– But any solution, asked her mother with a tight throat and bitterness in her mouth.
– Illness is also a natural state, they told her, and not every illness causes death.
Gjuvezia Dubrovska already thought that everyone was mocking her misfortune. There were days when she didn’t even want to talk to anyone. She just stood there with empty eyes and staring at something, who knows what. But most of the time, she kept her head bent over her lap. In those moments of depression, she didn’t even talk to her mother. But her mother never left her alone. Her father abandoned them soon after she was born, and she did not know him. But her mother did not give up hope. Even now, she believed there must always be hope, she just needed to find the right address. Only those who lack faith are hopeless, she said. Then, she began taking her one after another fortune-tellers, quacks, and monks. They were blowing and spitting, whispering something over her head, helping her untie the spell. But the help of their skills was not visible at all. Help is always late, her mother thought, and to wait for it means wasting time. And she did not waste an hour. First, she began to smear her with vinegar. She had heard that even Jesus Christ while crucified, on the cross, asked for vinegar. Just to wet his mouth a little bit. And his disciples, or his angels, brought him the vinegar secretly and restored his life. Gjuvezia Dubrovska said:
– I saw his punishment, but he doesn’t want to see mine.
– He sees everything, said her mother, but he also chooses what to see sooner. There are much bigger misfortunes to see on the Earth, she said.
The head of Gjuvezia Dubrovska smelled of vinegar rennet for days. But her hair kept falling out. Sometimes she was gripped by rage, and sometimes by expressionless despair. For a while, she visited Sija Hadjibanova, but Sija stopped coming since she didn’t know how to comfort her. And maybe she was afraid of the disease that does not go away. But Gjuvezia thought that everyone was already frightened of her. She said: How little beauty there is in life, and how much pain. Only when people need you, she said, only then do they remember you. She felt weak and helpless, almost rejected, and forgotten by everyone. Her mother tried to encourage her with carefully chosen words. Worse things happen on the Earth, she said, but not all of them end badly. God is great and merciful and after every bad thing comes a good one, she said and continued to heal her with balms. Sometimes she smeared her with chamomile oil, then with cow dung. Gjuvezia’s head stank of dung, and she thought she had been thrown into a village dump. She loathed herself, but she did not object to her mother. And she could not sit down to take a rest: she constantly changed her medicines. She also began to bathe her with towels soaked in the juice of crushed nettles and birch bark. She was wrapping her head, swaddling it like a child in a diaper.
– No, Mother, said Gjuvezia Dubrovska, my hair never will be back.
– Never say “never”, her mother scolded her.
But Gjuvezia Dubrovska’s head continued to bald, to bare itself. She could count those few hairs that were standing like burned grass. She could also pass a hand between them and still not touch them. Now she was afraid to see herself in the mirror. In fact, everywhere she saw only what frightened her. In the end, her eyebrows and eyelids began to fall off, her whole head became bare. All she could see was peeled skin covered in unpleasant redness and scabs. Then her mother said:
– You will go back and take your hair from the potter-man. Your curse is bound there, he said.
– If I show myself like this, said Gjuvezia Dubrovska, everyone will run away from me. As soon as they see me, they will run away, she said.
– You will tie a scarf, said her mother, women cover their faces there anyway.
– There they wear a third eye, sewn on the back of the shirt, said Gjuvezia Dubrovska. To look both forward and backward, she said, to avoid curses.
3.
A year later, almost at the same time, Gjuvezia Dubrovska returned to Avanos. The bus just stopped, and she got off, losing herself in the tall clouds of dust that rose again behind it. And when the dust settled, she saw that she was the only person who got off the bus. She blinked her eyes and couldn’t believe it. Even more, she could not believe that she would find an empty town. There was no such crowd of people who were constantly selling or buying something. And there were not those piles of pottery over which all of the known languages of the world were mixed.
She stood alone on the road, like an abandoned dog. Dust scratched her eyes, sand crunched in her mouth. Her shadow hid somewhere under her feet and was nowhere to be seen. And there was as much sun as you wanted, but even the sun didn’t explain anything. It was raised high in the sky as if it had always been there as if it had never moved. It was another sun, much bigger than ours. At least as much as Gjuvezia Dubrovska knew. Lord, she said to herself, have the people fled from me, or have I descended into some deserted city? But the board could not deceive her: Avanos was still written there. She walked and paced with a wrinkled look among the empty and winding streets. And then she noticed that all the doors and windows of the houses were closed. Not a living person, a living breath did appear out of nowhere. No dog to bark, no cat to run over. There was a kind of heavy silence that sickens your soul. Time, like everything else, was stopped, nothing moved. Even her breath stopped, she got petrified. She went up to the pottery workshops, but they too had their shutters down. Lord, she repeated, has this city really moved out? And as she wandered thus through it, she had the feeling that someone was walking behind her and that he was constantly at her heels. But when she turned around, there was no one behind her. I must be hearing my own steps, thought Gjuvezia Dubrovska. In such silence you can hear everything. You can even hear the beating of your own heart as someone else’s, even your breathing…
She dared to knock on a door, but no one opened it. Then she stopped in front of another door and hesitated for a long time, whether to do the same thing again. But when she made up her mind, she noticed as if something had come over her, and as if someone was watching her from above. She saw it only out of the corner of her eye. But when she looked up, there was no one there. In fact, there was one window ajar on one wing only. It was the only half-open window in the city. At least that’s how it seemed to her.
She got out on a narrow street between the houses and started shouting loudly: Hey, is there any human, is there any human? She shouted as much as her voice was capable, but no one answered her. Only her throaty voice came back to her, echoing down the steep and winding streets. She shouted: is there any human and only the part of the last word came back to her. Only – man, man, she was listening, and there was no man anywhere. Her other words remained trapped somewhere between the blind walls of the town. She didn’t know what to do anymore. She panicked and took off, running down the road towards the bus stop. She believed that a bus would pass by and pick her up, take her out of there. She was aware that everything was unclear and dangerous there and she didn’t know what else to do but run. But, running down, she again felt that another person was running behind her. She heard his footsteps repeatedly behind her and always at the same distance. Now she already knew that, for you to decide to run away, you need someone to chase you. And she ran and cowered, not knowing how to collect her torn soul. Waterfall of sweat flowed through her sleeves and down her loins. The scarf on her head was already wet, and her eyes were full of salty sweat. The salt made her wounds even worse. It was burning her, pinching her all over her head.
When she stopped at the bus stop on the road, she could not turn back for a long time, to see who was behind her. Standing like that, he just asked
– Excuse me, is this Avanos?
– Avanos, heard her own voice, she recognized it. And when she turned around, she was gripped by an inexorable horror: ten steps behind her, she saw herself. Gjuvezia Dubrovska stood in front of Gjuvezia Dubrovska. Now they looked into each other’s eyes but said nothing. Neither one to ask anything nor the other to say anything. Are they now different from each other? Because that Gjuvezia Dubrovska who was standing in front of her still had lush hair on her head and was not wearing a scarf. She was in the same summer dress and the same shallow sandals worn barefoot. She even had the same smiling face reddened by the potter’s wine. Sija Hadjibanova was still missing and everything should be the same as last year. So Gjuvezia Dubrovska was looking at last year’s part of her body. True, she was looking at herself as if in a broken, foggy mirror, but it seemed to her that it was from the big heat. At first, she felt some joy that she was not alone in the city after all, but immediately she noticed that she had a strikingly elongated shadow that stretched almost to her. And Gjuvezia Dubrovska had no shadow. After she returned to the city, she did not see her shadow. And in so much sunshine the shadow never showed itself to her. Did this one from Avanos take everything that was hers? A human without a shadow is just a dead human, Gjuvezia Dubrovska said to herself, realizing that one of them was completely unneeded here. And suddenly she began to feel weak: everything was weighing on her and not working on her, not being under her will. Her head was spinning, her legs were shaking, and her whole body was being taken away. It was melting in the heat, shrinking like a burning candle. And the one in front of her just grew and closed her view, almost the entire sky. Standing there, dazed on the road, she now felt even more deeply how unbearable life was as she broke free from it. And before she disappeared completely, with the last bit of consciousness she remembered that the eternity promised to her by the potter was just a transition from one place to another. And she also remembered that she, in fact, came here only to die in front of herself, to see her own death. But at least she saw where her life was.
Then some sparrows came and started rolling like stones on the road. Who knows where the sparrows came from and who knows what they were looking for here, where Gjuvezia Dubrovska smoldered off.
Translator: Aneta Paunovska