brassieres the colour of flesh, while she created an entire palette of colours. I respected her for that, if almost for nothing else.
As a child I sat for hours and hours next to her sewing machine, squeezing some toy and dangling my legs. By then, I guess, I already knew why she had taken me home with her. It wasn’t hard to figure out. But after that half-naked scene where she persuaded my father to agree to visit the orphanage, nothing essentially changed for her. There was, certainly, an arrangement by which the housekeeper would look after me in the late afternoon and my mother would have me during the day. But because my father wasn’t around most of the time, was in his office most of the time, with his papers, with his clients, with the system insects, as he called his law colleagues, and because no one was therefore obliged to show any conscientiousness, kindness, or tenderness, I was left with the housekeeper during the day too. She was a small, pensive woman. Even in my dewy youth, she must have been a few years past sixty, and when I was entering my teenage years, she was found dead one afternoon in a bathtub with toys. After she had done all she could do, after she fell down the steps carrying an entire crate of tomatoes, my parents decided to install her in one of the flats the family owned. Hardly anyone ever checked to see what was going on with her, what stage of dementia she was in, or where those toys in the bathroom came from. But in those days women like her were not so uncommon, and even her demise was, to say the least, not entirely unusual.
What my mother didn’t get from my father she got from her brother. Namely, admiration. Whenever her brother rang the doorbell, a long impatient ring, she would run from the sewing room, embrace him affectionately in the hallway – an embrace, by the way, that I always took as a sign of his insecurity – and return for a brief moment to shut off the sewing machine, by which time I could already see the glassy look of the protector, the guardian, in her eyes; then she would invite him into the kitchen. From that moment on they would behave as if they were the only two people in the world. No pats on the head, no ‘How are you, Ana?’, no ‘My word, how you’ve grown, I can’t believe it!’, nothing. I might as well have been non-existent. And non-existent as I was, the only thing left for me to do was drop my toy on the floor and run to the kitchen door, from behind which came the sound of furtive weeping. At first it frightened me; I didn’t understand why grown-ups would be crying, especially since a minute before they had been laughing, but then through the door’s yellowish pane I saw a hazy figure, probably my mother, stroking a man, probably her brother, at neck level and telling him not to worry, everything would be all right.
So I learned the story of Mama’s brother’s crime only in bits and pieces. It seems that when he was eighteen, he killed a girl in a traffic accident. Unintentionally, but nevertheless he’d been running ever since. Especially from himself, while my mother had declared herself his protector, his comforter – in other words, the only one who knew her brother was a good man. Despite the fact that he looked at me suspiciously. Despite the fact that for him I was little more than a stranger, a connecting link of sorts to the man his sister had surrendered herself to, though in his view this same man was hardly worthy of her. I gathered this from the fact that he came by only when my father was not home.
Despite the fact that it was the black polka-dot dress that encouraged me to study in England, and that my mother took me home with her and gave me a name, there was no need, at least as far as I was concerned, for her to do any of it. She could just as well have left me on the orphanage floor. In fact, it made no difference if I went or stayed; the difference came only as the years passed. When I was done leaning against the kitchen door, behind which two strangers were caressing each other, the first thing I did was run to the mirror in the front hall. Now you expect me to tell you that I ran my hands over my face, blew the hair from my eyes like some television bimbo, only for it to fall right back into the same place, made my lips into a pout, or something similar, but it wasn’t like that. I was more obsessed with my entire look. The general impression my figure might make on another person. Were my shoulders drawn with a pencil or fountain pen? How defined were my calves, and how long was the shadow I cast on the floor in front of the mirror? I did it in a such a way that nobody could really tell I was looking at myself. Just a quick glance of the eye, and then back to the umbrella deposited in the front hall, the man’s trench coat split at the back, the leather gloves carefully folded on the little stand.
All this time something has been trying to make me write that my mother and her brother were drinking tea in the kitchen, but once you write something down you can’t go back and change it, and the truth is, the strangers behind the kitchen door were never drinking tea. The tea was for the husband and the wife, who held the husband to his promise to stay with her because they were going to adopt a little girl. Ana. More than once I’ve wondered if the woman who set me down in the empty room at the orphanage ever gave me a name. Did she ever stroke her belly when she was carrying me? Or was she from a different generation of women, who didn’t do that? My mother and I never talked about where I came from, only about where I was going. The fact that I had a triangle of a garden, where I sat for hours and hours watching the sky, searching it for faces I would never know; that an elderly woman looked after me and not the woman who was supposed to – all this should have been enough.
My eternally absent father too – he should have been enough, and also the chair, among all the chairs in the room, from which I had to watch my mother at her sewing, and the bread with marmalade and margarine every morning, no matter how disgusting the jar from which we spooned the marmalade, and the window that looked out at the roof of another house and which my father had stood in front of when he agreed to visit the orphanage. At that moment of not-looking, he did not yet know the child’s name, although that changes nothing. He was thinking only that he had reached the point where a woman was ready to sacrifice everything for him. He was not thinking about the little girl; nor later, on those rare occasions when he happened to be at home and in a quick glance caught her eyes in the front hall mirror, and maybe even saw something in them of the loneliness that belongs only to people, adults or children, trapped in an empty room, not even then did he think about her. This was all part of the contract; the tea, too. In the kitchen, after my mother and her brother left it, as my mouth was cleaning the tiny elongated glasses in which they had drunk their schnapps and, in the front hall, the unintentional killer was pulling on the detective gloves and clenching the umbrella under the arm of the trench coat, I noticed a spot of blood on the chair where my mother had been sitting. Because I didn’t know if it was a polka dot from her dress or an actual stain, maybe because I didn’t want to know, I sat down on it and waited for my mother to return.
When she opened the kitchen door, paned in a heavy yellowish glass through which you could see the outlines of people and objects on the other side, so I was sure that my mother and her brother knew about my eavesdropping but in their self-absorption forgot they should tell me to go away, she was the same as before. Slightly out of breath, slightly tousled hair, but still with the same pencil-drawn shoulders as always, with dark shading on just one side. It occurred to me we could even be related by blood, that this woman in front of me could even be my mother, but, fortunately, that was impossible. I leaned over, as my father had once leaned over long ago, who had tried, quite unsuccessfully of course, to get away from her, and picked my toy up from the floor, pushed the chair in so the housekeeper wouldn’t have to, and ran upstairs.
* * *
I will not deny there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since I last put it in somewhere, and the pressure was mounting. It’s also possible of course that last time I did not do a good job of it. The girl – who could not have been more than seventeen, maybe sixteen even, and you know what girls that age taste like: watermelon, warm, soft and wet – she and I were hiding behind a movie projector. It was an outdoor cinema, and since I was focusing too much on her trousers, I was not really following the movie. Before it all started, before the girl, whose face I don’t remember but then she probably doesn’t remember mine either, signalled to me that she knew a hiding place where we would be covered in darkness – not total darkness, because she probably would not have done it if it was total darkness – I heard they were going to show a Yugoslavian movie. When her trousers were down at her knees, I saw a man on a horse. And when she sighed and I knew she liked it and had done it before, and would certainly do it again, some black bloke with soft features was digging into an old lady’s wall. This same old lady was somehow connected