The bone fire, p.20
The Bone Fire, page 20
There is a gap in the bushes, I step out of it—I’m standing in front of him.
He’s so surprised that he nearly drops his schoolbag.
The expression on his face is one of such alarm that I have to laugh. I am, however, extremely angry. I’m thinking of my hairband, of the pencil shavings and the dust, and when I speak to him there is no gentleness in my voice. I tell him that he has something of mine—and to give it back.
He smiles at me, shakes his head, and he says b-b-but no, he doesn’t have anything of mine. But he’s very happy to see me, he was j-j-just thinking of me, in fact.
I tell him not to think about me, to think about the great French Revolution instead. I’m hoping that will make him stop smiling, but he just laughs. He says there’s no need to bother with these old Commies. They all think they’re going to come back, but no, they’re finished completely.
I shake my head and tell him I don’t care about that—what I care about is why he stole something from me and when he’s going to give it back.
He takes a step toward me, and he says that he hasn’t stolen anything from me, but he would like to. He grabs my hand; his grasp is warm and moist, I’m so surprised that for a moment I can’t move or speak. Then he says that he’s been in love with me from the moment he saw me, when I stood in front of the blackboard and threw my braid behind my back and I wrote my name on the blackboard, yes, ever since the very first moment. I love you, he says, still holding my hand; he takes a step toward me, all the while licking his mouth; he looks into my eyes, he wants to kiss me, it feels as if this weren’t happening to me but to someone else, I see his hand moving, he wants to embrace me, I shout: What are you doing, leave me alone! I tear my hand away from his, I raise my bag and place it between us, and with all my strength I push him away. He stumbles backward; from the thrust the clasp of my bag opens, my schoolbooks and my notebooks fall out, the pages splay out and, clattering, they fall onto the flagstones on the pavement.
My pencil case falls out last, I step over to the side with my empty schoolbag in my hand and I look down. My chemistry notebook is half opened in a puddle, the cover of my pencil case has fallen off, my pencils and pens have all spilled out.
Now look what you’ve done, I yell at him, and I bend down to gather it all up. Gazsi stammers out that he didn’t want to, he didn’t mean to do this, he crouches down, he grabs my chemistry notebook, he takes it out of the puddle, it’s covered with mud. I want to rip it out of his hands, but he doesn’t let me; I pull on it, Gazsi kneels in the puddle, the notebook slips from his fingers, he scrambles to his feet with difficulty.
The edge of his coat is right there in front of my eyes. I know that my hairband is there in the lining, I grab it, even through the fleece and the lining I can feel that it’s there. Give it back! I yell at him. Gazsi says he has nothing, but I’ve already reached into my pocket and pulled out the razor blade, and I cut into his coat. Ripping, the coat material splits into two, inside the coat there is gauze and gray cotton wadding, and in the wadding there is my hairband, I grab it, and I pull it out. So then what is this, I cry out, and I shake the hairband in front of Gazsi’s face. So tell me then what this is, I cry out again, and on my hairband, the bells softly ring.
Gazsi looks at his coat, ripped apart, the frayed lining and the wadding hanging down in tatters. On his face is shock, as if he is unable to understand what happened, and then he sees the razor blade in my hand. He says I’m not normal. I’m crazy, just like my grandmother. Everyone knows about her, that she was in the lunatic asylum for years, well, that’s where I belong too, I’m an idiotic cunt.
He’s almost crying as he yells this out, he turns his back to me and starts walking down the street. I watch him as his hand rummages along the rips on the coat, trying to somehow stuff the wadding back in.
I put my hairband back in my pocket, then I begin to pack my schoolbooks and notebooks back into my bag.
20
That entire day I think about what Gazsi said to me—that I’m crazy, just like my grandmother.
When Grandmother comes into my room with the ironed bed linens in her hands, I suddenly ask her if it’s true what they say about her, that she was locked up in the insane asylum?
She puts the linens into the bureau and says: Yes, it’s true. She ended up there after the war, when, for the first time in her life, she forgot everything. She was there for a long time—weeks, months—and that’s where she met Grandfather. Do I want her to tell me the story?
I nod.
Fine, she says. She sits down on one of the armchairs, and she motions toward the bookcase, for me to look at the jug on the top of it.
It’s a fairly large jug; a rooster with green wings and blue legs struts around on it, its head thrown back, its chest puffed out, you can see that it’s just about to crow. Its crest is blue, its beak is yellow, its tail feathers spread out rigidly, and its tiny black eyes glitter, ready for combat.
Right now, the sun is shining on it; the rooster’s beak is nearly shining.
Grandmother asks me if I notice anything unusual about it.
No, I say, nothing, only that the rooster looks like the fighting type.
She smiles, and she says that the rooster is really beautiful, it was no accident that Grandfather really loved that rooster as well, but I should take a closer look at the jug.
I look at the jug; the white glaze sharply reflects the light back into my eyes. I squint, I see the scales on the rooster’s feet, I see the outlines of its feathers drawn in black.
Grandmother looks up at the jug too. Then she closes her eyes and begins to speak.
* * *
You’re in the hospital, they call it a mental hospital. A lunatic asylum. They say you’re here because they found you in the forest, you were living in a hole scooped out of the ground like some kind of animal, you didn’t even have any clothes on your body, you had smeared mud all over yourself as if you were made of earth, you were muttering and making rasping noises and scratching, you didn’t want to be taken away. They said that you had spent months, maybe even years in the forest, no one knew.
You don’t even know, you don’t know about this or anything else. You don’t remember the forest, you don’t remember the hole, you don’t even remember the earth, your oldest memory is of the wall lined with white tiles, the cloudy mirror hung upon it, and from within, a strange woman with matted hair stares back at you, you don’t even know who she is; you don’t even know who you are.
You don’t want anything, you don’t talk, you let them dress you and then undress you, you let them wash you, you let them put the medicine beneath your tongue, you let them jab needles into your arm. If they ask you something, you don’t answer; you don’t want to hear, you don’t want to understand.
The forest can be seen through the windows of the back corridor. One of the male nurses leads you over there, says, Look, maybe you can remember something, look, because that’s where you were living, there among the trees, look over there and try to remember who you are, what happened to you. You stand there looking at the forest, and suddenly you see that there is some kind of darkness wreathing through the trees, calling you, it speaks to you, it’s yours. You know what you need to do, you need to rip off the clothes that they gave to you, you need to tear the hairpins out of your hair, the hairpins they pinned into your hair, you need to climb out the window, you need to go across the yard, across the fence, across the meadow, up the side of the hill, you need to go back there, back among the trees. You begin to climb onto the windowsill; in your nose there is the scent of the rotting leaves and the moist earth, between your fingers there is the memory of the soft mud, you know what it’s like to smear it on your body, you know by now that everything they say about you is true.
You’re going to go back, that is your place, that’s where you belong. You don’t want to go back, but still, you will go back. You clutch the windowsill, you know that you don’t have the strength to stay here much longer. Then someone pushes you. Not very hard, but still you fall against the glass. In the reflection, you see that it’s a man carrying a suitcase, he pushed you. You turn away from the window, you look at him go; the pushing motion must have made his suitcase open, because sand is spilling out from it in thin lines onto the floor. You look at it for a while, then you follow its trace. You go to where the line of sand is leading you.
You find him in the courtyard; he’s sitting on a bench, in the sunlight. Next to him is the open suitcase with black sand; he’s rummaging in it with two hands, he’s kneading it, turning it over, forming it into something. All the while he’s talking, his voice is like a dry whispering, you don’t understand any of what he’s saying; it’s as if the grains of sand rustling between his fingers are all that you hear. You don’t know what he’s doing, you don’t want to know, not this or anything else, you don’t want to think, you don’t want to live, and yet you look; then the next day you go back, and the day after that, you stand there every day just a few steps away from him, pressing your back against one of the trees in the courtyard, and you watch him from there.
His movements remind you of something, but you don’t know what that is, of course, you just like to look, you like to observe the black grains of sand as they spin through his fingers; you watch him until it grows dark; when dusk falls the man closes his suitcase and snaps the latch, he puts it next to his leg, he waits for a bit, then he stands up, and with the suitcase in his hand, he returns to the sick ward. You step away from the tree, you wait for the nurses who will come and accompany you back to your bed, you don’t want to go, you’re afraid of the night, it’s true it’s never dark in the sick ward, but still you’re afraid, you would rather embrace the trunk of the tree, attach yourself to it so you could stay there, so that they wouldn’t be able to grab you, carry you away.
Days or weeks go by before you notice that in the suitcase there are not only grains of sand, but something else as well; at first you think that it’s larger pieces of stone and fragments of bone, then you take a few steps closer to look at it; you are standing right next to the suitcase, and you see that you were wrong, it’s actually pieces of crockery. Then you notice the gashes on the man’s arms, both of his forearms are covered with cuts; as he moves his fingers, the muscles and tendons stretch beneath his skin, the throbbing pattern of the wounds draws a red net across the skin.
You watch as his fingers dig in the sand; with his hands he suddenly raises two shards from the suitcase; he puts them together, they do not fit; he turns them, they don’t fit that way either; he turns them again, they still don’t fit; one of his hands is trembling, the shards knock against each other, the shuddering in his voice runs through you, the man drops the shards into the sand; he rummages around, he takes out two different shards, he tries to fit them together; he’s trying every possible angle and direction, but they don’t fit together, he throws back those shards, then he rummages in the sand again, looking for two different shards.
Suddenly he turns his face toward you; he looks off to the side, his eyes are gray-green water; then, with a tiny, birdlike movement, he turns his head slightly, now he’s looking at you; he speaks again, and from that point on you know for certain that he’s talking to you, he’s telling you something. As for what he’s saying, you don’t understand that for a long time, his words keep running together, as if he were speaking an unknown language, but you can’t even pay proper attention, you look at his fingers, at the grains of sand trickling through them.
One day, as you stand there in the sun, and you watch the shards of crockery in the man’s hands, you desire to touch the sand. You spread your fingers apart, the sun warms your skin, and you think of sand that has also been warmed by the sun, you know that you too could step over there, you could reach over there, it would be but one single movement, you too could plunge your hands into the sand, you too could search for those two fragments, you too could try to fit them together, you imagine how they touch each other, how they fit, how they go together, how they stick to each other as if you had spread beeswax on the edges of the fracture. For a moment you close your eyes, and when you open them, you see the man once again touching two shards together, they do not fit, but he turns one of them, and then what you just imagined happens: the two shards of crockery perfectly fit together, they stick together; for a moment the man just holds them, then he carefully lays them down on the top of the sand in one of the corners of the suitcase.
You look at the shards, at the pale blue lines that run across the white glaze; you still can’t make out the pattern, but you know that something has begun, that the man will find more pieces that will fit together, not immediately, but not too long from now.
Once again he’s digging in the sand, rummaging in it, and while he speaks you suddenly are able to understand two words: Frozen earth, he says; your comprehension of these words shoots through your skull like the sharpest of headaches, you grab your head, you press the palms of your hands to your ears, you don’t want to hear anything, you don’t want to understand anything, but it’s too late, his words have already moved into your head, they unravel, one after the other, from unintelligibility. A Y-shaped incision, he says, a spade handle, he says, rose, peritoneum, onion skin, barbed-wire fence, bread, bacon, blood clots.
You look and you listen, now you understand every word, as if you’d always understood, his stories are now swirling in your brain, he’s telling them all at once, and always in the middle of the sentences he switches from one to the other, now he is speaking of service at the front, then of a military academy, then about medical school, now he is speaking of being a prisoner of war, then of when he was a tiny child, then of the years he spent in the labor camp. He speaks of long journeys by train, he speaks of waiting, he speaks of the very first time he saw a naked woman, he speaks of what it was like to smoke cigarettes in the trenches, what it was like to fear being wounded, what it was like to wish for death.
He speaks in a mixture of verses, prayers, and songs, with long and detailed descriptions of surgeries and made-up stories. He tells a story about an appendix removal almost until the end, then he begins to talk about how he’d never tasted anything so sweet as the corn that, in his childhood, they would roast by digging them, husks and all, into the eternally burning slag heap behind the ironworks for fifteen minutes, and then the kernels of corn turned brown and they tasted like caramel, then he talked about how in the camp one time they had to dig a canal ditch for eight days without sleeping, standing up to their thighs in freezing water, the men, one after the other, fainted around him into the water, the ones who were lucky were pulled out by the guards and beaten on their chests until they came to and spat out the black water they’d swallowed; then he began to say that once he saw with his own eyes a man escape from behind a barbed-wire fence by cobbling wings together from the bark of a birch tree, straw, and strands of hair from his beard, and with that he was able to fly above the roofs of the barracks, and from there to the guard tower, and from there up to the heavens.
He tells every story over and over so many times that you already know all of them by heart, and yet you can’t stop listening as he talks, because he tells every story a little differently each time, leaving out certain details or elaborating on others, he tells a long story about how over the course of one night he sharpened the edge of a spade with a croissant-shaped piece of stone, using very slow pulling movements; it became much sharper than a razor, so that you not only feel the smoothness of that pulling movement in your hand, but you hear the soft yet protracted squeaking of the spade’s metal edge as it cuts deep down to your bones, so clearly that you have goose bumps all over both arms from it.
In the meantime, the man has found more shard fragments that fit together; with trembling hands he places them in a row next to each other in one of the corners of the suitcase. Already it’s clear that what he’s trying to put back together is a large glazed ceramic jug, and you know why, it’s because he thinks that by doing this he’ll be able to fix his hands; if he’s able to put the jug together he’ll be able to cure himself of that trembling; his movements will be precise; his grasp will be as certain as it was before, and then he will finally be able to complete what he set out to do before the war—become a vascular surgeon.
You’ve heard the stories so many times by now that sometimes you feel that everything that happened to him has happened to you. You reach your hand toward the suitcase, you look at the shadow of your fingers, spread apart, as you turn the palm of your hand to the sun, the shadows extend out, penetrating into the sand like black roots, then you turn your hand to one side, your hands weave into one trailing vine, then once again they separate. You look at the palm of your hand, at the smooth skin of your forearm, and suddenly on that too you see that web of scarlet wounds, as if they were really there, as if it had been you who placed your wrists onto the spade’s sharpened edge, as if it had been you who gashed both of your forearms right down to the bone, as if it were you who had wanted to die, as if it were you who had wanted everything to end forever.
You stand up, you sense how the air sharply penetrates deep into the wounds, your blood, throbbing, spraying out from them, the blood runs all the way down your palms, between your fingers, it feels neither scalding hot nor cold, simply lukewarm. You’re just imagining these wounds, but even so you know that it’s true, your life and your strength are flowing across your palms. You feel that if you could stand without wincing, without moving, then everything would really come to an end, you would really die, or if not, then at least you would forever lose the possibility of knowing who you were and how you ended up here.
The imaginary pain pierces your arm like a knitting needle stabbing it; you can’t stand it, you cry out, and then suddenly you see that a long needle is indeed stabbing your arm, now you’re not imagining it, and this is not the memory of someone else but your own, it really happened, the only thing was it didn’t happen to you, but you were there and you saw how it happened—you remember.
