Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

Yolandi, said Elf. I told you—

You have this amazing guy who loves your ass off, an amazing career that the whole world respects and gives you shitloads of cash for, plus you could quit any time and just be labelled mysterious and eccentric and then go live in fucking Paris in the Marais or whatever that stupid … fucking … arrondissement— No, don’t try talking, don’t correct me with your superior knowledge of French, you have an amazing natural fucking beauty that never seems to fade, an amazing house that magically cleans itself—

I have a cleaning lady, Yo, said Elf. You have a very low-grade understanding of despair, by the way.

An amazing cleaning lady, I said, okay? You have a mother who thinks the sun shines out of your ass.

Yoli, said Elf.

Okay, so dad died. Whatever! He loved you! You have … What is your major fucking problem anyway?

Plus, said Elf, I have an amazing sister. But can you … shhhh.

I am not! I said. I’m a total fuck-up! Can you not understand that? Can you not understand that I need your help! That maybe you’re here for a reason which is to be a goddamn sister to me?

Yoli, she said. She sat up in her bed now and was whispering hard, livid. You do not understand a fucking thing, okay? You have had my goddamn help all along. I had to be perfect so you could fuck up and you were more than happy to do it. One of us had to show some fucking empathy, do you know that word, it’s a good one, you should learn it, one of us had to show some fucking empathy towards dad and all his acres of existential sadness. Who was that person? Was it you? Was it mom? No! It was me. Just so you could go waltzing around—

I don’t even know what you’re talking about, I said. Now you’re comparing yourself to Jesus Christ? You didn’t have to be anything. You chose to be on his team.

Because nobody else would be, said Elf.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t have empathy, I said. That means we chose life, or some semblance of it. You happen to be more like him than us — which is lucky for you in a million ways — but that doesn’t mean we didn’t fucking care.

Oh so you’re saying I’m doomed.

I am not saying you’re doomed! You’re saying you’re doomed. I’m saying you didn’t have to be anything. And since when do you swear?

Yes, I did have to be something, said Elf. Have you ever heard of family dynamics? And don’t you think I’m scared shitless?

Well then what is this all about? Why are you here? Some kind of preemptive strike? Do the thing you most fear in order to overcome your fear of doing it in the first place? I’m afraid of killing myself so I think I’ll just kill myself and then I’ll be able to go on living without fear … oh wait! This one’s a little different. The logisitics are a bit—

Yoli, I’m trying to explain to you this incredible pressure I’ve felt to …

Quit then! Stop being perfect! That doesn’t mean you die, you moron. Can’t you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful? Get fat and start smoking and play the piano badly. Whatever! At least you know that you will eventually get what you want most in life—

What do I want most in life?

Death!

Yoli.

So why don’t you just wait for it to happen. Exercise some patience and all your dreams will come true. Guaranteed. What I want most in life is completely unattainable and everybody knows it.

What’s that? Elf said. Legalized marijuana?

True love, I said. And yet I’m sticking around unreasonably and knowing it’s impossible because who knows? I want to find out. I live hopefully .

Well, Yoli, your logic is skewed. You’re contradicting yourself. You are quite certain that your dream of true love, whatever that is, will never come true but on the off-chance that it might come true you will stick around to find out. I know that my so-called dream of death will come true so therefore, according to your own argument, I should be free to leave. There’s nothing to find out. No big surprises in the wings and nothing to hope for.

That’s not what I said!

I think it is.

Listen, I said. Don’t you think that mom has suffered enough with dad and all that shit and now, what, you love the perverse idea of a fucking encore?

Yoli, that’s so cruel. That’s beyond—

You’re just dying for a curtain call, aren’t you?

I’m not perfect, said Elf. I didn’t mean—

Yeah, I’ll say! I said. If you were perfect you’d stick around. See how life goes, how the kids do, do you ever think about Will and Nora and what this all means to—

Yolandi, shut up now, said Elf. Of course I do. I think about them all the time.

Bullshit! I said. If you thought of them, ever, just once—

Yolandi, stop it.

Stop what? I said. Stop making sense? Stop telling the truth? Sense drives you crazy?

You tell me, said Elf.

We stopped talking for a long, long time. A long time. Nurses came and went attaching and detaching things. Hundreds of thousands of babies were born while we weren’t talking. The continents continued to separate at the same pace as fingernails growing.

Yoli, look, she said finally. Can you just talk to me?

About what? I asked her.

Anything, she said.

Sure, I said, but you ask me to talk like you have some kind of hidden script you want me to follow and then when I veer from it — because I don’t even know what it is in the first place — you’re like no, no, don’t talk. You don’t want me to talk about the past because it’s too painful because there were good times, there was life, and it might persuade you to change your mind and you don’t want me to talk about the future because you don’t see one and so what — okay, I’ll talk about this second. I just inhaled. The sun moved behind a cloud. I exhaled. You’re in bed. A second is passing. Another one. Oh … and another one! I’m inhaling again.

She put her hand up and I took it. I held it, like we were champions of something stupid but hard-won, like a whistling tournament, but at a World Championship level. Just then Claudio appeared at the door carrying an extravagant bouquet of flowers. Ciao! He was wearing a patterned blue scarf, folded flat into his woollen coat. His black leather shoes glistened. Yolandi, you look beautiful! (I love Claudio.) He kissed me on both cheeks. Elfrieda, my darling, and he kissed her forehead just above the new scar. Claudio, I’m so sorry, she said. He spoke to her in Italian, ma cosa ti è successo, tesoro , but she shook her head, no, don’t, as though the language of her heart had no place here or that it reminded her of beauty and love and laughter and those things were bullets now, sharp teeth and shards of glass and cheap plastic toys you step on in the nighttime.

Elfrieda, we are together here, that’s all that matters. He put the flowers on the side table and took her hand. You rescued me from Budapest, he said. He said he liked the way Budapest was beautiful and elegant and crumbling, decaying, plucky and sad, but when he spent too long there, everything started to depress him. And he said he had meetings, lunches, dinners, and he began to feel crumbling, decaying, and sad. He told us he sat in a warm hot spring that exploded from the ground, the way he had as a young man, surrounded by art nouveau architecture, it was like bathing in a cathedral. The sky was pink. The scent of lilacs filled the air. Fat Russian gangsters in tiny bathing suits played chess while their bleached blond wives hung scowling from their necks and arms festooned with gold and silver. Barbarians!

Claudio spoke English well, only a faint trace of his Italian accent. Those Russians are the descendants of the guys who slaughtered the Mennonites, I thought. Now they wear bikini trunks. Then he told us he had been standing on one of the bridges over the Danube and looking down he saw a guy sitting on the riverbank. Is it blue? I said. No, it’s filthy I’m afraid, and not at all blue. Is it beautiful? I asked. Well, yes, it could be described as beautiful.