He can’t permit himself any further searching, he’s afraid, he draws back his hand. Half-asleep he imagines that his hand encounters some sort of foreign territory, something he’d overlooked for seven years of their marriage, something shameful, some defect, a strip of hairy skin, a fish scale, some bird down, an unusual structure, an anomaly.
He scoots over to the edge of the bed and from there looks at the shape that is his wife. In the pale light of the development that flows through the window her face is just a faint outline. He falls asleep gazing into that spot, and when she wakes up, it’s starting to get light in their bedroom. The light of dawn is metallic, it ashens colours. For a moment he has the frightening impression that she is dead – he sees her corpse, her empty dried-out body left a while ago now by its soul. He’s not afraid, exactly, just surprised, and quickly, in order to chase away this image, he touches her cheek. She sighs and turns to him, putting her arm on his chest, her soul returning. From now on her breathing is steady, but he doesn’t dare move. He waits for the alarm clock to release him from this awkward situation.
He’s unsettled by his own inaction. Shouldn’t he make a note of all these changes, in order not to overlook something? Get up quietly and slip out of bed and divide a piece of paper in half at the kitchen table and write: before and now. What would he write? Her skin is rougher – maybe she’s just ageing, or maybe it’s an effect of the sun. T-shirt instead of pyjamas? Maybe the heaters are on higher than they used to be. Her smell? She’s switched lotions.
He recalls the lipstick she had on the island. Now she has a different one! That one was a light, creamy, gentle one, the colour of her lips. This one is red, crimson, he doesn’t know how to define colour, he was never good at that, he never knew what the difference was between crimson and red, let alone purple.
Carefully he slides out of bed, touches down his bare feet on the floor, and blindly, so as not to wake her, he goes to the restroom. Only once he gets inside does he let himself be blinded by turning on the bright light. On the shelf under the mirror lies her cosmetics bag, embroidered with beads. He opens it carefully, in order to make sure of his suppositions. The lipstick is different.
In the morning he’s able to act it all out perfectly, that’s what he thinks: perfectly. That he’s forgotten something else and has to stay five minutes more at home.
‘Go on ahead, don’t wait for me.’
He pretends he’s in a hurry, that he’s looking for some papers. She puts her jacket on in front of the mirror, wraps a red scarf around herself and takes the boy by the hand. They slam the door. He hears them going down the stairs. He freezes over his papers and the echo of the slamming doors reverberates a few more times in his head like a ball – boom, boom, boom, until there’s silence. Then he takes a deep breath and stands up straight. Silence. He feels it wrap him up, and now he moves slowly and precisely. He goes to the closet, pulls back the glass door and stands facing her clothes. He stretches his hand out to a light-coloured blouse, she’s never worn it, it’s too formal. He palpates it and then runs his whole hand over it, gets his hand tangled in the folds of silk. But this blouse tells him nothing, so he keeps going; he recognizes the cashmere suit, which she also rarely wears, and her summer dresses, and a few shirts, one after the next; a winter jumper still wrapped up from the cleaners, and a long black coat. He hasn’t seen her much in that one, either. Then it occurs to him that this clothing is hanging here to throw him off, to trick him, to lead him astray.
They’re standing next to each other in the kitchen. Kunicki is dicing up parsley. He doesn’t really want to get into it again, but he can’t restrain himself. He can feel the words swelling up in his throat, and he can’t quite swallow them back down. Meaning the old ‘Well then what did happen?’ yet again.
She says in a tired voice, pointing out in a tone of I’m-reciting-this-yet-again that he’s being boring, that he’s making things difficult, ‘Here you go, one more time: I didn’t feel well, I think I had food poisoning, I told you.’
But he doesn’t give up so easily. ‘You didn’t feel sick when you went off,’ he says.
‘Right, but then I got sick, I got sick,’ she repeats, with pleasure. ‘And I guess I passed out for a minute, and then the child started crying, and that brought me to again. He was scared, and I was scared, too. We started towards the car, but just because of everything we ended up going the wrong way.’
‘Which way? Into town? Toward Vis?’
‘Yes, toward Vis. No, I mean, I don’t know, whether toward Vis or not, how was I supposed to know, if I had known, I would have come back, I’ve told you this a thousand times.’ She raises her voice. ‘When I figured out I had got us lost, we just sat down in this little grove, and the child fell asleep. I was still feeling weak…’
Kunicki knows she’s lying. He dices the parsley up and says in a sepulchral voice, not raising his eyes from the cutting board, ‘There was no grove.’
She just about screams, ‘Of course there was!’
‘No, there wasn’t. All there was were individual olive trees and vineyards. What grove?’
There’s a silence, and then she suddenly says with deadly seriousness, ‘OK. You’ve cracked it. Good job. We were carried off by a flying saucer. They did experiments on us. They implanted chips in us, here,’ and she lifts up her hair to reveal the nape of her neck. Her gaze is icy.
Kunicki ignores her sarcasm. ‘Alright, alright, continue.’
‘I found a little stone house. We fell asleep, it got dark…’
‘Just like that? It got dark? What happened to the whole day? What were you doing all day?’
She presses on. ‘We had a nice morning. I thought that you might worry about us a little bit and actually remember that we exist. Like shock therapy. We ate grapes all the time and kept going swimming…’
‘You’re telling me you didn’t eat for three days?’
‘Like I say, we ate grapes all the time.’
‘What did you drink?’ Kunicki urges.
Here she grimaces. ‘Water from the sea.’
‘Why don’t you just tell me the truth?’
‘That is the truth.’
Kunicki severs meticulously the fleshy little stems. ‘OK, and then what?’
‘Nothing. We went back to the road and flagged down a car that took us to –’
‘After three days!’
‘So what?’
He throws the knife down into the parsley. The cutting board crashes to the floor. ‘Do you have any idea how much trouble you caused? There was a helicopter out looking for you! The whole island was mobilized!’
‘Well they shouldn’t have been. It just happens that people disappear for a little while, you know? There was no need for anybody to panic. We can just still say that I wasn’t feeling well, and that then I got better.’
‘What the fuck is wrong with you? What is going on? How can you explain it all?’
‘There’s nothing that requires an explanation. I’m telling you the truth, you’re just not listening.’
She’s screaming, but here she lowers her voice. ‘Just, what do you think, you tell me, what do you think happened?’
But he doesn’t answer her now. This conversation has already repeated itself multiple times. It seems both of them have lost the strength for it.
Sometimes she leans back against the wall and glares at him and taunts him: ‘A bus full of pimps drove by and took me to off to a brothel. They kept the child on the balcony, on bread and water. I had sixty clients over the course of those three days.’