Lavie Tidhar - The Apex Book of World SF 2

When I married Gábor, I asked my father what I should expect. It was stupid but I wanted to be sure I’d done the right thing. I wanted affirmation. When he said, “Three years,” I felt betrayed. I didn’t invite him to the wedding. He still came; he stood in the back row and didn’t come to congratulate us.

It really was three years. Whether there couldn’t have been more time, or whether it was because I’d known from the beginning that I would have only three years with that man and had therefore allowed my marriage to slip through my fingers, I don’t know. Perhaps my marriage had been dead even at the moment I said my vows.

After that I didn’t ask him anymore. Not even now. He had decided to tell me because he had no other leverage to hold me back. To protect me?

Will Iván really die in one year?

Iván was a doctor, two years younger than me. We both worked in Rókus Hospital, saw each other every day, and even if there was no time for intimate talking, we were never short of a quick touch, a hurried kiss on a flight of stairs where our colleagues couldn’t see us. The day after I’d visited my father, I saw Iván briefly several times. Once he stopped for a moment to stroke me between my shoulder blades, then he continued walking. Words burnt my tongue: “I went to see my father and…” How could I end the sentence?

How could I tell him? I should. He should know in order to be prepared, even if he didn’t believe me, even if he laughed at me. Maybe, if he took the warning as a joke, I would be able to see it more light-heartedly. “Ha-ha, what a strange bird my father is,” I could say, and pretend.

As if I didn’t know the future. Just like my father does.

At the end of my shift, I was close to snapping like a cord. I craved a cigarette so badly that when I finally got down to the garden and lit one, I realised only during my third that I couldn’t remember smoking the first two. Anna from Surgery came after me, and asked me between two puffs:

“Why are you so nervous? You two had a fight?”

I don’t think she was really interested. She had her own quiet lake-world; she never let anything from the outside disturb its water. Therefore it was easy to answer.

“Just my father… Now that I am over thirty, he’s started to discipline me and he began with prohibition.”

She nodded, finished her cigarette and pressed out the stub.

“And you are really going to India?”

“Of course.”

“Well, good luck! It must be more difficult for a nurse. To talk those weird languages. It’s easy for Iván. Patients rarely chit-chat on the operating table.

She went in.

Sometimes I think Anna’s calmness comes from taking it from others. Her remark hit me. Iván and I had planned everything perfectly. There was a hospital in New Delhi where we would work. It would be good experience for him, but for me…? Patients were patients everywhere, but Anna was right: I would have to talk to them; simply turning the sheets was not enough. Every doctor spoke English well, but my patients…? And the native nurses, my colleagues…?

Will I feel unwanted? Still, Iván will be there.

For how long?

The thought knotted my stomach. When Iván sneaked behind me and touched the nape of my neck, I jumped as if licked by fire.

“Let’s go home!” I beseeched him, looking into his surprised eyes. “The sooner the better.”

“Let’s go then,” he said. I liked his way of knowing the difference between the important and the unimportant, when fuss was annoying. He didn’t expect an immediate explanation. He knew I would come around to that.

“Well?” he asked later, at home after ten minutes of silence and my nostrils had filled with his cinnamon scent. “What’s the matter?”

“I am afraid of losing you.”

He laughed—not with irony but with relief, as if my fear were a mere silliness not worth even a little consideration.

“What makes you think you will?”

“I went to see my father and…” I couldn’t bring myself to tell the whole truth. “He forbade me to go with you.”

“Aren’t you adult enough not to let him dictate your life?”

“Of course I am but…”

Because it was easier, I talked about my father: what it was like to see him only every two weeks, how much he helped or didn’t help as I grew up, how I wasn’t sure I loved him at all. Iván listened devotedly like a child would, and at the end he generously said he understood. This annoyed me because I knew he knew nothing. I didn’t tell him what my father said about his future.

Unspoken words have weight. First you barely feel it, then, as they proliferate you realise you cannot carry them anymore. You either release them or keep them in, in which case they start to press and pinch your heart. You feel the grip even if you are happy. Especially then.

I didn’t tell Iván, partly because I wasn’t sure, partly because I didn’t want him to lose the light. He was happy. In a sense, so was I—but while I was laughing, caressing, loving, part of me peeled away from me and, watching us, said, “Not much longer.”

It drove me wild. If you close yourself off to the future, the present seems richer. I felt every moment was perfect because there would be no more like it.

It’s sweeter if you know it will end.

For two months we carried on like this, until we had only two weeks before the journey. It was the best two months of the five and also the worst. Then, one night as I was straddling Iván, looking down into his face, the knowledge became too heavy. He was calm and young after making love, and more beautiful than any other. He caressed my hip slowly and without thought.

I’d been saying goodbye for two months and knowing that I’d been doing it, and I had no desire for another ten months of leave-taking.

He watched me peacefully, vulnerable in front of the future. The dimness of the bedroom made it feel like a nest, but the words gathering inside me kept me from feeling comfortable.

“I won’t go with you to Delhi.”

His hand stopped on my hip.

“Why?”

I shook my head. I still didn’t want to tell him.

“I won’t go with you.”

“But…” His hand fell down as if broken. After a few long moments, he blinked. “Oh. And when I come back? We continue?”

I turned away, stared at his books on the shelves. The ones I had read and the ones I wanted to borrow. Maybe from the library.

“We won’t continue,” I whispered.

We held each other, me crying, Iván caressing my back. We made love again, madly, passionately, and at the end, I packed my things and left. Three times I turned back from the door to kiss him and every time it was harder to go. But I had to. I closed the downstairs door feeling ten years older. Nothing inside me, only the weight of emptiness.

The following week I locked myself in the toilet several times to cry. In the end, I took some leave because if I saw Iván every day, I would turn back, go with him to the little apartment with the naked light bulbs that we had seen on the Internet, and to hell with what will happen in ten months time. I sat in my flat and waited until it was too late to do the paperwork needed for the journey.

Of course he called. Many times. He was sweet, his voice calm, but I knew that this meant nothing. The phone calls were full of awkward silences when only two wounds were bleeding at the end of the line. I knew more about how he felt than I did about my own feelings.

He didn’t speak of his thoughts, but he spent long, strained minutes remembering our trip to the conference in Debrecen. What it felt like when I fell asleep on his shoulder while he was driving. I told him in turn about waking up when he touched my face—softer than anyone before had been. We recalled the morning stuck on that godforsaken train station because we got off a stop too early, how we sat on the grass-spotted concrete and watched the sun rise above the Hungarian Plain. It was then that we began spinning plans for the Indian trip, and the red light of the dawn had seemed to spill over tropical soil. On the phone, he asked about my mother’s varicose leg and I sent word to his sister that there was a sale on skirts in her favourite shop.