I’ve stood at the top of the stairs that lead underground several times, but I haven’t been able to make myself walk all the way down; my legs have gone weak each time.
Sometimes I wonder if the lilies of the valley have already faded in Deep Tarn. Lilldolly and I would walk around together picking big bouquets of them. There are no lilies of the valley here. I often think about the little girl they lost, about Lilldolly and Arnold, their world, into which I had been welcomed.
On the days before the boy’s operation, he had to be scrubbed clean each night with a special disinfectant soap solution. I was so afraid that he’d die during the operation; they were going inside his head after all, to cut him there. When I washed him with the strong-smelling soap, I thought that it was like a ritual cleansing before a sacrificial slaughter. The animal that was to be sacrificed had to be very clean and prepared before it was handed over to the sacrificial priests. The soap smelled of incorruptible ritual and was so alien on the small, soft baby body in my hands, so foreign to the boy’s own scent. Now I was following directives while I prepared to give him away. After doing this, I would, for better or worse, place his life in the hands of strangers who spoke a different language, a language that came from the outside instead of from the inside.
The operation did go well in the sense that he survived and stopped crying and twitching. But at the same time, it was as if they’d cut him off from himself, as if a connection had been severed. His spirit couldn’t find a place to rest in his body afterward, he had no way of expressing himself, there was no city that was his own city, not even the city of tears was left. But what I kept thinking of was those cleanings, that particular kind of cleansing, the preparation.
June 30
For once to wash yourself clean. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s not dirt that I want to wash off. But rather a sense of presence, of myself; an invasive feeling. A consciousness that never gives way, that isn’t about anything in particular but simply about being, about existing. It’s a feeling so intense and infringing it’s like being slowly grated into shreds, like being scraped against sharp holes, no part of me is spared, no surface left alone.
I’m supposed to be alive; I’ve understood as much. I have to keep living. All the deeds evident on my body, like fingerprints all over me, like dirty, inappropriate hands, Daddy’s hands, mostly Daddy’s hands in addition to my own, they will remain. I was Daddy’s girl. I was the apple of his eye and even though he beat and humiliated me as much as the rest of the family, I was somehow his, part of his sphere. My mom was inaccessible; she sat with my older sister and the younger siblings and I stood outside their sphere and looked at them as if they sat in a spotlight of some kind. I longed for my mom — or perhaps I should say that I longed for Mom since she wasn’t mine at all. At any rate, I stood outside and longed to be with them, with Daddy’s hands, his presence clinging to my entire body like a virus.
I think it was because I was standing there to the side that it became my responsibility always to watch, that I was the one who had to witness everything, not just how Mom was humiliated, or my siblings, or myself. I had to watch Daddy too, and not walk away when he gave in to his fury. Sometimes I think my sister is the kind of person who spared herself, and I can hate her for that. She protected herself from seeing and didn’t participate or feel guilty; she just sat there with Mom like some noble victim. I was already tainted from the start, my heart couldn’t release me from getting mixed up and dissolved and touched and I often think that this was my fate, exactly this. It was meant for me. I don’t claim that I’m any better than my sister as I write this, I just envy her. I will never be clean.
Inside me, the boy’s gaze and spirit and what I’ve done are preserved. It is now part of my life. You can’t run away from your deeds; they become hands on your body and you have to live with them, force yourself to remain human with a voice and a face. I knew this afterward, when I was rocking and mute. I was in the kitchen with the boy where he lay on the floor wailing in despair, I was there constantly and would never get out.
I’d made him a birthday cake, a lovely birthday cake. We admired it for a long time together before I cut into it. Then I had to witness how he couldn’t eat it. I fed him spoon after spoon, but the cake kept falling out of his mouth and down his chin and chest. I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand it. At first, I was overcome with sorrow. I couldn’t bear seeing that he couldn’t live. And those eyes of his. Trapped inside of him. In those eyes I glimpsed his own terrible sorrow of not being able to do anything. Of being so helpless. Something in me snapped. Rage welled up. A rage that told me to defend him, in some way defend him against all the frustration and impossibility he was experiencing. I began beating him, beating his body and everything that hindered him. I began beating the obstacles out of him that cut him off from life, beating the curse out of him that he’d inherited from me, everything but his gaze and his longing. I beat him. I wanted to break something inside me. I thrashed out with anything I could reach, chairs, bottles, I flung anything I could get hold of, flowerpots, plates, cups, spoons. I threw them at him. At the one I saw. At myself. At the world. At his inability to live. At myself. I was responsible. I had given birth to his misery. At the same time, I screamed. No! I shrieked. No, no, no! I screamed in a terrible voice.
It was when it was already too late and he’d fallen from his wheelchair and lay in a mess on the floor that I saw him looking at me — how his gaze burned, concise, relentless. That’s when I came to my senses. He wasn’t me, his eyes said, he was separate, his fate was his own. A wide gash in his head was bleeding and suddenly the whole apartment filled with his scream and I fell to the floor and slid my hands under his head and placed my cheek against his and I whispered I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but not a sound came from my lips and I could feel life leaving him, could feel how it stole away from him and was gone. I carefully removed my hands and sat up and prayed to the God that couldn’t possibly exist, prayed to him to let me die with the boy, to let it all end. I’ve broken the fundament of life, I’ve broken the covenant, so let me now die with the boy.
I’d cut him off, cut off his gaze upon the world, killed his gaze. Sebastian’s gaze. And his eyes weren’t mine, no, not even his pain or his disappointment was mine. There’s space between people, and it is necessary, it’s a boundary that must not be crossed, you have to stay behind it. There’s space between people, and it is necessary, it’s a boundary that must not be crossed, you have to stay behind it.
I must not say the words: I killed my boy whose name was Sebastian, I crushed his head the way Arnold crushed the head of the moose calf. Those words are unspeakable. How could I have told Lilldolly? Yet she’s the only one I’ve met whom I’d even considered telling.
“Be calm, my child,” begins a poem by –
IV
~ ~ ~
It was evening, already late, when Kosti arrived. Marta was sitting at the table writing in her diary and he just stood there, in the doorway.
“Sorry for barging in,” he said, and his voice sounded large and deep in her ears.