You know, she says to me now, when I should have married? But you don’t know… or you know? I know, I say, you told me. No, she says, let me finish… They lied to me… Listen, I was going to get married. I even took my landlady, the old woman, with me to the registry office… this one, this old woman, the one whose cellar it is, I took her then instead of my mother. And when we reached the park, he says to me, leave this old woman, let’s go for a walk. No, I say, what walk, are you crazy? We took a few more steps, getting nearer the registry, he keeps stopping… He was as ugly as I am, rough, dark, somehow uncultured… Suddenly he says, I’m going to buy some cigarettes… what a wedding… I was just lying to myself… he ran away from me. Oh, how I cried… and now it doesn’t matter any more, I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to, so there. That’s not what’s the matter… I’d just like someone to talk to, my heart’s been burning for someone to talk to, to refresh my mind, and nobody comes here. I don’t go to work, I’m out on sick leave, I get sixty thousand, what do I need it for…?
She began to have difficulty breathing. Her shrunken chest did not hold much air, and it took a lot of effort for her to inhale air deeply. She put her hand somewhere on her stomach and kept saying that she was burning inside, and she didn’t stop talking, talking in spurts. At one time she said she was hot, I’m burning up, she says, I feel that my head is baking under my hair. I’ll burn up, she says. I got up to open a small window, a little rectangular hole, just on ground level. I opened it but no air came in. There was nowhere for it to come from, and outside it was a heavy, stuffy summer. Why don’t you go back to the village, I say, you have brothers. She didn’t answer, she stood for a long time, looking somewhere absently. Then she said in a low voice, as if talking to herself: they don’t like me. Yes, it does in fact seem that they were indifferent to her. They never made any inquiries, never wrote her a letter. At our house, father, when he came back from his journeys, would bring her presents, he even looked after her when she fell ill. And she felt like giving way to that tenderness, yet at the same time she knew she did not belong in our home. My mother did not approve of my father’s casual attention toward the girl, though it was mostly for her sake. And there was conflict. There were big quarrels in our home. But the real reason for the quarrels was not the girl. The real reason was that my mother thought she had not succeeded in life because of my father, who succeeded thanks to her support. We, the children, my brother and I, were involved in those quarrels too, and the girl was a witness. My mother, who looked down on creatures such as our domestic help, could not forgive her having witnessed them. Gradually the girl seemed to have become a witness to her unsuccessful life, something to keep reminding her there was something she could not free herself from. It was a strange connection born in my mother’s confused head. She began to complain constantly about the girl and to torment her with this and that. She tormented her concerning bills too. She was obsessed by the thought that she might be stealing from her, that she would take some money for herself when she sent her to the market. Therefore she kept her by her side for hours, going over accounts. And the girl did not steal at all, did not even feel like doing so.
There was at that time something more that drove my mother crazy. That was the freedom the girl started to display more openly. Now she wanted to go out, and she looked after her appearance. My mother could not stand that, she considered it impertinent in such a person as our help. And just then, when the girl began to pay the greatest attention to her own wishes, she experienced her greatest disappointments. She, who had been able to defend herself so far, got confused now. Ah, what sufferings they were! It happened when she herself had to choose what she wanted. And it happened that she did not know what to take from those modest things life offered her. There were men who sometimes followed her up to the entrance of the house. But she refused them rudely and immediately, as creatures unworthy of her honesty, and then she gave herself up to futile dreams. The years passed, and her big dream of finding a husband burned inside her, constantly melting her heart. She left us, she was our help no more, but a worker in a factory. Yet her expectations were futile and empty.
At some time during those days before she left, we made a discovery about her, which still upsets me to remember. In the room where she slept, in the small sideboard at the head of the bed, we found two or three bottles, one of them not yet empty. The half-empty one had brandy in it, and there was a bottle of wine, too. So, it meant the girl had started drinking and had not stopped to that point.
While she speaks, breathlessly and greedily, I can feel her breath smelling of alcohol. Why do you drink, I ask her, give up that evil. Ah, she says, you think I want to drink…? You know how it started? First only when I felt sad, then because of loneliness. I move around in this mold, and it’s hard to talk to yourself… Then I get drunk and happy, I talk, I tell myself stories and retell them… If I had somebody, no, not a man, if I had a friend, a person, anyone, to listen to me, do you think, you really think, I’d want to drink? She cries out all of a sudden, don’t stand up, she says. But no, I’m not standing up, I don’t intend to stand up, I say. I thought you were getting up, she says. Look, she says, touch me here, my heart will burst… you see how it’s beating?
I really did want to get up, to run away. Damn it, I said to myself, why did I stop by this creature. I wanted to break away, I even said something, that I’d had enough, but it was not good enough to get me out of the trouble coming.
It seems to me that my heart has gone on beating hard since then, she continued… since the barracks that evening… Who knows, it could even have been the driver… Oh, if only I had a child to call me Mommy… I’m burning, touch me, I’m burning under my hair, like live coals… I told them, I don’t remember, I don’t know him… I only saw his shadow when he was leaving. He was big and rough… he caught me and pressed me against the fence…
She had been coming back from work on the second shift. She had been passing by the barracks by the shoe factory. A big, rough man had put his hand over her mouth and pulled her into the dark. Now, she says, look, touch me here, my heart is beating, my head is boiling. I’ll burn up. If you leave me alone I’ll die, she says. There is nowhere to go from here, this is a grave, and I’m buried… Oh, I’ve been buried a long time. They threw soil over me, it happened, but now it’s over… You see, get out, go on, get out if you can! Listen, she says, this didn’t even happen, look, if I were pregnant you could see it… you see my stomach, there is nothing in it…
Even when I was passing by her cellar, I said to myself: should I go in or not? It was as if her misfortune was luring me down there, and it was now sticking to me like a scab. Couldn’t I escape all this? Now I wanted to shake her off, to get rid of her as if she were something evil. But I felt that it was becoming impossible, more and more impossible; I found myself enslaved in the horror of her ruined heart.
Sometimes I get drunk, she says, and I feel relieved, but shadows still come… As soon as I get drunk, here they come, shadows… all over the walls, like corpses… Sometimes I can hear them making noises with their mouths. But listen, you haven’t come here to deceive me, have you, you are not his matchmaker, are you?
She pointed her finger at me. It seemed to me that her whole face and her eyes were distorted. Her lips had long been dry, burning like a naked flame. She was trying to moisten them with her tongue, but it was also red-hot. She was not sitting down anymore. She was walking all round the room, stopping, putting the fingers of both hands into her mouth with a look of horror, pressing against them with her teeth. Again and again she kept feverishly telling her terrible story: several illnesses, insults, the bathing of her dead father, the husband who ran away from the wedding, the rape, the hunger, and the drinking. But the story would never be completed. It was becoming incomprehensible. Delirious, broken, and painful. And those horror-stricken wide eyes that escape the terrible hands of her pursuers…
Translated by: Lidia Arsova-Nikolich