Dad especially liked to lecture at the dinner table. The fact that his lectures often turned into loud, hateful rants of unbridled rage didn't seem to have any effect on his appetite. He shoveled the food into his
mouth between sentences, quickly and mechanically. The rest of us sat quietly trying to chew and swallow as best as we could while we carefully observed the characteristic and ill-boding quakes of anger that rippled through his thin body like an electric current.
But it wasn't enough for Dad to hold forth alone in front of a gloomy, silent audience. He wanted both assent and participation. The dinner lectures were part of his educational mission to elevate Mom, and especially us kids, to his level.
“Can you understand this, Marta, that your mother, your own mother sitting there chewing her tough beef stew like a cow chews its cud, do you understand that genetically, she's garbage? Do you grasp the meaning of these words, Marta?”
He always had to turn to me. In his eyes, I was Daddy's girl, and also more gifted than my older sister. He was speaking in a very low voice and his lips were thin and taut like rubber bands. When he lowered his light blue gaze into my wide-open eyes and fixed it there, lashed it there, I hated him so much I wanted him to die. The hate burned inside me like a dry chemical fire.
“Yes, Daddy, I understand.”
“Well, then I'd like you to explain to me, and the rest of us, what it is you claim to understand. For example, what does the word
genetic
mean?”
The word “genetic” sounded like the crack of a whip when he said it. I could sense the vibration of the word inside him; it seemed to fill the whole kitchen. If he'd had whiskers, they would have vibrated like those of a cat spotting a small bird.
“Well, Marta.
Genetic?
”
The way he said “well” was forceful like a vise, and I often felt that I could kill him for the way he said it. It was also in conjunction with
the word “well” that the rug beater would be brought out and used in explosions of uncontrolled rage. The word “well” was a dam that at any moment could burst from the water pressing against its walls.
“It has . . . it has to do with inheritance,” I said. “It means hereditary, it's hereditary.”
Animal breeding was one of Dad's special interests. He worked at the Department of Agriculture and specialized in hog breeding. Sometimes, to the relief of the entire family, he had to travel to different parts of the country to inspect selected groups of breeding hogs. It was on one of these occasions that Mom packed up some linens, clothes, some pots and pans, and toys in big boxes. Then an uncle we'd never met before came over and put Mom, the boxes, and us into a Volvo station wagon and took us away. That's how we ended up in the two-room apartment, which Dad later started calling the Exception.
Mom had evidently planned the move for some time, because the apartment was already furnished when we arrived. There was a worn sofa bed and a couple of plain beds, a kitchen table, some chairs and stools, a dresser, and a big brown radio with its green dial eye.
Mom probably hadn't asked her family for help before because she felt ashamed. After all, she'd been lucky to enter a good marriage with a well-educated man from a better family than her own. The way everyone saw it, she ought to be happy and content. The marriage to Dad had distanced her from her family, and as the years went by, the distance kept growing, especially because Dad didn't think Mom's relatives were good enough for him and his children. It was probably the doctors she met in the hospital after my sister's birth who pushed her to get in contact with her family and tell them what was going on. All of us siblings immediately fell in love with our uncle. He was very tall and fat and had lots of amiable lines around his eyes. He constantly made jokes and laughed more
during the move than our dad had done during our entire childhood. And he was a father too, we found out. There were fathers like him in the world also.
It's the Feast of the Holy Innocents today. Outside, it's thawing and suddenly the snow has no resonance or sparkle. All afternoon, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror looking at my face. Looking into it. I was searching for something in it, I don't know what. Perhaps a bit of life, an ounce of longing somewhere in the depth of my eyes. But my face was indecipherable. It expressed everything and nothing. Most of the time it was ugly, but for brief moments it was beautiful. It never ceased to be invasive; painfully, embarrassingly invasive. Like someone who comes to bother you. A stranger at once mysteriously intriguing and revolting. I just stood there, unable to step away from the mirror.
Many artists have been known to paint their own portraits; some become obsessed with it. I can understand why. They're trying to fix on the canvas the one face that always eludes us more than any other. Perhaps our own face isn't really available to us because it eludes us. On the contrary, it turns away from itself and toward others. Way back in the past, when no mirrors existed except for the occasional shaky reflection in a body of water, it was the people surrounding you who became your mirror. They reflected your face back to you, responded to it. I sometimes wonder if people were different back then. You're so alone in front of the
mirror, alone with your own perplexing face. Perhaps our faces want to tell us that the person who lives unseen has lost his face. That our faces are there for others, it is a language, perhaps even everyone's primary language.
I've probably lost my face. That's what life has done to me; it has driven me deeper into loneliness. My face has become unreadable, not only to myself but also to everyone who sees me. It has become an extinct language. I thought of Kosti there in front of the mirror. I wondered if he'd be able to give me my face back.
My years with the boy made me think a lot about this, about faces. His great loneliness was hidden precisely because he was missing his own face; he couldn't reach anyone through it, couldn't reach outside himself and was forced to remain inside his own darkness. Like being born without a body, I sometimes thought. A diabolic impossibility. And I, the mother, who finally couldn't endure his loneliness.
I had a terrible dream last night. I dreamt there was a war. My apartment was on fire and I stood on the street outside with a group of other people and together we saw the fire rising against the night sky and enveloping the entire neighborhood in worrying clouds of thick, brown smoke. Soon after this I found myself on a military airfield. It was early dawn. Muddy roads passed between big, depressing sheet-metal hangars. I was filled with an incredible anguish. Groups of soldiers passed me by and harsh voices gave orders all around me, commands, deadly words. Suddenly, Kosti's father came up to me. He was dressed as an officer and he gave me a small piece of paper.
“Go to hangar G,” he said sternly. “You're going to the front.”
Hangar G, the front. My legs felt weak and I stood there, confused, with my little piece of paper. I didn't know in which direction to go. Then I found myself in a dilapidated locker room, where grim guards
dressed me in a uniform and hung weapons, ammunition, and a pack on my back. They pushed me out to a giant hall where soldiers were lined up, and I understood that I'd come to hangar G. I was placed in the first row of soldiers, among those who'd be the first to leave. I'd never felt such intense fear before. When I looked around, I spotted Kosti's father and right behind him stood Kosti, in civilian clothes. They both looked straight at me, and when I screamed that I didn't want to go to the front, Kosti's father appeared and said that I must behave myself, that I had no choice. I had to go to the front and the plane that would take me there was about to take off.
I woke up before boarding the plane. My anxiety was like a spear thrust through me and I was soaked in sweat. When I'd gotten out of bed and had my first cup of coffee, I knew that I had to get myself to Mervas. Not because it was “the front” or to escape “the front” â I wasn't yet in any shape to analyze the dream. It was more of an insight that had come to me, a voice that the night had stripped bare, and this voice knew. I had to go to Mervas. I've known it the entire time; that's how it has to be, that's what has to happen.
We actually parted as enemies, Kosti and I. There's no other way to describe it. Perhaps love creates in us an obsession of wanting to be loved completely and entirely, into every part of us, every corner of our being. But when I became increasingly determined to drag Kosti into my darkest, worst stinking nooks and crannies, he turned away from me. He immediately became hard and impenetrable. I had crossed a boundary and his otherwise mild demeanor changed, and he became dry and barren and harsh. A stony desert. And he forced me out of his life; there was never a way back. His very words pushed me away. He didn't have to raise his voice, didn't even have to scream. The harsh and dry way he spoke to me was enough. He drove me away from him with those words, out of the apartment, the little dorm room we had shared. That was all it took. I was already crushed.
I slept in my car that night, and the following day I moved to my sister's. I didn't dare return to him; I was afraid to hear that voice. To see the lack of love in his eyes. I couldn't take it, not from him, from Kosti, who had seen me, received me, and renamed me. I was also afraid of being held accountable, of being reminded of the person I didn't want to be, the one I wasn't. To meet myself in meeting him.
We argued that night. It was worse than that; it turned into a scene. But before we started arguing we'd had a really nice dinner together. It was actually our celebration dinner, the last in the apartment. In a few days we were going to the Orkney Islands and before that we had to pack, move out, store our things. This was the last peaceful night at home before the big moving and traveling chaos would begin.
After dinner, we were sipping the last of the wine and fantasizing about the upcoming year we'd spend on Sanday, an island northeast of the Orkney Islands. We talked about the ocean and about the fall and winter storms, about the uninhabited skerries and the megalith burial sites we would study. Everything seemed so incredibly exciting. We hardly dared believe that we would be there in a few days and then stay there an entire year. We were both hopelessly romantic. We described images to each other of how the raging storms in a kind of violent act of love ravaged the flat, rocky islands with their sparse vegetation. Roaring, the storms would press and wail against the tiny houses, which mostly resembled orderly stone cairns. We described how the wind held the island landscape in its grasp out there, how it scraped and tore at the yellowing grass. The salt would penetrate the cracks in the small cottages, become mortar in the stone walls, and glisten like crystals in the curly wool of the sheep. We could see ourselves there, walking close together through the storm, struggling to stay upright and screaming to each other to be heard over the din from the sea. Finally, we'd have to throw ourselves down on our stomachs and lie there, pressed to the ground, with our lungs completely filled with air while the hard wind kept moving through grass and twigs.
Both of us started glowing as we talked. Everything we mentioned immediately became warm and alive, a hot fluid metal, which we shaped and melted down and reshaped again.
“Yes, and even you have to understand this,” I suddenly heard myself say. “In a place like that you just have to conceive a baby. I mean that's where you make love to become pregnant!”
Kosti quickly seemed to sober up. He sighed, and his expression became harsh and edgy.
“Dearest Mart, not now. Not again. We decided not to discuss this until after the Orkney Islands. You promised, remember? Right? You promised to wait until I was ready.”
It happened so fast. The Orkney Islands drifted away from us and disappeared somewhere far out at sea. And there we were, Kosti and I, sitting opposite each other in the sudden calm, interrupted and lost. It was terribly quiet. The ticking of the battery-powered clock could be heard through the whole apartment: ticktock, ticktock.
I could have done something. For example, I could have gone and fetched the book about the Orkney Islands that we had just bought and said: Okay, let's forget about that for now, let's look at this instead. Or I could have spread the big detailed map on the floor for the hundredth time and said: I'm sorry, we should let it go, it just came out of me, I don't know why. Come here!
Or I could've said that he was right, we had actually decided not to talk about it, we could discuss having children when we returned, and I wouldn't nag about it anymore.
But inside my head, a small voice said:
You
have decided, not the two of us.
You
want to wait; I don't. And I sat there silent, caught up in a strange, eerily quiet anger, which slowly spread inside me and filled me with its shadowy gray demons. I sat completely still and allowed thoughts to rise that I couldn't reverse and didn't want to have. A cruelty was coming from inside me that I couldn't defend myself from.
Kosti didn't do anything to change the gloomy atmosphere that had
taken over the room either. An unpleasant smell seemed to have found its way in through the cracks in the windows. The very air between us had changed, but we didn't know what to do to get rid of it. Kosti also remained silent, as if he were waiting for something. It was as if there were a secret director waiting in the wings, manuscript in hand, anticipating the next line. As if everything had already been entered into the great book of life, already decided. All we had to do was fill in the blanks with our voices.
I cleared my throat. The words had to come now, before they killed me; I could feel them inside, insisting I let them out. They had to come out into the light and be destroyed like vampires. Perhaps then they'd be gone forever.