Wolfgang tried hard to avoid any appearance of struggling with the food, but I am sure he did not always know exactly what he was picking up with his fork and that each bite contained an element of surprise for him. I tried not to look at him so as not to make him feel awkward, but when he picked up an olive-stone on his fork from the olive he had previously eaten, I almost shouted out to warn him. I restrained myself at the last moment in order not to make him feel berated or pitied, but it made my flesh creep to see his jaws closing over the stone and to hear the muffled cracking sound in his mouth. This did not discourage Wolfgang in the slightest, however, and he continued talking and nodding his head as if nothing had happened. My sister and I exchanged a look of mutual understanding—one of very few.
Bella and I spent the rest of the evening exchanging a different type of glance, mostly filled with impatience and rebuke. We also exchanged a number of napkins whenever one of us stubbornly refused to look at the other and ignored her gesticulations.
STOP TALKING SO MUCH!
was one of the more interesting ones, as was its swift retort
FUCK YOU!
In such a manner we somehow made it to the end of the dinner. Bella did manage to milk a few names in Austrian music from Wolfgang, as well as some offers of references for possible stipends, while I managed to steal Wolfgang from my sister several times and strike up a conversation about the people he knew in my profession. At last, my sister saw Wolfgang to his taxi. When she returned I was waiting in the armchair, ready to argue.
‘You really are a master in making a spectacle,’ I reproached her at once.
My sister was too tired to take me up, and so was I.
‘Come on! Relax a little!’ she said, and locked herself up in her room. This infuriated me even further. By not giving me a chance to have an argument with her she was placing herself above me. I turned on the television loudly to annoy her, but even this failed to goad her out of her room. After a while I surrendered to fatigue and fell asleep.
Several months after this event, my sister informed me that Wolfgang was to visit us again. This time she didn’t ask me to make anything, not even a salad. Out of spite, I offered her my help, knowing that she wanted to be rid of me in order to charm Wolfgang without interruption.
‘Are you going to feed him out of a bucket again and greet him wearing a bin-liner?’
My sister did not rise to this provocation, which again irritated me greatly. That is probably why she didn’t tell me that he would be coming this time with his twelve-year-old son, about whom we had heard that he was a painting wunderkind. I misinterpreted her dressing up and applying make-up as remorse for her previous behaviour, but when Wolfgang and Hubert rang the doorbell I saw immediately that I had been wrong.
Hubert was a quiet child who was constantly scribbling something or other. We gave him some blank paper, pencils and pens, and while we were talking he drew our portraits, though he fearfully hid the sheets of paper beneath each other, refusing to let us so much as glance at what he had drawn.
‘He’s a little shy, but very talented’, his father explained.
Hubert merely blinked fast with his enormous brown eyes behind the thick lenses of his glasses. As the lenses of his spectacles were like magnifying glass, I was able to notice that when he blinked he closed his left eye first and immediately after, his right eye. Despite this, he observed us intensely, as well as everything else around him, most probably in order to sketch all he observed on his sheets of paper.
This time Bella laid the table as she did for her other guests, producing her expensive china, crystal and silver from the special cabinet. Even the table linen and the cushion covers were changed. I could feel my mouth and nose twisting in scorn at my sister’s action this time. But my attention was distracted by Wolfgang, who was saying something reproachful to his son for the first time.
‘Hubert! Sit up properly!’ he said, looking somewhere between my sister and me towards the bookshelves in the living room. Hubert sat beside his father, but their bodies were not touching. On receiving his father’s rebuke, the child flinched and straightened up.
‘Take your elbows off the table!’ Wolfgang added. Hubert removed his elbows silently and cast his eyes down to his lap.
My sister and I exchanged our first worried look of the evening. The second followed shortly after as Wolfgang, just as he had done on the previous occasion, traced his fingers across his plate and the handles of the knife and fork, and announced: ‘A very nice dinner service.’
Our third worried look came when Wolfgang started describing the great time which he, his wife, and Hubert had enjoyed in Rome the previous month. ‘Rome is the most beautiful city. The Forum is truly magnificent, but the Coliseum…!’ Wolfgang exclaimed, thrilled, looking up, blinking, and placing his hand on his chest, ‘That is truly a grand beauty. Don’t let me start on the artworks!’ he sighed romantically.
I began to wonder whether Wolfgang might not be one of those almost blind people whose vision was, let us say, only 80% impaired. But even with such eyesight he could not have experienced the Coliseum and the Forum in the way he described, and for some time I considered the probability of his having experienced them through smell and sound; but finally this did not seem logical at all. I was left with the possibility that his wife, or perhaps Hubert, had explained and captured for him the sights they could see in front of them; but even if this had been the case, I concluded, he would surely not be expressing such admiration as if he had seen those monuments himself.
After Wolfgang’s last comment, Bella and I stopped exchanging glances altogether. She grew pale. Small beads of sweat gathered above her upper lip. From time to time, she would nervously scratch her head. When Wolfgang said that it was time for him and Hubert to leave, I noticed her face suddenly regain its colour.
‘Well, I hope we shall meet again, here or in Austria,’ Wolfgang said to my sister as he embraced her. Looking at my left ear, he said ‘I’m glad we found some shared interests,’ and embraced me as well. On his father’s orders, Hubert reluctantly shook hands, first with me and then with Bella. Then he took his father’s arm and they started descending the stairs while Bella and I stood at the open front door seeing them off with our eyes. Then Wolfgang turned around, batted his eyelids like a butterfly, smiled, and said ‘You are very interesting little sisters.’
Bella shut the door and we both silently headed towards the living room. Hubert’s drawings lay on the coffee table. Both Bella and I reached for them at once, but I managed to get to them first. One by one I examined them in astonishment, passing them to my sister and wishing the child had never left them behind.
#2 #1 #4 #3 #6 #5 #8 #7
Drawings by Jana Jakimovska
Translated by Marija and Matt Jones