English sample translation of Fifty Cigarettes for Elena by Marina Vujčić

Marina Vujčić

Fifty Cigarettes for Elena (Pedeset cigareta za Elenu) Novel Translated by Christina Pribichevich Zorić

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© Goran Čižmešija

MARINA VUJČIĆ was born in Trogir 1966. She graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, Department of Croatian Language and Literature.

Her novel Tuđi život (The Life of Others) was published by Profil in 2010 and in 2014 Hena com published her collected dramatic texts Umri ženski (Die Soft) and then the novel A onda je Božo krenuo ispočetka (And then Božo Started Afresh) was shortlisted as one of the four Croatian publications nominated for European Prize for Literature. In 2014 she received the third prize at the Marin Držić dramatic texts competition for her drama Umri ženski.

In 2015 Hena com published her novel Mogla sam to biti ja (It Could Have Been Me). That same year, at the competition organized by VBZ publishing house and Tisak medija, she won the prize for the best unpublished novel in 2015 for the novel Susjed (The Neighbour).

In 2016 Hena com published her novel Otpusno pismo (Discharge Summary), in co-authorship with Ivica Ivanišević. That same year she again won the third prize at the Marin Držić competition for her drama Podmornica (Submarine) and in 2017 Hena com published her novel Pitanje anatomije (A Matter of Anatomy).

She lives and works in Zagreb.

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WORLD RIGHTS AVAILABLE 232 pages Hardcover ISBN 978-953-358-152-1 Date of publication: 2019

Fifty Cigarettes for Elena, the latest novel by outstanding Croatian writer Marina Vujčić in its structure contains the chaos theory, the inaudible and imperceptible “butterfly effect” at the ordinary citizen and his everyday life level. The saying goes that a flap of butterfly wings in Beijing can cause a storm in Florida – but what can happen if a fifty year old man decides to mark his birthday by staying awake through entire twenty four hours, midnight to midnight, from the beginning to the end of his birthday and fulfill a bizarre vow to his dead twin sister by smoking fifty cigarettes in that time and keeping the fifty stubs?

The life of Oliver Radman, who made this decision, will not change in any way because of it. However, the night walk he undertakes in order to stay awake will influence the lives of three unknown people in a way Oliver could never think of and he will never become aware of it.

In the course of the plot development we will meet another three protagonists during these twenty-four hours that Oliver decided to spend awake defying his normal routine. The first one is Magdalena, a woman unable to sleep that night because the next day her husband must appear at the trial for robbing an exchange office. The fact that Oliver stopped at her window during his night stroll, spotting a sign of life at the dead of the night will change her initial decision to testify at the trial because of the fear she experiences thinking that this is a predator set out to harm her and her children. The second one is the young man Viktor, who, because of Oliver’s accidental presence in the street where the girl who spent part of the night at his place waits for a taxi, ends there half naked, without a key, unable to return to his apartment, although tomorrow is his first workday 39

at a long-desired job and he must not be late under any circumstances. The third one is Greta, a depressive woman who thinks that her husband’s cheating on her is her greatest problem, but the way in which Oliver accidentally crossed her path that day will generate a situation in which other, much more serious traumas will surface.

Four parallel stories about these protagonists, seemingly totally unconnected, will take place through twenty four hours in a day at whose beginning Oliver made a decision that would influence the lives of the other three protagonists and characters connected with them. In spite of this they will remain strangers, although this day, for some maybe the rest of their lives, would look completely different had they not crossed each other’s path.

PRAISE “Marina Vujčić has dived even deeper into small big people from whom she so passionately draws her inspiration and written a beautiful novel. Ultimately this is a novel that celebrates love, the biggest of all loves, the one we are (or are not) capable of presenting to ourselves.”

– Ana Jembrek, Knjige su moj svijet “On these pages you’ll find sentences so powerful and shattering that you will want to tattoo them on your body in order not to forget them.”

– Iva Rajić, Bibliovca

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Fifty Cigarettes for Elena

00:00 Midnight is the moment when the power of time hesitates and stops. Zero hours, zero minutes. A blink of time’s nothingness.

It is 00:00 on the big digital wall clock above the chest of drawers, on the small digital clock on the DVD player under the TV and on his digital wristwatch. That same second, the date on the computer and on the mobile changes.

There’s not a single clock with hands in the room. He can’t stand them. They cannot show zero time. Even when they stop, it is always at a certain hour, a certain minute, but for him the only thing worth waiting for is that timeless second.

00:00. No amount of fatigue can stop him from staying awake to see that globular alignment of digits. It has always been that way.

But not today. Today, his destination point is midnight. Like the door at the end of a long corridor. And there, behind that door, lies his hell in the calendar.

The fifteenth of May two thousand and fifteen, his fiftieth birthday. Their fiftieth.

At 00:00 he stubs out his smoked cigarette, the last in the box. On any other day, he would open a fresh pack in the morning as soon as he woke up. But not today. Today there will be no waking up because there will be no sleeping.

He had decided there would be no sleeping that afternoon, when his mother phoned to tell him the news. News that keeps you up all night because it is impossible to take it to bed with you and sleep as if nothing had happened. Because it did happen. It happened again.

There’ll be no sleeping until the following midnight. That’s how he’ll do it.

Elena deserves a proper extra vigil for her fiftieth birthday, even if she didn’t live to see it one way or the other.

Fifty years. A long time! I’d like to remember, say, my birth, rather than what

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I would gladly forget, but can’t. But that’s a memory one has. Others tell us their memories of our arrival into this world and that compels us to take it at face value.

On that fifteenth of May nineteen hundred and sixty-five, my mother woke up around three in the morning with a pain in her lower back. My father reluctantly took her to the hospital. He had been hoping to grab another hour or two of sleep so he asked her how she could be sure that these were labour pains when she had never given birth before. At least that is how his mother recounted the story of what happened that night. She told him that he had started asking her about it as soon as he learned to talk, unlike Elena, who wasn’t interested in the moment that brought her into the world. She was interested in what came later – in her sojourn in this world – but that later was all too brief.

His mother arrived in the hospital at around four in the morning. He wasn’t born until five in the afternoon. The fifteenth of the fifth at five in the afternoon – even that didn’t look like a pure coincidence to him. That it should be him, on that very day, at exactly five o’clock in the afternoon. The fifteenth day of the fifth month at five. In sixty-five. He could have been in Elena’s place, for instance, and been born an hour earlier. He could have fought his way out of his mother’s womb first and then that fourth five would have been taken away from him forever, like Elena later.

Something always taken away forever.

Oliver. That’s what his father said the first time he held him in his arms. Oliver Radman. The way he said Oliver made it clear to his mother that the name was not up for discussion. He had given his son a name and now everybody had better get used to it.

Oliver never did.

But Elena loved her name, which her mother was allowed to chose as a consolation prize. Who could have guessed that she would use it for such a short time. That suddenly nobody would be able to call her name , except as a memory.

At 00:05 he removed his wristwatch and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. He was going to need it. Twenty-four hours, added to the seventeen already spent awake the previous day. That was a lot. He could change his mind and lie down. There were no witnesses, there was no proof, nobody knew what he had decided to do. But no. He could not sleep with this new, double death on his mind.

He had learned long ago that life offered few guarantees. Twenty-six years ago he thought he had learned that lesson once and for all. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Today you live with a person, tomorrow you live with the memory of her. Every minute is important, but he kept acting as if it wasn’t. As if it was all the same, because to him it was.

Today he will make an effort, because of Elena. He will pay attention to the 42

minutes that are at his disposal but not at hers. Twenty-four hours of uninterrupted life, a thousand four hundred and forty minutes for Elena. That’s the least he can do for her after his mother’s phone call today.

He’ll do everything differently. Drink coffee after midnight, for instance.

Open a fresh pack of cigarettes, which he would normally do only after waking up in the morning.

But not today. He’ll chain smoke, all night and all day, at every opportunity.

He’ll smoke fifty cigarettes, as if blowing out fifty candles on a cake that will not be there. There hasn’t been one since the last birthday and Elena had had. That was when their two birthdays equalled forty eight. Today together they’d be one hundred. His fiftieth and her fiftieth – that’s how it could have been, but she was never more than twenty-four. That symmetry was gone.

By the following midnight he’ll have fifty cigarette butts. To be precise, fifty filters, because he’ll smoke each one down to the golden ring at the end of the white cigarette paper. He’s already prepared a small tin peppermint candy box for the butts, the one that Elena used to use as a cigarette case. The calculator in his head will work even without this evidence, but better safe than sorry. There have to be fifty.

Who knows what the hours that he would have otherwise slept off will bring.

To start with, he’ll go out for a walk, because that’s what Elena would have done.

He could go to the river and just listen. He could just drive around and observe how others live, gaze at the windows with lights on and try to guess what was happening behind the curtains. It would be silly to stay within these four walls, where nothing new was going to happen.

Outside it was different. Outside all sorts of dangers lurked. Maniacs on the road, glass window displays, futile births and wrong deaths. A world like a huge powerhouse of the collective whole which can manage without every one of us.

Even without Elena, for all these years. And now even without the only thing that he had left of her.

When he put his hands around the warm coffee cup, as he did every morning, he looked at the dresser where, until his mother’s phone call, her photograph had stood. As soon as he hung up he put it away in the drawer, as if in a grave, burying his sister anew. Now he missed that photograph. Perhaps at this moment he just needed to look at somebody who would never grow old. Who would never turn fifty. Who was never even thirty, not even twenty-five. Somebody who knows that the least you can do – if you already exist – is to stay awake.

To stay awake in the place of somebody who can’t do so anymore.

He quickly drank down his coffee, so as not to have time to change his mind about leaving the house. Once he starts thinking things over, he loses his resolve.

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He has to go out, and that’s that. What’s the point of staying up? What’s the point of time if being awake is merely about keeping your eyes open? If he is doing this in honour of Elena, then he should be awake in her sense of the word, rather than for a purpose.

He put on his shoes and slipped a spring jacket over the top he had intended to sleep in when going to bed was still an option. He took with him only his keys, cigarettes and cigarette case, which already contained two cigarette butts. The first two birthday candles, extinguished after midnight. He also took the hat that Elena had given him for his twenty-fourth birthday. He reached for it as if out of habit, although he had never worn it before. He had always lacked the courage to wear it, but now he felt he found it.

Let’s go somewhere, Elena.

He was surprised by how easy it was to imagine her by his side. Her high heels and his right arm slightly bent at the elbow, so that she could lean on him. The way she used to.

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00:35 When Victor and Barbara walked into his flat, the dial on the clock wasn’t on his mind. Barbara was.

She was sheathed in a dark cherry-red dress, which she might soon be taking off.

“The place looks good. I mean… it will look good once you sort out all these books”, said the still dressed body entering the living room.

“I’m having some shelves made. For this entire wall.”

She placed her hand on top of the nearest stack of books, leaving her fingerprints on Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows.

“You’ve got a lot here.”

“My mother liked to read.”

Surely she wasn’t going to ask him now about the tense. He’d blurted it out.

He needed to steer the dialogue toward the living, gear it towards the near future, which could unfold in the bed next door. Without the deceased. Without any heaviness, and without the sympathy that brings people closer together than necessary.

He hurried to save the situation.

“I’m not averse to it either. Reading. Do you want me to read something to you?”

He smiled as he said it, the way people do when they want you to know they are joking.

“Some other time.”

She smiled too. What seemed shyly, the way women do in the knowledge that such smiles mean they have other things on their mind.”

“Would you like a glass of wine? I’ve got some red.”

“That’s fine.”

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She wants wine. A good sign. I want her.

He drew a few rational conclusions but then chased them away as he opened the bottle.

She’s bound to want to stay the night. I’ve got to get up early. It’s not a good idea.

By the time he sat down next to her on the sofa and handed her the glass, desire had expunged all thought. It had come to make its claim.

“You’re beautiful, Barbara.”

“Thank you.”

And that’s where salvation lies. In the body that briefly forgets everything.

Everything is brief anyway. The people in our lives and life itself. So why complicate matters.

As if had read his mind, she rested her head on his shoulder.

The future in the next room was getting closer.

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00:40 The outside world always gives him a little shock. Especially now. He can’t even remember the last time he was out after midnight. He remembers, though it was a long time ago, that Elena used to reproach him for taking too little interest in the world. I can’t believe that we shared our mother’s womb, she’d say with astonishment. She liked people, places, happenings, change. Let’s go somewhere, she’d say to him, full of enthusiasm, full of energy which she had to expend somewhere.

Whenever Elena came out with her Let’s go somewhere, he always imagined that somewhere as full of voices, lights, sounds and people. Wherever she went, everything would come to life. Everybody wanted to talk to her. Everybody wanted to be infected with her cheerfulness. The light, the music, the smells were all different when she was around. Not even her tiresome twin brother could spoil it.

Let’s go somewhere.

Look, Elena, we’re on our way.

He wasn’t the kind of person who wandered around aimlessly. Yet here he was, with no destination. On a night when suddenly everything was unpredictable.

But predictability was his prevention system. No happenings, just repetition.

Everything as usual, that was the best. The safest. Waking up, followed by a shower and a shave. Six steps to the kitchen where he would boil water in the electric kettle for his coffee for twenty seconds. While the coffee cooled down, he would walk nine steps to the armchair where the clothes he had laid out the night before were waiting for him. With the coffee came his first cigarette of the day. Sometimes he felt as if smoking was the only thing that made any sense.

The only thing he really wanted.

After his second cigarette, he went out, locked the door and sat in his car. He refrained from lighting up another cigarette during the roughly fifteen minutes

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it took him to drive to work. He always refrained, though he had no reason to do so. Nobody other than him sat in the car. Nobody asked him if he had smoked or not. But no. He probably felt he had to deprive himself of something as well.

Well today it would be different. Today he would smoke to the extreme and live to the extreme. And, here, now walk to the extreme.

I should walk more.

He raised his left hand so that his brain could register exactly when the thought had come to him, but he wasn’t wearing a watch. He forgot that he had taken it off. Normally, that would annoy him but now it was as if his mind had adopted Elena’s approach. Every minute goes by anyway, whether registered or not.

It felt good to walk. His footsteps were almost silent because the soles of his shoes were soft. He remembered how Elena’s heels used to ring out on the asphalt.

He loved that sound. He could still hear it, after all these years. There was nobody to walk in step with him now. His footsteps were so soundless that he wasn’t even sure they existed.

He has to focus. This isn’t yesterday, or the day before, it isn’t 1985 or 1988. He doesn’t understand why he has always found it hard to be in the present. Why he always avoids the only time that counts.

Elena used to say that one should live only for the present moment. It sounded naive and unfeasible to him even then, let alone now. Only his body is in the present. His thoughts are always somewhere else.

But he’ll try. He’ll practice the here and now for Elena. In her stead he’ll ignore all time that is no more or has yet to come.

He looks down at his shoes. The right foot follows the left, crossing metres of grey asphalt, with the illuminated shop windows on the left, and the tram tracks and road on the right. The occasional car passes by, music blaring from one of them, the kind listened to only by people capable of turning up the sound in the dead of night, on the road, with the windows open. Not a single second hangs around, it immediately becomes something that didn’t last, and so in perpetuum, but all that is today, and it won’t become yesterday until midnight, although a second later that no longer applies.

Every so often he sees someone in passing. A couple or people walking on their own, like him. For them, inasmuch as they even notice him, he is probably simply a man with a cigarette and a hat. And for him, they arebarely more than silhouettes. Outlines of people. And he hates them, every single one of them. Not just because they are alive. But because they even laugh. They talk. They embrace.

They spend time together. As if nothing had happened. But it had.

Elena would certainly now go up to them and ask how they were. Where they 48

came from, what were they thinking about, what was troubling them. Because something was bound to be troubling them, and she knew how to deal with that.

He tries to keep his mind on what he sees. What isn’t his. He rests his gaze on things that don’t concern him. The closed newsstand in the dark. The broken street lamp. The flickering neon light. The cars standing quietly in their parking spaces. The teetering man. The shadows behind the curtains.

As if he now has to show the city to Elena, who hasn’t been around for a long time.

See, we’ve got a new bakery. Your favourite street now smells of warm bread rolls.

All those days when he avoided thinking about Elena are compressed into this one day. For three hundred and sixty-four years in the year they are only inadvertent memories, a feeling of injustice which he firmly cuts off at the root, but then comes this one day and he overdoes it.

This year especially.

However you look at it, this is her day. There is no salvation from this day. As if there were from any other day. Salvation.

He turns left into the first side street, and then right, and then left again. The best thing would be if he got lost, but his brain reorients itself, even without wanting to. In space, yes. In geometry and mathematics. It is only here that he lets it work as it should.

Let’s walk, Elena. There are fewer street lamps here. Fewer cars.

Had Elena survived the accident she would have been scared of cars. Even when the light at the pedestrian crossing turned green, she wouldn’t have trusted them. But, while she still could, she wasn’t afraid of anything. People who live in fear don’t know how lucky they are.

Walking, his mind is alive with thoughts. They bubble uncontrollably, as if somebody had dumped a text into his head that he doesn’t want to read, even though the text is his. Which is why he wishes he could stand still right now. An empty head suited him better. Just numbers, measurements, amounts of anything.

He thought that the number of his footsteps wouldn’t matter, but now he misses them. He thought that he didn’t have to notice even time, but now he desperately need that watch on his wrist. A brain unoccupied with measuring and counting becomes delirious. How long has he been walking? Half an hour?

An hour? He’d measure it by the pain in his legs, if he had something to compare it with from before. But he doesn’t. He uses his car to get from the flat to the few destinations his existence has been reduced to.

And now he finds himself in a small blind alley with dilapidated single-story houses and courtyards that in the dark look like the depository of an abandoned 49

world where people left things they no longer had any use for: dried-up barrels, broken roof tiles, rotting swings. He is just about to turn around and go back to the main street when he notices the light on in a window. A sign of life. Somebody’s life. A woman is standing at the window in her nightgown. He can’t say that she is watching him because she was standing there even before he started looking at her. She is staring out into the dark.

Elena, look, here’s somebody. Somebody here is awake along with us.

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02:05 She dreamed that an orange tree had grown in the courtyard. A big tree, not like other orange trees. One might say it looked more like a baobab with oranges growing on it, which was possible only in a dream. She remembered that in the dream she was bothered by it being a sharedcourtyard, whereas she considered the tree to be hers alone. In the dream she even had a document to prove it, with a seal and the looped signature of someone with an aristocratic title, but she knew that it wouldn’t stop the neighbours from picking her oranges when she wasn’t looking.

And she couldn’t hang out the window all day.

When she woke up, she felt an urgent need to check whether people were picking her oranges. She only realized that the baobab wasn’t there when, in the weak light of the street lamp overlooking the courtyard, she saw the only thing that was there: a stunted poplar tree which at this time of year had started blossoming before foliating, though it seemed indecisive about both, as if it had never really dared to live. As if it didn’t like being a poplar tree.

She looked at her watch. The small hand was on the two, and the big hand ws on the one. The children were peacefully asleep. They didn’t know that a peaceful sleep becomes but a memory.

She could sleep another four hours, but she was awake now and felt as if she would never fall asleep again. Four untroubled hours had been taken away from her just like that. Again. She’d lost count of all the nights this had been going on.

This insomnia.

She could defiantly take a sleeping pill. Chemically vanquish the restlessness.

Until it started taking effect, she coulkd look out the window some more at that baobab which wasn’t what it’ was supposed to be. At the poplar tree where she would recognize herself.

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She found two pills in the medicine drawer and swallowed them quickly before she had time to wonder if that was a smart thing to do. She drank some water only afterwards. On her way to the kitchen she could feel the two pills in her throat, or gullet, or wherever what you swallowed went down. She would have done better if she had taken that glass of water in the bathroom. But by the time she thought of it, it was too late. Because lying on the kitchen table was that piece of paper, that document that had caused her to wake up. Again. For the umpteenth night. She knew it was there but she didn’t want to see it again.?

She had to try and think about something else. About innocuous things that could send her to sleep. She’d make herself some mint tea and drink it slowly in bed. She’d gaze into the tea as if the world had been strained into it. Some other world, not hers here. She’d feel as if she had caught that whole new universe in her porcelain cup. As if she was holding between her hands the concentrate of a better existence. She would be present only here. Hands, mint, cup. No thought.

If only she could. If somebody had ever told her, before she had to make difficult decisions, that she would find herself in such a situation, she would have probably thought that the person had seen too many movies. But fate could defy even the darkest assumptions. Lying next to the court summons was an envelope with Magdalena Matas written on it. There was no doubt about it. And on the summons was the date: Friday, the fifteenth of May. When she had gone to sleep that had still be a relatively distant tomorrow; but now it was already today.

You’re not going to testify against him, are you?

That was what her girlfriend had asked her on the phone a few hours ago. As if it were a simple matter of choice. As if her girlfriend had someone in prison too and knew how it went.

She had to buy some shampoo. She had to somehow.. After washing your hair with soap three times, every strand of hair seemed to take on a life of its own.

You could clearly see it in the reflection of the window pane. She looked at her hair in that reflection as if it belonged to somebody else.

And then she saw him.

He was standing by the courtyard fence, looking straight at her window. Had it not been pitch dark, she would have said their gazes met. But silhouettes do not have a gaze. They have no age or answers on their face, because they have no face. This silhouette had a hat, making it look even more menacing. And the glowing ember of a cigarette, like an additional fiendish touch to visibility.

She froze; the last thing she needed was more fear. She stepped back from the window and hid behind the curtain.

Oh God, intervene. Do something, Please, please, please.

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After her cry, came the waiting. But while she waited she couldn’t know if God had taken any steps. Not until she looked out the window again.

And who knew what kind of competition there was, in the queue waiting for the Lord’s Mercy.

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02:07 She seemed to have spotted him because suddenly she moved to the side, behind the curtain. He stood there for a while longer, as if waiting to see whether she would reappear so that they could continue where they left off. And then it occurred to him that there must be a man there in her room, whom she’d already told that there was a strange man standing by the fence, looking at their window.

Or maybe it was somebody else who would use his voice or muscles to chase him away.

If he weren’t on this walk with Elena, he’d risk it. Mischief always cheered him up. He tossed a pebble at her window. Then he sat on the broken swing that probably squeaked so loudly it would wake up one of the neighbours. He’d wait for that somebody to shout at him through the window, or maybe even run out into the courtyard. Whatever, as long as he could remind that somebody that life wasn’t as good as he might have briefly thought.

But this was Elena’s night.

Anyway, he has a feeling that the woman knew life is no fairy tale even without him. He didn’t think she was being kept awake by something that was worth staying up for at this hour of night. Maybe she had some hell of her own in her calendar, like him.

He should go. We don’t have to look at others to have them in our thoughts.

That, at least, was something he knew only too well.

He could go somewhere else to wonder why the woman at the window was staring out into the darkness.

It wasn’t that he cared, but Elena certainly would. She could sense out unhappy people who needed cheering up even blindfolded.

The woman at the window gave just that impression, of someone whom only a person like Elena could comfort.

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02:15 If I go back to the window, he’ll still be there.

That’s what she was afraid of. She also thought that would be the lesser evil.

He could come up to the window and knock on the pane, or just wait for her to muster the courage to look out and find herself face-to-face with him.

One moment she was thinking about shampoo, the next about the stranger who possibly wanted to cause her harm. It was like that moment five months ago, when one second she was thinking about what to make for lunch, and the next the police were ringing at their door.

She frantically tried to remember if she had locked the door she’d been hiding behind for the past month. She must have, she always locked it, but she couldn’t visualise her hand on the door handle, and the sound of the key turning in the lock. She should check, but if she went to the door he would see her because she’d have to pass by the window to get there. Or, even worse, he might already be waiting for her on the other side of the door. If she stepped closer, maybe she would hear his excited breathing, or whatever kind of breathing people had when they were preparing to inflict harm on somebody.

The damned ground floor. She’d been anxious about it from her very first day in this house, but she’d had no choice. The dilapidated house in the cul-de-sac was the only thing she could afford. She could easily hate him right now, her convict. He should be with them, she should feel safe, and not like this. Now she was on her own, worrying if the stranger would break in and grab their children, who were quietly asleep in the next room, oblivious to what their mother was going through and to the fact that their father was in prison.

Lord, forgive me for lying to the children. Bear in mind, though, it was you who orchestrated all this.

It made her angry that she had to apologize to Him as well. That she had to

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explain to Him what He himself had stirred up. What kind of divine presence was it that left her completely alone, constantly having to make decisions that could cost her everything.

She dropped onto her knees and started crawling around the room. It hadn’t even been a decision, it had been the pure instinct of a mother who was in a situation where she had to look out for her children.

Only they were worth this humiliation. This crawling.

She lay down next to Anja, but she didn’t dare hug for fear of waking her up.

Yet, she needed that hug. She needed something, anything, that wasn’t fear. She was afraid her trembling would wake the child up. First the trembling and then the uncontrollable choked sobs. One such hug and instantly she’d have two children awake and have to explain to them why their mother was so frightened.

She tried to calm herself by thinking a little ahead, to a time when she would know that nothing terrible had happened. Assuming nothing did happen. But it didn’t work.

While trembling next to the kids, in the run-down single-story house with its courtyard which was even more pathetic than that house she had rented as soon as the bank had launched distraint proceedings against the house at that other address, she was nonetheless certain that she was capable of calmly sitting in the witness box in court and saying out loud that he was definitely guilty. That he had suddenly started bringing wads of money home, claiming that he’d done some successful trading on the stock market. She wasn’t suspicious at all. Who would ever complain about not having to deal with unpaid bills anymore? Not a single one, and now she couldn’t afford even a bottle of shampoo.

At first she thought she would invoke her right not to testify. Spouses had that right. Then her husband and his lawyer explained that his own liberty depended on her. She had to do the right thing for the father of her children. The only right thing. What was a harmless lie compared to the irrevocable damage the truth would cause?

But now, unprotected and frightened by the evil silhouette of the stranger in the courtyard, she felt a need to throw it all back in her husband’s face, in front of everybody. They could have had small, normal, everyday worries. They could have weighed up which to pay off first, the credit card or the electricity bill. But not this. She had never complained of needing more than she had.

There wasn’t a sound. Not behind the door and not behind the window. Maybe the predator was still there. Staring, listening, waiting for just the right moment.

It could take hours. Even if she went back to the window to check, she couldn’t be sure that he had really gone. She tried to remember where she had left her mobile, though whom would she call? She didn’t want to cause an unnecessary 56

panic like that in the middle of the night. What could she report to the police, anyway?

A man is looking through my window.

They’d probably just laugh at her. Then again, who knew how many people had lost their lives simply because they had been too embarrassed to report their fears.

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02:30 Practice the present. Even if it is somebody else’s.

A woman at the window, awake, at this hour of night.

Windows everywhere, and somebody behind each one of them. Behind the glass pane or in bed. People asleep, their worries now reposing. Maybe that’s the purpose of sleeping: to give people a break from their troubles. From the unsolvable. He had deprived himself today of biology’s few hours of mercy. Like the woman at the window, for now.

Very clever of nature. A brief death at night, after which you fall for the idea that everything starts all over again. A new day – a new opportunity. That’s certainly how Elena saw waking up.

He envies the people asleep in those rooms behind the curtains. He envies their lights switched off, the darkness of non-existence where the body exists but without obligation, where you don’t have to walk or eat or meet people or think.

That is the most important thing – not to think.

But today he has to. Think instead of Elena, walk instead of Elena, smoke in her name, notice people if they are there, and if not, then the windows they are behind. The street lamps, closed shops, silhouettes in the cars whizzing by, overloaded trash cans, house numbers, graffiti on the walls.

All the things that she can’t do.

Scanning the world with her eyes, he looks for what is there. There must be something.

Elena, maybe that something is what the living don’t understand.

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03:05 He felt as if he were doing something illicit, but all he was doing was watching her. She’d fallen asleep in his bed. Had she not fallen asleep, he wouldn’t have been able to look at her like this, as if he were seeing her for the first time. He wasn’t seeing her for the first time, but this was the first time she was in his bed and the first time he saw her lifeless, so deeply asleep that he had no idea what she was dreaming about. Still worse, he didn’t care. About the dream.

He’d have to wake her up and ask her to leave.

I’m sorry Barbara, but I won’t be able to fall asleep unless you leave.

He tried it out to hear what it would sound like.

I can’t sleep if somebody’s here.

She probably wouldn’t take it well. For almost a month now he’d been behaving as if he wanted her in his bed, and now that she was finally there, having shared everything two bodies can, he wanted to rid himself of her. That’s how it would look to her. If he moved to the sofa in the living room, she might misinterpret even that when she woke up and saw he wasn’t next to her in bed, and anyway he wouldn’t be able to go to sleep on the sofa knowing that she was still in the room.

That was something he couldn’t bear. Considerateness was an enemy. If he started thinking about her now, about her sleeping and her possible disappointment, he could put paid to getting any sleep himself. If he started thinking about himself, she might put paid to him.

Knowing himself, he’d hesitate for a few more minutes and then wake her up. After that, what would be, would be.

Admittedly, he could have told her before. Before she came to his place, or at least before they wound up in bed. I simply have sleep alone. The thought did go through his mind at one moment, when he was opening the bottle of wine, but

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he didn’t say anything. It would have complicated his chances of getting her into bed, and after all that effort he didn’t feel like wasting it.

Always that hesitation. Everybody wants the same thing, but they pretend they want something else, and that they’ll gain something by putting it off. That they’ll be taken more seriously. The only kind of person he would take seriously would be somebody who was spontaneously in the moment. Somebody who didn’t hesitate.

Barbara had hesitated for a month, and now here she was, sleeping in his new bed as if she had earned that good night’s sleep because she had hesitated for a month, rather than because she had stopped hesitating.

He didn’t know what on earth he had been thinking. He didn’t usually go to such effort. He moved on, tried somewhere else. But with Barbara he had made an effort. Maybe he was just being contrary. What’s more, for as long as they were inaccessible to him he was captivated by her breasts. This evening he had been able to see them for himself. They were really fine breasts. All the same, he couldn’t sleep next to them. He touched them again, hoping that would wake her up. No response.

“Barbara?” he called out.

She stirred. He called her name again, and then once more. Finally she woke up.

“I can’t sleep if you’re here.”

She looked at him in astonishment, as if she wasn’t sure she wasn’t dreaming.

Wasn’t even sure who he was.

“Not you; if anybody is here,” he explained.

“You want me to go?”

“Yes.” She got out of bed and started looking for her clothes. She didn’t say a word, but he could see that she was on the verge of tears. That the only possibility she entertained was that she had just slept with an out-and-out creep. What was he supposed to do, explain to her that it had nothing to do with her, that it was something much bigger and more terrible than her groggy assumptions? That his hell was much worse than what she thought she was going through now?

There’s no point.

When she finished dressing, she turned towards him as if she wanted to say something to him, but then she changed her mind. She took out her mobile and called for a cab. Only then did she realize she didn’t know the address. She hadn’t been paying attention when they came. She looked at him questioningly, the phone against her ear, and it was clear that the only thing she wanted to hear was the name of the street.

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Ujević Street 23.

He was just about to give her his old address. He’d only been at this address for five days, and hadn’t said it aloud until now.

She repeated the address on the phone and the next thing he heard was the front door slamming. She slammed it good and hard. He’d probably never see her again, but all he could think of right now was getting those few hours of sleep, in bed, alone.

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03:15 Oh God, make him go away. Send him to somebody else’s window. To somebody who can defend herself. Please.

That deadly silence. A god who sleeps through crisis situations. A god who brings strangers into her courtyard. That same god who chooses to send her own husband around robbing exchange bureaus. That heavenly cynic who has no mercy for those who merely wanted a small, ordinary life without any drama. A small life without any pomp, one where the loudest sound is a chirp, and the most frightening thing is a spider on the wall.

He’s not asleep now either, I’m sure That God. Perhaps he’s amusing himself by moving their miniature figures on something like a chessboard, laughing maliciously as He does it.

We’ll wake up Magdalena and take her to the window, and we’ll move that fellow with the hat over to that same window, and see what happens.

Perhaps by now he has already moved him on somewhere else. God and that stranger. Perhaps he has already become a terror in front of somebody else’s window. Perhaps now she is afraid of something that isn’t relevant anymore.

An encouraging thought, but not to the point of making her go to the window and check if the new situation is already in effect.

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03:20 He stood at the window to make sure that the taxi picked her up. She had run out of the flat the minute she had called for the cab so she was bound to have to wait for it in the street until it arrived. At four in the morning, in this kind of neighbourhood, that wasn’t particularly advisable.

He saw she was crying. Even though he couldn’t see her tears from the third floor, it was obvious. After rummaging through her bag for tissues that she couldn’t find, she wiped her face on her sleeve. Several times.

Twice, headlights lit up the street but they weren’t the taxi’s. The second time the driver slowed down and looked as if he was going to pull up to her, but she abruptly turned her back on him and he drove on.

She must have been afraid.

He thought how stupid it was that she had run out like that. She could have waited in the flat until the cab arrived. They could have exchanged a few words that might have made her feel better now, even though he wasn’t sure what words they could be.

Just as he decided he wasn’t going to feel guilty about her standing out in the street in tears, he noticed a man in a hat walking towards her. As he approached, the man noticeably slowed down. He stopped and was saying something to her.

Barbara covered her face with her sleeve, her shoulders shaking.

Damned his sense of responsibility. And guilt. He had no time to think. He put on his slippers and jeans, and, half-dressed, ran to the staircase, taking three steps at a time. Just because he couldn’t fall asleep is somebody else was there didn’t mean he would let her stand out there on her own, and be at the mercy of some random passer-by who could hurt her more than he already had.

Headlights illuminated them just as he ran out of the building. It was the taxi. The stranger had his hand on Barbara’s shoulder, but when the taxi pulled

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up he opened the door for her. It looked as though he might get into the cab with her. But he didn’t. He merely closed the door of the cab and continued down the street as if nothing had happened. And obviously it hadn’t.

A few seconds later, he was alone in the street, abstracting the stranger in the hat who was moving away at the same pace he had before spotting Barbara.

It was only now, feeling May’s fresh night air on his skin, that he realized he had forgotten his key.

Shit, Shit, shit, shit!

His old flat had an ordinary door handle, and he still hadn’t gotten used to this one-sided one. In his old place even the downstairs door to the building was never locked, but here everything was under lock and key, and under surveillance.

That ostensible security was now causing him trouble.

That’s what happens once you let yourself feel responsible for somebody else.

A moment of weakness, a moment of supposed kindness would cost him much more than a sleepless night next to Barbara. Now he would have a sleepless night on the street. If he had let her stay, that too would have been a moment of weakness. Once he stepped away from himself, took a step against himself, he had to pay the price.

For a few minutes he just kept swearing, muttering to himself, but it didn’t make him feel any better. Then he sat down on the front step because he didn’t know what else to do.

He could run after that stranger.

You put me in this situation, now you go ahead and resolve it.

It was already too late for that. The man had calmly walked down the street as if he was not guilty of anything. As if he hadn’t bothered Barbara, as if he hadn’t condemned him to spend the night on the street, half-naked. As if nothing had happened. But it had.

Even if he woke up one of his neighbours to unlock the downstairs door, he still wouldn’t be able to get into his flat. Damn that one-sided handle. Damn that stranger. Damn his own fear of having somebody in bed with him.

He was beginning to feel cold, and it wasn’t even four a.m. yet. He would freeze if he stayed out in the street until morning. One of the neighbours who went to work early would let him into the building, but then what? He didn’t have a phone, he couldn’t call a locksmith, and even if he could that locksmith wouldn’t want to leave his bed at this hour just for somebody who had been stupid.

He’d be late for work. A job he had wanted so much and had gotten only the day before. He would lose it if he was late. The four demanding interviews he had to go through to get the job were all in vain. The news stories he had to concoct and write to prove that he knew what would sell a weekly were all vain.

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What on earth could he tell his editor? That he had kicked out the girl he had screwed and then had run out into the street in the dead of night, without his keys, to rescue her from a pest? That would be hard to believe even in an invented newspaper story, and would be disastrous for his reputation. A reputation he had yet to make.

He sat on the step in front of the building, shaking and thinking how unattainable some little, innocent things can be. His four walls. His blanket, book, cup of warm milk. His bed with nobody in it.

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03:25 Who knows what got into her. The girl waiting for the taxi.

People cry, of course, but they seldom do so in the street. Weakness tends to avoid witnesses. Had it been any other day, had he not had Elena on his mind and the sound of her heels on the pavement in his ears, he would have walked past her without a thought.

Elena, I did what you would have done. I asked if I could be of any help. Put her in the taxi. Make her safe.

It was only when he moved on down the street that he realized he had done not only what Elena would have done, but what somebody should have done for Elena twenty-six years ago. Put her in a taxi. Make her safe. Stop her from running across the street on that long ago day of May fifteenth.

The girl was the same age as Elena was then. That living, sad girl.

His own voice sounded strange to him when he spoke to her. It was a voice used to silence.

He sounded to himself like a stranger.

As soon as he spoke, it was a kind of microphonia.

The safest thing was to keep quiet. He never wondered why people had a need to express themselves. Practically everything one said was futile.

Look at that girl he spoke to, for instance. It was as if he hadn’t spoken. His words were left hanging in the darkness as something superfluous, unnecessary.

A question without an answer, as is always the case.

No answer, No change.

Nothing in the universe moved, or even flickered just because he had wanted, in Elena’s name, to help some unknown girl.

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03:30 Insomnia. Again.

Sleep, Greta! Sleep.

If only you could order the head to obey. But no. He’s been awake now for three-and-a-half more hours. Being awake is the enemy. The aggressor.

A new day is the enemy as well, and now he will be waiting for it longer than he can bear. Waiting for it and flinching from it. No, flinching sounds too gentle.

Afraid of it, again. And with reason. Fear writ large.

Because when that day begins, it will again be the same. Whether he gets up or not. First comes no, and it stays there for a long time. Because why get up anyway? The body will do it if it’s told to, but it won’t think of a single good reason why it should get out of bed. It had been a long, long time since there’d been a good reason for the morning.

Come on, body, get up.

That’s how it will coax it in the morning.

Aldo will sleep by her side as he’s doing now. He has no idea what it’s like when you have to negotiate with your own body about assuming the right position.

About eating, About the movement of every muscle and every step.

Her body will obey her around seven in the morning. Because of the schedule, not because it made any sense.

It was easier than explaining to Aldo that she’d rather not. Get up, or do anything.

When she does get up, she will go down the wooden stairs barefoot, stairs that have a remarkably thick veneer which always made her think that one morning it will start melting and her foot will sink into a gooey mass that will keep her stuck between the upper and lower floor. When she manages to reach the bottom, because what she fears never happens, she will put the water on for

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coffee and then brush her teeth and wash in the downstairs bathroom. She will dry her face with the soft green towel – all their towels are green as dictated by the interior designer who organized everything down to the very last detail of feng shui – and return to the kitchen where the water for the coffee will have just started to boil. One, two, three, four teaspoons of coffee. At the fourth teaspoon he will walk into the kitchen. She will briefly put the Turkish coffee-pot back on the flame and concentrate on the volcano of coffee simmering and rising, threatening to spill over onto the stove if she doesn’t take it off the fire at just the right moment. That is the only real moment that she always catches. The only one.

He will open the refrigerator, take out a carton of cold milk, tip it back and drink. It’s always the same. Always the damned same. She has stopped drinking milk because every morning that scene made her feel cheated all over again. As if somebody was making use of her life in a way she would never approve of. If she ever had to sign a piece of paper requiring something, anything, to be omitted from their joint biography, it would be the sight of his lips on the lip of the carton, next to the open refrigerator door. One more reason not to get out of bed.

After she pours them their coffee, she will sit at the kitchen table. He will sit on the stool by the window, and she on the stool opposite. They won’t talk. Certainly not for the first ten or so minutes. That was something they had agreed on a long time ago, when they still loved each other.

We won’t spoil each other’s morning by forcing ourselves to talk.

That’s still a few hours away.

And there is the tension that came early this morning, because of waking up early.

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03:40 As soon as he came home, he looked at the watch. Had he taken his wristwatch with him, he wouldn’t have come back yet. It would be wise to lie down and get some sleep, if only for a few hours, but that would make him feel that he was betraying Elena. Again. A sleepless night would be easier to recover from.

Once he admitted to himself that he had come back just because of the watch, there was nothing more to keep him in the flat. It was good to have had thoughts that you didn’t have to explain to anybody. Thoughts with no shame.

Still, he was somewhat ashamed of his other thoughts. Elena would not have approved of them. He wanted to go back outside, among the rare nocturnal passers-by because their fear amused him. Perhaps it was because of the hat, though the people he saw this evening seemed to give him a wider berth than necessary.

The girl waiting for the taxi, backed away when he came up to her. And the woman at the window quickly pulled back when she noticed him in the courtyard. He liked this image of walking danger. He liked the disquiet of other people. There were too many people in the world who denied unhappiness but he revelled when he came across these unhappy people.

Unhappy people existed. For him that was good news. It worked in his favour.

There are others, apart from you, said the poem that Elena had recited in secondary school, who unbeknownst to you, live your life.

Tonight he needed another few unhappy people. Another few who had survived in vain. Who knew how many he might still meet. How many who had released tears.

As soon as he thought of more people, he remembered the train station. Probably because of Elena, since he and train stations had nothing to do with each other. Someone who vegetated didn’t travel. This was the day, this was the night, when she had to come to life even if she wasn’t alive. But Elena loved to travel.

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Elena, we’re going to the train station. We can pretend we’re taking a trip somewhere.

He set off on foot. It was about a twenty-minute walk from his flat to the train station. He looked at his watch so that when he arrived, he could check exactly how long it had taken him. It was 03:50 when he went back out into the street.

If Elena could see into this life on earth, she’d probably be irritated by his obsession with time and numbers. She’d wonder where it came from. This wasn’t the brother she had lived with for twenty-four years.

She’d be surprised because she never learned what it was like when you had to find something to occupy your brain so that it didn’t think about death all the time. On the irreparable. To find puzzles for it to solve.

That was why twenty-six years ago numbers became a good substitute for words. He just needed to be sure that everything could be counted, calculated, arranged in amounts and sequences. That everything was quantifiable. Because only the quantifiable was reliable. Nothing else, not even life itself.

Even now, he realized, he was unconsciously counting his steps. Somewhere in his head, there was that invisible wheel that turned in spite of himself, counting and measuring. And he was sure of one thing: if he didn’t count, he would become unaccountable for his actions.

He knew exactly how many cigarette butts there were in the box.

He knew how many steps he had taken since leaving the flat, how many minutes this second walk had taken.

But tonight that had to be put aside. Elena wouldn’t approve. He had to think with her head.

Maybe we really will take a train if it comes our way.

He could tolerate such thoughts, in between counting two steps. And today he had to.

At the fifty-sixth step, he encountered a couple with their arms around each other. He who had no one to put his arm around. He had counted all those cigarettes, meals, steps, bills, traffic lights, passers-by, minutes, windows, even the broken white lines on the road, but never embraces. He could barely remember them.

He picked up his pace. When he walked into the train station he deliberately avoided checking the time. He didn’t lock at either the big wall clock or his wristwatch. He dug his hands deep into his pockets to stop himself from peeking. In punishment. He had measured and counted so many unimportant things, yet knew so little about embraces. They would certainly be absent from any biography, if he gave them any thought. He couldn’t remember a single hug with Elena. And a sister should be hugged, while she exists. It made him feel sad, in spite of himself. Indifference was the safest attitude. The simplest. He regretted not 70

having stayed at home, even if it would have meant pacing up and down the room for the rest of the night to stay awake. What did he need all these strangers for, they only reminded him that others dared to live. To travel. To hug, whatever the risk. If he hadn’t realized that his bladder was full he would have probably turned around on the spot, left the train station and gone back the same way.

The toilette had messages written on all four walls, even on the door. Maybe they were real messages, he thought. Maybe it was time for him to finally start taking into account abstract, demonstrable things. To things that were unquantifiable and subject to interpretation. Maybe those walls, where people had written of necessity, in need, contained the answer to a question he didn’t know how to ask himself.

He scanned the traces of visits to this smelly toilette, ignoring the vulgarities as if they were a personal affront – and then he saw that one sentence which crept in like an endemic among the unsaid.

I forgot that I was born.

The sentence was written with a sure hand in a nice script which looked more like a font than the handwriting of somebody philosophising on the wall above the toilet bowl.

But more important than that was the affect it had on Oliver. It was like a message from the other world and in a single second it messed up all his accounts.

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04:20 I should have run after him, he thought. I should have asked him what right he had to go up to an unknown girl crying in the street in the dead of night. I should have told him that he couldn’t just burst into somebody’s life like that and interfere in another person’s situation.

More self-accusation.

I should have done lots of things. I should have told Barbara right at the start that I can’t sleep if somebody is there. Actually, I should have walked away from her right away, or at least after a week, as soon as it became clear that she would be a hard nut to crack.

And short of that, I should have at least told her that we couldn’t see each other tonight, that tomorrow was my first day in a new job. But what did I do? I smelled the possibility of sex and my brain capitulated.

All this went through his head in the street. On the steps in front of the building where he was still sitting helplessly.

Perhaps life was just a chain reaction and he had mistakenly dropped into somebody else’s. A cogwheel of parallel fates had briefly stopped and he was now stuck in the groove of another person’s time.

He should write a story about it. How a chance passer-by whom he had never seen before – and probably never would again – had ruined a young journalist’s career. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or perhaps in the right place at the right time for the devilishly fateful plan to have his job go to somebody else.

If only that chance passer-by felt guilty? But no. He had proceeded to walk down the street at the same pace, never knowing that the steps he was taking had been fatal for somebody. He would never know that because of him somebody was now sitting on the front step of a residential building, freezing and distraught, the way people with a ruined opportunity can be.

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See you tomorrow morning at eight, his editor had said to him yesterday. Don’t be late. He could visualize him at eight in the morning, less than four hours from now, deciding that he had misjudged him. Of all the candidates, he had chosen the wrong one. The one who wasn’t capable of coming to work on time on his first day in the office. Luckily, he hadn’t signed anything yet. It still wasn’t too late for him to thank him for what would never be.

As for Barbara, why did she have to storm out like that? He had obviously chosen badly himself. The easiest thing was to run out into the street sobbing.

Without asking any questions, or even making a feeble attempt to understand him. If only she had asked, shown the slightest curiosity, perhaps he would have told her.

When I was four, I woke up in bed next to my dead mother. The previous evening she had tenderly lulled me to sleep and in the morning she was no longer alive. She was cold.

For two hours I tried in vain to wake her up.

But no. She had drawn her own conclusion.

He screwed me and now he’s lost interest in me. He can’t bear me for even the remainder of the night.

Two heads, two interpretations of the same moment. A small death on one person’s mind, a big one on the other’s.

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04:30 Language, her toy. When she wakes up in the middle of the night like this, she can play with it to her heart’s content. That, if anything, is what insomnia is for.

No reprimands, no questions.

Where are you now, Greta? Again, you’re not here.

Lying next to Aldo, who’s asleep, she can pick a word, any word that she doesn’t say when she’s awake, and use it to build walls of comforting thoughts that she doesn’t have to explain to anyone. Comforting only because they are nice. They don’t need to mean anything. Anyway, there is no meaning, not in anything, ever.

Wistfulness.

That’s one of those words. A word that isn’t mundane. Nestled in the safe haven of the dictionary, among words that are seldom invoked. Poetry has a monopoly on such words.

It doesn’t need other words to make it a verse. It already is one. It encompasses the whole territory of her sadness which sounds too beautiful to abandon.

Wistfulness. Greta.

It sounds like the sea where you don’t have to swim. Floating is a state, depth a friend. If you sink, what happens is not death but rather a quiet surrender which seems sufficiently temporary so as not to worry you.

One word, and yet such tender content. You don’t know if it contains helplessness or omnipotence, but it doesn’t matter.

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04:55 It was almost four hours since the stranger under the window disappeared, but she still hadn’t managed to fall asleep. Not for a minute, in spite of those pills.

Anger kept her awake. She wondered if he was asleep there in his cell. If he was, she hoped a rat or one of those other horrible creatures scuttling around the prison cells would wake him up. He didn’t deserve one second of sleep. He didn’t deserve the luxury of closing his eyes, not even for a second.

She had come to all sorts of conclusions during these hours that she’d been awake. The most painful of all, even more than the humiliating conditions of her life now, was the feeling that he had taken away her memories. None of them was worth anything anymore. You live with somebody for eight years and think you’ve collected memories, and then this terrible sabotage happens and they all explode. All that’s left is lost, destroyed, indemonstrable time. Your own time which you cannot but be ashamed of because somebody contaminated it.

That’s what you can’t forgive him for. She’ll bear that in mind tomorrow, in court. That and the fact that she doesn’t know how to explain to the children that she’d missed the mark with their father. She’d chosen the wrong man.

She will walk into that courtroom and do everything she can to make sure he serves his time. She’ll drop anyone who doesn’t support her. Because any kind of You’re not going to testify against him, are you? is unforgivable.

She feels now that she would have no problem dealing with that predator in the courtyard. She’d yell at him so loudly that he’d never even think of peering into somebody’s window again. She might even run out of the house, grab him and throw him onto the ground, kicking him until he shrank from the horror of it.

Superhuman strength came to her out of the blue. So now she walked firmly to the window where just a few hours ago she’d been crawling in fear; she pulled

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open the curtain in the inexplicable hope that he’d be there and give her an opportunity to vent her anger, that intoxicating, righteous disillusionment with life, on someone.

But there was nobody in the shadow of the stunted popular tree.

She should be grateful to him. To that man who’d awoken in her an animal-like survival instinct. Had she not been afraid, she would have been stranded with a sense of responsibility towards her father, towards her children, regardless of the hell he had caused her. Now she didn’t have to do that anymore. Now she could be bitter and angry, and ruthless in her battle to live a normal life, with no exchange office robberies or prison visiting hours.

That’s what she would do. Live a normal life. By the time he finished serving his sentence, she would be a new person. New. And everything she had would be new. A new job, a flat in a better part of town, new clothes and a new hairdo.

Maybe even a new man.

The only thing she wouldn’t have was new children. Fuck it, they would always be his as well.

She should have known. She should have realized what kind of person he was the first time she had anything to do with him. Only somebody flawed could come to get perfume for one woman and then buy it for another. What a terrible opinion she must have had of herself when it made her feel happy that a man had replaced his partner with her. If he did indeed replace her. Maybe he just added her to the woman who had been the reason why he’d come to the perfume shop. He came with one woman in mind, and left with two.

It made her shiver to think of the life she had led until only yesterday. Of the eight years she had spent with a man who had proven to be a stranger. Of the parallel life he had led behind her back until he was caught. Perhaps surveillance cameras would uncover where else he had been and what else he had done while she was living in the belief that the only life he had was the one he had with her.

A life without dossiers.

But that would become the past. Further back than the past. The pluperfect which she would forget as soon as she stood on her feet again. On her own feet.

While he served his sentence. And he would certainly get that long a sentence.

When he came out, he would merely be the ex-husband of a woman who had deleted him from her biography, the father of children who had forgotten him. A stranger in their new life. That would be his new sentence in his life as a free man.

Sleeping was pointless now. The night was over. Many things were over, especially the feeling of obligation to the father of her children. She’d make some lentils so that there was a meal waiting for the children when she brought them home from kindergarten. She’d take a shower, wash her hair with the rest of the 76

soap, dress as if she was going to the theatre rather than to court, and then perform her new role there. The role that the stranger in the hat had arranged for her before she ever even dreamed she could carry it off. First she would take the children to the kindergarten. Her children. When she brought them home in the afternoon, they would already be children with a former father, whom they would all manage to forget.

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05:00 Perhaps the closed door was simply meant for him, as a leitmotifthat he would never get rid of.

The closed door he had been behind that morning, with his mother who wouldn’t wake up.

The closed door behind which his father was living a new life with new children.

The closed door of the office where he was supposed to start work today.

The closed door of the hallway where he was now freezing.

The closed door of the flat which he won’t be able to enter when he finally climbs up to his floor.

Open Sesame. pp. 7-48

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