The Greenhouse

Eight

First, I carefully put down my backpack, making sure the moisture doesn’t leak off the rose cuttings. Then I lie down, stretching out on the plastic-covered examination bench. Twenty-two years old and already at the end of the road, the journey’s over before it’s even started. It takes me a long time to write my name on the form, letter by letter, absolutely ages. The woman who is helping me to lie down in the fluorescent-lit examination room has shiny brown hair as well as brown eyes and is doing everything to assist me. I’m naked down to the waist and am now taking my trousers off. Is this how Mom felt, too, when she was dying out in the lava field in the arms of strangers? At any rate it’s clear that the day of my death will be a happy day for many of the inhabitants of this globe; by the time the sun has set, multitudes will have been born in my place and countless wedding feasts will have been held.

Not that dying is any big deal, since almost all of the best sons and daughters of this planet have died ahead of me. Naturally it’ll be a blow for my aging father, my autistic twin brother will develop some new system without me, and the as-yet speechless newborn who was still too small to sleep over will never get to know her father. I do have some regrets, mind you. I wish I’d slept around a bit more and planted the rose cuttings in the soil.

When the girl with the shiny hair gently places her hand on my stomach, I notice she’s got a green clasp in her hair that’s shaped like a butterfly. The woman who is nursing me in the final quarter of an hour of my existence bears the symbol of the continuity of life in her hair.

Rose cuttings can’t survive without water, which is why I hoist myself up on my elbows and point at the backpack.

— Plants, I say.

She stoops over the backpack and moves it closer to the bed. I don’t even have to know the right words; I point and she’s a woman who can understand me. For a moment, I therefore briefly consider whether we might have made a pair, if I hadn’t been on my way out of this world, as it were. She could be ten years older, about thirty-two, but right now that doesn’t feel like any age gap worth quibbling about. The sinister pain in my gut, however, prevents me from developing this steady relationship of ours any further. When I’ve finished throwing up the remains of the airplane breadcrumbs and cheese sauce, she helps me to carefully unwrap the moist newspaper from the rose cutting, as if she were removing the bandages around a patient’s leg after a successful operation.

— Did you bring plants with you? she asks, and now that she’s closer I see that there are yellow dots on the butterfly’s wings.

— Yes, I reply in her language with the fluency of a native.

She nods as if I am a man who knows what he’s talking about.

Then I throw in some Latin for good measure:

— Rosa candida.

When it comes to plants and cultivation, my performance and vocabulary both expand considerably. Then I add:

— Without thorns.

— Without thorns, really? she says, folding my jeans and placing them tidily on the chair, over my blue cable-knit sweater, the last sweater Mom knit for me. In a moment’s time the woman with a butterfly hair clip will also be the last of seven women to have seen me naked.

— And are the other two plants also — she hesitates—Rosa candida?

— Yes, for safety, I say, to produce offspring, just in case one of them dies, I say, allowing myself to slip back onto the plastic mattress again.

Since she has already been witness to my suffering, and helped me to throw up and water the rose cuttings, I feel the urge to share something more personal with her. Which is why I pull out the photo of my child and hand it to her.

— My daughter, I say.

She takes the picture and scrutinizes it.

— Cute, she says and smiles at me. How old is she?

She asks simple and manageable questions that my grasp of the language can easily handle.

— About seven months.

— Very cute, she repeats, but not much hair for a seven-month-year-old girl maybe.

This I had not been expecting. You place your trust in another person’s hands, sharing something important with them in that final moment, and they let you down. All of a sudden I feel it’s vital that the last person I communicate with in this life should understand this hair thing once and for all. That photographs can be deceiving and that hair on blond children isn’t particularly visible in the first year, that there’s no comparison to dark-haired children who are normally born with a lot of hair. There’s a lot I’d like to get off my chest, and it’s only my pain and limited linguistic skills that are preventing me from defending my daughter.

— About seven months, I repeat, as if this definitively explained the lack of hair. Then I realize it was a bit rash of me to show her the photograph and I no longer want her to be fidgeting with it.

— Give it to me, I say abruptly, stretching out my hand to take the picture back. I look at Flóra Sól, my daughter, grinning with two teeth in her lower gum, and remember in fact seeing her with a small curl of hair over her forehead, fresh out of the bath, when I came to say my good-byes to her and her mother without ringing ahead of me.

I close my eyes as I’m wheeled into the operating theater and feel cold under the sheet. Pain is the only tangible reality I can cling to right now, although my suffering obviously pales into insignificance when compared to the mutilations and horrors of this world, droughts, hurricanes, and warfare.

I try to gauge my chances of survival in the expressions and gestures of the people dressed in green. Someone says something to someone else, who laughs heartily behind a green mask; it’s not as if there’s anything serious going on here, not as if anyone’s about to die. There could be nothing more crushing in my final moments than to be subjected to the flippancy of this motley crew, the careless, slapdash attitudes of those who’ll still be here once I’m gone. They aren’t even talking about me — as far as I can make out — but some movie that one of them went to see and that someone else is going to see tonight. The Poppy Field, yeah, I’ve heard about that movie, it’s about a man who’s badly rejected and kidnaps the woman who rejected him and then they rob a bank together; the movie recently won some special award at a film festival.

Suddenly someone briskly strokes my hair. My ginger mop of hair, Mom would have said.

— Don’t worry, it’s your appendix, someone says behind a mask.

Strokes isn’t really the right word. It’s more as if someone were briskly running their fingers through my hair. I’m a bird and take off with heavy flapping wings. Hovering in midair above, I follow what’s going on below but take no part in it, because I’m free from all things. In the instant before everything fades I feel I can hear Dad beside me:

— There’s no future in roses, Lobbi boy.