misfortune had passed them by.

I refused.

The third day.

I was moved out of intensive care into an ordinary hospital ward, where I shared a room with this old man. He was a Slovak by origin.

Lukas Cierny. That’s what was written in blue felt tip on a little board on the wall, to the right of his bed. Nice name. Lukas Cierny. How old could he be? Eighty? Maybe more. He had Alzheimer’s disease, and some chest problems, and his breathing was very restricted.

In the middle of the night he got out of bed and set off somewhere, and they brought him back from the corridor. “Where were you going?”

“I want to get dressed and go for a walk.”

Old Cierny is much loved, there’s a procession all day long of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They fill our room with laughter while they fix their father’s, grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s pillows under his head, comb the sparse hairs on his skull and do whatever they can to please him. It is clear from the old man’s vacant gaze that he doesn’t know who all these people are. They turn to me as well, kindly, as though we’d always known one another and were related. The mere fact that I came from a Slavic part of the world gave them the right to that familiarity. Even though their own Slavic origin was pretty foreign to them. His daughter, when she introduced herself to me, said of Lukas: “He’s from Czechoslovakia.” She was a pure-blooded American, from Pennsylvania.

He, who remembered nothing any more, answered questions in English and then sometimes in Slovak. When he replied in Slovak, the people he was talking to didn’t understand him. However, that didn’t bother any of them, they weren’t conversing with him in order to exchange information, but to simulate communication.

Someone had just come into the room and greeted Lukas with “How you doin’?”, to which he replied: “Dobro.” It was a reflex response in Slovak, a language which at this time was evidently closer to him. The person to whom the old man directed his ‘dobro’ did not understand the word. The old man had been separated from his Slovak language for some seventy years. And now the word came out of him, as it were, unconsciously. But this linguistic muddle had an emotional effect on me. As though now, close to death, the old man was preparing to face death in his own language. When he pronounced his ‘dobro’ it confirmed for me that I was in a foreign, distant land. Sanja was sitting by my bed, and when she heard the old man say ‘dobro’, as though in our shared language, her eyes automatically filled with tears.

Later, I heard Cierny breathing with difficulty, as though he were having an asthma attack. That lasted for a while, and then he calmed down, and I no longer heard his breathing. And each time that happened, I thought he had died.

In the course of the evening, the nurses who looked after the two of us changed.

That evening there was an African Muslim girl wearing a violet silk scarf, with full make-up, including bright red lipstick, as though she was going out for the evening, to a restaurant and not a hospital ward. She was quite cheerful and sweet, young. She may have been twenty, perhaps twenty-five, but she addressed Lukas Cierny and me as though we were children.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

She laughed, and asked back: “Where do you think?”

“Ethiopia?”

“Close.”

“Sudan.”

“Close,” she said, and waited for the guessing game to go on. But I didn’t feel like going on guessing, so, disappointed with my faint-heartedness, she admitted: “Somalia.”

She stood in front of the board—on which she was going to write her name and mine—and asked, with a felt tip in her hand: “What’s your name?”

After a brief hesitation, I replied: “Me’med.”

From the perspective in which we found ourselves, the differences that are so fundamental to us became unimportant: whether she was from Sudan or Somalia? That mattered only to her; it left the entire continent where she now lived—indifferent. And the entire cosmos was indifferent to the differences in our identities. Seen from the perspective of death, it was a matter of total indifference which of the two of us was Slovak, and which Bosnian, Lukas and Me’med, patients stuck in the same room.

Just before midnight (she had come into our room to take blood samples), the young Somali girl asked the old Slovak: “What’s your name?”

He said nothing. She asked: “And what year is this?”

“1939!”

That’s what he said: 1939.

What did 1939 mean to him? He must have been ten, perhaps fifteen then. That was the year before the big war. Maybe that was when he had to leave his home for good, and now, in his old age, it turned out that he had never left that year. Truly, what had happened to him in 1939? I would have liked to hear his story, but he was no longer in a state to tell it.

There’s a year in my past I’ve never left as well.

1992.

Sometimes I’m woken by the clattering of Kalashnikovs over Sarajevo. I get up, make coffee and stay awake till morning. Through the window I look at the lights of Washington, or snow falling over the Pentagon.

During the night, Lukas Cierny got out of bed, and the young Somali put him back. “Where were you going?”

He replied: “To get dressed, I must go for a walk.”

He didn’t actually know he was in hospital.

Then in the morning, when she was encouraging us to get out of bed, he refused, and she ordered him loudly: “Get up! Stand up!”

“No!” said the old man.

And then—over the old Slovak who was refusing to get out of bed —she began to sing: “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!” Youth is beautiful in its arrogance.

The young Somali girl, with her turquoise scarf, with her new make-up, gleamed in the morning light, bending over the Slovak at the end of his life. She was happy because she was at the end of her shift, and singing.

I was waiting very impatiently to be let out of hospital. In fact I was afraid this wouldn’t happen today. It was Friday, and that would mean I’d have to stay here over the weekend.

But the doctor appeared and asked me to walk down the corridors hooked up to all those sensors and sonars. I walked down the corridors while the doctor followed the behavior of my heart on the monitor in front of him. I enjoyed that walk: in an hour I’d be outside, beyond the hospital walls.

When I came back into the room, the doctor checked the working of my heart once again, this time with a stethoscope and, as he didn’t find any sinister sounds in my chest, in the end he gave me precise instructions about how to behave—when I got out of hospital.

And then I could go home.

I looked at him. He was Indian, he was called Rayard. And I thought: this man saved my life and we’re parting like complete strangers.

I said: “You saved my life.”

He said: “Yes.”

And left.

After that a smiling middle-aged man arrived, with a mauve bow tie (“I’m your limo driver”), and took me in a wheelchair through the corridors to the main entrance. This was a hospital ritual. Regardless of the fact that I could walk, a man I had never seen before was pushing me in a wheelchair out of the hospital. There was something childish in that ritual move out of the world of the sick into the world of the healthy.

I parted from the stranger warmly, as though we had always known each other, and was left alone in front of the hospital. The fresh November air startled me. I’d been impatient to leave, and now that I was on the street, waiting for my taxi, I felt a mild uncertainty, and fear.

When you come back from a journey, you find things just as you left them at the moment of departure. After all the days of being away, you are now back in your own room, perhaps there’s an ashtray on the desk with a cigarette butt in it, perhaps a half-finished glass of wine, or a book you were reading on the day you left, open. Everything that retains a living trace of your presence in these objects becomes an image of the time that has passed and cannot ever be replaced.

I came back from hospital and the first thing I saw from the doorway was the nice cover on the bed, the one with the floral design à la Paul Gauguin, which had come home before me. Washed, it lay over the bed, and its textile essence was unchanged—there was no trace on it of the hospital, or of my illness.

Sanja had carefully removed from all the rooms most traces I had left of my previous life, which, according to the doctors’ instructions, I ought to give up. There were no ashtrays. The smell of tobacco smoke had quite disappeared from the air.

I went into the sunroom, my covered balcony, my office.

I wasn’t there either.

Erased from my rooms, now I could start over.

And then, reluctantly, I went into the bathroom, where it all began.

I undressed and stood in front of the mirror. I looked at the area beside my genitals. It was no longer a swelling but a bruise that was growing pale, with reddish edges, almost the color of rust.

I shaved.

Then I stepped cautiously into the shower, listening to the behavior of my body. The water was too hot. There was no pain in my neck, no pressure in my chest. Nothing hurt. The bathroom filled with warm steam. Water poured over me; was there anything simpler than this? a naked body with water pouring over it?

And I remembered a short film called The Room.

This is the story: a young man walks down the street as the light is fading, and through the open window of a room, above him, he hears the sound of a piano. And he stops. Then he sees the silhouette of the girl who is playing the piano. But the reason he stops is not only the music he heard, nor only the girl whose silhouette he saw. He does not know where that attraction comes from, he does not know the reason for his stopping, but he is aware of a strong magnetic pull emanating from that room, sensed through the open window. And years pass. He leaves that town and lives all over the world, then, as an old man, he returns. He buys an apartment, and lives out his last years in it. One day, after bathing, he leaves his room and hears the siren of an ambulance stopping in front of his building. It is night. And then he becomes conscious of everything. The room where he now finds himself is the room he had once seen, as a young man, while the sound of a piano reached him through the open window. And why had he felt such a strong attraction? The young man could not have known what the old man knows now: what he had seen then was his room, the one in which, when the time comes, he will die.

I came out of the shower; wrapped in a towel I walked through the whole apartment. Now I’m looking out of the window, and I say: “this is not that room.”

Sanja hears me. She stands behind me, leaning her head against my wet back, and asks: “What did you say?”

[AUSTRIA] LYDIA MISCHKULNIG A Protagonist’s Nemesis

So why do you think furniture stores don’t sell coffins? That’s what the young intern asked me at the last office party. I raised my eyebrows. But when I tried to answer her, I couldn’t think of a convincing argument. A coffin wasn’t a piece of furniture, I ventured hesitantly; it was at best a container, a shell.

But a coffin is an essential part of the furniture at wakes, the young woman insisted. We stock the right furniture for every stage and purpose in life. It goes without saying that we supply everything for newborn babies, so why not everything for the dear departed?

It also went without saying that we supplied everything for our own midsummer picnic—our office party. We brought along our own brand of garden furniture, tablecloths, and tableware so that we could enjoy our day in the park in true company style. Everything was stowed in our capacious yellow-and-blue shopping bags, which look a bit like wide-bellied boats. We ferried our stuff along the avenues to the historic Lusthaus, the pleasure pavilion where imperial hunting parties found shelter and amusement in days gone by. In front of its baroque façade, we set up the furniture, laid the tables, and put out the food from our own delicatessen. Meanwhile, the employees’ children cavorted on the grass.

We—the adults—ate and drank our fill and stretched out to relax on our own brand of rug. Then the intern asked, since we were used to having our office party outdoors, why couldn’t we organize a wake outdoors too? And again I couldn’t think of any good reason why we— meaning my company—had allowed ourselves, up till now, to ignore the very substantial line of business represented by funeral supplies.

I attended our staff parties in Moscow, Riyadh, and New York too. We’re expanding in every direction and bringing a family ethos to consumer culture; speaking for the company, I welcome this, but not the shortsightedness of excluding death. It is my job to connect mundane episodes and form a unified whole. Just as a wreath needs a frame, life, which is a series of episodes, needs a scaffold, a skeleton. A firm needs backbone, and people need backbones, for all people are brothers, and for “brothers” you can also read “sisters,” since they’re just as subject to mortality. I see it as my ideological mission to globalize the concept that both living and dying are affordable and part of everyday family life. Using innovative PR and marketing concepts, I gave the company a frame of reference for human existence that is understood the world over, while to the world I gave a culture of cordiality and to our staff a climate of congeniality in which a person can not only bloom and grow but also fall ill and die. But something is bothering me and I can’t put my finger on it. I keep feeling I’ve forgotten something, something that’s almost within my grasp… Our furniture company is prolifically permeating every aspect of life.

In principle, a corporation is a body, but not bodily in the sense that a body can be arrested or locked up; the corporate body is defined by its function, its role being to put skin on our flesh and keep it all wrapped around our bones so that we can embrace our nearest and dearest without literally assimilating them, merging or decomposing into a shapeless mass. Indeed, this is why you might characterize a coffin as a sort of wooden skin for the deceased.

My company’s branding is all about conveying a sense of security; we want our customers to trust that we are there for them.

I wanted to get to grips with my own self-deception too. What I’m saying right now sounds strange, as if I were merging with myself, my own plans and goals, and my own horror of death. Of course—death. Why didn’t I think of it first, instead of that impudent intern? There’s the room where the body is on view, the room where mourners are greeted or served refreshments, maybe another room where people can say a prayer… At the very thought of these spaces I could see before my eyes flat-pack coffins in pine, tie-it-yourself funeral wreaths, print-it-yourself sympathy messages, candles for the wake, lanterns for the cemetery, self-assembly crosses for the grave, in metal or wood. Of course, it would all have to be cheaper than the traditional undertaker’s wares.

I faced Death and overcame my fear. I lay back on the company rug and surveyed the set: woodland clearing, historic pavilion, horse-drawn hearse.

The children were playing baseball. A cradle with the latest employee offspring in it was nestled in the grass to one side. Patterned textiles fluttered in the wind, like flags run up a mast. A successful business playing its part in conquering death. The crown in our company logo symbolizes our Corporate Eternity.

Man is, and always will be, mortal, the intern asserted. I turned away; I had no desire to discuss the finer points of a monarchic corporation versus a corporate monarchy with some young intern. She was neither a political scientist nor a sociologist, nor had she any other authority to be voicing opinions. With every word she spoke, it became more obvious that she simply wanted to be noticed. She was trying to hook my attention with her determined obsequiousness. Once she realized that her pretentious blather was boring me, she moved on to topics that naturally interested her. Some of these were quite interesting, and I built them into the model of our furniture company, which would embrace the generations entering this life as well as those on the way out. Seeking was a way of life for her, she told me. She sought meaning and purpose in every word. She found meaning bit by bit, she told me; and the purpose of words was to make reality speakable and readable. The word was mighty, it ought to be so mighty that it could call itself forth; the word was almighty, she said. She confided in me that she wanted to be a writer. She wanted to write right into power, and write all the way through power. That’s highly ambitious, I replied patronizingly, and yawned. She apparently didn’t believe I had what it took to take her ideas and make them my own. She wanted to grasp each individual word, she continued, clearly not getting the message. She wanted to command the spoken word; to have power and be able to communicate what struck her as powerful.

She sat down on the rug and stretched out. I think she wanted to make herself my reality; she said she was curious and wanted to see what reality looked like. I only hoped that I looked better than her image of power. I had to muster all my strength when she said that the only real power was death and fear of it, which could only be sublimated by celebrating death triumphantly. Whoever manages to banish your fear of death, to show you how life and death can be overcome, will be rich and powerful, I thought. Suggestions of immortality… resurrection! Now we’re in advertising terrain. It’s time, I believe, for the word to be made image.

I’m originally from Memmingen, in southern Germany. I knew very well that Vienna was famous for its cult of the dead, but unlike “dear Augustin” of the folk song, who fell into a pestilential pit during the Plague, I had every intention of landing in a gold mine.

For all her clever ideas, I was more experienced and quicker at bringing ideas to fruition than you would have thought from looking at the intern’s funereal expression now. This afternoon she was being allowed to help out with the photo shoot for the pilot catalog.

I had to muster my strength. It had been a very trying year. I felt drained and didn’t want to move around too much. Soon I would see whether power could create reality—if I had the power that I portrayed myself as having, that is—and then I would see whether adding the funerary line to our business was a success. I sprawled on my rug, arms and legs stretched out, while the others unpacked the coffin parts.

Dressed in several layers of black, the intern was playing the part of a romantic beauty, recently deceased. Like a princess in mourning surrounded by flattering courtiers (the heads of department), she busied herself fashioning a funeral wreath of pink roses, ligustrum, and ribbon for the camera. The cameraman was clever, and certainly good enough at his job to conjure just the right mixture of grief and composure into her expression. I waved encouragingly from the sidelines. I kept out of the limelight. I thought it fair that she should be allowed to play the corpse.

From a distance, our midsummer’s party this year would have looked more than a trifle odd to passersby. The entire staff worked on the shoot. We were one big family, dealing with a bereavement.

Our furniture company will help you deal with your bereavement; that was the motto for our project, and this photoshoot was for the pilot catalog that would introduce our customers to the new line. We are setting an example, describing our vision of the affordable funeral of the future. We welcome more honesty in matters of life and death. We offer valuable tips, equipment and accessories, clever solutions. You will not be alone in this. We will help you. We will supply instructions. Invite your friends over and mourn together while you think up a few wise, comforting words.

The employees’ children were playing baseball, badminton, football. The younger ones were playing pirates in the sandpit, or on swings and jungle gyms. They relieved some of the solemnity of the situation and symbolized renewal and the eternal cycle of life. The first funeral wreath was under construction: the intern was making it with the heads of department. The photographer snapped away eagerly while they worked. She rattled off the instructions, and they handed her ligustrum, then carnations, roses, ribbons. She made a floral crown out of the leftovers, which she was wearing on her head the next time I looked over. It was slightly cloudy, so I could look up without sunglasses.

A canopy of leaves. Wind. Dappled sunlight. Perfect lighting conditions for our model funeral.

The checkout girls were dressed in casual gear from our textile department—we consider clothes, which after all we put on and take off, as portable furnishings. They were working away, equipped with screwdrivers, demonstrating that our coffins could be easily assembled by women too. The intern looked proud as she stood there, erect, chin jutting out. She was the first to put her hand up when I was casting for the shoot, I remember.

The wind was blowing the black ribbons about. The apprentices, who had put them out too early, were cursing and throwing away the tangled ones, rolling off new lengths of ribbon from the spool and putting them on the tables where the golden lettering for our sympathy messages lay. The early summer light shone playfully on the apprentices’ young faces as they enthusiastically rubbed the transfer letters onto the black ribbon.

The intern was busy chatting to the women screwing the coffins together when they began pointing excitedly to the other end of the grassy area. There, beneath the green shade of a tree, and between the green of the bushes, a woman dressed in white had suddenly appeared. She just stood there, a distraction.

I think my first thought must have been that someone had ordered an angel of death for the set. I was annoyed by this kitschy idea, which would have ruined my enlightened plan for an enlightened society. I was about to jump up and give the intern a dressing-down, but at the last minute I realized that the apparent angel of death was more likely a bride in her wedding dress who had accidentally wandered onto our set.

Meanwhile the intern was already running off in that direction, and before I could even raise my voice, she had already reached the little girls, whose innocent game of baseball was meant to illustrate how death is just a natural part of everyday life. Waving her arms, the intern shouted at the girls from the edge of the playing field and rounded them all up. Following her lead, the gaggle ran off blithely toward the woman in white.

I no longer remember whether the carriage that I’d spotted in front of the pleasure pavilion was our horse-drawn hearse or a wedding coach. The horses were whinnying, tossing their heads back and forth. The coachman was in traditional dress: black trousers, black cloak, and black bowler. We had even purchased a background banner that said “Horse-Drawn Hearse.”

The horses headed off, the coachman roaring unintelligibly at them. He kept shouting and yanking the reins as if to force the horses to a halt. But all his shouting and roaring only sped them up, and they broke into a trot, whinnying all the while. The coachman pulled on the reins again and the horses started to turn. Another yank on the reins, a crack of the whip, and the horses started galloping around the pavilion as if racing one another. The grown-ups were laughing; the children were getting a little scared.

The coachman disappeared behind the pavilion. He shouted for help. The horses stomped, then the carriage clattered off along the main avenue into the forest, the sounds fading as it grew more distant.

The excited children ran over to the grown-ups. The grown-ups reassured the children.

Had anyone seen what happened the bride?

And where had the intern got to?

At first I just scanned the area from where I was. Maybe she was behind the bushes?

We couldn’t go on with the shoot if the deceased had up and left with the bride.

I waited a bit, then stood up and went looking. The photographer took a break. I was fuming. The intern was sabotaging my project. Out of revenge, because I had stolen her idea. The first place l looked for the little bitch was behind the bushes. That’s where the pond was. A murky green. A few leaves floating motionless in the middle. Water lilies in flower. Water striders skated jerkily across the still surface. I spotted a few toads on a small spit of land along the shore, but no sign of my chief mourner. Farther on there was nothing but scrub.

I went back to the park area. The children were playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? As I listened to them explaining the rules of the game, I was struck by the careful way these kids, who had all grown up with two languages, chose their words. Everyone had forgotten about the bride, and the intern was still missing. Which of them had abducted which?

All the staff were sitting in a circle, finishing off the food. The half-assembled coffin lay abandoned on the grass. A few of the children were trying to put the crosses together. I took the screwdrivers away from them so that no one would get hurt.

Later on I had another good look around all the paths in the park. The intern had vanished into thin air. I had to take her place. Otherwise I might as well dig my own grave. We quickly finished assembling the coffin, completed the wreaths and ribbon-lettering in a flash, fit all the bits of the candelabra together, stuck in the candles, distributed the crape, and took up our places in a casual, free-standing formation around the coffin, in which I lay as the corpse, the piéce de résistance. The photographer clicked and clicked and clicked. I think we managed to get the whole thing in the can.

The midges arrived as the sun began to set. The toddlers grew cranky. The baby was hungry again. The children wanted to go home.

We started to break camp. The adults took care of the furniture and the heavier things; the photographer took care of his camera. The children folded up the tablecloths and collected the dishes. I took care of the trash, collecting the ends of ribbons, the scraps of crape, the bits of ligustrum and wire. Where had the intern got to? The women wrapped plates and glasses in foil and banners so that the insides of our bags wouldn’t be smeared. I stuffed what was definitely waste into an ordinary trash bag.

I carried the trash over to the large bins behind the pavilion. I walked right around the circular building.

Maybe the intern’s still hiding out with the bride and waiting to ambush me, I thought, because she feels robbed of her idea.

Not a trace of the carriage. Nothing but the wind and the avenue.

I went to the bins and stuffed the refuse in. Then I went along the avenue for a bit and from there into the bushes again. I found a piece of cloth. White and black. I pressed on into the thicket. Found what were perhaps shreds of ribbon or crape, and footprints in the softened ground. My heart pounding, I bent branches aside, broke off twigs. Snapping. Splashing. The pond. It was all darkness above the water; nothing to be seen.

I beat my way back through the undergrowth and hit upon the bins again. The tarmac shimmered a silvery color. I opened the lid of a bin and lifted up the bag I had thrown in, to see if any bits of bride or intern were lurking underneath. But the only thing under the picnic refuse was my funeral refuse. I walked around the building again and wanted to head back to the grass. But I couldn’t budge. I tried to lift first one leg, then the other, but I was glued to the spot. I pulled and strained so much that my muscles and ligaments began to burn. I couldn’t move, and finally became exhausted from all my exertions. I fell to my knees, breathing heavily, bobbing my head like a horse, and then looked up.

I was alone. I hadn’t even noticed the others leaving. My colleagues, the apprentices, the checkout girls, the photographer—all gone! They had left me behind. Where the hell had they got to? Why hadn’t they waited for me? How long had I been running around after the intern? By now it was pitch black.

There was one bag left on the grass. Where was the coffin, where were the crosses and flower arrangements that had been scattered across the grass? Only this last bag was still there, glinting in the dark. They would have waited for me, I was sure, and wouldn’t have dared leave a bag behind if I had exercised more authority with my staff and hadn’t stood in as the corpse.

Maybe they had stayed behind and were watching me from within the pavilion. In the darkness the round building had become a watchtower. I felt as though I was under observation, and that was enough to scare me. I didn’t want to feel scared. But I started to panic all the same. The only thing that seemed at all reassuring was the plain company bag on the grass. The crown in our logo gleamed kitschily at me. The bag had no handles, just a zipper. Surely I didn’t design this type of bag, I thought to myself. But I didn’t want to add to my confusion and ask questions that I couldn’t answer. All that mattered was that the bag was one of my company’s bags. So I accepted it unquestioningly. It was much bigger than our other bags, the ones I knew, and longer than it was wide; it looked a bit like a boat from where I was, if I were at the helm.

The dew was already falling on the grass, on the trees, on the bag, on me. I didn’t want to spend the night crouching there senselessly and getting wet. And I didn’t want to be afraid. Eventually I undid the zipper, crept into the bag, and was going to crawl over the grass and onto the avenue, on all fours, with the bag on my back like a shell. I was pleased that I’d had this idea and that I could, as it were, wrap myself up in the idea of sheltering and hiding in the bag. I started crawling but immediately got so tired that I had to give in to it. I lay there in the bag and slept and dreamed. I could hear myself speak. I distinctly heard myself say “bag.”

And at that very moment I realized that’s it, that’s what I’ve been forgetting. But now I don’t even care. I’m not thinking at all. For I am a fictional character, and the writer who created me wants me to die, because she doesn’t like advertising directors who steal her ideas. So she lets it become tight and dark and airless around me. I can already hear her closing the zipper, which can only be opened from the outside, of course. So I am trapped and doomed to die.

Now I’m shivering. I could do with a good stretch but I can feel my limbs growing stiffer and stiffer. I want to sink into a deep sleep again or else die quickly. I have a feeling I can still hear steps, but should I cling to disillusionment until my last breath? I think I am being carried. I feel the scratching of the pen that is writing: yes, you are safe.