A strategically body-built steward appears beside me. What would I like?
I would like to cry, but it would not be right to say that. I say:
‘Coffee.’
‘With milk or without?’ he asks.
And suddenly someone cares how I am going to drink my coffee.
She already had two children, it says, from her first marriage. She lives with her father and children. She does not have a job, her father supports her. She got pregnant out of wedlock with a lad from a neighbouring village. She did not have the money for an abortion. Her father insisted that she leave hospital the day after she gave birth. She held her baby in her arms, a healthy little boy weighing four and a half kilos.
I try to comfort myself. I try to tell myself that a healthy little boy one day old and weighing four and a half kilos does not have that much consciousness.
The father drove her into a forest. He cleared grass and leaves with his hands. He allowed her to feed her baby one last time. And then he took the little boy and buried him. Alive.
She says that she did not dare oppose her father.
He says that he did not have the money to support a third child.
The court experts say that the baby was probably eaten by wild dogs in the forest.
The neighbours say that they knew she was pregnant and saw that she came back without a baby.
The steward is still waiting.
I say: ‘With milk.’
I need something sweet. As sweet as possible. Intolerably sweet. Something capable of burying this feeling.
I have this appalling tendency to torment myself by visualising everything that hurts me. I imagine the baby’s little lips on his mother’s nipple, for the last time. I imagine the smell of the torn up grass and leaves. I imagine the ghostly sound that can be heard under the grass as the two of them walk away. I catch myself in a strange gesture, I rock backwards and forwards, like Hitler at that famous Olympics, I rock like that, trying not to burst into tears up here over some unknown mountain and hoping that my coffee with milk will be sufficiently warm and sufficiently sweet and that I shall somehow shake this news item from myself.
In the whole story, I feel least hate for the wild forest dogs. I imagine that they reached the baby, that they dug the grass and leaves away, that they smelled the fine aroma of milk and newborn tears and that they took that all into themselves in two tender bites and so put an end to the sacred suffering.
In some forest, perhaps precisely the black one lying ten kilometres beneath me, a sated dog is running about. Here, a little higher up, I sit and drink coffee with milk.
There is no drink that would be sweet enough for something like this. I breathe deeply and look at the sky all around me. Blue, translucent, fresh.
There is no way that I shall be giving up smoking this week.
As soon as this damned plane liberates me, I shall light a cigarette. Victor would not do that, I know, but I am not Victor and I will have to.
There are two young women beside me, talking without drawing breath. I realise that now. One of them is holding her cup just the way I like to, with both hands. As though it is warming her. That always moves me.
I only catch fragments of their conversation:
“… Now I get it. He spent a long time juggling all those three balls in the air, until he realised that he would have to drop one of them, otherwise he’d lose them all. It turned out that it was me who was the ball he decided to drop …”
“… The two of them cut that huge wedding cake together, clumsily and everyone went wild with enthusiasm, cameras flashing, relatives sighing, sobbing! I mean, what’s the big deal? They cut an ordinary cake, i.e. custard, beaten eggs, cream, soft, it’s not as if they cut through reinforced concrete for them to go so crazy! I mean, really …”
“… When you whisk up instant coffee, there is a precise number of drops of water that need to be added! One drop too many and it’s no longer right. It’s just a shapeless mass. However hard you try and keep whisking, that mixture is never going to turn white under your hand. It just won’t obey you any more …”
“… Don’t talk him up! Don’t make him better and more interesting than he really is! On the contrary, give him fewer chances than others. Brush out of his repertoire even something he does have. Then, if he manages to get through all of that – then he’s really quite a guy … “
“… I never thought I’d ever say this: I like the smell of his sweat …”
“… I’d really like to ask him to give me back all those orgasms I gave him …”
“… If there was no bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck atall … “
“… Of course, I kept turning my phone off until I finally realised that no one was calling me any more …”
“… I dreamed that I was talking to a woman, a psychotherapist, and I was telling her that I always hug my pillow when I sleep. She asked me how long I had been sleeping like that, I pretended I couldn’t remember. To myself, I thought: I know, I’ve been sleeping like that since I got married … “
“ … Being without all the others made me sad, but being without him makes me tense, that’s the fundamental difference … “
And here I’m beginning to lose the thread. I don’t hear them anymore. My ears are completely blocked again, yawning doesn’t help, or opening my mouth, or raising my eyebrows. I go back to Victor. I look at the papery cloud in front of me and imagine that it is in fact a ball of cotton wool. Victor is sitting alone in his chemist’s shop, it is evening. He breaks off little pieces of that cloud, puts a small white wad of it into each little bottle of medicine and then carefully inserts the stoppers. When he finishes it all, he counts all the bottles again, puts them into the cupboard of remedies and locks it. There is no one there, but those are the rules, medicines have to be locked up. Victor always respects all rules. The best lives have simple rules. Rules bring peace. Peace brings beauty. Victor’s life is beautiful. And every ailment has its tablet waiting in the cupboard, to cure it.
Love me tender
1
Elvis smelled fabulous! And his hand did not sweat, despite holding mine in his for two whole minutes. He wrapped his other arm round my waist. Firmly too. Quite firmly. I could feel all of him. The sequins on his high collar tickled my nose a bit. Amazing man, that Elvis! As though he was singing only for me, while we danced. He was whispering, but everyone heard him. OK, he had a microphone, but still.
Love me tender, love me sweet,
never let me go …
Who would ever want to let you go! You can keep twirling me round like this forever, as far as I’m concerned. Or until we fall into this pool, whatever.
You have made my life complete,
and I love you so …
I believed every word. And I really wanted to tell him that. But there was no time, and it would not have been right. The man was singing, everyone was watching him, and, which was worse, they were watching me too, and the microphone was there, between my lips and his, which were dramatically close, and who knows what might have transpired in some other situation. And that was just what I wanted to tell him, that I believed everything he said when he was singing. And that he ought to abandon that microphone, flutter his glittering silver cloak and carry me away from here, first down onto the beach, onto the sand, and then who knows where.