GABRIELA BABNIK
DRY SEASON
Translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau
An idea hungers for your body.
An alert, hot to dissemble and share.
Les Murray ‘Life Cycle of Ideas’, from Subhuman Redneck Poems
For my girls, who are asleep as I write this.
First published in 2015 by
Istros Books (in collaboration with Beletrina Academic Press)
London, United Kingdom
www.istrosbooks.com
Originally published in Slovene as Sušna doba by Beletrina Academic Press
© Gabriela Babnik, 2015
The right of Gabriela Babnik to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. The italicized passages in the text indicate borrowings from such writers as Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Ken Bugul, Chris Abani, Wole Soyinka, Helon Habila, and Reinaldo Arenas, among others.
Translation © Rawley Grau, 2015
Edited by Stephen Watts
Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak | www.frontispis.hr
ISBN: 978-1-908236-265 (printed edition)
ISBN: 978-1-908236-760 (eBook edition)
This Book is part of the EU co-funded project “Stories that can Change the World” in partnership with Beletrina Academic Press | www.beletrina.si
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Chapter 1
You cannot know how much a chicken weighs until you pick it up and shake it.
(African proverb)
We were lying on the bed and had not let the sun into the room, but even if we had turned on a light, I don’t know if anything would have changed – if I’d have become what I was or he what he was. I moved nearer to him. I moved as near to him as possible. To his raspy breathing and warm skin. He was unusually warm. He had said in total seriousness, which gave his words added charm, that he had the heart of a buffalo. I had harnessed him, this buffalo, and now it would be hard to ever let him go. My bones wouldn’t let me. I know I write as if from the previous century, but I am from the previous century. I was born not long after the Second World War. I read somewhere that’s not the way to start a novel. I mean saying ‘I was born in such-and-such a place’, but let me do it anyway. Let me be forgiven for lying in bed without the light on next to this young man whose face looked like it had been drawn on. Eyes, forehead, nose – as if cut out of cardboard and pasted there.
He slept with his lids half-open and I found myself wanting to close them. There were also things about him I just knew, from a distance. I could have predicted them. Like when we were going to the hotel. While I was bent over my bag searching for my wallet, he looked away. Or on the avenue in the middle of the day, when I wanted to take his arm, it was better not to, even though I had done it just a little while before. It was better that he just walk beside me, with his slim, slender car mechanic’s body – although... although he must have already done many things in his life; you could see it in his veins, not only the veins on his arms but especially at his temples, big powerful veins, veins like electrical cables, veins like steel, like salt, like water, invincible veins, and I, next to him, was carrying my yellow bag printed with garden flowers, which later, somewhere halfway along the way, I let out of my hands. In the hotel, when we had leaned back on the plastic chairs, when our bodies had rested, he said the bag was what made him notice me. From across the avenue. Rivers were flowing between us – cars, people, street vendors, women with and without bundles on their heads, children with old and less old faces, but even so he spotted me on his retina. He was squinting his eyes, as he did now, except now they were almost completely open. Though now he was no longer looking anywhere, at least not in my direction. I imagine him looking inwards, at that buffalo heart of his and the hot blood flowing in waves through his body.
That’s probably why he was rasping in his sleep like that. In total seriousness. As if he hadn’t slept for an eternity, as if he could barely wait for someone to invite him into bed. I suppose I sensed that even from across the avenue. And when we were finally standing face to face, he said, ‘You were looking at me.’
I remember it clearly, him using the formal vous with me. Then I said the same thing, only with the familiar tu: ‘I noticed you were looking at me.’
‘So what do we do now?’ he laughed. I said nothing, with that yellow printed bag of mine, since it would have been too stupid to say something and look away. That’s also when I realized it would be hard to bear not looking. At that tall, slender body. But I suppose I’ve already said that, so now I need to say something else, to lay my cards on the table. When I looked away from him, I imagined him slipping his big dark hand, which reflected the sun and everything else too, beneath my sweat-soaked T-shirt and lifting those breasts that for a century had been sagging to either side. ‘I will help you carry your bag,’ he added, as I slowly turned my eyes back to him.
I laughed back. After I barely escaped death crossing the street, you wanted to carry my bag for me? Only that and nothing else? No, not that I didn’t know how such things are done on this continent – no kissing on the street, no holding hands, least of all between two people of the opposite sex, no intimacy at all in public – but to carry my bag, when what I had in mind was a finger in the mouth, a hand on the belly, was simply too much. I shook my head – what else could I do? Even as I child, whenever I really wanted something, I shook my head. ‘No need. I’ll manage.’ Of course the subtitles said the direct opposite and I think he even deciphered that. From across the street, beneath the sun. Later, as we walked side by side, slowly, lightly, like two cotton flowers in swirls of dust, he took my bag all the same.
We went to a nearby hotel. Where else should we have gone? A woman like me and a man like him. Standing up, he was two heads taller than me. But I’m used to tall men from home. For me that’s not a problem. Maybe it bothered other people. That a sixty-two-year-old woman and a twenty-seven-year-old man were strolling along side by side. Maybe it bothered the receptionist at the hotel. That when I put my hand in my bag our elbows accidentally touched, and then our shoulders. I saw it; it was written on her face. Here’s another woman who’s come for a safari. Except that here, in this faded hotel, I don’t see any clouds, let alone grass or lions in the grass. Just a dark, narrow hallway and stairs that lead to a room. When you open the door, on the left is a bed and, next to the bed, a night table with a tawdry shine; a little to the side, a fridge with a vase of plastic flowers on top. Also, let’s say, two chairs, on which we sat down timidly, maybe me a little more than him. I bent my legs a little, a pose I’d later assume more than once in Africa; he, meanwhile, went to the fridge and took out a bottle of water. I was pretending to look at the window, the curtains on the window, heavy curtains that reached to the floor and somehow jarred with what was happening outside, all that sunlight and those exaggerated gestures and inviting smiles from the street vendors, and trying not to think about the things that might happen between us. I suppose I was afraid, yes, afraid of the words from his mouth. That he would suddenly turn away from the fridge, the bottle of cold water still in his hands, and say, ‘Lie down and spread your legs’ or ‘C’mon, let me fuck you, ’cause that’s why you brought me to this hotel, isn’t it?’ Words like that I wouldn’t know how to respond to.
‘Are you cold?’ My shoulders flinched, but I would have probably flinched no matter what he said. And because the question was followed by silence, I looked over at my bag and only then realized I had put it on the floor by the bed when I entered the room. As if he understood the quick turn of my head, as if he understood more