Miljenko Jergovic - Mama Leone

He dropped his trousers, took his jersey and shirt off, and in his boxers and a UnisTours T-shirt with the slogan “East and West Kiss Best” on it crept over to the bed. He lay down, the girls didn’t flinch. In the darkness he saw the face of the one closest, so still, her lips closed, the face asleep as if dreaming of nothing or maybe she wasn’t even there. She’s not there , thought Mahir Kubat, I’ll never see her again because in the morning I’m gone . He didn’t feel anything in particular for the sleeping girl, but the idea of her and the image saddened him. It was an image far from his reach, in itself of no importance, but nonetheless an image he would never see again, from which he would soon be so far away that he would never know if how it remains etched in his memory is how it really was, or if someday it might just escape him altogether. At that moment, on that bed, Mahir Kubat felt like someone who leaves forever, leaving behind everything his eyes have ever seen, and more than anything else, things he has only seen once and can’t even recall anymore.

He turned onto his back and gazed at the ceiling, letting sleep slowly slip up on him, his thoughts imperceptibly sliding away, like the loved ones of a dead man after the janazah. He felt the tears rolling down his cheeks, dripping into his ears, flowing like the Buna and crashing down like the waterfall at Kravice; he was in the seventh grade when they went swimming there on a school trip, he stood beneath the waterfall, the water heavy and strong, and his tears fell, just like they are now, without a sob and without sense, for he knew the water would never again fall from such a height, hitting him straight in the head, in the seventh grade on a school trip to Kravice.

He opened his eyes and it was like someone in a film had drawn broken roller blinds and with a crash and bang introduced a new scene. Maybe he’d slept for just a minute, maybe he’d been asleep for hours. He lay on his side, the girl’s wide-open eyes right in front of him. Her face was as it had been while she was asleep, only now her eyes were open. You are. . he whispered, and remembered that he should have started with I am. . but now he didn’t know how to swap the words. His lips were stuck on the m , clasped shut like an aquarium fish when it catches sight of a soft kitty paw on the other side of the glass. I’m Nora , said the girl, Nora, like Ibsen’s Nora .

He didn’t dare move; she thinks she’s still asleep, he needs to wait for her to close her eyes and then quietly slip out, he needs to keep quiet and not be from this world. What do you want to do now? she said, very, very slowly. Nothing. . You want something, you want it, because you wouldn’t be here otherwise, that’s for sure. . No, I’m just about on my way. . Who kisses best?. . East and West. . I’m dreaming and I won’t remember. Please, you remember, please, please, please. . Nora closed her eyes and repeated please until her sad face fell back into a deep sleep. Mahir Kubat didn’t move a muscle. He waited until he was completely sure Nora was asleep, and he thought that maybe he’d stayed on in her dream, that maybe everything was not yet lost. Nora might dream of him even when he’s far away, even when he’s gone.

He slid off the bed, crouching he checked if Nora and the girl next to her were asleep, then he grabbed his clothes and tiptoed out into the hall. He closed the bedroom door, a door he’ll never open again, and immediately it ceased to exist. He got dressed, took his suitcase, and headed for the front door, and then he stopped, fixed his two Clint Eastwood furrows, scratched his head, and started rummaging through his jacket pockets. He took his keys out and tried to get the key ring off with his fingernails. There was a metal pendant on it, a black-and-red ball with the words “FK Čelik Zenica.”

He snuck into the living room, Nancy and Sid were asleep in a hug, her naked, her right leg straddling him; they looked like octopuses in a lover’s embrace, their tentacles inseparable. Mahir Kubat went over and put his pendant down beside Nancy’s head.

It was freezing outside, the dawn breaking behind four high tower blocks, on the other side the sky still in complete darkness. Mahir Kubat held his suitcase in his right hand, in his left the keys he’d taken off the key ring. He needed to toss them somewhere, but not on the street because someone might find them and think some kid lost them. Mahir Kubat looked for a trash can, but there wasn’t one in sight. When he finds one, nothing will stand between his life and his departure.

This is a new start. Like a second honeymoon , said Kosta the day Rajna came back from the hospital. He ripped out the doorstep in the entrance way, leveled out any bumps in the rooms, shifted the wardrobes so the wheelchair could reach every corner of the apartment, even get into the pantry, where once Rajna and her wheelchair were in there you couldn’t fit anything or anyone else. She watched him as he worked, and he smiled, holding three nails in his mouth. He waved the hammer here and there, as if it meant something and all the merriment was completely natural, that the goal of every sound and happy marriage was the woman ending up in a wheelchair after three years.

Everything will be okay , he said. There’s so much we can do now that we’d never thought of before .

At first life continued with a semblance of normalcy. They’d wake every morning at six, he would unfold the wheelchair, lift her out of bed, and say soon you’ll be able to do this by yourself . She’d wheel herself to the bathroom, him trailing a step behind. He walked with slight pangs of remorse, almost hoping he’d be able to trick her, that Rajna wouldn’t notice there was any difference between walking and wheeling. But in the bathroom a ritual began where nothing could be concealed. He removed her underwear, sat her on the toilet seat, and waited.

Wait outside , she told him after a few days. From then on, every morning he smoked his first cigarette of the day slouched down against the closed door. It could be worse, he thought, at least she can control her bodily functions. Ten minutes later, she’d shout Kosta , and he’d go in. She had never called him by his name before, she’d said darling , or used his surname, Ignjatović, but with things having changed so much, little terms of endearment when summoning the man whose help she needed to perform what she was no longer able to do for herself, well, that just seemed inappropriate.

Their life together reduced to one of home help, she never called him darling or Ignjatović again.

After the bathroom they went into the kitchen. Breakfast would bring a kind of calm. She was silent, and he’d talk about his plans for the day. He spoke fast and loud, trying to outrun every silence. It was silence he feared more than anything in those first few months, like a nighttime DJ who knows he can’t stop talking, that at the core of every silence slouches the darkness of the abyss.

Stepping out into the street, he would breathe a sigh of relief. At the newsstand in front of the Landesbank he would buy a newspaper and then head off to work. Asked about Rajna he kept his responses brief; his voice cold to the secretary, not hiding that he wished she’d stop talking, and polite to the manager, to whom he gave a good dose of self-pity. She’s brave, she’ll get through it all; I don’t know about me though . That’s what he’d say. The manager would tap him on the shoulder and walk out.

Kosta would then sit at his desk and begin reading the paper. He read everything, from business and share market updates to the sports section, from the obituaries to the classifieds and inserts; not a scrap of news escaped him, none of it of any relevance. He read and remembered without any obvious sense or purpose, as he had done when his father was dying and he had waited in the park in front of the hospital, so the final word of the day would be one not to cause him pain, a word from the newspaper.