I usually prefer the south, warmth and lots of light, but not now. Now I could do with the other side of the world, with the north and its perpetual cold and dusk, its connection to Hades where I landed when I collapsed on the floor and clearly died. Died as the wife of my husband, as his partner, died along with love, faithfulness, loyalty and everything that goes with it, all shattered by the broken vow of “forever”, now nothing but an empty word. Because nothing is “forever”, not the dog, not me, not the damned insects or this apartment or this building or this tree or this town or this planet or the Milky Way and the Universe with it, everything changes, and so do words, which are basically always a matter of politics, in other words, a bitch.
To Hades what’s dead, to life what survives, I tell myself rationally, but I don’t go out, I’m still down there, looking down on my corpse as if I want to bring it back to life, although I don’t. And I can’t. Because you can’t revive the dead, the dead stay dead and should be buried or cremated so that we don’t look at them anymore, so that we can part ways because they don’t belong to us anymore, nor do we to them. We belong only in our thoughts – me now and me once upon a time – and in photos, and these photos keep us together like Siamese twins attached at the head, making it impossible to separate the two. Except with a knife. When one of us will drop away.
II.
Finally something I can wear, I say to my mother seven years earlier, meaning the latest fashion pictured in the women’s magazine Žena, aimed at women of all ages, but especially mine – an age group that doesn’t know anything yet, that has just an inkling, an idea – offering fashion trends and advice on how to catch a man and keep him, nothing about how to get rid of him, I notice now but don’t then, no I don’t – my mind then is on the craze for maxis, as compared to minis, which I can’t wear... I’m a bit chunky for a girl of nineteen, with narrow hips and broad shoulders, but strong thighs and calves, and legs that are neither short nor long, but definitely not made for mini skirts, which is what all the girls are wearing when I’m in secondary school... The vogue is for willowy girls with no curves, for girls built like boys, something I will never be unless I starve myself, and not even then. Because even when I starve myself, the curves remain, I am still chubby, I’d have to starve myself to death for my flesh to melt down to the bone, I’d have to waste away, I realised later, when I lost a drastic amount of weight, though still not enough to wear a mini, with all its damned demands.
In school, it never occurs to me to lose weight, I have no idea that you can lose weight, not even theoretically, for some things I am just stupid, even when they are obvious, I just schlep around in dresses and knee-length skirts like some old bag. The boys in my class give me a “C” for my legs, those little idiots graded us, a “B” for my face, and an “A” for my body, so my average is a “B” and I feel doomed and unhappy; I drag myself through life like a downtrodden cat, casting morose looks at people right and left, which nobody finds attractive, and if somebody does, then I don’t find them attractive. Whatever happened to that attractive thirteen-year-old girl, I wonder miserably, when three lovelorn boys used to stand under my balcony, the fourth pining for me in the school corridors, tossing me little packets of foreign chocolates and sweets, hoping to impress me... I ate the sweets with the brazenness of a vamp who takes but gives nothing in return, and even laughs at him. So now you try being the one who is invisible when she walks by, despised in advance, looking enviously at the other girls’ long, slim legs, because even trousers don’t look good on you, watching them you smile at the magic encircling them but that locks you out a hundred times over. So you stop even smiling and all you can do is nurse your contempt for the girls who leaf through fashion magazines that offer pointers about clothes and make-up, colour-coordinated brand-name shoes and handbags, and, to make matters worse, the sluts are rich, which you are not, and they revel in the luxury of all that fashionable plumage whereas you have already opted for black, dark blue and dark brown, colours that make you look thinner and taller because they hide your shortcomings. Your superiority comes from the inside, you tell yourself, because you see how shallow it is to view fashion as fundamental to life, to prattle about hairstyles and eye shadow and mascara and shaping your brows to look arched, to admire skeletal women who five foot ten inches tall and weigh less than eight stone but since everybody is crazy about them then you have to be, too, and how much it will cost you to work on your body instead of your mind, which is the only thing worth the effort.
And then I start uni, and the fashion changed, not by ditching the mini but by introducing the maxi, the skirt that goes down almost to your ankles; maxis had been in, then they disappeared, and then they had a comeback just at the right moment, as if somebody heard me secretly calling out for something that those of us with fuller figures could wear, and so I ran to my mother’s cousin Julia, a dressmaker who made all our clothes for us, with a fabric that I loved – dark brown, studded with details in the same colour – my eyebrows already plucked and pencilled into an arch, my mousy brown hair bleached, I just need that maxi to be trendy, too, rather than one of the herd taking the early morning tram to work, I think to myself, overjoyed.
I even found a pattern for a dress, with an A-line skirt and a long-sleeved button-up top – I’ll have the buttons covered in the same brown fabric – and with a belt to emphasise the waist, I chatter away, telling poor Julia what I want. She does her sewing in the kitchen, which is crammed with all sorts of things, and where all six of them congregate – her husband, three daughters and son, the neighbours often joining them, all of them sitting around, huddling like birds, filling the room with their warmth. There is always a pot of coffee on the stove, not the real thing, chicory, a coffee substitute, with everybody helping out, chatting, joking, laughing, even the two older sisters’ boyfriends join in, and miraculously, with all the comings and goings, everyone manages to fit into that kitchen; I love all the babble, which I don’t have at home because I am an only child, always alone.
I ask Julia when I can have the first fitting and she says the following week, but that is too long for me to wait because I want to wear the dress that minute, on the catwalk, in the street, at uni, my lectures have just started, and so has the flirting, and I want to present myself in the best possible light as soon as possible, because first impressions are crucial. So I ask for the fitting to be on Thursday, in two days' time, and I want to be able to wear the dress on Monday, because tomorrow I’m going to have the buttons covered. And I can come for the dress on Sunday, even if it’s in the evening, I say, pestering her, I don’t care that I’m making the woman work on a Sunday, not giving her a moment’s rest, even though I know she suffers from constant headaches because of all the pressure she has, from her family, from her clients, and that she always has a little packet of headache powder in her pocket, which she takes whenever she feels she needs it, as she’s doing now, while I’m pestering her; her childlike little hand dips into her pocket, takes out the packet, opens it and, using the paper like a funnel, she pours the powder into her mouth, while her son, already well trained in these matters, brings her a glass of water.
Julia is almost a midget, she’s always been grey, with a face like a raisin, round and soft like a puff of cotton, placed on this earth as if she’s always been crushed, though maybe she hasn’t, maybe that’s just how I saw her; mind you, I would be crushed, too, if I had to deal with the pressure of the five of them, no matter how much I loved them. And when you are crushed you don’t know how to defend yourself, not even from a squirt who is barely nineteen, who is breathing down your neck, who is young and big and on your back – two of you can fit into one of her – because all she can see is Monday when she’ll be fitted into that brown fabric, the one she brought, and it will shape her figure, highlighting the difference between her and the rest of the world, launching her into the starry heights of beauty, or at least attractiveness, making her feel important, feel like somebody, because in her mind she is nobody. Who am I, nothing and nobody, the words keep reverberating in her head; she has no idea that she will remain nothing even when he tells her that she is something, because in his mind he is nothing as well, but she is supposed to reassure him that he is something; what a farce...
We don’t live far from one another, our parents