and a taut back and a face on which I recognize at most two expressions, talking head.
‘What about you?’
‘I’m thinking I ought to fix up the scooter. I’ll get it out of the shed for a start. I hope it still works, it’s exhausting doing this walk every day. It’s really too much.’
That’s what we’ll say to one another. And each of us will be thinking that today would be Daniel’s birthday.
Daniel’s death swallowed up the death of our young red-haired father, and all the previous deaths that had happened to us were caught up in it as well. Like a new love, I thought, new, and already ragged with all the earlier losses.
(‘Love and death are words without a diminutive,’ said our neighbour the vet, Herr Professor. I tried: lovette, lovelet, loveling, deathlet, deathette, deathling... And augmentatives: death-and-a-half, super-death, super-love... ‘Hey ho. There are no bigger or smaller words than them. Unlike life which is a lifelet,’ sighed Herr Professor theatrically. He’s that sort of guy, he doesn’t really fit into the Old Settlement. He wore his hair combed back and he had a thin, sparse moustache on his fat face, above his full lips. He used to beam at us. He was different. He knew more than other people, he knew something about everything and expressed himself well, in a literary way. Apart from that, we found him somewhat nauseating.)
We laid the flowers down, a birthday gerbera-heart, on our grave, threw away the rotting plants, replaced the water. Ma swept the grave, while I sat on the edge beside the marble vase with Daniel’s name, bored. Bored to death.
Ma and my sister watched a film recently where a woman goes mad after her child dies. So Ma said when she finally sat down beside me and lit a cigarette.
‘And when after a while the pain eased, that woman, a fine lady, if mad, stopped a man in the street, a passer-by, and asked him whether she was alive.’
‘Am I alive? she asked him,’ Ma repeated vaguely, brushing bits of dry flowers from her dress.
‘What happened to the woman afterwards?’ I wanted to know.
‘What d'you mean what happened?’ said Ma. ‘D'you know anyone who went un-mad?’
When we get back, outside the house, I see that all those winter shoes intended for cleaning have been left on the outside steps and now they’re roasting in the sun. Among them are some men’s boots, brogues and trainers, although the last time a man took his shoes off in this house was... four years ago?
Two pairs of shoes on each step, from the fifteenth to the third, as though some chance group of people who had found themselves in a column were coming down the steps. a funeral, a procession or wedding guests.
Daniel, my brother, died in his eighteenth year by jumping under a speeding Intercity Osijek–Zagreb–Split train. He threw himself onto the track from the concrete viaduct over the railway, one early winter morning. His body was found some twenty metres further on, in a vineyard.
‘His blood was splattered everywhere, on the trees and the frozen leaves of the vines,’ said people who, for the first few weeks, had made a pilgrimage to the site of the mishap; leaving, behind the St Andrew’s cross, plastic roses and lamps that glimmered for as long as their batteries lasted.
Among my jottings, written on a notepad, I found this:
‘Stay up, stay on the surface,’ said my father, throwing me into the sea from the jetty. ‘Swim, for god’s sake, you’ve got long arms and legs,’ he laughed out loud, with his tanned face and light eyebrows. And I swam, like a puppy, like every child.
Daniel jumped in after me and went under. Just a plop. Then nothing. That’s the only time I ever heard Ma scream. She shrieked at my father. My sister shouted and wailed as well, standing on the beach in her wet bathing suit, dropping unchewed slimy pieces of bread and paté from her mouth. But I could see that Daniel had stayed sitting on the bottom, he wasn’t even trying to come up.
‘He's swallowed a bit of salt water,’ my father repeated from the sea, holding him.
Afterwards Daniel laughed and said: ‘What’s the big deal, I was just teasing. Seeing who’d save me!’
They left me alone in the sea, for a moment, while they brought him out.
‘What're you thinking about now?’
‘Cicadas. It’s strange that we can’t hear any cicadas. Had you noticed?’
It’s as silent as a cave.
‘It’s really strange, maybe they’ve all burst.’
Everything is brightly lit, and yet I can’t see anything. I cover my eyes with my hand and through the milky screen against that unbearable light I peer into the still olive-grove, full of evil silence and bad sun. I see my sun-tanned fingers and the thin white membrane between them. Behind them is the even sunnier beach, behind the beach is the empty prairie at scorching noon.
My hands will become even darker, my hair copper, my private places white in front of the mirror in my cold, darkened room.
But still, I never succeed in imagining the comfort of my room as I cross the prairie with a red-hot hat on my head, every time, every blinding Monday and Friday.
I try to step broadly and shallowly, to stay on the surface.
2
You didn’t tell me how old you were?’ he said.
‘Seventeen,’ I lied through my teeth and that made him smile.
He’s quite a lot older than me. He has joined-together eyebrows above bright eyes.
‘What're you doing at the market, this early?’ he asked.
‘Nothing much, looking at the fruit and vegetables, taking some photographs. Good colours.’
He had caught me off guard, in other words. In fact I was meant to be collecting news stories from the market about the vendors’ strike; the camera was my room-mate’s, a prop. An amazing new Konica-Minolta – with which neither fruit and veg, nor the old women at the market would need ‘Photoshop’ – they’d never have given me one like it at the office.
We had met three weeks earlier, he and I, at a party at Shit.com that was paying me to write or steal news for their site. I was good at re-working news from competitors’ pages: copying, pasting and touching-up. Even its own author wouldn’t recognize it. It was more than they deserved for the pittance they paid me.
The party was on the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper, and at that time I adored skyscrapers, lifts and all of that, life in the air, in the heights. Understandably, given that I had grown up, as it were in a depression, in a cleft between two houses.
I spent the whole evening being pestered by a scarecrow from Marketing.
Before she turned thirty she would ‘sometimes knock back a little glass of brandy or dark ale,’ she said, but that evening
