Amálie and her inertia / My laziness is my fortune
Fever Ray: When I Grow Up
Amálie has been lying in bed in her Letná apartment for three days now, feeling no desire to move. When she got back from work on Friday night, she went to bed, but on Saturday morning she couldn’t think of a good reason to get up. She made herself fall asleep again and again, for as long as she could, but by eleven she could no longer sleep and so she just lay there, staring at the ceiling.
The ceiling was white and nothing was going on there.
She was overcome by a complete laziness, a lethargy she had never experienced before, as if her will to live had packed a rucksack and gone on a visit to some faraway, exotic place, deliberately and maliciously leaving her all alone.
She lay in bed, motionless, and stared for a change at a picture painted years before by her grandfather—a still life with a skull, carafe of wine, glass and playing cards—and she couldn’t stop thinking about the motionless body of her father.
Her father’s nose / Will you stroke my skull?
Eric Satie: Gnossienne No 1., Arvo Part: Fur Alina
When Amálie’s mother called her in tears that day (two years ago) and said that Dad had maybe died, Amálie immediately started crying as well. Maybe died. (So there was still some hope that someone had made a mistake when assessing his bodily functions.)
News of this kind invariably comes by phone: her mother had received a call herself from a relative of father’s third wife. Amálie then waited until the evening, expecting her mother to call again to say that it was maybe a mistake after all, a false alarm, that he was only in hospital, regaining consciousness.
But the phone was silent.
People firmly believe that this will not happen to them, that parents will never die, not their parents.
When acquaintances occasionally spoke about the death of their parents, she thought: this is silly, it sounds so old-fashioned, so limp.
Imagining a parent dying is as difficult as imagining them copulating (least of all with the other parent).
And then it came.
On a Sunday like any other, a Sunday in March, three days after his sixty-third birthday, her father packed his satchel and tools and set out to visit ‘Grandma’ (a member of his third family) to paint a room so that his stepson could move in there with his girlfriend.
That’s how it happened, they found out later from that other grandma who called the ambulance. Dad is given a coffee and a home-made sweet bun by the grandma, and then, all of a sudden, he feels dizzy. He has to sit down in an armchair. Why don’t you lie down, Grandma says.
He tries to lie down, but it makes him feel worse, so he sits back up again. Then he starts slumping forward in the armchair. And as he keeps slumping, grandma calls the emergency services. Dad wants to say something, but he can’t articulate. His aorta has already ruptured. The nephew comes in and tries to massage his heart. The paramedics arrive, they too try to massage his heart and give him an oxygen mask. His third wife arrives, but it’s too late, within half an hour it’s over.
That’s what they say. Amálie is unable to imagine it. The collapse of her dad, who would call her on her birthday, making a tired joke he would repeat even in the afternoon: Hi there, did I wake you up? You’re not still sleeping, are you? (He knew that A. rarely got up before nine.)
So that’s it, without a warning, without a goodbye, he hadn’t managed to arrange anything, and now he was lying dead on the carpet, in the middle of various life plans. Amálie tried to imagine him dying, but she didn’t succeed.
What we know about death is second-hand knowledge, because we are never there when it happens. Dead bodies are immediately removed and taken away, we don’t know where to or what their expression was at the time of death. We only know that the dead will never call us again.
Why did Dad’s heart rupture? What was on his mind at that moment? They say that men’s hearts rupture because they have to suppress so many feelings. They are not meant to cry in public, women have to live their emotional lives for them.
She thought of that photo. Her parents, still young and slim, in a metal boat, her father holding the oars and Amálie’s older brother, at that time around two years old, seated in front of her mother, his little hand pointing at something in the distance; they are all looking in that direction, Mom is smiling and she’s still beautiful. Amálie herself is not in the picture, because it was taken in a world in which she didn’t exist yet. Her parents are young, you could say full of hope, if you didn’t know that their marriage was doomed to end from the word go, like everything that ever begins. Even though the end took fifteen years to come, and Amálie managed to be born in the meantime.
Now it was Sunday, Amalie lay motionless in bed, staring at the white ceiling and thinking about the delight with which her father had showed her the new bathtub in his last, third, home, some ten years ago. It was a large whirlpool bath with jets. She also thought of how pleased he was when he found a new job a few years back and became a school inspector. She thought of his motionless body on the carpet, and how it related to the new bathtub with jets and his new job as a school health-and-safety inspector.
She thought of the digital pictures of his great-niece’s christening he took not so long ago, standing on tiptoe in the church, holding the camera with his arm stretched up to photograph the ceremony over everyone’s heads. What were they good for these photos, she wondered, in that short time he had left to live? And why did he photograph the baby of a relative stranger, yet left her so easily when she was little? It was his departure that left a deep impression on her psyche and convinced her that men didn’t care about children. That for them, children were a reason to leave the family.
She also thought about his nose and what would happen to it now. She pondered noses, those cartilaginous protrusions into Euromerican space – in Asia they didn’t protrude as much – about the cavities through which all living beings draw air into their lungs until the last moment, though later these protrusions disappear from buried skulls, leaving nothing but a terrifying gaping hole.
As she lay alone in bed on Saturday afternoon staring at the motionless ceiling in her apartment, she thought of her father in relation to the hole in his skull that would be left there in place of his nose if he were not cremated.
Someone rang the bell at her door, but she didn’t open it. Where’s the fire? she thought.
Lately, wherever Amálie looked around, she saw a story leading to decay.
On Wednesday, she went to the opening of someone’s exhibition, and while others admired the works, she imagined a future in which the artist was forgotten and displaced by others in history.
When she saw a cute child, she immediately imagined it rapidly growing up into an adult, its new family, potential career, old age, pension, death.
She observed various manifestations of human effort which often left her in awe, and for the life of her she couldn’t comprehend what drove all those creatures to engage in the compulsive activities with which they filled the time allotted to them.
She observed how the dust gathered regularly in the same corners of her apartment, wiped it off with her hand and washed it down the sink. She didn’t know what gave the dust a pink tinge.
Again and again, she he would wash her hair under the shower, as it stubbornly refused to stay clean forever.
She thought of Sylvia Plath, who one day stopped washing her hair for the same reason, went into the basement of her house, wrapped herself in a plastic bin bag and swallowed a lot of pills. When they asked her in hospital why she had done it and why she stopped washing her hair, she replied: I’d like to do everything just once and then be rid of it forever!
Exactly what Amálie wanted.
But she didn’t have the slightest desire to buy a large plastic bin bag just for that reason and lie wrapped in it in the basement.
And so she just lay in her bed.
Then it was Monday and she was meant to go to work, but she couldn’t muster the strength to do it.
The phone she hadn’t been answering for some time rang. First it was her mother, but she didn’t pick up, then Marek sent her a text message, again she didn’t respond, and now it was her boss calling. This time she picked up. Are you coming in today? her boss wanted to know. I’m not feeling well, Amálie says, I have to see a doctor and stay in bed. She hangs up and continues staring at the white ceiling and observing the dust on the decorative relief of the wooden wardrobe looming above her bed.
Her father was the third of four children.
Amálie thought about the motionless body of her aunt, her father’s younger sister, who attempted suicide three times in her life. When they saved her the second time, she swore that next time she would succeed.
One day in winter, about a year before her brother’s death, at the age of almost sixty, she left home and didn’t come back. Her husband reported her missing and begged her to come home on TV because they’d had an argument earlier. Later it transpired that she had gone into the woods, washed the pills down with alcohol, had lain down in the snow and fallen asleep, this time successfully forever. It was only in spring, when the snow disappeared, that she was found by mushroom pickers.
In the body of an ancient whale / Eternity in mummy’s belly
Only after her father’s death did Amálie find the courage to go into therapy.
Until then, she had been afraid that, hearing about the formative childhood experience of her parents’ divorce, any therapist would send her to talk to her father. And she couldn’t do that. She knew that she was unable to ask him about anything from the past.
When she was seven, he suddenly vanished from their home. Since then, they had never spoken a word about why he had left without saying good bye. It was a taboo subject.
She found herself in a vicious circle again.
Her current relationship, which had at first appeared to be the culmination of all her previous ones, had hit the same wall as the others.
She urgently needed to ask a therapist if it was possible to step out of the circle.
She had tried so many times to make a start. She had to take from men what her father hadn’t given her—admiration, presence, support. Men had always noticed her. Even when she wore only men’s clothes because she disliked the way the decorativeness of feminine clothing objectified women, men always appeared from somewhere and demanded her attention, seduced her, climbed into her bed, even climbed up scaffolding to the window of her apartment on the third floor, and so she let them in. She never had to make an effort, in no time she would feel a tongue between her lips and a hand between her thighs. She took them all, indiscriminately, whoever offered themselves to her, dropping one so she could take up with the next. Later, having caused a lot of damage, she understood that she was subconsciously settling accounts with her father in myriad subtle ways.
She searched in her memory for the moment when her relationship with M. started to fall apart. Her beloved Marek, the first man with whom she had managed to live for five years. And that was the moment she had taken off and set out on a journey away from him, without realising it at the time, a moment that deadened something inside her that had been alive until then. She was certain that it was that specific evening and a concrete sentence that stabbed her with such force that she really felt physical pain in her heart, as if he had plunged something sharp in it and jerked.
One November evening, M. told her at the dinner table that he would like to start using condoms again when they made love.
(…)
blue-eyed boy
Amálie sits motionless in the sand on the most beautiful beach she knows, staring at the horizon of the sea.
One sunny day, on a sandy Baltic beach in Latvia, for the first time in her life, at the age of thirty-five, Amálie entertained the thought that it would be nice to have a child with Marek, the man she likes so much.
It was an entirely new feeling, because so far, she had found the idea of having a child repulsive. And that’s how her relationship with Marek started, years ago: neither wanted a child. But this new desire of hers was so weak and introduced so many doubts, it made her feel quite confused.
I think I might like to have a child, she later told her first therapist. Marek doesn’t want one, but every time I imagine having a child, I feel angry with my mother. Does that make sense?
When she wrote to Marek telling him that she wanted to have a little blue-eyed boy with him, he went silent for a week. Long discussions and explanations ensued.
No, he didn’t want a child, he’d have to give up his artistic career. Look at poor Eddie who wanted to paint when he was young, and where is he now? He has a family and hasn’t painted anything for ages.
They were sitting in her Letná apartment on the blue sofa she had inherited from her parents, discussing and listing everything he would have to give up if they had a child, and which activities and hobbies she’d have to let him pursue. Him? Wouldn’t she also lose her freedom?
Amálie thought that the key problem she had aimed to solve by means of therapy was hidden in her relationship with Mark.
She lived with him (they met every other day at her place), ‘the man of her life’, who was closest to her of all the men she had ever tried to date or live with.
She was so fond of him, his sense of humour, sensitivity and depth. For her their home was not the space they inhabited together but their shared physicality. She loved his body pressing against hers, she loved his ardent, conquering virility, the way he would seduce her like a strong bull, that animal undulation and grunting, his well-formed body, wide shoulders, blue eyes, his large sculptor’s hands with their beautiful fingers which kneaded her, his sturdy penis, his veins and blood, his life.
She always felt with him as if in the middle of a stormy sea or on the back of a herd of stallions, she felt as if she were in a vibrant, bright-green forest, in luscious fog, in a cloud of freshly cut grass fragrance, happy, fulfilled. And even when they sometimes indulged in sadomasochistic games in bed, his approach was always cultivated, she never felt humiliated by his dominance. In everyday life he was gentle, calm, caring. His personality brought together so many characteristics, as if made just for her. They had found each other and it was a miracle. Sometimes, she was overcome with anxiety at the thought of what she would do if he were to disappear from her life. She would never find another man like him, that was certain.
She wanted to have a child with him, but he didn’t want that.
Amálie therefore thought that the main problem was in her relationship with M.
Then, during the third session, the therapist surprised her with the following statement: “You have a stronger relationship with your mother than with your partner, even though it’s essentially negative, but even so, it’s still a relationship.”
The next day, she woke up with a terrible awareness that at the age of thirty-five she was still lying in her mother’s body like an old, ingrown embryo.
It’s the apartment, they concluded during the following session, when Amálie described her mother’s behaviour regarding the flat in which she now lived. For example, her mother had just arranged for the windows to be cleaned without even telling her!
(…)
Arian and the Japanese world / Fuck me, sir
The closer the date of her planned departure for the Alps, the vaguer her agreement with Lucas that they would really go. His wife had sensed danger and declared that she wanted to join him on his trip to the concert in Salzburg—that was the excuse he had given. He wasn’t sure whether he would manage to convince her to drop the idea.
In the end he called the trip off.
It seemed that his passion for Amálie had more to do with reviving his relationship with his wife. Make her pay attention to him again, keep her on her toes.
But Amálie had been looking forward to that trip so much, she had never been anywhere at an altitude of three thousand meters, and since he had described to her where they were going, she booked a hotel on the lake shore in Zell am See, and departed on another trip alone, this time to the top of Kitzsteinhorn.
And even though nothing came of the relationship or the journey—at least she hadn’t had to spoil her karma with a married lover—she was still grateful to him for telling her about these places, that she had been able to see those monumental mountains, the little blue pools in grey-brown earth without a trace of green, the tops of the Alps, the golden glimmer of the lakes in the distance, that she had felt the sharp mountain wind on her skin.
That was also the month she met Arian.
She immediately liked him. Nothing about him reminded her of Lucas or Lasse. Black wavy hair, chiselled manly face, deep voice. Almost a caricature of masculinity. Where had this mesmerising creature appeared from in her over-familiar literary world, where everyone knew everyone else and anyone who could had already been intimate with anyone willing? In the world of all those sensitive, not to say oversensitive males, there is a man in the audience at the Far Away Café who looks manly at first sight. She probably glanced in his direction and he responded. He started a conversation. He had a practical, quite boring but well-paid job. Pipes. Ventilation systems. Technical equipment for buildings. The first conversation didn’t leave a particular impression on her.
He was pleasant, but too pragmatic, too direct, perhaps too simple for her taste. With a sense of humour that was occasionally a little too pedestrian. She liked complicated, brooding men, intellectuals with some kind of inner hitch, a wilfulness.
A couple of months later they happened to meet at another event. She was pleased when he spoke to her again.
How is she? he asked. It’s complicated, she said, just breaking up after five years. For him it was also complicated, he said, just divorcing after twenty years. Well, well, well, she started paying attention, a man both attractive and available was a rare find. Men her age were all burdened with wives, partners, between two and five children.
His two children were almost grown up.
What will happen to them after the divorce? she asked.
We’ll either kill them and eat them … he said, expecting laughter.
This is not at all witty, Amálie thought, and stared at him without expression.
… or we’ll share them, he added.
Then he asked, out of the blue if she could cook.
Twenty years earlier she would have snorted in response to this question and run away from a man sending such dangerous signals about his conviction that women belonged in the kitchen. But she had recently spent six hours preparing a roast duck. She had invited M., possibly in a subconscious attempt to reverse the breakup she had caused.
I know how to make roast duck! she said triumphantly. She thought that if she wanted a man worth something, who was clearly responsible and active, wasn’t exactly poor and didn’t live just in his head like so many of the literary types she knew, she had to bring a little feminine accomplishment to the table. Excellent duck, with two kinds of cabbage and two kinds of dumplings! – she painted a vivid picture of her cooking skills.
He licked his lips. He’d love that.
His wife was a brilliant cook, but she had just moved out, he said with an expression of regret.
And as they parted, he suggested he’d like to visit her sometime.
That’s a bit too forward, isn’t it, she thought. She had to resist such a fast conquest. They should take their time, get to know each other first, chat, become close step by step. Meet in cafes, go to the cinema, for walks …
To invite a man for a roast duck lunch, to her apartment, allow him to cross her boundaries—that amounted to an invitation into her bed, if not outright into her life. If he came with a friend, why not, being lonely as she was at that time, she would gladly offer a roast to two nice male wayfarers.
She was surprised that he was inviting himself to lunch after they had spoken just twice.
Two weeks later he asked her to have coffee with him.
And so that manly man with black hair and in a black shirt was there just for her.
Returning from the toilet, she observed him from the side, sitting at their table, and his beauty, his profile, made her feel dizzy. This sexy guy was waiting for her? She could sit down opposite him, just like that?
This time, she only let him kiss her cheek when they parted, but something emanated from his body, something that danced around her like erotic sparks, and she felt dizzy again. She felt desire in his eyes and his body, and she would have allowed him to pounce on her there and then.
So, what about that duck? he insisted.
He wasn’t going to let it go. She liked his insistence.
How about Sunday? she said.
A duck stuffed with many promises was hanging there in the cloud of erotic desire surrounding their farewell.
He was prepared to buy the bird, bring it to her place and roast it together with her. He clearly didn’t trust the culinary skills of what he thought was an intellectual woman.
But to be served at lunchtime, her six-hour duck needed to go into the oven at seven in the morning, and how could she receive a stranger she hardly knew so early, still sleepy, and what would she do with him for six hours?
No, no, she would buy and roast the duck herself, she assured him.
She had only minimal expectations as far as his visit was concerned. They would eat the duck and make love. Her lust was becoming alarming.
Arian brought flowers, like a classic gentleman. He helped her carve the duck. Opened the beer. The duck was tasty! After the meal, he opened a bottle of wine. It was close to Christmas, it got dark early, and she lit the third candle in the advent wreath. He, whose family values had collapsed with the breakup of his marriage to a licentious, high-maintenance wife, was moved by this gesture. She was pleased that he didn’t get up to leave after the meal. They sat opposite each other in the kitchen, chatting and drinking. It was beginning to look like nothing would happen after all … Feeling relaxed, she stretched out her leg under the table and placed it on the chair next to his. He looked down as they spoke, noticed her foot and squeezed her ankle with his hand, invisibly, under the table, then continued chatting as if nothing were amiss. Then they couldn’t resist any longer and held hands on the table. You’re so handsome! she sighed. Not me, he retorted. Come here, he got up and pulled her closer to him. They embraced and kissed. He smelled of everything. Himself, his hair, his classy cologne, sexual power. He had a manly chest, manly voice, manly nose, but he embraced her a little too timidly and gently. He led her into the bedroom. She took off her clothes perhaps faster than he did, leapt into bed and dragged him in behind her. Slow down, he cried, as he followed and just before he penetrated her. Aaach!
She was happy again, well-fucked, satisfied, embraced, she could again smell a handsome male’s armpits and groin and stroke his skin, hear a desirable man tell her that she was desirable. What a miracle!
His expectations of the Sunday visit had also been minimal. Had nothing happened, he would have been content with just the duck.
Translated by Alexandra Büchler