He told her to get dressed and go make him tea in the kitchen. He spoke French, but in the late afternoons he still had his cup of tea. Sitting on the bench by the table, he still stared blankly in front of himself and wondered how he could overcome alienation. How does he explain to a woman who’s been fighting body and soul for what she ultimately saw as the only good – how does he explain to her that he does not believe it’s possible to eliminate dissonance in the realm of the empirical? What was she trying to say with that unbuttoned blouse? That everything would be different if they made love? That that was how they could reclaim their dignity?
‘There’s a three-year-old girl in the orphanage. I’ve already chosen a name for her. Ana. We’ll call her Ana.’
He lifted his face. He lifted it as if lifting it for the first time. Her skin really did seem mixed with water. Now he was already sorry for that sentence, though not for anything else. But since he had said it in a different language, she had not understood. There would always be an insurmountable barrier of loneliness between them. At first he thought they would overcome it by having a child, but he changed his mind when, in that skirt and blouse, she handed him the doctor’s report. All he had expected from her, nothing more and nothing less, was offspring. And a little lightness too. Like this tea and the plucked sprig of cherry blossom on the table. So far everything seemed fine, if only there wasn’t that obsessive look in her eye. That she had to hold on to him at any cost, that she would consent even to other women, would give him all the money she earned, would learn French, and, if he wanted her to, would perform that scene in the film where the man pushes the woman away when she tries to embrace him. Deftly, with a practiced motion, she slips out of her blouse and stands behind his back. Together they gaze at the roof of the neighbouring house. Because there is nothing for them to see, they are gazing mainly at themselves. The man thinks about the fact that, because she has consented to his meeting other women and taking them to evening films, he remains alone with himself and with the world, he has learned to experience himself and the world, and he knows what has been taken and what has been given; she, meanwhile, thinks about the sentence he said in French. Where did he get it anyway? Did he really think they were in some movie?
Suddenly, he leaned across the table; the darkened, half-cooled surface of the tea lurched and threatened to spill over the rim. ‘Ana’s a nice name. If you want, we’ll call her Ana.’
* * *
Despite all that happened between us, my son knew that the doors to the mysterious and unpredictable realms in the depths of my thoughts, overspread with gardens of strange and dread-inducing flowers and plants, were closed to him. This forbidden territory was at most the target of certain adverts for soap and detergent, and maybe detective novels and colourful newspaper supplements. I sometimes noticed him watching me from under his brows or from the side, trying to catch a glimmer of this oily female domain. Or when we’d be strolling in town and meet one of my girlfriends, he’d scrutinize her as if searching for a clue. Only once did he ask if I agreed with that Lars von Trier movie. The one where the woman loves her orgasm more than her son.
I wanted to stroke his hair, but he was too old for such things. We were both too old. I knew the scene he was thinking about: a few moments earlier the camera shows us a penis going in. It is big and wet. It goes into the woman and her scream is drowned out by music. Then a few shots later, a boy jumps out of a window. He moves a chair next to the window and falls into the snowflakes. Somewhere in the air a teddy bear is flapping all by itself. She, meanwhile, has her mouth open in pleasure; the man on top of her knows nothing.
That’s the sort of film my son would watch locked in his room, and that’s why he went crazy, I think.
But this sleeping man in front of me was from another time. He had a god drawn on his face. I wanted to say that earlier but it slipped my mind. As I was walking toward him from the other side of the avenue, I felt a strong desire for him to touch the secret territory inside me. Ever since I gave birth, almost thirty years ago, I knew I had to put it aside for a while. I mean, touching the silky surface of blades of grass with my palm or licking honey slowly from a metal spoon and then looking at my face in it. For a while I was about to surrender to this spell, but when my mother died and then the man my mother so strongly believed in left me, I could not shut myself away inside myself and let the plant roots grow over my face. My father, from the very start, in fact from the moment I came back to Ljubljana, made it all very clear. Do your work, print your botanical designs, or we’ll disown you. Glue the gold leaf onto the cupboards, or we’ll take your son away. So when it was time for me to let myself give in, I wasn’t allowed to. And now, when I could, I was haunted by the feeling that it was too late.
‘Are you sleeping?’ he said, and shifted his god-like body. He was from a golden age, when lovers did not hold hands and hardly ever ran their fingers through each other’s hair.
‘No, I can’t sleep.’
I wanted to say, ‘I don’t know how to sleep like you,’ but there was no point; he wouldn’t understand. A random stranger I had been lying in bed with for an afternoon and a night without anything happening between us.
As I was again depositing my bag on the floor, on the rug, which so many feet, mostly bare feet, had walked over, which gave off the smell of journey, of nakedness, of things left unsaid, it occurred to me that this appendage was all I had left from my former life. Outside it was pouring night, dripping stars, and somewhere in the other world my son was watching yet another crazy movie. This time from his own life.
I gazed at his silence, and then at his big hands with their beautifully shaped nails, somewhat strange for a boy from the street who had already done so many things, but which, all the same, were shoved into his jeans. This is that barren, stony realm, which probably only men possess. Or am I just being old-fashioned?
‘I am cold,’ he said, pointing his chin to just below his waist, as if trying to interrupt my train of thought.
‘So you’re warming your hands?’
‘Yes, but it is also a habit.’ I always imagined that when men stick their hands down their trousers it means protection and, of course, they’re making sure the thing’s still there. My son never did this, at least not in my presence. Our lack of concord, too, was part of it. When something was going on with him, he concealed it; when something was going on with me, I had to show him. To teach him. But I thought another woman would have to teach him everything about the birds and the bees. Another woman, just as I was that other woman for this young man in front of me. ‘A lot of men do it,’ he added lazily, and smiled at me, revealing his upper gum. ‘You have seen footballers do it, haven’t you?’
I was confused – confused by him suddenly using the familiar tu. Would he now start repeating again those vulgar words? Spread your legs, c’mon, let me fuck you. Although... although... he never said them the first time. A lot of women – I’ve seen it in those adverts for soap and detergent, read it even in those detective novels and colourful newspaper supplements – have a desire, no, not desire, obsessive craving, for a rapist. The dread that some man might take their body by force, violate them in some shadowy hotel room, especially if he is handsome and young and dark-complexioned and they are old and withered and fair-complexioned, can become a mantra, an invocation. Oh God, if he really does do something like that, my life will be over. I will open my mouth the way she did, with that moist, gleaming thing inside her, as her child fell into the snowflakes. And the chair by the window remained empty.
‘Sure. So?’
‘That is where we are most sensitive – down there.’ Again I looked at my bag on the floor. All my women friends, once they had met my son, once they had noticed his somewhat wilted, startled appearance, began eyeing me with suspicion. They saw me as a different person, not the Ana they knew. I was still Ana who wore high leather boots in winter and
