Vyhľadávanie
I was facing death. Death in form of my eternally drunk father, staggering around the kitchen and bawling “I’ll kill you all”. This summer could have been lovely, translucent spider’s webs floated on the breeze and got caught on the washing line, dishevelled like a naughty girl’s hair. At dusk, the crickets rubbed their wings, but I never heard them, because the sound of dishes smashing and mum’s wailing drowned everything out.
In the morning, she picked slivers of glass out of my streaming feet. She touched the soft balls with her warm mouth, and the rainbow coloured bruises which father had given her under her beautiful sad eyes shined up at me from between my toes. She sucked my feet until she tasted glass in her mouth, then spat it out into the toilet bowl. I felt like a hunted animal. Every evening, I hoped that father might not come home, or that he would break his neck on the steps. Everything was so desolate, not a single light in the black tunnel, I often thought about death. I imagined him finding me in the bathroom, ridiculously contorted by the white radiator, with slit wrists and a smile on my face. Then he would go insane and they would take him off to the madhouse. And mum would finally have peace. I thought about it all the time, in fact I could no longer think of anything else. Right after that, they sent me to my grandma’s for the holidays.
Grandma was wonderful. A bitch. She lived in a decrepit old house on a hill just outside town. Hens once lived in the enormous garden full of trees heavy with fruit, until the neighbours poisoned them. Out of compassion. Her right glass eye reflected hatred, straight from her soul, I suppose. She really was quite repulsive, but compared with father she was an angel. With socks and no teeth. As soon as we had said hello, she informed me that I would, of course, be a good girl, would not get on her nerves, and most importantly, would not talk to her. She dressed me in an old torn tracksuit and kicked me out into the yard. I ran down the stairs, then all the way down the garden to the wooden dilapidated woodshed. A lanky boy was there, writing CUNT on his leg with a fallen plum. Grandma shouted out of the window that my cousin was there too.
His pale face contrasted sharply with his black hair, shining almost blue in the sun. He was wearing an old torn tracksuit, which I was sure grandma had dressed him in, and big shoes with the laces tied around his ankles. He looked like a stick and big front teeth, on which he wore a brace, protruded from his lovely lips. I went up to the wall and slowly read aloud, C. U. N. T., “like grandma”, he added and threw the plum towards the house. I picked up another and wrote PRICK, “like my father”, I added. It was clear to us that we were on this island alone, the only ones among the hatred, surrounded by the cold and lies of adults.
We had been cast aside, like umbrellas once cast aside in a cloakroom. No-one asked us what we wanted, or how we felt. And we felt like we wanted to live.
I fell in love, quickly and madly. He was a little older and turned up his nose at the small, skinny girl with sticking-out ears from the start. It was clear I had met the first man who would not beat the hell out of me. And we could play great games together.
(...)
Dini was a wolfhound. Grey and lean. Grandma’s right hand. I think he even hated himself, because he would sometimes savagely bite his tail. He ran up and down on a long chain, which was attached to a steel cable along half the garden. He would run from one end to the other and bare his sharp yellow teeth at us. Especially when we ate bread and butter, which grandma made us occasionally. We ate the bread slowly, making it last and wondering whether Dini would go crazy with annoyance. But the best game was Who’s After Who. My cousin thought it up. One of us would stand at one end of the steel cable. Then the other one had to sneak up unnoticed to the other end of the cable, where the dog’s food bowl was, and kick it hard. The dog ran furiously after the intruder, gnashing its teeth, while we had to escape. It was exciting, especially when the grass was slippery after the rain. We only played this game for three days. Once I fell and the dog tore my tracksuit bottoms and my foot. My cousin chased him away with a birch broom and saved my life. Grandma was angry. I think it was because of the tracksuit bottoms.
I mostly talked to my cousin about my father. How he hit us and smashed bottles against the wall in the evenings, how I wanted him to leave or die. How much I wanted to hear the crickets chirping in the evenings. I showed him the bruises all over my body. Then my cousin had an idea and we played doctor for days in big haystacks.
They were burning hot. We took off all our clothes and then my cousin stroked my wounds with big burdock leaves. They were green and smelt of the stream. We were completely covered with dust. In the sunlight pouring through the hay, we looked like two skinny bees sprinkled with gold. It was a beautiful game. We caressed each other’s bodies with all-powerful grasses and placed small cold pebbles on our stomachs. My cousin told me he did not want me to go back to such a bad father, he wanted me to run away with him. And then we played operation. I placed a plastic bag on his bum and cut it with scissors.
I cut his bum by mistake. He cried and called me a cow. He could not sit down for a week and I healed his wound with burdock. We never played operation again.
Translated by Sharon Miklošová
