I took out the plates: a plain white for her, the blue one from my childhood for me that had cars, bicycles and ships running along its edge.
“You don’t know what he wanted?”
“I learnt long ago to leave his things be. You know the cost.” Her voice was sour, as always, when she talked about my father. “If I am not cautious, I might get to know something.”
“I see.”
“Is that why you won’t talk to him?” She glanced at me searchingly. “May I ladle you some soup?”
I nodded.
The bean soup was thick and hot, it burnt my tongue. It was good to sit in Mum’s kitchen, although it has been a long time since I had last felt at home there. Lights were subdued, noises low: the cat purred in front of the stove, the washing machine rumbled softly in the bathroom. I was calmed not by the familiar plate, noises or the taste; the peace and harmony came from not speaking to my father. Suddenly we were on the same side and closer to each other despite our differences.
I finished eating sooner than my mother. I leant back and looked around the kitchen. It was cluttered, full of bric-a-brac, crochet left on the top of the fridge, books put down, opened on their belly.
“If Dad had begged you back, would you have gone back to him?”
She looked up surprised.
“What do you mean?”
“When you took me from him when I was small. If he had called you back…you said you wanted it…would you have gone back to him? Would you have stayed with him, even if he’d seen you leave?” I didn’t add the question: would you have broken the prophecy?
Her mouth was pulled into a smile as if by a hook.
“It was so long ago, Judit…”
“Would you have gone back?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. I wouldn’t have taken it for long, even then.”
She shook her head, more to herself than to me, and continued eating.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said at length.
I left it at that. Maybe she was right.
My father died. I hadn’t seen him before that, and I hadn’t talked to him. I had erased his last message from my phone without listening to it; I learnt the news shortly after I had done that. I don’t know what he wanted to say. I imagined a thousand messages, but I can’t say if the real one was amongst them.
He had a heart attack. Perhaps he could have saved himself if he had called an ambulance, for he knew when he would die. But he did nothing of the sort. He simply lay down and waited for the last kick of his heart. A bottle of whisky and a big bar of hazelnut chocolate were prepared on the bedside table. The silver wrapping was torn just a little as if he had changed his mind.
I inherited his flat. I packed his things and I should have thrown them away but, somewhere between casting everything onto the floor and bundling it into a carton, a feeling overwhelmed me that the pullover I held in my hands was my father. And the books on the shelves, also. The used toothbrush, the leftover food in the fridge, the stuffed notebook on the table, the old guitar in the corner—all were him. Unmatched, incomplete objects that were not bound together by anything anymore. I tried to imagine my father in the pullover, the pen in his hands, his feet in his slippers, but I couldn’t. My memories were leaking.
He had wanted to talk to me. For the last time.
If I had known…
I realised in the end that knowledge wouldn’t have been absolution. If the only reason to talk to him was his death in a month, a week, a day, I wouldn’t have been less of a stranger to him.
I stood in his flat, knowing where every object belonged and yet I felt lost. I had tried to understand him but had failed. It was too late for that now. But there was something I was still in time for.
I purchased a ticket to India. Just then, I didn’t know when I would come back or how long I would have to stay for. I was only sure that I wouldn’t budge from Iván’s side. I didn’t care what happened in a day, two days, three days or a month; I just wanted to be with him and not on another continent, alone.
He was waiting for me at Delhi Airport. The huge, multicoloured and multi-smelling crowd in the waiting hall undulated between us, but it disappeared when I saw Iván—or I just pushed everyone aside, I can’t remember. Our meeting was just as you would expect. I will skip that.
“I have been waiting for you,” he said in the cool cab. His hand enveloped mine, holding me as he might hold a bird. “I knew you would come.”
“Funny, I didn’t know.”
“I knew it for you.” He laughed. “No, that’s not true, I didn’t know. But I am happy.”
“And were you careful with the trees?” I asked.
“I haven’t as much as peeked out, just like you said. This warning was a clever idea; it made me think of you whenever I saw a tree. Smooth. Is that why you warned me?”
I was giddy from his closeness. I hadn’t seen him in such a long time; all his features were new and yet painfully familiar. My fingertips remembered him more than my eyes.
I saw only his eyes and mouth as he talked. I noticed his dark tan, the scratch on his neck from shaving, his thinning hair. I was unguarded. I hadn’t yet got used to taking care of him, although that was the reason I came.
In the sudden heat, as we were walking towards his lodgings, pulling my suitcases after me on the bumpy street, I didn’t notice the people, the houses, the dirty motorbikes. The screeching, the honking din, the shouts, the singing on the street, the stench rising from the pavement; all of it came to me only later. I didn’t see the truck turning the corner, nor the timber whooshing free.
Iván was looking at me, pointing at his house behind him.
“I had rats but I put out some poison,” he said. “You are not afraid, are you?”
His eyes told me something else. I smiled and I started to answer this other, unspoken question and then…
The timber could have hit me but I only felt its draught. Iván fell like a bowling pin. His head… I am unable to write down what happened to his head.
I hadn’t stopped it. I stood on the street that was suddenly filling with a loud hubbub; I smelt the stink and the spices and stared at Iván lying before me. I almost leant down but froze. I would have recognised his death even if I hadn’t seen countless other dead before. I knew it.
The year had passed.
I understood nothing from the shouts around me. They spoke a strange language, strangers all. My suitcase was dotted with red, the feeling of Iván’s touch was cooling on my hand.
The sounds fled; the scene became distant and memories attacked me.
First from the past: Iván, laughing when he tried to hide a pain; his touch on my belly; him shaking his hair from his face—then from the future: me, as I run away from all relationships; me who lets go because holding on hurts more; me, who will be the last oracle on this Earth for I won’t bear a child for anyone.
I see me living alone, and when the gas remains on—accidentally or deliberately—I flare up without anything to feel remorse for, only that I have nothing and no-one to regret. It will be a perfect death, for I won’t be alive before it happens. I won’t even be old.
I trembled with the certainty, and then I was again standing on the pavement with two Indian women beside me who held my hands and talked to me in English. A large crowd gaped around us. Iván was covered with a tarp that had offered merchandise a few minutes ago.
I stared at the plaid tarp and still the tears didn’t come. Only later, at the police station where no-one understood my pronunciation and mangled English and my stammer.
I don’t recall how and when I made the journey back home.
They left me alone. Perhaps they realised that my gaze was barbed wire and my silence a brick wall—at least they didn’t approach me. They knew what had happened and talked about it, too; I heard the half-sentences float out of the nurses’ room. Although I wished to see them fall shamefully silent as I entered, I waited in the corridor until the topic shifted.