8.

I imagine myself turning to the wall. She is talking to me and I just roll over onto my side and stare at the oily green wall paint. And then I pull the sheet over my head. This would be most glorious act of defiance in the world. A meter and a half up from the floor, the wall is painted in a shiny green, while above, toward the ceiling, it is whitewashed. Maybe this is so the walls are easier to scrub and wash because of the scuff marks left by the patients. I don’t know the real reason, but I can’t turn over anyway, I’m not up to such a feat. On the other hand, I also can’t keep my eyes shut all morning long, this is why I crumble quickly and easily, I join her stream of consciousness and try to switch off my own. “I was over at Manda’s for dinner on Sunday, I didn’t want to go, you know me, I don’t like going over to other peoples’ places. But what can you do, she was so insistent and tiresome, called me every day, and called Anja too, because of everything that has happened I shouldn’t be so alone. She made some soup or other, then Zagreb cutlets, but using turkey, with breaded cauliflower, you know how we used to fix it with eggs and breadcrumbs, from the oven, and stuffed tomatoes, God help us, I mean she really cooked up a storm. And again, that cooking of hers, not to complain, but what she prepares doesn’t taste right to me. You know that smell from the frying, so wrong. And her soup. My soup speaks ten languages. It’s like she tossed in a bone, then took it out, and, why not, stirred in a pinch of Vegeta to liven up the flavor. That is not the way it’s supposed to be. When you put it on the stove at eight in the morning to cook with a nice cut of veal, but not at a rolling boil so you’ll be done sooner, the cooking needs to be slow, three hours at least, and you stand there right by the stove, scooping off the foam that forms on the top with a strainer to keep the broth from getting murky, or all muddy. You know how you were always asking me, how come when you make it, the broth isn’t clear? Well, it takes time. But fine, anyway, they sent their regards, asked after you, how and what, maybe they might stop by one day, and I told them, later, not now, God willing you’ll be home soon and you can see them then. I think they’re decent folk, they’re good neighbors. Though, again, what has happened is something they cannot understand. Manda has no children, what does she know? Anja’s kids have been living in America for years, so she’s used to them being away. How could they know . . . When the little one you bathed, kissed, carried while she was no more than a moppet ends up like this. I tell them: how many nights I spent in vigil by her side, on foot to the doctor’s in the dark, then watching over her homework, then her studies, keeping an eye out, steering, you have to be her teacher, her nurse, her psychologist. You hope she’ll become something one day. You praise her to the stars, and then look what happens . . . ” At this point she starts to sob and turns away, we’ve practiced this several times already, ever since she found out I can hear her. She dabs her face with a tissue, spins back around, pats me on the head as if I’m a dog and says, “Well as long as you’re with us, even if you’re like this.” She is heating up with the excitement, I can see her brow beading, and she moves to pull back my covers, because if she’s feeling hot, I must be hot. This is parenting. I am burning only with the desire to no longer be alive, but this is not yet an option. Mama pulls the sheet back from my breasts and rolls it down, then she shrieks so vehemently that I am nearly catapulted from the bed. She covers her gaping maw with her hand and, grimacing, screams for the nurse. Like a panicked hamster she scampers back and forth between the bed and the door, waiting for help. Soon the rhythmic thump of clogs can be heard. The older nurse comes in with big, firm strides, asking everyone and no one: “What’s going on here?” “Where did all this blood come from?” wails Mama, gesturing to the red stain with its intense smell, her discovery under the sheet. A luxurious, garish flower is pooling there, below my pelvis, I feel a mild gust of air on the wet, exposed skin between my thighs, my nostrils are filled with the smell of metal. The nurse catches on right away, she is still a little miffed by the panic my mother is forever raising, but she speaks with a professional demeanor. “Ma’am, this is just her menstruation, someone didn’t put the diaper on properly.” Mother stops, this was the last thing she’d hoped for from me, her re-born baby. Bleeding from my reproductive organs was beyond all her expectations, a betrayal by an organism, which, maimed in every possible way, was still geared for reproduction. The miracle of science cares not a whit for what is up with the rest of the body—the head, the heart—it does all it’s supposed to do each month, like a self-sustaining factory, producing ova that wait patiently to be pierced by the corresponding bearers of chromosomes. They crouch there in the dark of my apparently dead and useless pelvis, carrying in themselves all the potential for a living and ambulatory future human being. They treat me like a warehouse from which they’ll wriggle free as soon as possible, after taking all the food and shelter they can muster. Cells care nothing for my desires, nothing for your desires.

There was one time when we were lying there on the couch, at the very beginning while we were still in hiding. We’d stolen a few hours from a day and our hands were everywhere. At one moment, you were stretched out in front of me and I burrowed into your back, into the smell of your skin that radiated through the warm cotton of your tee-shirt. Your bottom was in my lap and we tried to find a position where there wouldn’t be even a centimeter’s gap between us. I nuzzled up against you, hugging you from behind, and my hand slipped into your pants. I wanted to crawl in there, into your warmth, soft and close, but you firmly took me by the hand. For a while I smiled to myself, trying to work my way in, but the grasp on my wrist was not playful. Then I heard only a dark, “Don’t.” I drew back and asked you gently, “What is it, love?” Shame sifted through the strainer in crumbs, choking you. “You’re smart, figure it out,” was all your bent back said. I don’t know whether you’ll ever be able to understand this, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that your body had betrayed you that way. Not once did I think it would be capable of such a thing, to betray you so totally. We made it through that moment. At least wordlessly. By the end of the day you’d pulled yourself together. A whole man. As for myself, I grieved for your pain, full of admiration for the courage you manage despite a life spent in your prison. Only later did you tell me, explaining this dimension of a world I hadn’t known—all about disbelief and humiliation—with moments like the time when you were in fifth grade and as you were squeezing through between the window and the shelf where all the art materials were stored you happened to knock the window frame with your chest and you realized that something was hurting differently. Grief for childhood, such as it was, and the beginning of losing the body that had protected you at least partially until then. Pleading with the few girlfriends you had for them to wait in line at the cash register in the drug store and buy your sanitary napkins for you. Bloodied again each month. Your embarrassment and attempts at getting closer, those strings of misunderstandings, were taut at first, but relaxed in time and produced much more agreeable sounds. We became so much closer that we entered one another, easily, more easily than ever, and at times we turned our insides out to that pain, and then found it weightless, even amusing. The “trouble” caught me off guard once—that’s what we called it, we had our own words for almost everything— when I was in town and started bleeding at that old movie theater we most loved going to, on a Sunday afternoon, angry and in pain, and not a drug store or kiosk in sight. You took me by the hand and gave me your backpack. “Go to the restroom, you’ll find everything you need in the inside pocket. Where else could you find such a boyfriend?” And then you even shot me a wink. My heart spilled over because of the wall you’d jumped over, because I felt on the surface of my skin how we were changing and becoming normal, how we loved each other with trust. Nowhere, my love, nowhere.

Only then does she start sobbing bitterly, realizing what else she’d lost “what with all that happened.” Grandchildren were spilling in crimson over the sheets, into the diapers for incontinence, heading irretrievably for the hospital garbage dump where they’d join the amputated limbs, surgically excised growths, and all the rest of the detritus of human bodies. The nurse wheels the cart in with clean linens, steering Mama toward the door and from there I can still hear her sobs.

People who have children seem the loneliest to me. Maybe theirs is an entirely different kind of loneliness, which people without kids cannot know. In the period of life when you have your baby, you probably think you are finally done with loneliness, you think you’ve brought something into being, you’ve given yourself and the world a justification for your life. This is a time when you are able to look beyond yourself, to the needs of the most selfish creature you’ll ever be bound to. For the next few years you live under the romantic-religious illusion that all the sacrifice you’re making will be compensated, that the people who are made of your very own flesh and blood will truly care for you. It is in their nature, however, as it is in yours, to survive, to take all they can get to secure for themselves better living conditions. And this is as it should be. But the fact that this is as it should be is the greatest disappointment faced by people with children, and that they must nevertheless accept their children as their own. Most parents make it halfway down this path and stay permanently disappointed by their offspring. A very small number faces this head on and lets their children go far away, as far away as possible. People without children mainly entertain a kinder view of parenting—fancied and embroidered with the most charming fantasies—than do those who have real, deficient children. We dwelt between these two worlds.

I don’t remember how exactly the thing with Lupko got started. The way I remember it, we were lying on the mattress in my apartment, watching a show on our laptop. A rabbit-shaped stuffed animal with one buck tooth peeking out from its snout, an attractive grayish color, a little worse for wear, a relic of my childhood, had been dumped in a corner of my room. You stretched to reach for another pillow to make us more comfortable, and along the way you grabbed him, Lupko, so we could push him under our heads. As we nudged and nestled, he ended up between us and suddenly, in the glow of the computer screen, we were a rabbit family. Daddy, Mommy, and Baby Bunny. The same thought coursed through our bodies, I saw it flash by as it was born, Lupko wiggled its paw, and we looked at each other with a crazy spark in our eyes. Thumbelina, Pinocchio, Lupko, beloved children all over the world are born from the same sources: a flower, a tree, polyester. They do not come about in the usual way, their parents are already elderly, they’re alone or, like us, they are fairy-tale monsters. Though I was quite sure of what had just happened to us—we’d had a child—I took Lupko by the paw, looking deep into your eyes the whole time, and lowered our little one into your lap. You whispered softly, “Is he ours?” I answered, pressed up close against you, “Our very own.” “He has your cheeks,” you said, stroking the synthetic fur, and I saw in this our unique alliance. “And your big feet,” I added, teasing you and pinching Lupko’s pudgy paws. “Well, he had to take after me somehow,” you agreed, feigning disappointment.

The days that followed were the most wonderful of our parenting, we often had to spend time apart then, go off for weekends to satisfy the needs of the families our government acknowledges, travel for work, and one of us took Lupko along each time. He had our smell, we couldn’t get enough of it, in the fur below his chubby neck. Whichever one of us was more alone or on a longer trip could hold him at night. We took him with us everywhere in a backpack, when we were traveling by train we’d unzip the pack just enough for him to enjoy the view; we could see him, convince ourselves he was real. We noticed how he was growing, on the good days when we spent a lot of time together, and when we were alone, Lupko would be bigger in the morning than he’d been the day before, we teased him about getting fat. On those other days he’d pull away from us into himself and start looking like a twenty-year-old stuffed animal. So it goes with children; when there is a lot of love around them, children flourish, their mark on the world deepens, they become unique human beings, and when there is none, they seek a crowd, meld facelessly into the masses, fearful to march to a different drum. Their averageness shields them from their lack of courage. Once when you had him in your backpack and didn’t have time to go home, you took him to work and I teased you about what might happen if he fell out in front of your colleagues. You said, “So what, I’d put him back in, I wouldn’t be ashamed.” That was you being you. Sometimes I wrote him a poem, a children’s poem, but when my friends came over, Lupko waited in the closet. That was me being me. Maybe Mama would have been glad to know about him, to know we had a child, that we weren’t the most lonely people in the world. Maybe she’d be willing, if she could understand, to bring him here, to the hospital, he wouldn’t mind. Maybe she wouldn’t moan and groan so much about her lost grandchildren and be horrified by my wayward body which, immobile and vulgar, discards my ova. Maybe if she put him next my head I could still get a whiff of my motherhood and our evenings on the couch. Maybe you could take him, if only I could reach you, take him from the closet and keep him in your backpack.

While I am imagining the quantity of dust that has by now probably eaten away at him, I have been changed and cleaned, as if nothing happened at all. “Whoopsy daisy!” says the nurse while she flips me over on my back, and my gaze slides to her floral clogs which have finally learned to walk after their short spin on my dead feet.