Tomáš Zmeškal - A Love Letter in Cuneiform

“‘Why so many?’ I asked on the way back.

“‘Well, when do you think we’re going to get into town again?’ she said.

“‘Usually we make it about once every three weeks,’ I said.

“‘That’s right, every three weeks,’ she said. I suddenly realized the drive didn’t take three and a half hours, but much longer. I just hadn’t noticed because I had slept most of the way while she drove. We got home late that evening. Martha went straight into the shower and I carried the crates of bulbs into a room where, one by one, I washed them off and deposited them in a long tank, which I filled with antifungal solution. It took me till nighttime. That night we met in the kitchen and it dawned on me that this was probably one of our common routines. There were some letters on top of the fridge, along with some bank statements, advertising flyers, a few magazines, and an envelope with a university letterhead on it. I opened that one first. It was a polite letter from an officer in the admissions department informing me, allegedly with sadness, that due to the high volume of applicants they couldn’t accept me. I paced around the kitchen a while, then went outside, made a couple of housekeeping notes on some of the plants, and then got angry. Martha was rearranging boxes of food in the freezer when I walked in, but seeing me she stopped, sat down at the table, and waited to see what I was going to do or say. I didn’t know what to do or say. I was just enraged.

“‘Be careful you don’t hit your shin again, honey.’ That was all she said. Nobody before or since has ever addressed me with that strange word, honey . She seemed to know I had been rejected. ‘I really had my hopes up for you,’ she said after a minute, ‘but maybe it’s time for you to let it go. It’s devastating you. This is the fifth time they’ve turned you down.’

“‘No, the sixth,’ I corrected her. ‘The first was before we knew each other.’

“‘You know how much I want it for you, but it’s devastating you to get these rejections, and it devastates me that you’re devastated.’ I had nothing to say to that. We had strictly budgeted the movies Martha rented to make them last till our next trip into town, but that night we went through at least four and I drank almost two bottles of Jamaican rum. The next day I didn’t wake up till afternoon and didn’t feel like talking at all. A week went by like that.

“On Monday a buyer from one of the companies I worked for occasionally, a man by the name of Winter, was supposed to stop by. I don’t know what possessed him to drive all the way out to the edge of the desert to see me, but he came. As I welcomed him, it became clear that he had brought along his nephew, who was eager to see my flower beds. I showed them whatever they wanted. As they were leaving, his nephew asked, ‘So is there any building going on around here, Mr. Hegel?’ It felt funny, him calling me mister. He couldn’t have been more than ten years younger than me, maybe sixteen or seventeen. ‘I don’t think anyone’s building anything around here,’ I said. ‘We would know if they were, don’t you think, Martha?’ ‘No, of course not. We would know,’ she repeated. But the young man insisted. I didn’t think about what he’d said for some time after that, but several weeks later it came back to me. A few months earlier I had finally finished my artificial irrigation project. It cost me all my savings, all my earnings, and Martha lent me all her savings as well, and it turned out it actually worked. Now we just had to live extremely modestly for the next four and a half years or so, as we slowly paid off our debt, but I was sure we would earn a return on our investment. I was grateful to Martha for going in on it with me and for the fact that she liked it here too.

“Without wind, there is no desert. The desert and the wind are like brothers by blood. One settled, the other a drifter who pops in from time to time with a sack full of gifts from all the wonderful places he’s visited to make up for his bad conscience. The desert is deserted and lonely, and acquires her knowledge of the outside world via the wind. The gifts the wind brings with him are small, microscopic particles of earth. Particles of earth that erode soil and rock. Particles of earth so small that even a slight breeze is enough to keep them airborne, like clouds or airships. Gravity doesn’t apply to them. They remain in the air forever, suspended like souls in purgatory till they ascend to paradise or plummet into hell. They are weightless and free of commitments, traveling light, catching a lift on the air currents, elbowing through whirlwinds, creeping along, saltating from one to another, clambering from there to a third. A grain of sand measures roughly a fifth of a millimeter in diameter and scatters in the wind like fog or dust. Usually the wind lifts a particle of sand and carries it only an inch or two over the dunes at a speed half or a third as fast as the wind itself. After a while the grain of sand crashes into another, which then takes off, and the whole thing repeats all over again. About a quarter of all the grains of sand in the desert shift back and forth this way, depending on the speed and direction of the wind. The process is known as aeolian transport, and if you can understand it, you have at least a chance of also understanding the infinity of time. Every desert is like a gigantic hourglass with the sand trickling from dune to dune, back and forth, up and down. Do I need to tell you how much I love the desert? I was seven or eight years old, living with my parents at the edge of the desert, as I do now, when I got a new encyclopedia for my birthday. In it I learned that deserts are not only on Earth, but on Mars and other planets too, which so captivated and delighted me that I ran straight to my father with the news. I could tell he was happy I was happy, but I don’t think he understood why. The important thing for me was that there was something connecting the Earth and Mars. I imagined the two planets as connected hourglasses. Later on, I actually imagined us living on Mars, surrounded by red sandstorms. What boy wouldn’t want to see that? And now I lived in the desert. The closest significant landmark to our house was Mount St. Aloysius, which rose to a height of 3,560 feet. That was where Martha and I lived, that was where I had my house, that was where I irrigated my flower beds.

“Once I had finished the last part of my irrigation system, my work was more or less done. I had invested money in the pumps, drilling several new wells, and all that was left to do was some occasional maintenance. I was very proud of my artificially irrigated flower beds, seeing that no one had ever tried it before. The flowers did better than ever, which meant greater yields and faster repayments on my debt. Then one day, having nothing better to do, I got it into my head to go look at that place in the desert that Winter’s nephew had mentioned. I wanted Martha to come along, but she said she didn’t have time. No time? Us? I had the feeling she was just making excuses, and when one day after breakfast I decided to drive out there, Martha said she would come along after all. We set out early. When you live in the desert, you have to leave early in the morning so you don’t get caught out in the midday sun. We drove for several hours, and when we reached our destination, I saw a long barbed-wire fence stretching into the distance. Beyond it was a dirt road leading to a group of large buildings. We came to a small building at the entrance to the fenced-in lot that looked like a gatehouse. We pulled up in front of the gate, I honked the horn a few times and got out. Martha stayed in the car. She seemed a little tired and there were beads of sweat on her forehead even though we had the air conditioning turned all the way up. After a little while, two men came out. One stood at the gate while the other gave me a hesitant glance. They both had on some kind of uniform.