The Apex Book of World SF 2

A Single Year ^{Csilla Kleinheincz}

I had learnt love with and for others, so when I met Iván, I almost knew what it was. I was confident enough to make the decision to leave the hospital and move to the country of curry and red plains. I visited my father for the first time in two years to tell him: I am moving to India with someone I met only three months ago, but I wish to spend all the following months to get to know him better.

I didn’t expect his blessing; we never had that kind of father-daughter relationship. Rather, my visit was the work of defiance: I wanted to look into his eyes to prove to myself that I dared. He usually disapproved of my decisions, although he never explicitly forbade anything. He left me to discover the consequences. This time he never even waited for me to finish before he announced that I may not go with Iván. He spoke forcefully, almost like a normal dad would.

“Why not?” I asked and didn’t look away because I had promised myself I would be brave and bear anything he might say.

He didn’t answer at once, but the pity in his eyes jarred my teeth.

“Why not?”

“Because he will die in one year.”

I watched my father, his face covered in grey stubble, his eyes that, even in my childhood, seemed tired—tired and as resigned as the planets that circle on the same route forever and know everything that can be known.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Do you feel it? Even so, I don’t care what you know.”

“What should I tell you, Judit?” His gaze stole my breath from me. Cassandra must have had the same look as she faced the Troyans.

“Even so,” I said, rising. “Even so.”

I trembled. His study felt cramped.

Then I was standing on the doorstep, looking back. He was sitting in the same hunched pose, clasping his hands in his lap and regarding me with the same insufferable pity. I slammed the door and, in the next moment, was running down the stairs; another blink and I sat in my car, my hand on the ignition key. The time I had left behind caught up with me, swept through me, bringing the flotsam of rage and helpless frustration. I hit the steering wheel, and I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t hit my father instead, when he told me what he shouldn’t have.

For even if I told myself repeatedly, even so, even so, hoping the undulation of words would loosen the knot in my belly, I knew he told me the truth.

Iván will die in one year.

My father was no Cassandra. You had to believe him because he told the truth. We knew that.

Others thought this a gift, but they never knew the man beyond his reputation and they never got their prophecy. I wasn’t even three when my mother left him. As his other women left him later. Not because he wasn’t a good person or a suitable partner; he brought in a good income, he was nice and polite, never even raised his voice. But when his eyes turned to inhuman holes, showing the future, all the women fled. They tried to cope with it but it’s impossible. You cannot live with someone who is sometimes older than the solar system.

I had visited him every two weeks but, as I grew up, it became less and less. After I divorced Gábor, I had taken up talking to my father, first on the phone, bouncing accusations back and forth, then more gently and in person, but once that faraway mist appeared in his gaze, I shied away for months. I didn’t want to let him chip at my life.

You can never really get used to having an oracle for a father. You may forget it for a while, but then something happens to bring forth the strangeness. Often, he didn’t even realise it. I remember once, when I was still in primary school, he stepped onto the crosswalk while the lights were still red. The horns blared crazily but when I held him back, he pulled me with him and said, “Not yet.” He hurried like those who, unlike him, didn’t know the exact time of their death. But his steps were surer. He knew that, until his appointed time, he was invincible. I looked up at him as I would upon a wonder. That passed, too. No big deal in being brave if you know you are invulnerable.

Now I know exactly what Mum must have felt when she took me and left him, finding that my father had ironed and folded her clothes beforehand. She knew she had to break away, but she also wanted to be held back. We all want that deep down inside.

So Mum entered the flat with the prepared words of goodbye on her tongue. The clothes were folded in neat piles on the sofa.

“I saw that he wanted to call me back,” said Mum after my divorce, when we talked about the end of relationships. That time she was more like a friend. Not so much since. “I saw that his heart was breaking; he wanted to hold me back so much, but he knew what would happen and he didn’t even try to change it. I couldn’t forgive him for that for a long time. That he didn’t even try.”

At first, I didn’t understand why my father never attempted to change fate. I tried to pry into it but he always dodged the answer by saying that he didn’t see the future in order to change it, the same as I didn’t control the lives of people I saw on television. After many years, I realised this was the only answer I would get. He cannot change the future just tell it. He wanted me to know that. That was why his girlfriends had left him. That was why I said goodbye to him when, as we were talking, I saw the planets relay to him a sliver of the future. When you cannot fight fate, it is better not to know.

No, this is not entirely true. I asked him many times what he saw. I just stopped asking about Gábor.

As a teenager, I nagged him to tell me if I would pass my exam; would I be a doctor, a pharmacist, a nurse? No, no, yes. It had been a kind of vocational guidance. What could he tell me about Márton? Béla? Attila? When he told me whether the love affair ended in a nice or ugly manner, I realised I didn’t need to know. I shouldn’t know beforehand, never, because it is poison, a permanent ache, a constant search for faults and defects. Why wouldn’t it work? Because of him? Or because of me? Which of us wasn’t enough for the other?

I told my father to keep the messages of the planets to himself. For a while he complied, but I knew from the shadows crossing his face that he saw my future. I pressed my lips together and didn’t ask. Perhaps it was defiance rather than the good sense not to let myself be controlled by my father’s prophecies. I managed to refrain from asking. For a while.

When I married Gábor, I asked my father what I should expect. It was stupid but I wanted to be sure I’d done the right thing. I wanted affirmation. When he said, “Three years,” I felt betrayed. I didn’t invite him to the wedding. He still came; he stood in the back row and didn’t come to congratulate us.

It really was three years. Whether there couldn’t have been more time, or whether it was because I’d known from the beginning that I would have only three years with that man and had therefore allowed my marriage to slip through my fingers, I don’t know. Perhaps my marriage had been dead even at the moment I said my vows.

After that I didn’t ask him anymore. Not even now. He had decided to tell me because he had no other leverage to hold me back. To protect me?

Will Iván really die in one year?

Iván was a doctor, two years younger than me. We both worked in Rókus Hospital, saw each other every day, and even if there was no time for intimate talking, we were never short of a quick touch, a hurried kiss on a flight of stairs where our colleagues couldn’t see us. The day after I’d visited my father, I saw Iván briefly several times. Once he stopped for a moment to stroke me between my shoulder blades, then he continued walking. Words burnt my tongue: “I went to see my father and…” How could I end the sentence?

How could I tell him? I should. He should know in order to be prepared, even if he didn’t believe me, even if he laughed at me. Maybe, if he took the warning as a joke, I would be able to see it more light-heartedly. “Ha-ha, what a strange bird my father is,” I could say, and pretend.

As if I didn’t know the future. Just like my father does.

At the end of my shift, I was close to snapping like a cord. I craved a cigarette so badly that when I finally got down to the garden and lit one, I realised only during my third that I couldn’t remember smoking the first two. Anna from Surgery came after me, and asked me between two puffs:

“Why are you so nervous? You two had a fight?”

I don’t think she was really interested. She had her own quiet lake-world; she never let anything from the outside disturb its water. Therefore it was easy to answer.

“Just my father… Now that I am over thirty, he’s started to discipline me and he began with prohibition.”

She nodded, finished her cigarette and pressed out the stub.

“And you are really going to India?”

“Of course.”

“Well, good luck! It must be more difficult for a nurse. To talk those weird languages. It’s easy for Iván. Patients rarely chit-chat on the operating table.

She went in.

Sometimes I think Anna’s calmness comes from taking it from others. Her remark hit me. Iván and I had planned everything perfectly. There was a hospital in New Delhi where we would work. It would be good experience for him, but for me…? Patients were patients everywhere, but Anna was right: I would have to talk to them; simply turning the sheets was not enough. Every doctor spoke English well, but my patients…? And the native nurses, my colleagues…?

Will I feel unwanted? Still, Iván will be there.

For how long?

The thought knotted my stomach. When Iván sneaked behind me and touched the nape of my neck, I jumped as if licked by fire.

“Let’s go home!” I beseeched him, looking into his surprised eyes. “The sooner the better.”

“Let’s go then,” he said. I liked his way of knowing the difference between the important and the unimportant, when fuss was annoying. He didn’t expect an immediate explanation. He knew I would come around to that.

“Well?” he asked later, at home after ten minutes of silence and my nostrils had filled with his cinnamon scent. “What’s the matter?”

“I am afraid of losing you.”

He laughed—not with irony but with relief, as if my fear were a mere silliness not worth even a little consideration.

“What makes you think you will?”

“I went to see my father and…” I couldn’t bring myself to tell the whole truth. “He forbade me to go with you.”

“Aren’t you adult enough not to let him dictate your life?”

“Of course I am but…”

Because it was easier, I talked about my father: what it was like to see him only every two weeks, how much he helped or didn’t help as I grew up, how I wasn’t sure I loved him at all. Iván listened devotedly like a child would, and at the end he generously said he understood. This annoyed me because I knew he knew nothing. I didn’t tell him what my father said about his future.

Unspoken words have weight. First you barely feel it, then, as they proliferate you realise you cannot carry them anymore. You either release them or keep them in, in which case they start to press and pinch your heart. You feel the grip even if you are happy. Especially then.

I didn’t tell Iván, partly because I wasn’t sure, partly because I didn’t want him to lose the light. He was happy. In a sense, so was I—but while I was laughing, caressing, loving, part of me peeled away from me and, watching us, said, “Not much longer.”

It drove me wild. If you close yourself off to the future, the present seems richer. I felt every moment was perfect because there would be no more like it.

It’s sweeter if you know it will end.

For two months we carried on like this, until we had only two weeks before the journey. It was the best two months of the five and also the worst. Then, one night as I was straddling Iván, looking down into his face, the knowledge became too heavy. He was calm and young after making love, and more beautiful than any other. He caressed my hip slowly and without thought.

I’d been saying goodbye for two months and knowing that I’d been doing it, and I had no desire for another ten months of leave-taking.

He watched me peacefully, vulnerable in front of the future. The dimness of the bedroom made it feel like a nest, but the words gathering inside me kept me from feeling comfortable.

“I won’t go with you to Delhi.”

His hand stopped on my hip.

“Why?”

I shook my head. I still didn’t want to tell him.

“I won’t go with you.”

“But…” His hand fell down as if broken. After a few long moments, he blinked. “Oh. And when I come back? We continue?”

I turned away, stared at his books on the shelves. The ones I had read and the ones I wanted to borrow. Maybe from the library.

“We won’t continue,” I whispered.

We held each other, me crying, Iván caressing my back. We made love again, madly, passionately, and at the end, I packed my things and left. Three times I turned back from the door to kiss him and every time it was harder to go. But I had to. I closed the downstairs door feeling ten years older. Nothing inside me, only the weight of emptiness.

The following week I locked myself in the toilet several times to cry. In the end, I took some leave because if I saw Iván every day, I would turn back, go with him to the little apartment with the naked light bulbs that we had seen on the Internet, and to hell with what will happen in ten months time. I sat in my flat and waited until it was too late to do the paperwork needed for the journey.

Of course he called. Many times. He was sweet, his voice calm, but I knew that this meant nothing. The phone calls were full of awkward silences when only two wounds were bleeding at the end of the line. I knew more about how he felt than I did about my own feelings.

He didn’t speak of his thoughts, but he spent long, strained minutes remembering our trip to the conference in Debrecen. What it felt like when I fell asleep on his shoulder while he was driving. I told him in turn about waking up when he touched my face—softer than anyone before had been. We recalled the morning stuck on that godforsaken train station because we got off a stop too early, how we sat on the grass-spotted concrete and watched the sun rise above the Hungarian Plain. It was then that we began spinning plans for the Indian trip, and the red light of the dawn had seemed to spill over tropical soil. On the phone, he asked about my mother’s varicose leg and I sent word to his sister that there was a sale on skirts in her favourite shop.

We made everyday chit-chat because it seemed absurd that we were no longer a couple and soon he would leave my life for good, for there is no leaving as definitive as death. We laughed into the phone and sometimes I felt he was sitting very close to me, whispering in my ear—still we didn’t meet. We didn’t say our relationship had ended because it was different from breaking up.

He left for India and I went back to work. After a few months, I had to admit that breaking up was meaningless. I was still thinking about him, counting the days, and I was just as scared. The fear wouldn’t lift until the year had passed, and maybe not even then. Sometimes you recognise things that are meant to be forever.

Then I saw my father on the tram.

I hadn’t talked to him since I’d been burdened with his prophecy. My first thought was to get off the tram before he noticed me; in the end I shoved my way to him through the crowd of passengers and, skipping the hello, I said:

“You shouldn’t have told me.”

He started. He hadn’t noticed me, and his face showed embarrassment—and maybe a little guilt.

“How can I keep it from happening?” I grabbed his arm.

“Put it off, you mean?”

“Don’t play with me. You know very well what I mean! Turn it back, pre-empt it… I know what will happen. I can slow it down, right?” The passengers froze. They turned away with so much care that their attention filled us with tension.

“You can’t slow it down; it is the future,” he said and nervously glanced around. “Listen, can we get off?”

I laughed even though I didn’t want to. The laughter choked me.

“You still want to control what and when you tell me?” I flicked my wrist. “Whatever. Let’s get off!”

The tension followed us to the tram stop. I didn’t wait for the people to leave the platform.

“I don’t believe it is futile,” I said. “Your prophecies…they cannot be gratuitous. They must be changeable!”

His eyes were tired.

“You want an answer from me? I only tell what I see. I don’t make up the future. I don’t control it.”

I pushed him hard, surprising myself as much as him.

“I don’t believe you haven’t ever tried!”

“I have,” he said bitterly. His eyes showed some passion at last. “I have tried but in vain! The only way is acceptance or you go mad. That is my advice to you, as well.”

I shook my head.

“I wish you hadn’t told me at all.”

“I’m sorry.” He extended his hand, perhaps to draw me close, but we never felt easy enough around each other for an embrace. I stepped away.

“Or you told me to make me try…” I looked up, realising this was it. This had to be the reason. “I have to try, maybe…”

“Don’t!”

“Then why?”

“Because I, too, can make mistakes!”

I shook my head.

“Then tell me what will happen to me! What will I do?”

A familiar face, yet confusing. Do I love him? Hate him? Despise him?

“It doesn’t work like that. I cannot control what I see and what I don’t. Don’t you think I would have done it? Judit, listen to me…” He reached for me and this time touched me before I could pull away.

“Then tell me something, anything that will happen to me before the year passes!”

The next tram arrived. People shoved past us as they rushed towards the crosswalk. I saw his gaze darken.

He rubbed his face.

“One of your patients will die within six months while you are on your shift. I don’t know exactly when. You won’t hear her calling.”

“Would I be able to save her?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a doctor and I see only what I am allowed to see. Judit! There is no point.”

“There is.”

I left him there, without even a goodbye. I didn’t care if he was right or wrong, but I knew my only chance was to reject his advice, to believe that fate can, indeed, be changed.

My plan was quite simple: if I could change my own future, I could change Iván’s. Somehow. Because I couldn’t believe that fate was already written.

It was a test. On my shift I did rounds every fifteen minutes to catch anything serious that might happen. We usually didn’t have critical-surgery patients; I was sure that if one of them crashed, there would be enough time to notice.

A few of them indeed had serious conditions, an old woman crashed in the corridor, but I was close by. A month passed, then another, and I became doubtful. What if the danger has already passed? What if the old woman who crashed was the one I had to save? Had I changed the future or not?

Sometimes I thought I could relax, but then came distress again; I didn’t dare break my new habit for fear it would be the hour of the augured death. I began to understand what it was like to be my father: knowing and yet not knowing, waiting for something unclear with the certainty of the threat breathing down his neck.

I knew nothing about Iván’s death, only the approximate time. I imagined him run over by a car, shot by a madman, having a heart attack despite his age, or getting sick from the Indian tap water. Oh my God, he commits suicide because…

Because I left him.

No, I told myself, and again: no, no, no, but the thought had already stabbed its hooks into me.

One evening was especially depressing. The sickly yellowish light of the nurses’ room painted the walls, and the clock ticked. I was alone, and suddenly fear seized me because, in that moment, I was sure Iván would die because of me.

“It’s late,” said my father when he picked up the phone.

“How will he die?”

“Who?”

“You know who! Iván.”

His sigh felt close.

“Judit, don’t torment yourself with this! Won’t you come over and talk? It would be easier to accept—”

“How will he die?”

“I’d rather not say.”

Rage burst out of me.

“Because you are a coward! I don’t believe this! You have your gift and just sweep it under the carpet? I don’t think so! The world doesn’t work like that. It’s your choice not to do anything, but don’t expect the same from me. I am not like you!”

“You make it more difficult than—”

“So what? It’s my life! Even if you behaved like a proper father, my life wouldn’t be yours to decide what I should do with it. Oh, fuck, I don’t believe this! Now you want to protect me?”

Chilly silence. I had to press my hand against my forehead to cool my feverish brow. I could have said more: obscenities, accusations, suppressed hatred burnt my tongue and I bit my lips to hold it all back. I knew what I’d already said was more than enough.

“He will be hit by a branch,” said my father at last, and he put down the phone.

“That’s it?” I shouted, but the line was dead.

I sat with my cell phone in my lap. It tired me to move and when I finally stood, my knees trembled. I went out to check on my wards.

The corridor shone coldly as the night lighting reflected off the tiles. I had got my answer from my father and yet I felt empty. When I looked into the third ward I froze. I saw a patient with a pillow in her hands leaning over another patient, but the sight seemed abstract.

I don’t remember moving.

I tore the pillow from the wizened old hands. She scratched my arm. “She wanted to kill me!” the old woman shrieked. “I saw it in her eyes, I knew it… she wanted to steal my money this afternoon; I had to hide it under my pillow.”

I leant towards the dying woman’s mouth—it was parched and smelt of age—but I was too late. I already knew it. I started CPR for I had to try. Only afterwards did I grab the old woman’s trembling arm. She babbled on.

“She waited for me to fall asleep. As soon as I was asleep, she tried to take my money! I saw her hand! I wanted to make her sleep.” She started to cry then. “I just wanted to make her sleep…”

The other two patients’ eyes glistened in the darkness. Only for their sake did I refrain from hitting the old woman. I wanted to hurt her not because she was demented and had killed her bed neighbour, but because she had fulfilled the prophecy I wanted to thwart.

“You come with me!” I shouted in her face. I pulled her out of the ward as if I were a jailer. I had to report the incident. She was crying, but I didn’t look at her.

My eyes were dry.

I tried to warn him. I called him in New Delhi. He immediately picked up the phone as if he was waiting for the call.

“Judit?” His voice was so eager and happy that it was hard to believe we hadn’t seen each other for five months. How could one e-mail a week be enough? “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I missed your voice.” As soon as I said it, I knew that was the real reason, not the warning. My whole body ached from missing him, and his absence smothered me.

“I missed yours, too.” He paused.

“Listen to me!” I began. “If there is a storm…don’t go for a walk, especially not under trees! And always watch for woodcutters thinning the branches. Take care…”

“What?” He laughed.

“I’m not joking. Take care with those trees!”

He didn’t understand. I sputtered the warning again but I feared he didn’t comprehend my words. He didn’t believe me.

“Promise me!” I demanded.

“I do,” he said, still laughing. “Okay. And what about you? Tell me, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to chat. “Do you promise me?”

“Yes! I will be careful with the trees.”

“Good. Bye!”

I put down the phone. A cigarette was already in my mouth. I couldn’t remember taking it out.

Iván’s voice had told me that he hadn’t understood. He wouldn’t keep his promise. Silliness, he would say, and even if he watched the trees on the first day he would realise it was pointless and forget about the stupid request. He would live like he did, walk under trees and, if he remembered his promise at all, he would only smile. Silly, pet, he would say fondly, and for a moment he would feel my face in his palm. That was all.

I wrote a letter to him, but it was already too late to start explaining my father’s prophecies to him. Would I believe them if I hadn’t been born into the family of an oracle?

My father wanted to ask for my forgiveness, at least that was what I deduced from the text messages that urged me to visit him. When he tried to call me, I didn’t pick up. I deleted his e-mails—so he only wanted to talk, well, I didn’t care. Maybe he was not the one who would kill Iván, but he knew about his death and not only stepped aside but wanted to pull me aside, as well.

“Your father called,” said Mum one day when I visited her. She didn’t look up from the stove. “He wants to talk to you.”

They hadn’t spoken to each other for a long time now. When communication was absolutely unavoidable, they sent messages through me. They didn’t hate each other; I think my father was afraid of my mother who, in turn, looked through him.

“My fault,” I said. “He has been trying to reach me for a month now. Sorry.”

“He didn’t tell me anything else.” Based on her voice I assumed she was smiling sarcastically. “He just asked me to tell you—visit him by all means—then said goodbye. I think he doesn’t really know how to treat me. Will you put the cloth on the table?”

I took out the plates: a plain white for her, the blue one from my childhood for me that had cars, bicycles and ships running along its edge.

“You don’t know what he wanted?”

“I learnt long ago to leave his things be. You know the cost.” Her voice was sour, as always, when she talked about my father. “If I am not cautious, I might get to know something.”

“I see.”

“Is that why you won’t talk to him?” She glanced at me searchingly. “May I ladle you some soup?”

I nodded.

The bean soup was thick and hot, it burnt my tongue. It was good to sit in Mum’s kitchen, although it has been a long time since I had last felt at home there. Lights were subdued, noises low: the cat purred in front of the stove, the washing machine rumbled softly in the bathroom. I was calmed not by the familiar plate, noises or the taste; the peace and harmony came from not speaking to my father. Suddenly we were on the same side and closer to each other despite our differences.

I finished eating sooner than my mother. I leant back and looked around the kitchen. It was cluttered, full of bric-a-brac, crochet left on the top of the fridge, books put down, opened on their belly.

“If Dad had begged you back, would you have gone back to him?”

She looked up surprised.

“What do you mean?”

“When you took me from him when I was small. If he had called you back…you said you wanted it…would you have gone back to him? Would you have stayed with him, even if he’d seen you leave?” I didn’t add the question: would you have broken the prophecy?

Her mouth was pulled into a smile as if by a hook.

“It was so long ago, Judit…”

“Would you have gone back?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I wouldn’t have taken it for long, even then.”

She shook her head, more to herself than to me, and continued eating.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said at length.

I left it at that. Maybe she was right.

My father died. I hadn’t seen him before that, and I hadn’t talked to him. I had erased his last message from my phone without listening to it; I learnt the news shortly after I had done that. I don’t know what he wanted to say. I imagined a thousand messages, but I can’t say if the real one was amongst them.

He had a heart attack. Perhaps he could have saved himself if he had called an ambulance, for he knew when he would die. But he did nothing of the sort. He simply lay down and waited for the last kick of his heart. A bottle of whisky and a big bar of hazelnut chocolate were prepared on the bedside table. The silver wrapping was torn just a little as if he had changed his mind.

I inherited his flat. I packed his things and I should have thrown them away but, somewhere between casting everything onto the floor and bundling it into a carton, a feeling overwhelmed me that the pullover I held in my hands was my father. And the books on the shelves, also. The used toothbrush, the leftover food in the fridge, the stuffed notebook on the table, the old guitar in the corner—all were him. Unmatched, incomplete objects that were not bound together by anything anymore. I tried to imagine my father in the pullover, the pen in his hands, his feet in his slippers, but I couldn’t. My memories were leaking.

He had wanted to talk to me. For the last time.

If I had known…

I realised in the end that knowledge wouldn’t have been absolution. If the only reason to talk to him was his death in a month, a week, a day, I wouldn’t have been less of a stranger to him.

I stood in his flat, knowing where every object belonged and yet I felt lost. I had tried to understand him but had failed. It was too late for that now. But there was something I was still in time for.

I purchased a ticket to India. Just then, I didn’t know when I would come back or how long I would have to stay for. I was only sure that I wouldn’t budge from Iván’s side. I didn’t care what happened in a day, two days, three days or a month; I just wanted to be with him and not on another continent, alone.

He was waiting for me at Delhi Airport. The huge, multicoloured and multi-smelling crowd in the waiting hall undulated between us, but it disappeared when I saw Iván—or I just pushed everyone aside, I can’t remember. Our meeting was just as you would expect. I will skip that.

“I have been waiting for you,” he said in the cool cab. His hand enveloped mine, holding me as he might hold a bird. “I knew you would come.”

“Funny, I didn’t know.”

“I knew it for you.” He laughed. “No, that’s not true, I didn’t know. But I am happy.”

“And were you careful with the trees?” I asked.

“I haven’t as much as peeked out, just like you said. This warning was a clever idea; it made me think of you whenever I saw a tree. Smooth. Is that why you warned me?”

I was giddy from his closeness. I hadn’t seen him in such a long time; all his features were new and yet painfully familiar. My fingertips remembered him more than my eyes.

I saw only his eyes and mouth as he talked. I noticed his dark tan, the scratch on his neck from shaving, his thinning hair. I was unguarded. I hadn’t yet got used to taking care of him, although that was the reason I came.

In the sudden heat, as we were walking towards his lodgings, pulling my suitcases after me on the bumpy street, I didn’t notice the people, the houses, the dirty motorbikes. The screeching, the honking din, the shouts, the singing on the street, the stench rising from the pavement; all of it came to me only later. I didn’t see the truck turning the corner, nor the timber whooshing free.

Iván was looking at me, pointing at his house behind him.

“I had rats but I put out some poison,” he said. “You are not afraid, are you?”

His eyes told me something else. I smiled and I started to answer this other, unspoken question and then…

The timber could have hit me but I only felt its draught. Iván fell like a bowling pin. His head… I am unable to write down what happened to his head.

I hadn’t stopped it. I stood on the street that was suddenly filling with a loud hubbub; I smelt the stink and the spices and stared at Iván lying before me. I almost leant down but froze. I would have recognised his death even if I hadn’t seen countless other dead before. I knew it.

The year had passed.

I understood nothing from the shouts around me. They spoke a strange language, strangers all. My suitcase was dotted with red, the feeling of Iván’s touch was cooling on my hand.

The sounds fled; the scene became distant and memories attacked me.

First from the past: Iván, laughing when he tried to hide a pain; his touch on my belly; him shaking his hair from his face—then from the future: me, as I run away from all relationships; me who lets go because holding on hurts more; me, who will be the last oracle on this Earth for I won’t bear a child for anyone.

I see me living alone, and when the gas remains on—accidentally or deliberately—I flare up without anything to feel remorse for, only that I have nothing and no-one to regret. It will be a perfect death, for I won’t be alive before it happens. I won’t even be old.

I trembled with the certainty, and then I was again standing on the pavement with two Indian women beside me who held my hands and talked to me in English. A large crowd gaped around us. Iván was covered with a tarp that had offered merchandise a few minutes ago.

I stared at the plaid tarp and still the tears didn’t come. Only later, at the police station where no-one understood my pronunciation and mangled English and my stammer.

I don’t recall how and when I made the journey back home.

They left me alone. Perhaps they realised that my gaze was barbed wire and my silence a brick wall—at least they didn’t approach me. They knew what had happened and talked about it, too; I heard the half-sentences float out of the nurses’ room. Although I wished to see them fall shamefully silent as I entered, I waited in the corridor until the topic shifted.

I smoked a lot alone in the hospital garden. I noticed that the others went down separately whenever they could, while I was turning the sheets, giving shots, serving dinner. It was already winter, my fingers were chilled red and my feet were cold in my clogs because I only ever put on a coat, but I wouldn’t go back until I had smoked at least two cigarettes.

“We will catch a cold,” said Anna from behind me on one of the freezing afternoons.

I glanced back. She hadn’t even put on a coat, just a sweater. She didn’t seem to be cold; maybe she had spoken only to make me notice her. I made some space for her by the ashtray of the refuse bin. As she stepped closer, I grew dizzy for a moment. She was pregnant but she didn’t know it yet: I saw her going on maternity leave. I kept silent for a while then said:

“All those cigarettes will ruin you.”

She laughed hoarsely. “Look who’s talking! You have more nicotine in your blood than haemoglobin.”

I shrugged. I knew how I would die, and it wouldn’t be from smoking. “Not yet,” said my father from my memories as he pulled me across the street.

We were silently blowing out smoke.

“So what’s going on?” I asked for the sake of asking.

“I have a room full of living dead,” she said calmly. “I hope they hang on until Christmas.”

I nodded. Rooms like that embittered nurses. Smiles and comfort lasted only so long. For half a year by my reckoning.

“I can take over if you like.” It would mean hell for administration but it was all the same for me.

“No problem,” she said and smothered the butt. “Are you coming? I have a kilo of tangerines, would you like some?”

I went with her to her floor. Their nurses’ room was smaller but more snug. Someone had brought several pots of poinsettia, and I smelt the cinnamon bark hanging from a closet door. I closed my eyes. Iván’s perfume also had a hint of cinnamon, and I realised that I missed his scent the most. I will remember his smell longer than his face.

We ate tangerines while Anna talked about making Christmas presents. She didn’t ask me what I would give for Christmas and to whom, and this bothered me, although I had no inclination to tell her. When the time came to check the wards, I accompanied her because I felt that our conversation was incomplete.

Dead were lying in the room. They were still alive but as I looked at them, I saw how they would die.

“You were right,” I whispered to Anna.

“About what?”

I just nodded at them. I waited while she made her round. She stopped at every bed and asked how she could help. I was wondering whether I should tell her there were some who wouldn’t live to see Christmas, but in the end I kept silent. I knew my father, and he wouldn’t have given away information like that. There was a reason for that. When Anna came out to the hallway I just smiled.

“You are doing the same,” she said as we were walking back.

“What?”

“You know it is only a matter of a little comfort for a few days, and still you won’t give up.” She stopped at the door of the nurses’ room. “Well, bye.”

“Bye.” I didn’t budge. Then: “I think you are pregnant.”

The surprise in her face. The happiness. Who would have thought? I was amazed. Is that all? You tell a prophecy and you do good with it? Then the sudden prick: why hadn’t my father told me anything happy?

“How do you know?”

I shrugged. “A feeling.” I turned away and then I remembered what I had vowed. That I would never have a child. Ever. I was already sorry for saying anything at all.

“I have to go. My patients are waiting.”

She nodded. “You seem to be in need of a nurse yourself,” she said in her old, wry voice.

She had thrown me off my balance again. Her remark hurt, although I didn’t really understand why.

I went back to my own floor. As I was adjusting the pillows under the patients to make them comfortable, I was chewing on Anna’s words.

“May I have a glass of water?” The raspy voice jolted me out of my thoughts.

I looked down at the old woman, and a wizened prune of a face looked back at me. My vision blurred and in a memory—as if it were my own—I saw her recover from her operation and fall in love, then marry. I was shocked. Her skin was yellow, her eyes full of grit—not someone who has something waiting for her. And still.

I poured her a glass of water. My hand shook.

“Don’t worry, love,” I said as I handed her the water. My father kept prophecies to himself, good and bad alike, although the latter was more likely to be spoken. I could afford to tell the good news. A small thing but it is within my power. “Two weeks and you will be like new. You will even dance at your wedding.”

She laughed. “Me? Oh heavens, no! Perhaps at yours, Judit.”

Definitely not at mine, I wanted to say, but my throat constricted. The face of the woman looked younger from laughing, and I would be sorry to see her age again. Plus… My breath stopped. The stupidity and futility of prophecies was suddenly plain, and I was lost amongst the waves of my thoughts.

“Just believe.” I put down the glass on the table and fled to the hallway.

I pressed my hands to my face. I knew that my father had wanted to talk about the future before he died. Was it good news or bad? I realised his message didn’t matter. What I see in the future doesn’t matter—for we are not unlike each other, the old lady and I. I know only a little bit more, and still I asked her to believe me. And what about me? Do I believe myself and what I have seen?

Or do I decide not to believe, and only believe what I wish for myself?

I clenched my teeth and hoped I had a little of my heart left still, for it has to feel. If it breaks in the process, it still has to feel.

I know the future. But I resist it.

I turned away from my past smelling of cinnamon, and while my clogs rapped loudly and quickly on the floor as I fled towards my room, my future melted at last and, salty and streaming, it overflowed.