“And you’ve never, ever thought that you should have had a different kind of fate?”
“Some people move through the world in such a way that their sense of order goes along with them. When they enter my room and see an open book lying face-down and crooked on the desk, they will, without fail, pick it up, bookmark the page with a strip of paper, and position it neatly on the corner of the desk, face-up, its spine evenly parallel to the edge. Those people must possess a great clarity, which keeps them connected to the overarching sense of order, and which comes to mind when they see the errors of the world. I don’t have that. When I bump something in a strange room by accident, I always try to put it back exactly where it was before. I don’t know whether the spot is right or wrong. I wish for nothing other than to be capable of slipping through the world without leaving a single trace behind.”
“As if it were a mirror?”
“I was good at it in school. Everything they taught us was absurdly easy, but I realized before long that I mustn’t let it show. As long as I’m a good enough student who causes no problems, I won’t have any problems with them either; but if I’m too good, if I understand everything without needing their explanations and ask questions about things that they might not have noticed at all, I’ll be penalized—then, in class, the teacher will call on me to give the correct answer in order to put down the others who haven’t been able to come up with it; and at the end-of-year assembly, I’ll be brought up in front of the whole school and their hateful glares as if to stand as a role model, but in reality, it’s a pillory, and it’ll be that way every time. As a result I was diligent, but dull. Things grew more complicated after graduation. I would gladly have given birth to a couple of rambunctious kids who weren’t like me in any way, and gone around cleaning up after them, but the Villa didn’t allow it—it was like a stone around my neck; our fates were intertwined and it was still there no matter how much I might have wanted to fade into the world.”
“Because you yourself could be forgotten, but not your name?”
“I can’t say I’ve come to terms with it. You don’t come to terms with those kinds of things. Like how you can’t get used to torture—you can only lose consciousness. Although it might appear to be the exact opposite, it’s actually always been very easy for me to make decisions. Decision-making means that something is being changed, doesn’t it. This is the way it will be from now on, not anyhow else anymore. The chance for things to go otherwise has been erased. We’ve chosen our path. But there’s nothing for me to choose. As a result, every decision of mine has been an agreement. I agree to what comes. No matter that it’s hard and painful sometimes—that’s how it is for everyone, inevitably, isn’t it? I generally don’t go out more than I really have to, just every once in a while in springtime—when the amusement park opens up on the river bend, I go and I wander around there; I watch the skilled sharpshooters winning stuffed teddy bears for their sweethearts and the flushed young mothers keeping watch over their sons galloping on the carousel horses. I’m not cheered by the fact that I’m not one of them, but I’m not saddened by it, either. And I don’t feel like a spy there like I did at school dances, which I attended with the other girls just so that my absence wouldn’t be noticed. One time on a whim, without really understanding what I was doing, I bought a ticket for the Ferris wheel and let it hoist me up above the town. And I just stared at the floor of the cabin.”
“Do you know how many people never actually learn to be alone?”
“I’ve never talked about myself this way. At least I don’t remember having done so.”
Father.
“I remember almost nothing about him,” Laila said. “Just that sometimes, when I was playing with my ball on the second floor despite being told not to—I might have been, say, two or three years old—and it rolled into his study, my heart would be pounding when I went in to fetch it and he didn’t even look in my direction, so engrossed in his work; but even so—one time, he lifted his head and smiled, said something, but I was so startled that it might as well have been in a foreign language. Then he shooed me away. The fights started soon after. They always closed the doors so I wouldn’t hear, and I didn’t. He didn’t leave his study door open anymore then, either. And so, I never did find out what on earth he was writing.”
Mother.
“Father never talked about Mother with bitterness,” Brother said, “because he saw himself as the guilty party. Although he did talk about her a lot. I knew about you the whole time, too; I knew I had a sister. Losing you really was the greatest punishment for Father; nothing could ease it, not even me. But Father always called her Mother, even though she herself hadn’t carried me, you know; so I’ve never had another Mother. I don’t want to see her picture. Let me have the picture that Father’s stories painted for me.”
Father.
“There were only a few random traces of him left at our place. His big desk wasn’t removed from the study because it was too heavy for us, and every once in a while when I took some old volume from the shelf in the Villa’s library, I would find thoughts jotted down in the margins in his handwriting. I read them without understanding anything, as if they were messages meant specifically for me; notices from the blank places in a photo album, just for me, not for anyone else.”
Mother.
“Father would have someone from time to time, and I wasn’t supposed to talk about Mother then. Some of them tried to find out from me what Mother had been like so they could be able to surprise him with only good things. They didn’t know I lacked my own memories of her. They thought that when I didn’t tell them, it was out of jealousy—that I wanted to keep it all to myself. They would’ve been right, but I didn’t have anything.”
Father.
“Red autumn leaves, leaving.”
Mother.
“The first snow, so delicate that it vanishes when it touches the ground.”
Father.
“And afterward,” Brother said, “for as long as I can remember, he didn’t write anything anymore. But he talked about the poems he’d left behind, talked about them a lot. He hoped that they’d be left to you. Maybe you’ll find them some day. Maybe you’ll understand.”
Mother.
“She wasn’t able to forgive him,” Laila said. “She probably didn’t even try. Everything had to disappear—everything. Papers went into the fireplace, clothes to the dump, she even smashed his big coffee mug on the kitchen floor. And the fireplace was lit for several days in a row, the flames dancing in angry, all-forgetting joy. That, I remember.”
Father.
“That’s true. He often said he would die in a fire, just unaware that he’d done so already. Then he tried to paint instead of writing, but he himself realized it was pointless. In reality, he wasn’t good at anything; maybe not even at writing. Maybe he never even existed.”
Mother.
“We loved the Villa, probably even more than each other. But while my love was mixed with awe—every door there opened up into a netherworld, from which I myself, in a mysterious and actually inexplicable way, had come—then Mother’s love was split almost cleanly in half with rage. When we didn’t have the servants anymore, she would still