15.

Someone was taken ill last night. If that is even possible to say because we are all sick all the time here. Taking ill, the continuous form of the verb. This meant commotion in the ward, the on-duty doctor was summoned, the nurses huddled in one of the rooms across the hall. They prepped me for the night in a rush and didn’t remember to fully draw the dark-green curtain of mites and dust. So now, ever since daybreak there has been a golden rectangle punching me in the head. The distant star is casting its blazing light on my face and I cannot evade it. So I wait to see what will happen. Either someone will move the shade or the sun will explode—an event forecast for roughly ten billion years from now; we’ll see which happens first. “Oh, damn it, the sun woke you up,” says Ružica in her raspy voice. Today she is being noticeably reticent with me after the doctor chased her out of the room. She fiddles listlessly with the diapers, rubs me roughly, with brusque movements she cleans and arranges the tubes. As if I were the one who hurt her feelings, she snorts and doesn’t offer her usual comments, she vents her frustration on me because of her difficult and pointless existence. Where else can she vent? She finishes up quickly and leaves the room without a word, thank you, goodbye. Soon I hear the tramp of steps in the corridor, steps from several different feet, shoes that are heavy, medium, and light with a heel are approaching my room. I hear muffled laughter. First enters Mama, acting like a child who is sneaking into a hiding place she’s built by herself on an untended field behind their apartment building by piling up boards, branches, nylon bags, and assorted trash, a place where she tends to a mangy little kitten. Half proud, half anxious. The other children file in after her. The boy who thinks he’s God’s gift conquers the space with his pompous self, he assumes everything belongs to him and he has the right to it all. Behind them comes an airheaded little girl who builds her sense of importance at the side of a boy like him. She is convinced she is not someone who can have finer qualities and has no need for them, except lipstick on her lips and a sly toady up to those who are stronger and more aggressive. A couple from paradise, a couple from hell, Adam and Eve, stupidity and the rib, the prototype of man and woman as envisioned by one of the near-sighted authors of the most influential book on this awful place called Earth. Still, the pompous boy freezes in horror, fear, and disgust when faced with the sight of his mangy car-wreck of a kid sister. The core of this Holy Trinity is society’s acquired and violent reaction to nonnormative bodies. Bodies that determine destiny. The skull of an albino child—smashed to guarantee a good harvest, skin color as the alibi for iron shackles, hips too narrow to give birth banished to the outskirts of town, paralysis of the limbs as a ticket to the sanatorium, compulsory medical intervention on babies whose future life hasn’t yet begun to take shape. The scalpel for normalcy. The noose for those who don’t opt for the normal. Long is the history of attempts at correcting those who don’t fit in. A history built on the wooden beams of the gallows, on torture devices, in concentration camps, gas chambers, ouster to the very edge of society. Rich and varied, yet the same everywhere on Earth. My brother was swept up by it at just the right moment, there he stood on a street corner, lost, already halfway through his life’s journey, without firm footing within himself, desolate and, to be fair, endlessly sad, as empty as a black hole in the universe. This time, history comes in the shape of a mob that fears you. A mob that over the years emerged from the wartime traumas of a small tribe at the edge of a jungle, a tribe that after a brief period of progress reverted quickly to instinct, to the dark age of myths awash in the fragrance of incense. My brother was given the opportunity to stand at a booth in the center of town and volunteer as a member of a movement of people who had declared themselves the guardians of moral order in society. He had the honor of gathering the signatures of citizens so he could push for a law that would abolish the rights of a minority. Lacking their own center, obsessed with the lives of other people, they launched an attack on the intimacy of others. Marriage belongs to us. They are free to register. Dijana and Olja are the target, their bond reduced by the law to a dry linguistic phrase used for regulating the ownership of a new vehicle. My brother distributed leaflets saying that we face extinction because of them, if we allow them to use our words for their relationships. My brother plucked at the sleeves of passersby and asked them to sign the petition he was holding, because if they signed it they’d be protecting their families. My brother laughed with his healthy, white teeth, he waved to people, gave balloons to children in strollers, my brother felt important and good, he was on the front line of the defense of our families and our values, he was upright and righteous, for fourteen days he battled his opponent—who was a hundredfold more threatened than he was—he fought with all he could muster, if need be he’d repeat lies thousand times. Around his neck he wore a crucifix, the rear-view mirrors of his car flaunted the checker-board insignia of the Croatian state, my brother was obsessed with the idea that if Olja’s and Dijana’s love were treated equally with other loves this would mean stripping our country of God and Homeland. It seemed as if the Almighty and the Homeland were so fragile that a tender caress between two women could reduce them to dust. He was fighting so that if a person as righteous as himself were to throw a rock and hit them in the back while they were walking arm in arm, the attacker would be applauded instead of being charged with a crime. “Last spring,” he said, “when we showed those fags their place . . .” paved the way for years of violence. The new struggle, even greater and more vocal, this time oriented toward your minority, my love, within the minority, began at the same time as that unstoppable warmth was blossoming between us. A closeness that created rifts around us on all sides, with dense and uncalculating warmth that melted our skin and made us liquid and vulnerable, a warmth that gave rise to life itself.

“Son,” Mama pats him on the cheek, consoles him while he stares at me, trying to soften his bad feelings at having to see me. “Would you like to sit for a minute,” she asks him gently. He stands there as if turning to stone, Mama scrapes a chair over the floor, I can’t see him clearly, but I feel his stifled energy, I feel how he can’t take even one step toward the bed; broken and immobile women are the most terrifying monsters for courageous fighters like himself. He brushes her hand away roughly and goes on staring at me. His wife stands behind him, she takes a few steps in my direction, leans over the bed as if leaning over a coffin, and presses a paper tissue to her mouth. She finds me appealing, I feel it, I appeal to her the same way people rubberneck traffic accidents, horrified, yet at the same time almost erotically caught up in the wrongness of the scene. This sort of lurid fascination springs from the disjointed fantasies of people who have never outgrown early adolescence. I see straight through her, through the perfectly coiffed hair, through her little leopard-skin patterned coat and the fashion-brand handbag she is clutching with her long fingers and gel nails. I see the little girl who got stuck, who never fully grew to what she could have been, who walks through the world like an empty mirror of social reality. Ironed, superficial, malicious because of the feeling that she is missing out on something, but too lazy to make her own way. She counts on my brother, acts as if she might faint, tries to draw his attention, but he doesn’t actually care about her. This is all just a game. Then it’s as if she pulls herself together, opens her handbag and takes out her rosary. She drapes it over the drawer handle, without asking anyone whether that’s okay, she just slips it through the handle and tugs it tight. “She’s actually not in such bad shape,” says Mama, uncertain, I realize her enthusiasm has faded a little because she has suddenly seen me through their eyes, on her own until now she was used to seeing me and forgot what I look like when someone is seeing me for the first time. Her comment receives no response. Tomislav sighs loudly, and all he says, through clenched teeth, is: “Fuck life,” forgetting, or maybe not forgetting, that I can hear, “She should be released from this torment.” Mama starts to cry, “Don’t say that, Son, she is my child, too . . .” she sighs and sobs, and his wife merely stands there and stares blankly, her mind has already wandered off. The family moment isn’t quite as idyllic as imagined, Mama sobs louder, and he starts snarling at her, unable to bear the picture in which he finds himself. “Come on, Mother, she’s no longer alive like this.” I feel for him. I am always wondering, ever since I found myself in this condition, what kind of an impact it has on people—being faced by someone’s boundless isolation. To bear something like this you need to be strong as an ox. It’s easier for me, the isolation is mine, in some ways now it is getting easier and easier. Mama sobs, the air becomes loud and thick, I hear light footsteps from the corridor that somehow reach my hearing. In comes my doctor. “What’s going on here?” she asks gently but firmly, clearly taking my side. Mama goes on wailing, my brother turns to her and, with his usual pompous tone, asks: “What are her chances, how long can she go on like this?” I see that only now my doctor fully understands, she needs a few seconds to pull herself together, swallow her fury and disgust, and then she says to him, equally brusquely: “Sir, I must ask you to leave, your sister needs peace and quiet, she’ll be fine.” She stands by the door, the moment is frozen, I have the impression she is raising her arm like a switchman at a railway junction, shunting them to a side they weren’t expecting: “Come on, now, all of you, out you go, please, leave. Visiting hours are over, she needs rest,” she says loudly and implacably. “But we only just got here . . .” protests Mama, “and you said we can visit her whenever we like!” Her tone rises and she prepares for a fight. “From now on, that will not be possible. Please.” Him first, he can hardly wait, and after him, his wife, he’ll probably give them a piece of his mind, he knows what needs to be done. He should be asked.