30.

I couldn’t break through to you until they moved you to this forest. The state bureaucracy that dictates our relationships, that regulates who has the right to inquire about your condition, that knows exactly who should be holding your motionless hand while you lie there, punctured by tubes, has determined unambiguously that this cannot be me. The only people allowed to see you are your mother and brother. Dijana was quickly exposed as an imposter sister, and I—whose very existence had stymied the debate among the political parties just when they were about to adopt the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, when someone introduced the dreaded ideology of gender and then the whole mess spun out of control—I must not come near. In the café, two men at a table: “Hey, have you heard? I mean, what the fuck, they’ve made it law now that men can get pregnant.” “Fuck them all, them and fuck Europe, they’re out to rip us to pieces.” So that’s why I snuck, unnoticed, through the green corridors of the hospital but didn’t dare come any closer for fear my presence would bring even greater harm upon you. Your life belonged to the category of the most vulnerable, of the good vulnerable, the immobile and mute, the ones the state has deemed worth protecting. Then early one morning, because I was trying at various times of day to break through to you along the corridors of the healthcare system, I heard from a young nurse that you’d been transferred. Shyly, the same way I’d melted into the corridor walls, she asked me whom I was looking for. She must have been new and still willing to help. “But she’s not here anymore,” she said, softly, spreading her hands. “What do you mean? Where is she?” At first this news clanged in my temples and I was terrified to pursue it further. “Marof.” She whispered. With pity. This was slightly better than my first thought had been. The air drained from my lungs and like an empty sack I sank back onto the wall. Then I went out into the autumn day.

They’re dressing you, at least they’re dressing you. They’re packing up your handful of belongings. They’re moving you gingerly from the bed to a gurney. You are light, even lighter than before. After weeks of staring at a single point, now you’re seeing images dance before your eyes. You’re taken on an elevator and nobody, but you, notices it bouncing. People don’t notice much. You used to tell me: “We are riding in an elevator. Do you realize how far down and up the shaft goes, do you understand, dearest, how our life is hanging here by nothing but the cables installed by people at some point, and if they didn’t do their job properly, we might drop at any moment into the abyss? And the electric circuit on whose uninterrupted current our safe ascent or descent depends doesn’t take much to shut down, and then we’d be left in the dark, stranded in such a close space, and a long, long time might pass before anyone discovered where we were. There we’d sit, airless, consumed by panic. See, love?” and then you’d shoot me a wry glance, though I know you were being dead serious and these are all comprehensible things that worry you, but you hide behind your arched eyebrows and the corner of your lip that twists ever so slightly, “Everything depends on everything else, we rely so much on one another and people are so sure that their life is all about their choice, but one loose screw and everything goes to hell.” I’d hold you close in the elevator and say: “Don’t be such a worry wart,” wishing I could go from screw to screw with one of those tool belts slung around my hips. I’d tighten them all. I’ve always dreamed of being a construction worker. I confess this only to you. They wheel your gurney out and the sky blinds you. When I first went outside, having spent five days convalescing in the hospital after the operation, I almost fainted from the lucidity, the perspective of space and freshness, the clouds and smog, the variety. Once a year people should all be shut for five days in a room with no windows, and then brought out into the sunlight. They wouldn’t keep wasting time on inanities. Never you, though. Your gurney with its little wheels is loaded onto a large-wheeled van and off you roll toward another hospital where there are many more people like you. To reach you I have to take trains, first one to Varaždin, and then a second from there to Marof, and then walk for a spell before I catch sight of a tall ornate gateway enclosing lush nature. When we began spending time together, you always used to say, as long as there is good jazz playing, I’d rather sit at a bar, my natural habitat, than under a tree. Ticks and thorns, then mud, wet feet, allergies, let nature take its course, the rhythm method, abstinence, really? Thanks but no thanks. I laughed because you clearly thought of nature differently than I did, and soon we came to see that under the shade of a tree was where we were safest, under a treetop that shelters all equally we could most be ourselves. In nature nothing is unnatural, otherwise it wouldn’t be in nature. So the building’s surroundings brightened my mood a little, though only a little, because I didn’t dare think what lay ahead, indoors. At the entrance to the hospital grounds there was a sense that this place was going to be a little different. The staff here also wore white and blue lab coats, the rubber wheels on wheelchairs carved shallow ruts in the linoleum, here, too, convulsed skeletons with gaping jaws sat in the wheelchairs, drooling saliva, and here, too, I noticed the smell of disinfectant cleaning supplies mingling with the smell of shit, but nobody here seemed to be in a rush. It was as if time were drip-drip-dripping at the threshold to the waiting room of the next-to-last station, the one right before the end of the line. Everyone was walking slowly, like in a slow-motion movie, nobody was in a big rush to get where they were going. A dense, unbearable drabness dripped from the ceiling and poured down all the room’s surfaces. Society’s apparatus for dealing with those so close to death was more flexible here. At the portal to this quiet building they didn’t ask for a certified document from me stating that we’d shared a bed or eaten at the same table. Here they favored a more holistic approach, an approach which had been lacking in society my whole life, so when one drew the winning card in the lottery and was given a month in Marof, the maximum time allotted for this last stop, the bureaucracy loosened up a little and people made an effort to lighten up. The crush of visitors wasn’t so overwhelming here, because what could they say to someone who was melting away? What to say to a person when you could see their demise in their eyes? There were no signs of death in the corridors and at the reception desks, they were bathed with the fragrance of fresh paint and the optimism of expanding the wards with the same European funding that would compel men to give birth.

They actually direct me to you. It still doesn’t feel real. All of it, this paralysis, the sweat coating my palms, that I am really looking for you here. I approach the half-open door to the ward cautiously, at the end of a long corridor leading to your room, number 17, there is a big window looking out over the garden. In the counter-light I can just discern a small figure that is growing. A figure I can’t recognize in the shadow, whereas I am fully lit and transparent. This gives her a certain advantage. Before I realize who she is, sound is faster than any image, the sound of the fretful voice over the door buzzer and cell phone, the voice planted deep down in your pelvis that kept you from orgasming, barks at me: “What are you doing here?” She is even more gaunt, even more petite than before, much smaller than even small me, embittered and shrunken by the horror in which she finds herself, her life. “I’ve come for a visit,” I say calmly, my voice hoarse. Before I can brace myself, her clenched fists fly at my face, poke me as if we’re playing a children’s game, I could stop her by merely raising my arm. But I stand there like that and let the body of your flesh and blood pummel me. “How dare you come here after everything! Leave us in peace once and for all!” Two nurses come out of an office on the side, they aren’t sure whether to interrupt this family drama, I’m not sure whether I should turn around and go before you have to hear from the corridor that we still aren’t leaving you in peace. When your mother, her eyes welling with tears, her voice crackling, says, “I know full well who you are!” I take a step back and fall away into a chasm. Her words keep ringing in my ears, only I don’t know whether I was hearing her right when she said that she knows. Who I am or what I am? Because I am sometimes a what, and not only a who. We all know full well what you are! I turn and leave because I don’t want this to happen now, not like this, because I assume what it is that she’ll say. She’ll say “woman.” She’ll spit it out as if it is a dirty word. Woman. I could never bear the word. I hated it that I was linked to it in a way that was never me. I wanted to erase the existence of that woman. But even if I’d succeded, as I realized much later, erasing myself would have erased everything that had gone before. For a long, long time, I could not accept that nature had given me the gift of being a person who has experienced what it means to be a woman in this world. And much too much of my experience in childhood and youth was feminine. Sometimes only because the world saw me as a woman, sometimes because of my brother who didn’t experience the world that way, because of the family where Dora must help her grandmother sweep out the yard, where she mustn’t muss her shorts when she plays soccer, who would horrify everyone by refusing to wear a bra. That is how nature treated me, how it kept me down and shaped me. And how I fled. And now I am still fleeing at times—from your mother, a woman, who addresses me with scorn, speaks to the part of me that is so like her, we could be so close, bonded by a profound and total understanding of a world that has kept both of us down since our first cry. Because today, when that same world looks at me and no longer sees what is implied by the notion of “woman,” I know better. I know how the attitude of the world toward me has changed over a short time; the breasts, ovaries, or chin I had didn’t make me what I am. It is enough to raise my hand, show up, clear my throat, warn, to be taken seriously, to be paid more, to not be mocked, not exploited, not taunted, not slapped, not downplayed. But I still can’t stand before her. I’ll step aside and let her pass, and then I will make my way to you, to all that’s left.