Hair Everywhere. Tea Tulic

friend’s Grandma always knew everything about everyone. She broke her hip in the bathtub, lay in bed and made lots of telephone calls and watched tele­vision. Since she died, she knows even more.

      She had very, very thick ankles.

      In my immediate family no one has ankles like that.

      Blessed Assumption

      I liked to spend part of my summer holidays in front of the house. Lots of children lived nearby, so I could choose my own friends. The friends I chose used to go to a building with big brown doors every Saturday morning. I would stay outside; until one day I went after them.

      ‘Where are you going?’ asked my best friend.

      ‘With you.’

      ‘We’re going to Sunday School.’

      ‘Can I go too?’

      Inside that building it was wonderful. So wonderful that I went there every Saturday after that. They told me the building was called the Church of the Blessed Assumption. And that Blessed Assumption means something invisible lifts you up high into the sky. Magical!

      After that I stopped going to folk-dancing classes at school.

      Other Types of Tea

      These are two different kinds of tea from the House of Green Tea. One is for Mum. The other for me. Eight treasures of Shaolin. Eight pearls of health. I buy it also because its name transports me to eastern monasteries. I shan’t buy tea in filter bags any longer. They contain only dust.

      In the big market place, stuffed with people and different kinds of yoghurts, I buy cheese. Only people, of all the mammals in the world, consume milk and milk products after they grow up. And all those people are here, in the queue in front of me, buying plastic necessities reduced by forty per cent. I don’t buy any chewy sweets. They contain only codes for something I don’t understand.

      Decision

      First I tell Dad, and then my brother. Dad gets sick. We decide not to say anything to Mum, Grandma or my sisters. At least until Mum gets better. Then they can be cross with us as much as they like.

      The Two of Them

      ‘Where have you been, it’s nearly five o’clock?’

      ‘I was playing in front of the school.’

      My sister is often goalkeeper. And attacker. And a striker. So she needs new trainers every three months. She sits dirty and sweaty on Mum’s bed.

      ‘Did you do your homework?’

      ‘No, I didn’t.’

      ‘Hah, you’ll be in trouble!’

      ‘Mum… when will you come out of hospital?’

      ‘Next week, I’m going to the school to parents’ evening.’

      ‘How will she go to the school with those bottles hanging off her? Everyone will laugh at me,’ my sister whispers to Dad as we leave.

      Catechism

      Not long after the first time I attended Sunday School, they gave me a lovely colourful book. All the men in it had beards, and the women had tablecloths over their heads. In it was written:

      “Respect your father and mother so that you may live a long and good life on earth.”

      I did not understand this. “Do not steal” was also written there, so that it no longer occurred to me any more to take money from the cash-box for the poor with Mum’s tweezers. There is a dark and ugly place where people who do this end up. I kept the book under my pillow at night. I didn’t know whether that was right. Nothing was written in the book about keeping secrets.

      The Neighbourhood in the Neighbourhood

      Every spring, in the gutter above the window of my balcony a big family of little sparrows nests. All sorts of things are up there: small twigs, dogs’ hairs, feathers, pieces of paper, the remains of felt-tipped pens. Some of these building materials end up on the balcony floor. The baby birds empty their little bowels in the nest; and their parents do the same over my drying clothes and the sun-basking dog. It can be fun up there, for shit’s sake! Up there, and nowhere else.

      A Short Conversation About Our God

      Once I came home and told Dad and Mum that I was unclean. That I could not die unbaptized and that this needed to be changed, urgently. Grandma said that if it were up to her, she would have had me baptized long ago. Then we all dressed nicely and went to church. Mum put a white blouse on me, Dad kept silent through Our Father and it was all finished in fifteen minutes. Many times after that, immortal, safe, I played the organ, gave sermons to the benches, cleaned the altar, read the colourful book, and rang the bell at midday. In my thin trainers, engaged to God, I asked the priest:

      ‘How can God send my father to hell if He loves me?’

      He was silent. After some time they transferred him to another church, me to another school, and God onto the telephone.

      Dreams

      They say when you dream about a snake, it is not a good sign. It means you have a friend who is not a friend. That his true face is hideous. And when you wake up from such a dream, you should take a good look around! Look out for the one who eats from your hands. The demon in human form that you caress. Whether you find him or not, beware. He is someone you know.

      As well as snakes, Mum and Grandma especially dislike dreaming about teeth. When one of them dreams that her teeth are falling out, she always says:

      ‘Someone will die soon.’

      Then, usually, an acquaintance of ours – or somebody else’s – dies.

      The Capital City