I wanted to say that some things are more important than the truth, but I did not.
From this distance of four decades it may seem that I was not scared, but I can tel you now that my blood was coursing triple time, for I kept expecting troopers to round the corner, or some dead family spirit to lean in from a doorway to see what had happened to me, how I had betrayed al that I had ever known. I had no name for what I had become, it did not exist in either pain or pleasure.
Stil , the less I talked, the more the boy talked, and he was not even aware of what he was tel ing me. They never remember what they have said, chonorroeja, instead they wait for the wisdom which you have borrowed. He gave me his answers and I repeated them back and made them mine, he had no idea of my trickery. I could have dressed the dead in bearskins and taught them how to dance and stil he would have believed that they were there to console him. His voice became low and even. I said to him that he should carry bread in his pocket as protection against bad luck and that in the spirit world everything was fine for his good friend Tomas. I talked of goodness and purpose and vision. Keep things close to your heart, I said, and they wil be a power. The boy stood, reached deep in his pocket and took out a whole handful of coins, which he laid on the wooden board.
You cannot understand what this means to me, he said.
I pocketed the coins and hurried back to the dump. I found an old chair and set it up in the al eyway and by noontime I had four customers, each of whom paid successively more, relegated as they were to their own peculiar dooms.
There are times I must admit that I had a little giggle at the foot of their foolishness. Once a trooper came by, slapping his truncheon at his thigh.
For al his snarl he could have been a Hlinka, but I rol ed the riverstones for him and fil ed him with fol y about his good life, and he promised that he would leave me alone as long as I did not make too much of a fuss. I told him he should wear socks of a different color for good luck and the next day he walked past me, flicked a quick look at me, raised his trouser legs, one after the other, brown and blue, and marched on.
A number of weeks went by and I lost myself in the tel ing. Word of my talents spread. Many young men in particular came to visit me. I could see that something inside them had gone soft and loose and hopeless, but when they talked about it they briefly forgot it. I fil ed them with promises of cures and good days to come. I made a cross of wax mixed with charcoal and wrapped it in hair. I sewed two yel ow buttons together and tied them on a stick. These I cal ed my little corpses and I set them up around me; such ridiculous charms only gave weight to my words. They paid me good money for such foolishness and I sat watching the shadows reach out for other shadows as the idiots rol ed a few riverstones across a cupboard table. I had no mercy for them, it was not my pocket they were reaching into.
Mozol almost cried her eyes out onto her breast when I gave her al the money.
In the height of autumn, 1961, Mozol left on a canvas-covered truck. Her few possessions were stacked high in the air and her children stil higher upon them. Her husband was spread out over them to keep them from fal ing, but was already sleeping. She smiled, clasped my hands, and looked me in the eye. For many years I would remember that look, how close I came to tel ing her the truth. I stopped her several times as she gathered her possessions together and said: Mozol, I must tel you something. But she said, I am too busy, tel me later. I am quite sure she knew, she kissed my forehead when she left, then put my hand against her heart.
There is no single goodbye for us, chonorroeja. Ach Dev-lesa. Dza Devlesa. One is staying. One is leaving. Stay with God, go with God.
I saw the white mountains and how they lay against the sky, and I am not ashamed to tel you that the sight was terrifying.
You'l be next Marienka, said Doctor Marcus. She walked back towards her clinic with her hands tight behind her back.
How lost I felt then, daughter, how very alone.
Only people with desires can be fooled, and I had none. My friend was gone. The next morning I put on the same clothes that I had worn for months, took my makeshift table, and prepared to go into town. But then I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass and let me tel it to you straight, daughter, I knew that in my shame I had lost every shred of dignity that I had ever worked to own. I do not seek to make a complicated dance of it, I had done these things for a purpose, but now the purpose had disappeared. I looked at myself and saw nothing that shored me up on the left shoulder and little to shore me up on the right. The worst burden in life is what others know about us. But maybe there is one burden even worse than this. It happens when they don't know about us, it is what they think about us when, in silence, they force us to be what they expect us to be.
Even worse is how we become it and I, chonorroeja, had become it.
I went down past the cathedral to Franz-Liszt Street. No sound came from the high shuttered windows. I set my things around me. The people gathered and I gave them al bad omens that they accepted and wore like masks. The next day, I walked beyond the red-white-red barrier like there was nothing unusual at al , but instead of going down by the dump road I went towards the mountains.
Last night I woke thinking Enrico was here. I rose and flamed the lamp but found only these pages. Out the window, I could see way down into the val ey. What is it about the cold that sharpens the edges of everything? Enrico used to say that the emptiest days are the loveliest.
Do you, daughter, recal the sight of your father coming home after a foray across the rocky part of the northern mountain when he had cut himself from a fal off a smal cliff? He was carrying animal medicines then—steroids, hormones, injections to sel on the other side. He had packed them solid into a giant rucksack, had even fil ed his pockets and socks, and then he trudged off to Maria Luggua. A blizzard blew up, a curtain of snow opening and closing around him. He was edging his way around the point in the mountain where not even the goats ventured. He stepped off into nothing but air, and his fal was broken only by an outcrop of rock. He landed in a drift and he looked down to see that his leg had been ripped open.
He contemplated the animal injections but didn't know which might help him with the pain. He had to dig himself out with a smal folding shovel strapped to the side of his rucksack. The blood fil ed UDhis snowboot. He could onlv recognize where he was by the feel of the trees—the further down he went on the slope the less gnarled the bark became. When he reached home, he dropped the rucksack, and simply said: Put the kettle on, Zoli, I'm freezing.
He pul ed off the snowboot, put it by the stove and said it had been a very bad evening for a walk. He had been gone three whole days.
I can see him now, his thin nose, his wide mouth, the lines grooved deep in his face, his eyes half-closed against the glare of the snow.
When the new trade laws came in, there was no longer any need for medicines or cigarettes or coffee or seeds to be brought across the mountain, and he had always refused to bring dynamite for the Tyroleans who were blowing up pylons and causing havoc. He stopped his trade, just as suddenly as he had started, and he seldom walked the mountain anymore, except on festive days, and he made his living instead at the mil house, and when the mil house went the way of everything else, he bought it, moved with us in here, kept the wheel running, and did whatever handyman jobs he could find around the val ey. Two or three times a day he stood in the doorway, looking out over the weather above the mountain.
He could have walked out blindfolded and stil found his way there.
I have loved your father, pure and simple; his and yours are the only lives I have never betrayed.