What they count on most is the complexity of male desires. It’s hard to answer the general question: what do you want? So I answer very concretely, using names, weights and colors: “I want coffee and doughnuts”—this snaps the passive listener out of her stupor. “What?” is the following logical and slightly astonished question.
“Coffee and doughnuts, but with that taste of the good old days.”
The effect of sincerity is short-lived. They soon turn their back on you again, somehow accusingly, but now with a certain contempt. Women are at first endlessly curious, they start to love me. Then they begin to despise me to my very core, because I turn out to be boring, the living picture of their dissatisfaction. Should I ask them what they wanted from me or whether I’ve promised anything? I don’t think there’s any point.
“Come on, get up, wake up! How can you even feel like sleeping, I could hardly sleep a wink from anxiety.”
What anxiety, I could reply, but I don’t want to. Some breath of the dream is caught between my lips, a warm sip with a strange aftertaste, slightly bitter, slightly sweet, the slightly rotten taste of waking that spurs you to brush your teeth — so as to forget that gloomy little ghost, that telltale memory, trace, souvenir and hint that in your dreams you embraced something dead.
“You haven’t shown me anything of your father’s,” I say after swallowing that chunk of mummified dream.
I lie back on the pillow. She has stopped moving her hand, right as it was passing through the roots of her hair. I love watching women stop moving their hands, especially when executing one of the most primitive female movements.
“What?”
“It just occurred to me all of a sudden, I don’t know why, that you almost never say anything about your father.”
“My father’s been gone for years, you know that.”
“He died.”
I say this without a questioning intonation, yet not exactly as a statement, either. More like an opinion open to argument, proof, verification or refutation.
“What’s the matter with you?” Her nervous liveliness has suddenly dried up. After that I again hear in her voice those notes of annoyance and stubbornness. The feeling that she’s being attacked — by none other than me. “Did something happen? Are you trying to tell me something?”
I keep silent. She reaches out her hand toward mine:
“Come on, get up.”
But I don’t move.
How did I meet her? Our whole shared path has passed under the banner of tension. I can’t understand why, I can’t even recognize myself.
“Get up, get dressed.”
I remain silent in response.
She leans over me threateningly:
“I’m not going to let you do this.”
“You go ahead, leave me alone.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I said leave me alone!”
We fall easily into a childish squabble. Only I can’t remember what we’re fighting about, as usual. There was some theme, some attempt to outwit each other. A childish war always flares up over some formal reason, but the symbolism of the toy, the object under dispute, is usually deeper, much deeper. Like an unconscious motif, for example, a lack of parental love, more precisely a father’s love. I strike again while I know the wound has not yet healed:
“Tell me about your father and I promise to get up right away.”
The glass alarm clock in its see-through case rings near my head — I don’t have time to close my eyes, to protect myself, she hurls it at me from very close range. She didn’t even pick it up in her hand, just swatted at it with her open palm and it smashed against the wall, shattering into pieces.
With eyes now closed, as I overcome the fear of a potential new blow, I continue. So cold and calm that I am amazed at my own voice:
“Tell me about him and you’ll feel better. We’ll both feel better. We’ll make peace. You’ll make peace with yourself.”
A much-needed pause. Silence.
“I’m not going to let you do this,” she speaks the words very quietly, but very clearly, right over my head.
I open my eyes. I see her directly above me. She’s looking at me vertically, her gaze like a plumb line, in its lower part her irises are hidden under the edges of her lower eyelids.
How did I find her? I don’t think it was a matter of choice. Every moment of my communication with her is actually movement toward the very moment when she will strip herself naked, like a steel blade unsheathed, and the true reasons will blaze forth. The more I resist, the longer and more cruelly the blade will be sharpened, raised like a scorpion’s tail, ready to strike.
“I had a really weird dream,” I tell her, to soften her up, at least to start.
“It doesn’t matter,” she replies and makes the first move, just like every other time.
Just like every other time, first a drop of childish blood is shed, in the sense that she makes me suffer through all my childish scorching-enchanting memories all over again. We reach this stage easily — we need only to start the familiar game. In the game, she is never his daughter, as it were. Total disguise, total relief, total flight from the reality of whose daughter she actually is.
His
They only make such an effort for the children of the Party elites. Black cars, no motorcade. They bring the boys and girls there as inconspicuously as possible, at dawn. The children are sleepy, they don’t resist. The medical checkup has to take place in a semi-dream state.
The building is surrounded by woods, you can hear the birds. The stone path leads up to the entrance, now is a convenient time, Sunday, the whole complex is empty. At the entrance: only the guard.
They lead her into a changing room and point to the hook. She takes off her skirt, her shoes, her T-shirt cut low under the arms — they all wear those, both boys and girls. She’s left only in her panties.
“Don’t be afraid,” the doctor with the horn-rimmed glasses tells her, a professor of something or other, and the woman has her lie down on a metal stretcher in front of a strange machine. She isn’t actually a woman, but rather a pudgy man; below the elbow his arms have the same meaty, twisted flab as on the arms of the cleaning lady whom she sees every morning at home with her mop and bucket in the hallway in front of her father’s office. This strange man-woman’s hair is hidden under a white cap, just like the lady who gives out rolls and pours warm milk from a teapot later in the morning at school.
They don’t have school for a few days, so they don’t have snacks during recess. They brought different food and milk in a jar, frothy and very sour — this is the way it has to be, they told her, you mustn’t eat anything else. The wild plums of springtime, the wild cherries in the courtyard of the residence — everything was forbidden. Vacation, they told her, but not at the seaside — you can’t go to the seaside, now isn’t a good time for the seaside.
“Don’t be afraid,” the doctor of something or other tells her, “we’re just going to measure something, we’ll check something, it won’t hurt.” The steel frame of the stretcher and its brown leather hammock start moving slowly. She slides along, lying on top of it, she slides toward a towering lead pyramid in the center of the room, the walls are painted a very light blue, it’s enough to make your head spin and your eyes ache. The pyramid is made up of fat gray rectangles. Her legs are swallowed up with a hissing sound from the electric motor, her body slowly slides forward. She wants to close her eyes, but she can’t, not before reaching the mountain of lead.
“See,” says the doctor, trying to speak in a fairytale voice and failing miserably, “you’ll just pass through this little tunnel and that’s it. It’ll just take a minute, long enough for us to measure something, and then you’ll come out the other side. There’s nothing to be afraid of, it won’t hurt a bit, I promise.”