10.

You, too, ended up with no worldly possessions. I became aware of this on the morning when I helped you pack up after they released you from the hospital. You got up slowly, you were feeble, only a few days had passed since the operation and only a few hours since they’d removed the drains from your armpit. Open holes remained, direct passageways into you. You moved like an old man, your hands moved, robot-like, slowly and away from your body, you struggled to pull on your sweater, but under the tense grimaces on your face, under that first sheath of physical pain, a light was breaking through, a new smile. With slow steps you went over to the nurse’s station for them to write your discharge letter, and I swept into a plastic bag the crumbs of cookies, the blackened banana, the moist wipes from the nightstand. Your mother brought you all that. She showed up and talked for a long time about problems at work, you asked her to help you, rub you down a little with the moist wipes because you weren’t supposed to bathe yet. This was strange for both you and her. She hesitated to touch your bare skin, and you said with a hollowness in your voice: “I can’t recall her touch, I can’t recall it from before.” She rubbed your back while staring at the metal legs of the bed. After she pulled your tee shirt down over the bandage, she remained another minute, two, and then left. I retrieved your slippers from under the bed, I opened the cupboard you used, I took out the shirt you were wearing that morning when you came alone to the room. I was ill, running a fever and full of anxiety, maybe I was also feeling a little uncomfortable, loving you had pulled to the surface all that was pathetic and cowardly in my nature, I left you by the entrance to the hospital. From the shirt wrapped up in a ball on the floor fell a bra. It wasn’t a proper one, it was a sports top, two sizes too small, the armor you lived in from your earliest youth, we called your bras “black devils,” there were also gray and white ones you wore under lighter-colored T-shirts and white undershirts.

Once you called to me from behind the shower curtain: “Could you please pass it to me!” “What?” I didn’t catch what you’d said right away. “The black devil!” you shot off in the direction of the top that was lying there, black, on the washing machine. So we wouldn’t have to use the word, we had the devils. So it was that you found yourself losing many of your belongings, and even though you hated them, when you lost them you lost your past and never again would you have the right to claim it. No matter how awful it might have been, your past was you and you were it. Your childhood days were etched into your being. They were days filled with anguish but also with growth, with the carefree spirit particular to children whom life has exposed to unfathomable pain, but also they were days of little victories, with strides that finally brought you to where you are today. In one small part, this past of yours was built on the us we found right at the very moment when you were ripping yourself up inside, getting ready to emerge through your skin, mucus, blood, and stitches. Everything leading up to the moment of transformation was supposed to be soaked in gasoline and set on fire so that for once, the grass would grow up green, and later, entranced by the most beautiful living green, nobody would ask what lay beneath. But I didn’t have the heart to jettison our past into the depths. So I preserved the images that made us what we were from our first days. When we sunned on secluded beaches in summer, when I rubbed your back with sunscreen, when I tucked my fingers between the edges of the straps on the black devils and your skin, when I kissed you along the transitions in the shading of your suntan. When I held a towel around you so you could change, but we were wobbly and a little groggy from the sun so both of us almost tipped over, you were tangled up, trying to strip off the black devil, and I choked with laughter, trying to hold back a spurt of pee so I crouched and in the end heaved the towel at your head. We looked like two maniacs in front of the families with children, in front of the chiseled bodies, in front of the need to be a perfect man, a perfect woman, perfectly superficial. When I watched you from the rocks on the shore as you stood knee-deep in the sea, two months before the operation, that last summer of your larval stage, with a plastic frisbee in your hand and a grin that summoned me. From afar I could see how the drops of water gleamed on your skin, how your wet and lustrous black slicked hair glistened, how alone you were in front of the boundless seascape, how you stood there like a marine demigod, radiating beauty, fear, and awe. And then I thought, I’ll never be able to describe you as I truly see you, and I’ll always feel sad about that. Maybe you were the most beautiful to me then, maybe that’s when we loved each other the most.

For almost a year you didn’t let me lie across your chest and caress you. If I started to move in that direction you’d take my hand and lower it to your belly. Only sometimes, late at night, when we’d come closer than close, when the whole world went still and nobody alive could hear us, you’d nod when I said in my softest voice: “But I love it all so much, all that’s you.” And then you’d add from the dark, “You are a very strange girl,” which always angered me, maybe because that very feeling of wholeness we had was what felt the most normal to me. Today, when other people are getting to know you as a young, attractive, talented man, a photographer, when they ask about your remarkable work, about the rays of light you capture in your lens as if instead of an eye you have a magic globe, when they ask you something about yourself, you’re a person without a past. Full of generalized stories about growing up in a small town, the younger brother you roughed up, leaving home early, your grandfather’s Leica camera that gave you a window onto the world, a world hidden beneath the world and which, with your dislocated point of view, you drew into the right angles of photography. This is more or less all you have to say about yourself. A greedy cast-iron stove reduced to ash all those years filled with wrong ways of responding to your surface, your stabs at retraining yourself to fit into the gears of other peoples’ expectations, all the black devils you strapped yourself in with until you were out of breath, vanishing into the chasm of the non-existent, along with your childhood fantasies at your grandmother’s house when you dreamed you’d wake up one day in your right body, and how at the age of twenty-five you’d be sitting under a tree with your girlfriend, with a moustache, sipping Coca-Cola.

Smoke devoured all of it. You are without a past, I, without a future. You are standing now in another sea, less vast, less terrifying, no black devil, with slender lines of scars across your heart, which, and only now I can see this, you can sport as a badge of courage from the goriest battle. If I could, I’d tell you, don’t hide. But now I’m afloat in the dark of the hospital night. I am letting the scenes that live inside me flood the verges of my consciousness like pleasant waves without end, without wanting, I have separated me from myself and am allowing my life to live. I think I’ll die tonight, I feel I’m forgiving them all, but isn’t exasperation what keeps us alive?