work hanging in the hospital corridor. Before he called me into the office, I put my hands on the snake in my stomach.
Tumour.
Doctor, don’t look at the floor.
Spells
I sit in the train and journey towards the South. That’s where the woman lives whose fault it is that Mum is in hospital for the third time. The lady who works by day in the bank, and removes spells at night, told me this. She said Mum’s eyes were like buttons in this woman’s hands. I stick my head out of the window while I travel. I’m careful not to hit the overhead transmission line. I’ve been travelling for a long time. My hands are dirty, from the red plush and the folding table. I come out of an unending tunnel and the hills turn into mountains. Brick houses hurry by in the opposite direction. After them, dogs and sheep. After that, I pee in the toilet. I spill urine on the railway tracks. I look at my reflection in the mirror. I practice my introductory speech.
That woman put a spell on our family because she was jealous when Dad married Mum. Maybe her jealousy no longer exists but the spell remains. I tell her everything, and afterwards beg her to leave us alone. This surprises her. She is angry. Her hair is badly dyed. She says I am inventing it all. No, Mrs, I am not inventing anything, I am just imagining.
Thick Ankles
One of our neighbours has always been fat and old. And her children were always old. Grandma sent me to buy bread for that neighbour who lives on the first floor, and salami and frankfurters. It was hard for her to walk, because of her thick ankles. Her apartment smelt of stewed beef. And frankfurters. When she was even older, she accused me of stealing her post. I said:
‘The postman doesn’t leave your pension in the letter box!’
Another woman in our neighbourhood had no teeth, and her apartment was no bigger than our kitchen. She had a medium-sized mongrel dog. I used to take him for a walk every day. Her apartment smelt of cardboard. Piles of clothes were strewn everywhere. It was hard for her to walk because she too had thick ankles. I said to the people in the park:
‘This is my dog! He’s a good dog.’
My friend’s Grandma always knew everything about everyone. She broke her hip in the bathtub, lay in bed and made lots of telephone calls and watched television. Since she died, she knows even more.
She had very, very thick ankles.
In my immediate family no one has ankles like that.
Blessed Assumption
I liked to spend part of my summer holidays in front of the house. Lots of children lived nearby, so I could choose my own friends. The friends I chose used to go to a building with big brown doors every Saturday morning. I would stay outside; until one day I went after them.
‘Where are you going?’ asked my best friend.
‘With you.’
‘We’re going to Sunday School.’
‘Can I go too?’
Inside that building it was wonderful. So wonderful that I went there every Saturday after that. They told me the building was called the Church of the Blessed Assumption. And that Blessed Assumption means something invisible lifts you up high into the sky. Magical!
After that I stopped going to folk-dancing classes at school.
Other Types of Tea
These are two different kinds of tea from the House of Green Tea. One is for Mum. The other for me. Eight treasures of Shaolin. Eight pearls of health. I buy it also because its name transports me to eastern monasteries. I shan’t buy tea in filter bags any longer. They contain only dust.
In the big market place, stuffed with people and different kinds of yoghurts, I buy cheese. Only people, of all the mammals in the world, consume milk and milk products after they grow up. And all those people are here, in the queue in front of me, buying plastic necessities reduced by forty per cent. I don’t buy any chewy sweets. They contain only codes for something I don’t understand.
Decision
First I tell Dad, and then my brother. Dad gets sick. We decide not to say anything to Mum, Grandma or my sisters. At least until Mum gets better. Then they can be cross with us as much as they like.
The Two of Them
‘Where have you been, it’s nearly five o’clock?’
‘I was playing in front of the school.’
My sister is often goalkeeper. And attacker. And a striker. So she needs new trainers every three months. She sits dirty and sweaty on Mum’s bed.
‘Did you do your homework?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Hah, you’ll be in trouble!’
‘Mum… when will you come out of hospital?’
‘Next week, I’m going to the school to parents’ evening.’
‘How will she go to the school with those bottles hanging off her? Everyone will laugh at me,’ my sister whispers to Dad as we leave.
Catechism
Not long after the first time I attended Sunday School, they gave me a lovely colourful book. All the men in it had beards, and the women had tablecloths over their heads. In it was written:
“Respect your father and mother so that you may live a long and good life on earth.”
I did not understand this. “Do not steal” was also written there, so that it no longer occurred to me any more to take money from the cash-box for the poor with Mum’s tweezers. There is a dark and ugly place where people who do this end up. I kept the book under my pillow at night. I didn’t know whether that was right. Nothing was written in the book about keeping secrets.
The Neighbourhood in the Neighbourhood
Every spring, in the gutter above the window of my balcony a big family of little sparrows nests. All sorts of things are up there: small twigs, dogs’ hairs, feathers, pieces of paper, the remains of felt-tipped pens. Some of these building materials end up on the balcony floor. The baby birds empty their little bowels in the nest; and their parents do the same over my drying clothes and the sun-basking dog. It can be fun up there, for shit’s sake! Up there, and nowhere else.
A Short Conversation About Our God
Once I came home and told Dad and Mum that I was unclean. That I could not die unbaptized and that this needed to be changed, urgently. Grandma said that if it were up to her, she would have had me baptized long ago. Then we all dressed nicely and went to church. Mum put a white blouse on me, Dad kept silent through Our Father and it was all finished in fifteen minutes. Many times after that, immortal, safe, I played the organ, gave sermons to the benches, cleaned the altar, read the colourful book, and rang the bell at midday. In my thin trainers, engaged to God, I asked the priest:
‘How
