You’re a good little girl. What’s your favorite subject? he asked. I didn’t respond. I bet you’re a good student, take lots of notes. I can see it in your hands. Strong, diligent little hands.
I didn’t look down, though I could tell that’s what he wanted, for me to look down and see his own hand next to mine, his veined wrist, his thick fingers ending in wide nails. A grown-up hand. Not like the hands of the boys in my grade. He leaned closer to me on the plank. My stomach hurt. For minutes I’d sat unmoving, staring at the point where my father had disappeared. The reeds had grown back up around the dock, only a single broken stalk bent over into water.
Won’t you talk to me? he asked. His voice was so gentle, I might have answered if I hadn’t felt his breath on my neck. We have a German exam tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to it, even though grammar is my favorite subject, not German. This is what I would have said if someone else had asked, but no one else was asking, just him, my father’s friend, and to him I said nothing.
Yet that morning I’d been excited I could go fishing. I knew my father wouldn’t speak to me, and I wouldn’t be able to talk either lest I frighten the fish. I’d jumped into my new sandals, pink as fruit punch ice cream, mother had bought them at the market two days earlier. Now my feet sweated profusely in them. Father will be back any minute, he’s just checking on the landing net. The reeds grew so dense in that area that they swallowed up all sound, but I knew Father was out there somewhere whistling to himself. We never docked here, he would only ever go ashore, look around, and come right back. When it was just the two of us, it was my job to hold the rowboat alongside the dock, but now that his friend was with us, and I wasn’t moving, the water had pulled us out. Father’s friend wasn’t paying attention to the dock. He didn’t know the currents beneath the water’s surface.
He kept badgering me, and I kept my silence. My stomach throbbed. Deceptive bays formed in the reeds, I could hardly see the point where my father disappeared anymore. What will he say when he sees I’ve allowed the water to sweep me away? I wanted to reach for the oars, but father’s friend was too close. My nose itched with sweat, but still I remained motionless, even when the grown-up hand took my own and pulled me in.
Now my hands have disappeared,
My hands have gone away!
Hey, ho, my hands are back,
La dee da dee da dee day
This is a children’s song and peek-a-boo game
for teaching kids the body parts.
This is how you play:
for teaching kids the body parts.
This is how you play:
For every verse you hide or cover a different body part.
First your hands, then your nose, then eyes, then ears.
When you reach “hey, ho” you reveal the hidden body part.
Stadt
For some time I suspected I would disappear without a trace. Pants cut into my waist less and less, the ring was loose on my finger, the sapphire wobbling in its setting as if it were shaking its head: no good, this won’t do at all. At night my skin became translucent, the veins meandering unsteadily along the backs of my hands. Dina was the only one who saw the signs. Mommy, where are you? she would ask when I fell silent during the bedtime story. I’m here, I would answer, and stroke her head.
My husband had already disappeared, but no one other than me knew about it, because he hadn’t faded away. In fact, his shoulders had become even more angular, his eyebrows even more defined, but his body was as empty as the vacated cocoon of a silkworm. From then on, eating was his chief concern: he searched for new textures and flavors with a slow, deliberate ardor, as if he were trying to fill the yawning void inside him with brisket and caviar. He knew all the city’s top chefs, waiters knew which table was his favorite and which brand of mineral water he drank. Like smokers with their cigarettes, he measured time by meals.
Are you going to see this midlife crisis through to the end, or stop somewhere along the way? I asked him one night. He didn’t hear me. He smeared wasabi on his tuna nigiri and carefully bathed it in the dish of soy sauce. I think I’ll send for another plate of sashimi, he said finally, thoughtfully stroking his right ear. Are you going to see it through? I continued. What happens next? You rent an apartment downtown, move in with that woman, it drives me insane so I follow you around, make a scene everywhere you go, take a pair of shears to the suits you leave at home? I need to know if this is what you want.
That got his attention. Don’t speak so loudly, he said, but it was no use, I didn’t quiet down, I kept pushing him, are you going or staying? You’ve lost your mind! he spat, signaling for the waiter. Someone might recognize me.
I imagined flipping the table, porcelain dishes smashing to bits on the red marble floor, the look of indignation from the pig-faced woman next to us, the sencha tea running down my husband’s shirt.
In the end he didn’t order the sashimi. He paid by card and left too small a tip. It was in an Indian restaurant twelve years ago that he’d asked me to marry him, but he was thinner back then, barely filling out his gray herringbone jacket. The ring lay in a red box on the table. He’d purchased it on a business trip in Istanbul. Bullied him down to half price for it, he’d said, forehead shimmering in his fervor. I could see that he had a future. I hoped that, with him, I could have a future as well.
The waiter cast me a disapproving grimace as he took away my untouched plate. My husband’s forehead shone now as well, but this time he wasn’t looking at me. He grabbed his phone and made for the exit. I’ll wait for you in the car, he said over his shoulder.
I stood up and followed. As I rushed to the door, I could feel the pig-faced woman’s gaze.
Glass ● Üveg
Glass—One day, as I was laying the table for dinner, I put an antique brass candleholder in the center, an heirloom from my grandmother, with a fat angel and loads of roses. I sat down. Dinner was ready, Dina must have been hungry, but my husband had not arrived yet, had not even called to tell where he was. He was half an hour late, which was not unusual these days, it was actually quite unusual for him to come home for dinner, because lately he preferred to eat out with some friends, or as I suspected, with his lover. Sometimes he said he would dine with us, then decide otherwise later, forgetting to let me know.
When it happened the first time, I asked him why he did this to me. He answered that I must have imagined the whole thing, he didn’t promise me he’d come home, he couldn’t have, since he’d had dinner plans with a business partner. I did not argue. He must have thought that I was mad. After that, on such occasions, I waited for an hour, then gave Dina some porridge, and put her to bed, a little too late, but at least I didn’t cry until I read her a story. Afterwards, I put back the plates and the cutlery in the cupboard, and scraped the dinner into the dustbin. It was all about timing, I decided. I had to clear all the signs before he got home.
When I sat down at the table that day, he was half an hour late, which meant that he may still arrive, but most likely would not. I found myself wishing he wouldn’t. As I sat there, staring at the po-faced angel, wondering whether I should give Dina something to eat now, or wait a little longer, I suddenly felt exceedingly thirsty. I wanted to drink, but not water, that didn’t seem good enough, wine rather, as I sometimes did when my husband was late, and I didn’t know where he was. So I reached out, but couldn’t find my glass. I remembered putting it out, but now I couldn’t see it. I saw the flowers, the plates, the cutlery, the brass candleholder, but not my glass. I stood up, looked around the kitchen counter and the sink, but it wasn’t there either. Only when I went back to the dining room did I see that it was standing there where I had put it, a little to the right of my plate, a sunbeam playing on the rim. I sat back again, feeling better, reassured. I am not going crazy. The glass had always been there, I only didn’t see because I was looking through it at something else. At that mean-looking angel on the candleholder.
Die Schande ● Szégyen
Shame—I am a monster, a terror, a freak, but if I look in the mirror, I just see a normal woman. Others might say I’m pretty. People don’t point their fingers at me, don’t laugh at me, but I’m still ashamed when I have to walk down the street alone. I would prefer to hide or be invisible.
On the day I got my first period my mother hit me. I didn’t tell her what had happened to me because I didn’t know how to bring it up. I’d heard from my classmates that I needed to put a sanitary pad in my panties to hold in the blood. It was a stuffy Sunday night when I saw blood in the toilet after peeing. Since I couldn’t find any pads, I crammed a wad of cotton into my panties. So much that I could hardly sit down, but I still left a big stain on the cream-colored sofa when we were watching our evening movie. My father didn’t say a word, just gave me a long look and then left the room. It wasn’t my mother hitting me that hurt. It was the shame. My mother was just a woman, as I too became in that moment. But my father was something else. To him I was disgusting and weak. I couldn’t be trusted.
*
Parking garages filled me with panic. Sometimes it was just a passing discomfort that assailed me, a brief shortness of breath, yet at other times my hands would still be shaking hours later. My psychologist talked about perinatal asphyxia and unresolved maternal abandonment issues, but I believed it’s death, not birth, that a person relives in the underground corridors. I wouldn’t just drive in, initially I even asked my husband to stop on the street. He got progressively more irritated, and week by week had more trouble finding a spot outside. You need to try to overcome these fits, he harped. Eventually he no longer said anything, simply turned down into the depths of the garage and pretended he didn’t notice I was suffocating.
Ever since I had realized there was someone else, my husband avoided my gaze. Now he was calling, his voice distant over the phone, and even more impersonal than usual. It was like a stranger was speaking to me. I’m on level C, he snapped. If you hurry up I’ll take you home, but I can only wait till half past, I have another meeting tonight. We’re coming, I cut him off, and hung up. Dina cried out. She was frightened. I’d accidentally squeezed her hand too tightly.
We were in front of the toy store on the uppermost floor of the shopping mall. Before my husband called we’d been admiring the dollhouse in the window display. Mama Bunny reading upstairs, Girl Bunny playing in the next room over, and Papa Bunny, with his enormous reading glasses and checkered slippers, feeding Baby Bunny in the kitchen. Dina didn’t beg me to buy the dollhouse. It never crossed her mind that this world of bunnies could be hers as well, she liked just looking at it every Wednesday after flute lessons. It was our little secret, a waste of time my husband knew nothing about. I was at least as sorry as Dina that we had to go.
My husband had had flings before. So far I’d pretended not to know anything, but this was different. Though it’s also possible it was me who was different.
Lately I couldn’t even get into elevators, so we rushed down the service stairwell instead. We were on the first floor when my phone rang. I thought it was him again. Maybe he’d already left even though it was only quarter past, but it was an unknown number on the screen. I didn’t often get calls from unknown numbers. A woman’s voice came through. Only at the second sentence did I realize she was speaking German. She was calling about a job application, that’s all I understood at first, but I was confused, I hadn’t applied anywhere. In fact I hadn’t worked at all since Dina was born. Not that I would’ve made much, and besides, my husband didn’t want anything taking my attention away from him and the kids—we’d planned to have a second and a third, which were never actually born. It was a wrong number: the woman on the other end of the line was looking for an anesthetist with years of experience. It was too late to clear things up. The woman kept talking, then started asking me questions, and I answered, I didn’t want to confess I wasn’t the person she was looking for. It was a short, no-frills conversation about qualifications, professional experience, and a possible start date. I lied like a pro, long unused phrases jumped to their place in the sentences all on their own. Before we said goodbye, I asked her to send an email with the details. I hoped that whoever’s interview I had just done at least gave them the correct email address.
There were things even my psychologist didn’t know about. She never heard about the river I lived by in my childhood, nor about the dreams in which a whirlpool pulled me down and held me under. My husband knew about where I grew up, but the whirlpool? Of that, I’d never spoken to anyone.
Let’s go, Dina tugged on my hand. Dad will leave us here. I looked at my watch. We still had five minutes. I opened the metal door and stepped into the first-floor corridor. The swirling mosaic of window displays blinded me. We’ll take the tram home this time, I said, and stroked Dina’s hair.
