Кристиан Новак - Dark Mother Earth

“Go for it, get the pictures, and I’ll pour us a glass.”

Dina pulled out a manila envelope, and Matija poured two glasses of wine. She placed several photos on the table. Matija glanced briefly at the first and told her all about how it was taken, if he remembered correctly, while his dad was still alive. They’d gone to the coast at Orebić, but it had rained almost every day, hence the overcast sky and the fact that they were all in T-shirts. The other people were Slovenes his folks had gone sailing with a few times. They’d gone together to hear music on the hotel terrace, and there, out of pure guest-worker mischief, they’d stolen the wineglasses. He laughed aloud at the next photo because, he told her, it was taken when he was helping his uncle with the grape harvest, and Matija and his friends had gotten so drunk that some women from the nearby vineyards had had to herd them home like livestock. He didn’t recognize the third photo right off the bat, but then he realized it was of his mother.

“Oh ho ho, now will you look at this? I’d forgotten. Look at her, wearing socks with sandals. Motherrrr.” Matija laughed and said it was taken in Germany when his parents had gone to an amusement park with colleagues from work; he and his sister must have stayed home with their grandmother. Dina took out the next one.

“Look at that hair. They let me grow it so long when I was a kid, I don’t know why. It probably amused the guests. That was in front of our neighbor’s house in Međimurje. They had two horses—see, behind here—and I sometimes helped feed them. Then they’d make me grated apples with sugar and cinnamon.”

He was so caught up with his stories that he didn’t even see her tears. He didn’t know it, but not one of the photographs was genuine. After her meeting, Dina had googled, despondent, honesty , memory , remembering , childhood trauma . Matija rarely spoke about his childhood, and when he did his voice changed completely, as if he were flattening all nuance. He’d stare at the ceiling, as if searching for a clear image there. His mother and sister were also quiet on the topic. They deftly changed the subject whenever it approached the events of their lives before Zagreb, and Dina had been too polite to press. For this very reason, she knew she should start with them.

She called Matija’s mother and told her she was putting together a scrapbook and needed some of Matija’s childhood photographs. They had coffee and cookies, and then she went home, where she scanned the pictures she’d chosen and digitally cut out the figures of Matija, his mother, his father, and his sister.

In various combinations she inserted these figures into backgrounds she found online. A stretch of open ocean seen from a road in Manila, a house and yard in a town in southern Sweden, a road alongside railroad tracks somewhere in rural Sandžak. Places where she knew the Dolenčec family had never been. After that, she added some random adults and kids in stovepipe jeans and shirts with floppy collars, which she’d dug up when she googled “family photos from the late seventies.” It took her several hours to tweak the collages she’d assembled and print them out. She knew it would be hard to explain why she was so determined to do this. No one would understand that perfect happiness in love is, in fact, beyond reach. As far as Dina could tell, the prognosis was bad no matter how you looked at it. Great love either faded or became extremely painful. This first outcome she’d recognized while observing a couple in a café staring silently into space; doing so was less painful than saying something and getting nothing back. Only their elbows, their spines, and the people around them propped up their listless bodies. As far as the second outcome, it happened when people cycled between hurting each other and having makeup sex. This first scenario was acceptable to Dina—she considered it an asceticism of sorts. The second—absolutely not. That’s why she wanted things to be clear, even if this meant resorting to duplicity.

She’d show Matija the collages. If he said he didn’t remember where and when the pictures had been taken and didn’t know the other people, he’d be telling the truth. If he launched into stories about the pictures and the people in them, she’d leave him that night. And he did make a story up for every single photograph. How thorough he was! He even added the odd detail for authenticity. She hated him for the bit about the grated apple.

While talking about the sixth photo, as he described how his sister and cousin were sledding and Matija was trying to pelt them with snowballs, he finally looked up at her face.

“Jesus, what’s wrong? Hey!”

Dina didn’t answer. If she’d spoken, her voice would have quavered, and the situation no longer allowed for that.

“Whoa, what’s wrong?”

Matija offered her a napkin. After a time, she began speaking softly. “These aren’t real photographs. I photoshopped them myself. The people here… you’ve never met them. You’ve never been to any of these places. You never threw a snowball there, you never fed any horses. I wanted to see if you’d lie no matter what, or if you’d admit you didn’t recognize these pictures.”

Matija felt his whole body go numb. The space around his chest folded over for a moment and formed a shape physicists call a wormhole. The wormhole vanished immediately, but the space around him stayed forever crumpled, like a handkerchief. Matija’s life began to ooze out through the microscopic opening, and it might be said (though science has yet to prove it) that his biological demise began at that moment.

“A test? I suppose I deserve it. But I told you how things come to me. When I see a picture, for the first three seconds I don’t remember anything, then I see my face and a familiar detail, and then things start occurring to me… and I just start talking.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“The things I told you earlier, they are 100 percent true… But from when I was little… I can hardly remember any of that stuff.”

“But then why did you say anything?! Why not just say you didn’t recognize them?!”

“Because you wouldn’t have accepted that. What do you want from me? Look, that’s me. I can’t explain it, not to you, not to myself. I see dirt on my sneakers, like when we went for that walk along the riverbank, and I know it has something to do with the eyes of a horsefly, but I have no idea what that means now. Then the next day I see an old wooden toy, and I feel a surge of rage, but I don’t know why. All my memories are like that. Broken. Shit, that’s why I make up stories.”

“I see, you’ve got amnesia. I’ve read about that. Serial killers and politicians pull that out as their excuse all the time. What’ve I gotten myself into… Who are you, damn it? A man with no past?”

“That would make you a woman with no present—damn you and your police investigation.”

“Did something happen when you were little?”

“Sure, aliens abducted me and experimented on me. Does that line up with what you read in My Secret , or whatever? Why the fuck’re you doing this?”

Dina went to the bathroom and retrieved her toothbrush, deodorant, perfume, and the emergency tampons she’d stored there. Then she went into the bedroom. Matija was still staring at the fake photographs, hoping he’d find a detail that would by some miracle prove he hadn’t lied after all, but he could hear her opening the drawers with rough, brusque movements—heartfelt movements—and packing her belongings into a cloth bag.

She came back into the kitchen, steadied herself for a few minutes, and, without a trace of a quaver, said, “Why did you lie to me? Why is it so damned difficult for you to tell the truth, even though you see how much I love you?! You idiot, whatever you’d said, if you’d told me you’d stolen, begged, been abused—if it had been the truth—I’d have loved you even more. Why can’t you understand this? What could that six-year-old child have gone through that was so terrible you can’t tell me about it, even when you see me leaving?!” She waited another ten seconds, saw that Matija wasn’t going to say anything, then took her bags and opened the door.