A letter has come, I thought, and a sudden fearlessness filled me: I wanted somehow to feel how time had passed, all those years after Kosti, how my life turned out, how everything turned out. I dared thinking about the fact that I had been a mother: even someone like me had become a mother by giving birth to a child, a boy, my deformed boy, unfit for life. And now I saw the years, months, hours, and minutes bound to him, the peculiar slowness, millimeter upon millimeter of the gray, faintly buzzing slowness I'd felt together with him. It was like a period of timelessness injected into my life, and when I looked into the glass, I saw those years, saw them moving faintly down there on the bottom. I'd been absorbed by timelessness back then; I'd let myself be nourished by it. I'd been a mother during those years after Kosti, a mother to a helpless child, and even though this child was no longer alive, I dared to think I'd gone on being his mother, and that I'd kept living with him in that timelessness. Perhaps that's why I'd been hit so hard by Kosti's letter; he'd jolted me into the present. And that hurt. Timelessness is a kind of death that attracts those who cannot or do not have the courage to live. But despite my pain, I also noticed that something had awakened in me during the day and it was calling me, there was something intriguing about the memories and images that flashed through me as I drank. It was as
if I'd been missing myself for a very long time. As if I'd been standing abandoned for a very long time.
The boy's face. Heavy and impossible to read. The mouth without control and constantly glistening wet, a mere cavity that had happened to end up in his face. He couldn't reach his own mouth, couldn't access it fully. It was as if a thread, the link that connected him to his own body, had been severed. His legs and hands were also half-asleep, somehow muddled. He couldn't reach himself anywhere.
Except his eyes. He existed through his eyes. His gaze reached out from that big, lifeless body, found its way past an otherwise meaninglessly constructed face. From the moment he was born, his gaze had been the same. And it seized me. From the very beginning, there was an intimacy between us so profound that as soon as I recognized it, I knew I'd never be able to escape it. His gaze went straight into my life.
I remember the first few days after his birth as a quake. A quake that reached all the way to the center of the earth. I had just delivered, felt so recently opened. At the same time, I burned with a sense of presence. They left me alone with him for twenty-four hours. Then they came and tore us apart. They stole my boy.
It was at the radiology ward, you know, where there are lots of odd little booths with drapes covering the open doors. I sat in one of those
booths and waited for them to return with my boy. The booths around me were empty: the whole place seemed deserted. Perhaps it was the weekend. During the night, my breasts had filled with something that felt like cement. They were enormous. Rock hard. So tender that even the light feeling of my clothes against my skin made me shiver with pain. I thought I was the one who had just been born. I was as newly born as my small child that they'd just carried away. And in this strange new world, nothing existed but him, nothing but the child, only his gaze, his smell, and the feeling of his small, eager mouth searching for my nipples.
I remember that it took a while. Then I heard steps, and voices far away in the maze of booths. I sat, alert, and listened. A man's voice called out:
“I've found a space in ward nineteen!”
I'd already left the booth and ran like a blind person through the maze. Suddenly, I saw the doctor standing there, the one who'd called out, and I threw myself at him.
“Where's my boy?” I screamed, my fists hitting his chest. “Where have you taken my child?”
“Calm down!” the doctor yelled, and grabbed my wrists. “Calm down a little, and I'll explain.”
But I wasn't calm. I tried to drag him in the direction where I thought they'd taken my boy.
“Give me back my child right now!” I screamed. “I want my child, I want my child, I want â ”
I burst into tears, and the doctor I had attacked a moment earlier put his arm around me and led me into a booth.
“Try and pull yourself together. I'm going to explain what's going on,” he said formally and rather sternly. He took a pencil from the breast pocket of his shirt, and I hated him. Go on, talk, I thought. I know you're
lying. I know you've taken away my son to slaughter him. My hatred was so intense it ought to have made him dissolve like a fly in an acid bath.
“You're going to slaughter my son,” I said.
“No, we're not. We're going to try to help him. Your son is gravely ill and I insist that you make an effort to listen to me.”
He drew something on the paper that covered the examination table inside the booth and explained how something was very wrong inside the boy's head. I didn't believe what he was saying, and listened with only half an ear since I was sure they'd taken the boy to slaughter him. I knew I was the only thing my boy needed, and it was up to me to save him.
“I want to go to ward nineteen, where my child is,” I said as soon as the doctor had finished talking.
“You can't do that,” he said. “You have to go back to the maternity ward first. They have to discharge you there before you can come back to the children's ward.”
“Then the police will have to come and take me back to the maternity ward. I'm going to my boy now.”
I felt strong enough to upend the whole hospital, if necessary.
The doctor thought I was being difficult and couldn't hide his irritation. Finally, he gave in a little.
“You know, there's no room for you in ward nineteen anyway. It's an intensive care ward. You can't stay there overnight.”
We then made our way in silence through the big hospital over to the remote children's ward where they'd taken my child.
Entering the dimly lit room where the boy was supposed to be, I thought for a moment I'd ended up in Hieronymus Bosch's Hell. Fetuses with tubes and hoses taped everywhere on their perplexing little bodies lay in their incubators, exposed in the strong lights like ancient relics or the crown jewels in a museum's glass case. Around the room, between
these incubators, were transparent carts with infants, and I immediately focused on a baby with shiny white pieces of tape on its face. The tape seemed to hold the unnaturally round cheeks together. I was filled with violent disgust at the thought that they had to tape the child's cheeks to keep them in place, that otherwise they would fall away to each side like two loose lumps. My gaze searched the dim room and there, at the farthest end, I spotted the boy. The first thing I saw was that they'd taped his cheeks too. Narrow white strips appeared to tear his tiny face apart; it was as if they had marked him like a sacrificial animal.
At the sight of the boy, my breasts, which all day had been on the verge of exploding from the pressure of the hardening cement filling them, began to leak. I closed my eyes and leaned over the bed to finally inhale his scent, to feel his skin against mine. When I carefully folded the blanket aside to lift him up, I saw that the tape on his cheeks held a thin tube in place. It was placed inside one of his nostrils. A tube. A feeding tube. They don't want me to feed him anymore, I thought. He would no longer get to lie in my arms and catch my nipple to drink with his whimsical, eager mouth. The doctors thought this boy was so sick he didn't need a mother. He'd get a new, clinical mother; someone approved of, perhaps even a man.
I remember that I shook with a sense of injustice; it moved through every cell in my body. For a while, I stood and cried with the boy pressed against me. Then I put him back in the bed and went out to the nearby reception area. At a desk, a doctor was talking on the phone.
“Why have you given my child a feeding tube?” I asked, trying my utmost to remain calm, to not throw up, to not rush up to the man by the desk and start hitting him with the phone.
“Could you hold on a second?” he said. “As you can see, I'm on the phone.”
“I want to know why you've given my child a feeding tube!” I screamed. “He can eat on his own. I'm going to feed him. Me! You hear me? He's my child!”
“Sorry,” the doctor said into the phone. “I think I've got a nursing-crazed mother on my hands.”
He turned to me. I saw the horns in his forehead.
“Which child are you referring to?” he asked.
The days that followed were like a slow descent into a warped underground realm, an abyss where faces in gaudy colors floated through the air, their voices snapping as if they had fangs. I searched for the boy everywhere, and everywhere he was taken away from me, following protocol after protocol according to regulations so sacred they couldn't be questioned by anyone in heaven or on earth.
“We think the feeding tube is more practical because then we'll know exactly how much he eats. We can send a breast pump to your room, so maybe eventually we'll let you bottle-feed him,” someone said.
The first few days I tried to defend myself by transforming into a bear mother, a lioness, a tigress. But the high priests weren't scared by any mother animals, they didn't understand the meaning of words like mother, milk, mouths; they didn't understand what thousands of years of deep dark knowledge and desire can awaken in a human being. They didn't realize how close they were to driving me insane when they ignored the inner forces that threatened to tear me apart.
One evening when I sat in the little hospital room I had demanded, a nurse came to me and whispered:
“Don't sit here pumping. Bring the baby in here and nurse him. Screw the doctors, they don't understand anything.”
But by then it was too late; the claws of the tigress had already been trimmed, her teeth pulled out. The milk was drying up, and I didn't dare try placing the child on my breast.
It would probably have been good for the boy to nurse. And for me too. When he was a week old, one of his arms began twitching strangely, and at the same time he started crying. And the crying never ceased. It went on day and night, every waking moment, and sometimes even when he slept. His cries were sometimes hoarse and exhausted, other times high and shrill.
But in the midst of this wailing, his gaze was alive, the boy's gaze. It pierced through his tears. And it was insistent. Insistent that the world give him an answer.
Mervas existed. Yes, it exists. I found it in the index of a big Nordic atlas in the library. Mervas, it read suddenly, and I almost started with surprise. I'd found it! I got the strange idea that no one before me had ever looked it up in this atlas. Mervas was listed just for me; it had waited for me between the covers, waited to become a kind of sign, a secret pact between Kosti and me. If I came back later and looked it up again, it would no longer be there, having already served its purpose.
These were foolish thoughts, and as soon as they emerged I was filled with doubts. Perhaps the Mervas in the atlas wasn't Kosti's Mervas at all. His Mervas probably wasn't in any atlas whatsoever. And even if this was the Mervas Kosti had referred to, nothing indicated that he'd be there. Or that he ever set foot there. That was what the grinding doubts in my head were saying.
I nevertheless searched the actual map to see where the place was. It was up north, way up north, in the middle of nowhere.
Mervas,
the map said, but there was no dot or square to indicate the place or reveal anything about it, just the six letters and something that appeared to be a road or possibly just a trail leading to it. I kept searching. At least Mervas was now a place in the world. Whatever it represented, it was a
message from Kosti to me. Whether he really was there didn't matter, I told myself. The important thing was that he'd sent me the name of this place after more than twenty years of silence. This place was marked on a map, it already carried the possibility of a story, even though it hadn't been described as a village or mountain or with any other cartographic symbols used on a map. That was just as he'd written in his letter. Mervas was farther away than anything else; you couldn't get any farther away.
Finally, after searching several encyclopedias and books about various municipalities, I found additional information in an older encyclopedia.
Mervas,
it said,
former mining community in L., the mine closed in 1951, community abandoned and all buildings dismantled and removed in 1953.
So it was a nonexistent place. A former place. A ghost town. That's where Kosti was. With the name of this place, he'd shaken and roused me from the sleep I'd allowed my life to sink into. I read the brief text several times, feeling oddly upset. It was somehow completely impossible for me to rationally and sensibly grasp these simple facts. I saw nothing but messages: hidden, intricate, subtle messages. Am I this shut-down mining town? I asked myself. If so, what did this mean:
all buildings dismantled and removed
? Was this
former mining community
our relationship, our love affair?
I tried to make sense of it but only became increasingly confused. It really wasn't so surprising that Kosti was in a nonexistent place, considering that he was an archaeologist. I used to be an archaeologist too, once. Now I wasn't anything, I'd been on disability, as it's called, ever since I was locked up in the dark city during my time away from the world. Suddenly, I was struck by the notion that perhaps Kosti knew something about all that. The fact that Mervas was an actual mining town made my heart flutter with terror. “The Salt Mine” had been the patients' name for the ward where I'd been locked up. I tried not to think about this, not
to let my mind return there. After all, Kosti was an archaeologist, and it was entirely expected that he'd be in a place like Mervas, an existent but nonetheless shut-down and removed
former
place.