He shakes his head. His forehead is dry as parchment paper.
‘I don’t want to do confession,’ he says. ‘Just hold my face in your hands.’ He smiles weakly; there is mischief in his smile.
She does it without hesitation. She feels his thin skin and delicate bones, the cavities of his eyeballs. She feels him pulsing underneath her fingers, trembling, as though tense. The skull, that delicate latticework structure of bone, perfectly solid and strong yet fragile at the same time. Her throat tightens, and it is the first and last time she is close to tears. She knows this contact brings him relief; she can feel it soothing the tremor beneath his skin. Finally she removes her hands, but he stays still, with his eyes closed. Slowly she leans in over him and kisses his forehead.
‘I was a good person,’ he whispers, digging into her now with his eyes.
She assents.
‘Tell me a story about something,’ he says.
Stumped, she clears her throat.
He prompts her: ‘Tell me what it’s like where you are.’
So she starts:
‘It’s the middle of summer, the lemons on the trees are ripe now…’
He interrupts: ‘Can you see the ocean from your window?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘When the tide goes out, the water leaves seashells in its wake.’
But this is a ruse: he hadn’t planned to listen, and for a moment his gaze clouds over, but then its former sharpness is restored. Then he looks out at her from very far away, and then she knows that he is no longer a part of the world where she is. She could not have identified exactly what it was she saw in him – whether fear and panic or precisely the opposite: relief. Faintly he conveys – clumsily, and in a whisper – his gratitude, or something like it, and then he goes to sleep. Then she takes the vial from her purse and fills the syringe up with its contents. She removes the drip from the IV and slowly injects all the droplets of the liquid she has brought. Nothing happens aside from the fact that his breathing stops, suddenly, naturally, as though the movement of his rib cage from before had been an odd anomaly. She runs her hand over his face, reinserts the drip into his IV, and smoothes out the place on the sheets where she’d been sitting. Then she leaves.
His sister is standing on the porch again, smoking.
‘Cigarette?’ she says.
This time she says no.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to visit him again?’ asks the woman. ‘It’s been so important to him that you come.’
‘I’m leaving today,’ she says, and as she goes down the stairs, she adds, ‘You take care of yourself.’
When the plane takes off it switches off her mind. She does not give it a further thought. All those memories now disappear. She spends two days in Amsterdam, which at this time of year is windy and cold and could essentially be reduced to combinations of three colours: white, grey, and black, wandering around museums and spending the evenings at her hotel. As she walks along the main street, she comes upon an anatomy exhibit, with human specimens. Intrigued, she goes inside and spends two hours there, taking in the human body in all its possible permutations, perfectly preserved using the latest techniques. But since she’s in a strange state of mind and very tired, she sees it through a kind of fog, inattentively, just the outlines. She sees nerve endings and the vas deferens that look like exotic plants that had escaped the control of their gardener, bulbs, orchids, lace, embroidery of tissues, meshwork of neuration, slate shards, stamens, antennae and whiskers, racemes, streams, folds, waves, dunes, craters, elevations, mountains, valleys, plateaus, winding blood vessels…
In the air, over the ocean, she finds the coloured leaflet for the exhibit in her purse, featuring a human body, without skin, posed like in the sculpture by Rodin: head resting on hand resting on arm resting on knee, body troubled, almost thinking, and although it’s missing its skin and its face (the face turns out to be one of the most superficial characteristics of the whole human form), you can still see that the eyes are oblique, exotic. Then, half asleep, submerged in the dark, discreet rumble of the plane’s engines, she imagines that soon enough, when the technology becomes more affordable, plastination will be available to all. You’ll be able to put up the bodies of your loved ones instead of putting up tombstones, with labels like, ‘So-and-so travelled in this very body for a few years. Then he left it at such-and-such an age.’ As the plane prepares for its descent, she is suddenly seized by fear and panic. And she grips the armrests, hard.
When finally, exhausted, she gets back to her own country, back onto that beautiful island, the customs officer asks her several routine questions: had she come into contact with any animals where she’d been, had she been in rural areas, might she have been exposed to biological contaminants.
She pictures herself on that porch, shaking the snow off her boots, pictures that overfed dog running up the stairs and rubbing up against her legs. And she pictures her hands as they opened the vial that looked like a perfume sample. So she says, peacefully, yes.
The customs official requests that she step aside. And there her heavy winter boots are washed down with a disinfecting agent.
FEAR NOT
I gave a ride to a young Serb in the Czech Republic named Nebojša. The whole way he told me stories about the war, to the point that I began to regret that I’d picked him up.
He said that death marks places like a dog marking its territory. Some people can sense it right away, while others simply start to feel uncomfortable after a time. Every stay in any place betrays the quiet ubiquitousness of the dead. As he said:
‘At first you always see what’s alive and vibrant. You’re delighted by nature, by the local church painted in different colours, by the smells and all that. But the longer you’re in a place, the more the charm of those things fades. You wonder who lived here before you came to this home and this room, whose things these are, who scratched the wall above the bed and what tree the sills were cut from. Whose hands built the elaborately decorated fireplace, paved the courtyard? And where are they now? In what form? Whose idea led to these paths around the pond and who had the idea of planting a willow out the window? All the houses, avenues, parks, gardens and streets are permeated with the deaths of others. Once you start feeling this, something starts to pull you elsewhere, you start to think it’s time to move on.’
He added that when we are in motion, there’s no time for such idle meditations. Which is why to people on trips everything seems new and clean, virginal, and, in some sense, immortal.
And when he got out at Mikulec, I repeated to myself his strange-sounding name. Ne-boy-sha. It sounded exactly like the Polish ‘Nie bój się’: do not be afraid.
DAY OF THE DEAD
The guidebook maintains that this holiday lasts for three days. When it falls in the middle of the week, the government rounds out the length of the holiday’s duration, and schools and public offices get a whole week off. Radio stations broadcast without interruption the music of Chopin, since it is thought that this favours concentration and serious reflection. It is expected that every inhabitant of the country will visit in this time the graves of their dead. Since the country has over the course of the last twenty years gone through an unprecedented boom and industrialization, this means that almost all the residents of several of the large modern cities set out for distant provinces. All the flights and trains and buses have been reserved for months. Those who weren’t quick enough before will now be forced to drive to the graves of their ancestors in their own cars. On the eve of the holiday the roads out of the cities are already congested. Because the holiday is in August, sitting in a traffic jam in high temperatures is not much fun. Therefore people, anticipating all sorts of inconveniences, come equipped with small portable plasma TVs and coolers. If you close the tinted windows and turn on the AC, you can get through those few hours, particularly in the pleasant company of family or friends, with a travelling buffet. This is a time people make phone calls. Thanks to the fact that mobile phones are being used everywhere for video connections, you can make up the distances in social contacts. You can even, sitting in a traffic jam this way, connect with your friends through videoconferences, gossip and make plans to meet up after everyone gets back home.