Lavie Tidhar - The Apex Book of World SF 2

“She waited for me to fall asleep. As soon as I was asleep, she tried to take my money! I saw her hand! I wanted to make her sleep.” She started to cry then. “I just wanted to make her sleep…”

The other two patients’ eyes glistened in the darkness. Only for their sake did I refrain from hitting the old woman. I wanted to hurt her not because she was demented and had killed her bed neighbour, but because she had fulfilled the prophecy I wanted to thwart.

“You come with me!” I shouted in her face. I pulled her out of the ward as if I were a jailer. I had to report the incident. She was crying, but I didn’t look at her.

My eyes were dry.

I tried to warn him. I called him in New Delhi. He immediately picked up the phone as if he was waiting for the call.

“Judit?” His voice was so eager and happy that it was hard to believe we hadn’t seen each other for five months. How could one e-mail a week be enough? “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I missed your voice.” As soon as I said it, I knew that was the real reason, not the warning. My whole body ached from missing him, and his absence smothered me.

“I missed yours, too.” He paused.

“Listen to me!” I began. “If there is a storm…don’t go for a walk, especially not under trees! And always watch for woodcutters thinning the branches. Take care…”

“What?” He laughed.

“I’m not joking. Take care with those trees!”

He didn’t understand. I sputtered the warning again but I feared he didn’t comprehend my words. He didn’t believe me.

“Promise me!” I demanded.

“I do,” he said, still laughing. “Okay. And what about you? Tell me, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to chat. “Do you promise me?”

“Yes! I will be careful with the trees.”

“Good. Bye!”

I put down the phone. A cigarette was already in my mouth. I couldn’t remember taking it out.

Iván’s voice had told me that he hadn’t understood. He wouldn’t keep his promise. Silliness, he would say, and even if he watched the trees on the first day he would realise it was pointless and forget about the stupid request. He would live like he did, walk under trees and, if he remembered his promise at all, he would only smile. Silly, pet, he would say fondly, and for a moment he would feel my face in his palm. That was all.

I wrote a letter to him, but it was already too late to start explaining my father’s prophecies to him. Would I believe them if I hadn’t been born into the family of an oracle?

My father wanted to ask for my forgiveness, at least that was what I deduced from the text messages that urged me to visit him. When he tried to call me, I didn’t pick up. I deleted his e-mails—so he only wanted to talk, well, I didn’t care. Maybe he was not the one who would kill Iván, but he knew about his death and not only stepped aside but wanted to pull me aside, as well.

“Your father called,” said Mum one day when I visited her. She didn’t look up from the stove. “He wants to talk to you.”

They hadn’t spoken to each other for a long time now. When communication was absolutely unavoidable, they sent messages through me. They didn’t hate each other; I think my father was afraid of my mother who, in turn, looked through him.

“My fault,” I said. “He has been trying to reach me for a month now. Sorry.”

“He didn’t tell me anything else.” Based on her voice I assumed she was smiling sarcastically. “He just asked me to tell you—visit him by all means—then said goodbye. I think he doesn’t really know how to treat me. Will you put the cloth on the table?”

I took out the plates: a plain white for her, the blue one from my childhood for me that had cars, bicycles and ships running along its edge.

“You don’t know what he wanted?”

“I learnt long ago to leave his things be. You know the cost.” Her voice was sour, as always, when she talked about my father. “If I am not cautious, I might get to know something.”

“I see.”

“Is that why you won’t talk to him?” She glanced at me searchingly. “May I ladle you some soup?”

I nodded.

The bean soup was thick and hot, it burnt my tongue. It was good to sit in Mum’s kitchen, although it has been a long time since I had last felt at home there. Lights were subdued, noises low: the cat purred in front of the stove, the washing machine rumbled softly in the bathroom. I was calmed not by the familiar plate, noises or the taste; the peace and harmony came from not speaking to my father. Suddenly we were on the same side and closer to each other despite our differences.

I finished eating sooner than my mother. I leant back and looked around the kitchen. It was cluttered, full of bric-a-brac, crochet left on the top of the fridge, books put down, opened on their belly.

“If Dad had begged you back, would you have gone back to him?”

She looked up surprised.

“What do you mean?”

“When you took me from him when I was small. If he had called you back…you said you wanted it…would you have gone back to him? Would you have stayed with him, even if he’d seen you leave?” I didn’t add the question: would you have broken the prophecy?

Her mouth was pulled into a smile as if by a hook.

“It was so long ago, Judit…”

“Would you have gone back?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I wouldn’t have taken it for long, even then.”

She shook her head, more to herself than to me, and continued eating.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said at length.

I left it at that. Maybe she was right.

My father died. I hadn’t seen him before that, and I hadn’t talked to him. I had erased his last message from my phone without listening to it; I learnt the news shortly after I had done that. I don’t know what he wanted to say. I imagined a thousand messages, but I can’t say if the real one was amongst them.

He had a heart attack. Perhaps he could have saved himself if he had called an ambulance, for he knew when he would die. But he did nothing of the sort. He simply lay down and waited for the last kick of his heart. A bottle of whisky and a big bar of hazelnut chocolate were prepared on the bedside table. The silver wrapping was torn just a little as if he had changed his mind.

I inherited his flat. I packed his things and I should have thrown them away but, somewhere between casting everything onto the floor and bundling it into a carton, a feeling overwhelmed me that the pullover I held in my hands was my father. And the books on the shelves, also. The used toothbrush, the leftover food in the fridge, the stuffed notebook on the table, the old guitar in the corner—all were him. Unmatched, incomplete objects that were not bound together by anything anymore. I tried to imagine my father in the pullover, the pen in his hands, his feet in his slippers, but I couldn’t. My memories were leaking.

He had wanted to talk to me. For the last time.

If I had known…

I realised in the end that knowledge wouldn’t have been absolution. If the only reason to talk to him was his death in a month, a week, a day, I wouldn’t have been less of a stranger to him.

I stood in his flat, knowing where every object belonged and yet I felt lost. I had tried to understand him but had failed. It was too late for that now. But there was something I was still in time for.

I purchased a ticket to India. Just then, I didn’t know when I would come back or how long I would have to stay for. I was only sure that I wouldn’t budge from Iván’s side. I didn’t care what happened in a day, two days, three days or a month; I just wanted to be with him and not on another continent, alone.

He was waiting for me at Delhi Airport. The huge, multicoloured and multi-smelling crowd in the waiting hall undulated between us, but it disappeared when I saw Iván—or I just pushed everyone aside, I can’t remember. Our meeting was just as you would expect. I will skip that.