Which I do instantly: I’m sorry, I say, but you can’t come in, you can’t, I’m a mess, I shake my head, slowly closing the door in her face, because I don’t want to be unkind, and because I’m wondering hypocritically where she’ll go, who’s going to help her, I feel sorry for her already, and guilty, but not to the extent that I want to run after her, bring her back to this mess of a flat, and of me, falling apart at the age of twenty-six and not knowing why.
As for Aunt Višnja, she’s been in my bad books for a long time, I think to myself, as if such thoughts are any justification before the all-knowing and all-seeing, maybe he records everything in the mysterious memory of the Universe – that Aunt Višnja of ours would give the leading roles to the children of important, politically powerful parents and leave the bit parts for the rest of us when putting on plays at the theatre she once ran, where my mother wound up at a certain point in her life, with me, of course.
Oh, she’s not that bad, my mother said when I complained, the poor thing has been through a lot, and when I grew up I learned what “the poor thing” had been through, which was that at the age of sixteen she had run away from home with an actor she had fallen in love with and who had literally gambled her away in a card game when he ran out of money. And then she passed from hand to hand, became an actress and, when she got old, a drama teacher, which is how she came with the children from Pula to Zagreb and stayed with us, where she had a free bed and room service.
But you’ve never been fair, I tell her, the thorn of her injustice still in my heart; as if that justifies the inhumane way I treated the girl.
To hell with her, too, I say to myself, disposing of the ballast that landed on me, as if I don’t have enough problems of my own, and I open the door to the space between the bathroom and the two rooms, a space that is a room in itself, except with no window overlooking the street – it does have a window, but it looks out in to the elevator shaft, which is always dark because it’s a ground-floor flat – and I step onto the carpet just long enough for the insects nestling inside it to jump out and take possession of my ankle.
Get off of me, I shout, shaking them off my leg, pushing away the hovering dog; what do you want, you stupid thing, I say, showing her my bite-pocked leg, which these guys go for when they’ve got nothing better around to nibble, and I close off the “prohibited zone”, as I’ve called the rooms ever since they started breeding there and the dog and I escaped to the other side, to the dining room with the small kitchen and little maid’s room, the only refuge we’ve got left. For now.
Luckily, the insects haven’t made it into the hall, where the toilet is, but they’ve occupied the bathroom, and the cupboards; I unplugged the phone, and at the last minute moved the television into the dining room so that at least I’d have something to break the silence, even if I didn’t watch it, so I’d know I’m alive because that’s not how I feel. I’m as alive as a zombie. As the living dead. And I have no idea how it happened – how I became a zombie – when only three days ago I was literally dancing with joy around the house, happy that the bastard had finally left; forever, I even sang, because we had thought it would be forever.
You and I are going to solve this, I tell my canine adviser curled up on the chair, who, hearing my words, raises her head and pricks up her ears, actually the top part of her ears, the bit next to her head, because she’s a cocker spaniel and her ears hang down to her neck so she can’t really prick them up, only to immediately sink back into her chair. Yes we will, I say, though I don’t know how because to know how you have to know what’s happening to you in the first place. And I don’t, life has caught me off-guard, it’s as if I was possessed by demons the moment he walked out of the flat, slamming the door behind him, when I thought I was so strong, when I did a victory dance around the space still uncontaminated by insects.
Hey-ho, I danced on the corpse of my marriage, the dog at my heels, twirling my twenty-six-year-old body down the hall, into the bedroom, and then into my mother’s room, as if to make sure that he wasn’t hiding there.
My mother’s room is a mess, with rolled up carpet leaning against the wall, the furniture pushed into the middle of the room, the paintbrushes, buckets and paint tins that I will later move into the hall, who knows why, probably to have a reason to stretch my muscles, as if that would help. And then hey-ho, it was back again to the dining room for the wine, because you always have to drink to victories, to make them bigger, and to defeats, to make them smaller, and then with the bottle back again into the hall, where we keep the bottle opener handily on a tray on the table and just as I grabbed it I fell onto the floor, as if mown down. And the bottle dropped out of my hand, quietly rolling until it came to a stop under the table.
It wasn’t that I tripped, no, I literally collapsed onto the carpet, as if my legs had given way, the same legs that had danced their way here, stockingless, in brown cork sandals with four-inch heels, legs as white as a naked corpse on the carpet, I suppose, because I’d never seen a corpse on the carpet, dressed or otherwise, legs that didn’t seem to belong to me, that were huge, they’d always been too strong, at least in my opinion, because there were also other opinions, legs that the dog immediately proceeded to sniff, maybe she knew something that we have long since lost.
So what if I collapsed, I tell myself, getting to my feet pretty easily, because I’m elastic, I have no trouble assuming a lotus position, doing cartwheels or a bridge, but I already know that I fell not because I wasn’t paying attention but because I had a blow to the head, an internal not an external blow, and it wasn’t my blood vessels that had decided to burst, as they had with him. No, the blow came to my head from my stomach, from my solar plexus where the third chakra is located, I read that somewhere but forget what it means except that it’s something vague and connected to your whole being, something that comes to life or collapses, that masters life or is mastered by it, as in my poor case.
The fact that I could stand on my legs and move them again was of no help at all, because while the machine worked externally, internally it was experiencing a permanent, endless breakdown. Early this morning I crept out of the house, waited for the poor dog to poo, trying not to be impatient because she was taking so long to sniff out a good spot, and feeling guilty because that’s all I can offer her now, she’s being deprived of the long walks she enjoys as if her life is unimportant, and it isn’t, so, keeping my head down, I ran back into the house and the realm of insects.
Until recently, there were no fleas at all, except for two or three on the dog, which are good for it and should be left there, say the experts, but after I collapsed on the floor they reproduced at the speed of light, as if they were unable to reproduce while I was strong, but the loss of my strength was a signal for them to breed, for a population explosion in my flat, miraculously arrested at the door to the hall.
At first I tried to exterminate them individually, one by one, since I couldn’t go out to get something from the pharmacy, and I listened to the blood-bloated insects crack, satiated to death, I thought to myself, as if that was any consolation. It wasn’t, I didn’t empathise with the parasites, I even drowned them in the sink, but to no effect. They came out of the water just as alive and hungry as before, so I gave up. I preferred taking the dog and retreating to the uncontaminated zone, even if I was bitten all over. And there I waited for who knows what, because it’s a known fact that fleas can go hungry for a long time, they can go without food for a year, they’re biblically tough. The dog and I aren’t.
And so I finished up on the southern, warm, sunny side of the world, where the balcony overlooks the courtyard with an apricot tree, its fruits scooped up into a bucket a long time ago by the neighbour who lives in the basement. I don’t know if she gave them to the other neighbours, but she certainly didn’t give them to me. The neighbour from the apartment above ours, on the first floor, had planted the tree when she was a child, accidentally, when she was playing in the courtyard and buried the pit of an apricot she’d just eaten in the ground.
It’s