same as him and she was different. He felt ashamed to have a sister. He invented and did all kinds of things, and she just sat there, dull, watching him. He did not want this lump, so similar to him, to sit there and watch him. He did not want to have a sister.
When they began school, his mother was no longer there to take his sister in her arms whenever she started weeping. It quickly became clear that Margarita could not stay in the same school. This solved the problem, and after rejecting the idea for a year, his mother agreed to send her to another school, for children like her. Although no one knew exactly what his sister was like. Except perhaps his mother, but she never said anything.
Margarita thus disappeared from Valentin’s life. At least for a while. She reappeared during weekends, but he had other things to do, he had friends, and his mother would simply take her out somewhere.
He could remember how his father once became very angry about Maria and Margarita’s going out. He had insisted on joining them, he had insisted on being told what they intended to do together. Maria had ignored his shouting. When the two women were ready to leave, his mother whispered something in his sister’s ear, and Margarita remained by the door to wait. His mother then went into the bedroom with his father.
After that everything quieted down, as if someone had enclosed the world in a box. The two children fixed the bedroom door with their eyes. Valentin looked at Margarita. A peculiar thought crossed his mind, but by then his mother had reappeared. Without a word, she grabbed Margarita’s hand and they went out.
Valentin waited for a while, then gently opened the bedroom door. His father was snoring happily in his bed.
When they brought the piano to the house, his mother said it was for Margarita. Valentin could not believe it—such a big and important object meant for this miserable, annoying little thing that was his sister.
In the beginning, Maria herself taught Margarita how to play. Valentin discovered that his mother could play the piano. He felt extremely proud and wanted to learn to play too. But she would not have it, the piano was for Margarita.
He remembered that later a blond woman would come to the house and play the piano with Margarita.
Then Margarita started playing the piano by herself and Valentin lost interest in the whole affair. One day, after many years, when they were about fifteen years old, a friend of his happened to hear Margarita play and said he wanted to see her. They tiptoed into the dusky living room and listened to her unnoticed for a long time. When she stopped, she saw them and ran away into her room.
His friend, however, who was the son of musicians, could not leave it alone. He wanted to see the sheet music, he wanted to know if Margarita studied at a music school… They searched for the sheet music everywhere, but found nothing. The boy insisted that what they had heard was the finale of a very special sonata by César Franck, which people studied for the entry exams of the Conservatoire. And that Margarita played it like a virtuoso.
12.
Raya
Valentin thought that Raya was an incredible woman.
Her family was everything his family was not. Grandmothers and grandfathers from all different branches of the family tree kept appearing, either in person or on portraits hung on walls.
In this open and overpopulated house, Raya chirped like God’s little bird.
The house echoed with laughter and music. The radio boomed and piles of newspapers and magazines lay under armchairs or right in the middle of rooms.
Valentin, like all other visitors, was welcomed as part of the house. In this house, children, both the family’s and other people’s, played hide-and-seek and blind man’s bluff, they knocked over half-empty tea cups and threw stray newspapers in crumpled balls. Beautiful little pictures surprised one in unexpected corners. But the chaos was not at all filthy or shabby; it was the receptacle for the peculiar life of this incomprehensible and wonderful house, which attracted Valentin like a magnet.
Raya was not so much the child of her parents as an offspring of the house and the life in it. To win Raya meant to be accepted by the house. Whether Valentin and Raya were in love, whether they slept together—such things passed unquestioned in the general state of absent-mindedness. No one, neither the children, nor the adults, were interested in such details.
From the very beginning, Valentin realized that being part of the family came first, and being with Raya came second. Perhaps that was why he didn’t take any precautions—it was the desire to leave a trace, to win a place for himself in the group picture. Gradually he began to feel anxious, realizing that he was after something which was only important to him, but not anyone else. Not to Raya, and not to the rest of them.
Little by little, the foreboding that it was all doomed overpowered him. He could no longer fight it. And no one around him seemed to notice anything. The sisters, the cousins and the little brothers, the grandfathers and the aunts, the parents and their parents, no one seemed to suspect for even a moment that Valentin, once having formed a part of this harmony, could ever break away from it.
Valentin was nearing a steep ledge. He felt neglected. Raya could not understand why he felt this way. But he blundered on, trying to step outside the family circle. A game of blind man’s bluff of a different nature. He adored Raya for her inimitable ease: she did not have to try to be this way or that way, she did not need to make decisions and stick to them, she did not need directions. But he also hated her for it and wanted to destroy that in her.
The rupture came when she got pregnant. Everyone felt betrayed. The endless joyride was over. Valentin knew that, in this household, everyone loved everyone else and did what was best for them. The best for Raya was to preserve her childhood; the best for the pregnant Raya was to marry Valentin, but leaving the house was out of the question. Valentin had slept with her, but she was a child of the clan, her baby would be a child of the clan, and so Valentin was invited to become the same.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture it. After a brief silence, the Ferris wheel turns again for another ride. One more sweet little baby crawls on the floor, vomits over the rich thick carpet, and everyone laughs. Raya’s older brother hugs the baby as if it were his own, her younger brother plays with him as if it were his baby brother, her father throws a bemused look, not sure whether the tiny creature is his grandson, or some kind of great grand-nephew, or even—why not—his own son. At this point in his imaginative reconstruction, the water in Valentin’s body reached boiling.
After that, Valentin could not hold back from acting stupidly. He knew he was destroying everything, and this time it was not because he wanted something else. Raya cried at his wickedness. And she became increasingly miserable, because she could not understand where it was all coming from. He himself could barely understand what he was doing, yet he felt that it was his turn to act. He was obsessed by the idea that part of Raya belonged to him and he wouldn’t share that part with anyone. Within the communal Garden of Eden of her family, his behavior appeared disgusting. So be it, then—he was disgusting.
He lay down impossible conditions and made demands he knew Raya could not satisfy. For instance, he wanted them to live separately, just the two of them. There were strong arguments against it—they could not support themselves. They were still in school. They were too young. But why couldn’t they get jobs and be like a normal family? Raya did not understand the meaning of “normal family.” She imagined work as some kind of hobby that had nothing to do with earning money. And she imagined herself as a molecule of some precious substance whose chemical formula was her family’s secret.
Then Valentin disappeared. He disappeared
