To the Wedding

16

The wheels screech against the rails as the tram corners. It is the No. 11 beneath the windows of Zdena’s flat. Zdena is ironing a blouse in the room with the tiled stove. On the floor lies an open suitcase already packed.

I used to help Tante Claire hang out the washing. We went out to the garden together carrying a plastic basin — a thing just large enough to bath a baby in. That is something I shall never do. The basin was blue. The geese were there in the grass. Piece by piece we picked out the wet laundry and hung it on the line with pegs. I carried the pegs in my apron. They were made in plastic, coloured red and yellow like baby’s toys. All my babies have been killed.

When everything was on the line, flapping in the wind which blew down the valley, it always surprised me how much Tante Claire and I had carried out in the basin! Enough to fill a whole garden! I have the same surprise when I watch Gino unloading his van. It’s hard to believe so much gear can be fitted into a Mercedes D320. Under his sunshades, which have wooden spokes like giant parasol mushrooms, Gino starts to arrange jeans, waistcoats, hunters’ jackets, caps, swimming trunks, shirts, sweaters, shorts, headbands, neck rags, suits, macs, sandals, bathrobes, kimonos. He doesn’t let me help him unload. You can chat up the clients, he says, they’ll buy to make you smile! He’s selling a kind of bathrobe which I called an Egyptian Tunic and that’s what he’s written on the piece of cardboard above the rail where they hang: TUNICHE EGIZIE. 99,000 lire.

The other day he sent me into the van to find a jumbo shirt for a client who was so fat he looked as if he’d need a bell-tent for a shirt. And there, behind a pile of slips, I noticed what looked like a letter in Gino’s handwriting, stuck with scotchtape to the metal side of the van. Who’s he writing to? I ask myself, and why does he stick it there? I could see it wasn’t a stock list.

So I squat down and read it and it says something like: You’re beautiful, love, there’s no spot on you. Your lips, beloved, taste like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under your tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home. You, my wife, are my garden, a secret spring, a fountain that nobody knows. The smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home. And underneath in capital letters is written my name: NINON.

I come straight out of the van, I scream at him in front of everybody who’s there. I call him a liar and a cheat.

It’s from the Bible, he says.

Fuck it, I tell him, you know what I have …

There appeared before my blind eyes something which was part of the story, yet I could not say how.

The cross is not made of a noble wood like cedar. It’s a common wood, like that used for shuttering concrete. Christ’s hair with his head slumped forward hides one of his eyes and falls over half his face. The nails nailed through his feet, and the thorns of the crown tugged over his head by hands wearing gloves, show forever the cruelty of men. This cruelty can use anything. This is why the Christ has a body. His body is also loved. He was betrayed, abandoned, forsaken and he was loved. His body — pallid, fragile, doomed — shows this love. Don’t ask me how. Ask the criminals, ask children, ask the Magdalen, ask mothers …

Zdena places her ironed, folded blouse on top of the other clothes and packets and toilet articles in the suitcase. She kneels on the floor to close the case and she looks at the acacia tree through the window. What has she forgotten?

Tante Claire loves birds. Her geese with red beaks recognise me as soon as I come home from school, as soon as I turn into our little road. She hears them squawking and she comes out to talk to me. They are always there, the geese, they wake up every morning, they guard the house, they lay eggs, they never forget to look up twice every minute to see who’s coming next and to quack, and if the grass is too tall and they can’t see over it, they flatten the grass down with their feet which are like flatirons. If one of her feet is hurting, a goose limps like I do when my foot hurts.