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die_my_love_-_ariana_harwicz

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I’m in my son’s room, lit by a faint blue light. I watch my nipple satisfying him with every slurp. My husband – I’ve got used to calling him that by now – is smoking outside. I hear the puffs at regular intervals, fffff, fffff. The baby chokes on my milk and I lean him against my chest to burp him, ridding him of the air that gets trapped in his stomach, air from my milk, air from my chest, air from my insides. After he burps he becomes a dead weight. His arms hang by his sides, his eyelids thicken, his breath grows sluggish. I lay him down, wrapped up in my scarf, and while I swaddle him: Isadora Duncan. Who gets which life. What body do you end up in. I can no longer hear the smoke slipping between my husband’s teeth. I throw out the heavy nappy and walk towards the patio doors. I always toy with the idea of going right through the glass and cutting every inch of my body, always aiming to pass through my own shadow. But just before I hit it, I stop myself and slide it open. Outside, my husband is pissing a stream the colour of thematehe was drinking earlier. I can see the hot, greenish-yellow drops cascading down the garage’s corrugated metal. He turns and smiles at me with his hands on his limp, dripping member. Want to go and look at the stars? I’ve never been able to make him understand that I’m not interested in stars. That I’m not interested in what’s in the sky. That I don’t care about the telescope he’s now struggling to carry to the bottom of the garden, where it slopes down into the woods. I don’t want to count the stars, look at their shapes, see which is the brightest, learn why they’re called Orion’s Belt or the String of Pearls or the Big Dipper. He busies himself setting up his precious three-legged device. My husband’s an enthusiastic kind of guy. Do you see the String of Pearls? Yes, dear. Look at those bright twinkling specks, don’t you just want to eat them with your eyes? They’re so tiny, and to think they’re actually huge masses. No, I thought, I don’t like illusions. Not optical illusions or auditory illusions, not sensory, olfactory or cerebral illusions. I don’t like black objects in the sky. They make me feel alive, he says. Look at that constellation and try to jump from one star to the next as though you were crossing a rickety wooden bridge… And look at that face, it’s like a skeleton! His elation hurts me. He hugs me, puts his arms around my shoulders. It’s been months since we’ve hugged. We don’t hold hands either, we’re always pushing the buggy or carrying the baby instead. Do you see the Great Bear and the Little Bear? Yep, I say, and hug him, but my eyes linger in the starless space, in the absence of light. We face the threat of the dark sky above us, every night… A meteor! he shouted, letting go of me in his excitement. I missed it. You have to pay attention, you can only see them when they’re close to the sun, and only for a split second. Didn’t you see its trail? he asked, annoyed. Then he lit a cigarette and said, It’s about getting your bearings in the sky. Look at that group of stars and follow an imaginary line, okay? It’s no more difficult than reading a road map and following the dotted line so you don’t end up in the sea. I thought the child might be crying, but I hear him crying every night and when I go to him I find absolute silence, as though a few seconds of his cries had been recorded and were playing back of their own accord. But sometimes I don’t hear anything. I’m sitting on the sofa, a few feet from his room, watching a programme about wife-swapping or super-nannies, or painting my nails, when my dear husband appears, his underwear hanging low, and says: Why won’t he stop crying? What does he want? You’re his mother, you should know. But I don’t know, I say, I haven’t the faintest idea… Don’t you find the moon relaxing? Go on up to the lens, take a look at the moon right now because it won’t be the same tomorrow. Those grey craters, they make me want to eat it, smoke it even! I did look at the moon, but all I could think about was the sound of the baby crying, my body secreting, impatient for him to stop. The advice I was given by that young social worker who came to our house when my mother-in-law called, alarmed: ‘If your child cries so much that you feel like you can’t go on and you’re about to lose control, get out of there. Leave the child with someone else and find a place where you can regain composure and calm. If you’re alone and there’s no one to leave him with, go somewhere else anyway. Leave the child in a safe place and take a few steps back.’ If only there weresantiguadorasliving in these parts, those village women who for a flat fee will pray away your guy’s indigestion and your toddler’s tantrums, simple as that. I’d have liked to be aboard the Apollo, are you listening? Or any mission to outer space… Are you even paying attention? On the Apollo, watching the earth grow distant… Shhh! Is he crying? What do you mean, is he crying? I’m talking to you about the moon! The moon is just like you lot, come to think of it, he says. You all have your dark side. But I’m thinking about pacing up and down with the baby in my arms, hour after hour of tedious choreography, from the exhaustion to screaming, screaming to exhaustion. And I think about how a child is a wild animal, about another person carrying your heart forever. My husband got fed up, decided he’d had enough, closed the telescope and took it to the garage to store with his tools, my father-in-law’s tractor, and the canoe and paddles. The little man, as my in-laws call him, wasn’t crying, and it was so silent in his bedroom that I had to poke him to see if he was still alive. I went back into the room with the patio doors, walked straight towards my reflection, and slid the door open just before I crashed through. My husband was smoking another cigarette, he’d started a second pack while insulting the moon, women and me in equal parts. I saw the smoke surround him and felt afraid. The most aggressive thing he’d said to me in seven years was ‘Go and get yourself checked out’. I’d said to him ‘You’re a dead man’ during the first month of our relationship. We were standing side by side in the freezing cold, the water in the grass dyeing us. Our feet soaking wet. The earth churned into craters by the moles. He wasn’t looking at the sky any more, and neither was I, of course. But I thought a meteor passed above us, fleeting like everything else in life. Later, we went to sleep, each in our own bed. I’d already grown used to sleeping alone, stretched out diagonally across the bed in this house that was once a dairy farm, whatever that might mean. Any old group of people can make up a family, I said suddenly, letting my eyes wander.【缺少答案，请补充】
When my husband’s away, every second of silence is followed by a hoard of demons infiltrating my brain. A rat jumps onto the see-through roof. She seems to be enjoying herself, the crazy little thing. Every minute or so I go and check the baby’s still breathing. I touch him to see if he responds, uncover him, change his position, shine a light on him, pick him up. He’s still at the age when cot death is a risk. Then I get a hold of myself, make a sandwich and sit down in front of the TV. But right away, the aghh, aghh of an owl, that genital sound, involuntary and erotic, terrifies me. I turn off the TV and imagine an orgy of animals, a stag, a rat and a wild boar. I laugh, but then the jumble of creatures is suddenly frightening. The legs, wings, tails and scales tangled up and racing towards pleasure. How does a wild boar ejaculate? I hear the aghh, aghh again, like a man being hanged, aghh, aghh, a hoarse, cat-like gargle coming from the owl’s curved beak. Through the patio doors, I can see out to where the old camper van sits. I don’t know why, but this vehicle that’s left us stranded in the middle of the road on more than one occasion must be cursed. It’s covered in rust, but my man says it’s still got a few miles left on it and the three of us could drive to the seaside. I worry it’ll overturn and that’ll be it, bye bye baby. We’ll have killed the child between the two of us. Between two and four in the morning it’s hardest, later it gets easier and I make myself something to eat. But between two and four I feel this urge to throw myself around. I see the doorknob turn on its own. See myself walking to the woods and leaving the buggy on a downhill slope. Aghh, aghh then thank goodness the phone rings. How far away are you, my love? Still a hundred and seventy miles to go? Oh, you went to McDonald’s? And filled up the tank? Right, give me a call from the next service station then. Kiss. Kiss. The quick roadside calls break up my madness. I go back to see if my baby’s sleeping. I organise his action figures in order of their arrival in our lives. Will my darling husband head to a cheap hotel with some girl working at the drive-thru? I walk barefoot through the house. I go and leaf through a book. My shelves are full of things I bought for the pregnancy and still haven’t read. I’m not good in bed any more and he knows it, I say to myself out of nowhere. That’s why he’s at some roadside hotel with peeling walls and the vacuous drive-thru girl moving on top of him, bouncing better than I can. I like thinking about sex, not having it. I was always good at the theory and a failure at the practical bit, that’s why I don’t know how to drive even though I’ve learnt the traffic laws by heart. I try to concentrate on a book by Virginia Woolf, a gift from my husband, but I’m too full of milk. Why does he sleep so much? Why doesn’t he stir? The death of a child is science fiction. I go and check on him. Then I step outside and a red Ferrari speeds by. I stand at the front gate, phone in hand. Apparently the radiation from mobile phones causes cancer. My hand is a terminal case. He’ll be calling any second now, like he always does when he gets to the next service station. Melisa, the single mum with two children who lives next door, has left the window open and the light on. I think she’s crying, or moaning. She earns a living showing off her arse. A man somewhere will be chatting her up online, typing ‘Jesus, you’re so hot’ and paying more cash to look at her crack for a little longer. Why won’t the phone ring? The client wants to lick her, she spreads herself open, the guy’s sucking on the monitor in his city-centre flat. I look at the little mongrel tied up across the road, sticking its tongue out at me. It’s ringing! Hi, my love… Hiya! Hi! Did you get a coffee from the machine? What did you have to eat? Okay, I’ll wait up for you. Me too. Bye. Kiss. Kiss. There, he’s called now. I used the right voice to talk to him. I asked him the same things as always, like what did you have to eat? Why do we women ask our husbands what they ate? What the hell are we hoping to find out by asking what they ate? If they’ve slept with someone else? If they’re unhappy with us? If they’re planning to leave us one day when they say they’re going out for an ice cream? I dodge the nettles and walk down to the woods. At one point a stag appears and shoots me a hard, animal stare. No one’s ever looked at me like that before. I’d put my arms around him if I could. Later on, I read a few pages. Ever since the pregnancy I’ve been a slow reader and it’s only getting worse, one page and I drift off. But what’s that faint, broken sighing sound? The neighbour with dyed-red hair showing her hole to another punter or the dog in heat? Waiting for my man is torture. I should cook something for when he gets home but I’m not sure I want to. He’s always telling the same story. The time my in-laws were here for the day and I made lunch. The menu: rice croquettes with rice. And they all laugh at me. Well, not all of them, the baby doesn’t. But before the baby existed it was all of them. Fits of laughter. Sometimes I want him to cry so I can sneak into bed next to him guilt-free and drain my tits. On days when my husband’s not here I get aggressive. I go after the weak, like the fat nurse who comes to give anticoagulant injections to the sick man next door. This woman arrives in her little white car every morning at seven on the dot. Her movements are always the same. She turns off the engine, gets out of her car and walks towards the house as only a government employee or home-care nurse can in a nowhere town like this one. Today I took out the rubbish on the hour and gave her a look of disgust as I walked past. She said hello the way civilised people do and I snarled back. I raised my voice and took a few steps towards her, prepared for a fist fight. She shrank back. Poor plump little nurse, she must have thought I was a refugee from some war-torn country. My hair was a mess and I was wearing one of my man’s old basketball shirts, which gave me a figure I don’t have. She must have thought I was going to head-butt her and knock her teeth in. No wonder she scurried away into the sick man’s house, the little scaredy-cat, to rub him with alcohol and give him his injection. I also act haughty with the cashier ladies at the supermarket, the pizza delivery men and the manicurists. I yell at them in public. I like to make a scene, humiliate them, show them how cowardly they are. Because that’s what they are: chickens. How come none of them have tried to fight me? How come none of them have called the authorities to have me deported? It’s so obvious they’re right, that I’m the one who’s looking for trouble, that they’re just doing their jobs and not bothering anyone. When my husband goes away in the middle of summer I leave a plastic doll on the back seat of the car and wait for the alarmed neighbours and state employees to come running. I love watching them react like the good citizens they are, like heroes who want to smash the window and save the little one from suffocating. It’s fun to see the fire engine arrive in the village, its siren sounding. Morons, all of them. And if I want to leave my baby in the car when it’s forty degrees out with the heat index, I will. And don’t tell me it’s illegal. If I want to opt for illegality, if I want to become one of those women who go around freezing their foetuses, then I will. If I want to spend twenty years in jail or go on the run, then I won’t rule those possibilities out either. The other day, the silly blonde down the road told the nurse that in town, but on the other side of the river, s【缺少答案，请补充】
My last memory of the pregnancy is from Christmas. My husband’s whole family had come to stay from towns even more in the middle of nowhere than this one. My stomach was churning, the baby was moving at an abnormal speed, and people had their fingers crossed hoping they wouldn’t have to rush off to hospital with me and leave their turkey-and-apple dinner unfinished. I was standing in the living room in front of the fire. I can’t remember having done anything in particular to reveal how desperate I was feeling. For some time I’d been containing everything, or so I thought, in a swaying motion that was subtle though intensifying, when, suddenly, I was offered a seat and something cool to drink. Since when did sitting down and having some water get rid of the desire to die? Thanks, Grandma. I’m fine though. But they sat me down and brought me the glass of cool water anyway. These people are going to make me lose it. I wish I had Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon for neighbours; then my son could grow up and develop intellectually by learning that there’s more to the world I brought him into than opening old skylights you can’t see out of anyway. As soon as all the others had escaped to their rooms to digest their meals, I heard my father-in-law cutting the grass beneath the snow with his new green tractor and thought that if I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I’d do it. Later on I saw him sitting at his desk, going over last month’s supermarket receipts. He read the price of each product and then checked the total with a calculator. By the time he’d finished recording the sums in his log of monthly expenses, the desk lamp was no longer giving off enough light. We ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he’s exceptional. After that, he cleaned his dentures and went to bed. And this is a day lived? This is a human being living a day of his life? In his bedroom there’s a rifle; on his night table, a few cartridges. I won’t be killed in my own bed, he says. If I hear noises, I’ll load my gun and go downstairs. And if there’s trouble, I’ll fire. Straight at the feet, he’d say, inhaling the saliva that was always caught in his throat. My mother-in-law watched me all day long, worrying. She didn’t know what else to do when she knocked on my door at dawn and entered timidly with another glass of water and a green-and-white pill. Thanks, I said, and as soon as she left I tossed it into the fire. I don’t like side effects. I don’t like antidepression. The only thing I could do at times like this was hug my womb and wait. The baby was asleep in there, wrapped up in my guts, foreign to me. He wasn’t much help back then either. As soon as the ritual of the raised glasses and well-wishing was over, I tried to escape my husband’s gaze. He was already throwing darts at the bull’s eye on the terrace. Every time he missed a shot he’d say, Arghh! I walked through the living room, which was strewn with wrapping paper, ribbons and other decorations, to the pile of clothes for the unborn child, but I didn’t put anything away. Instead I went out into the woods, exhausted from the contractions. When I think back now, the pain returns, leaping onto me like a dog. The questions asked that Christmas perforated me with more force than hunters’ bullets. Have you been looking for work? Do you think you’ll send the kid to a nursery? Are you paying your taxes? And your health insurance? Do you need any help? I’m finally here. I only ever come down to the woods at night when it’s an emergency. How is it possible for my father-in-law to spend the afternoon before Christmas going over receipts with a firearm under his pillow. How is it possible for my mother-in-law to speak so softly, walk so neatly, be so proper, and yet offer Prozac to a mother-to-be. How is it possible for my in-laws to have slept in the same sheets, under the same duvet and bedspread, in the same wallpapered room, for fifty years. My husband put down the darts and went looking for me in the forested fields. I walk on and shut myself away among the clusters of trunks and saplings. I’m one person, my body is two. Through threads of smoke, I see a small group of gypsies off on their own, camping near the snow-covered pond in a caravan as ramshackle as ours. I see them there, on the ice and frost, smoking and laughing in another language. In the morning, my in-laws will complain about the beer cans and needles left lying around. Beyond are the bee hives with wild honey and the path that leads to the main road. Mushrooms sprout up everywhere after a downpour, and now I can see them rotting. I hope the first word my son says is a beautiful one. That matters more to me than his health insurance. And if it isn’t, I’d rather he didn’t speak at all. I want him to say magnolia, to say compassion, not Mum or Dad, not water. I want him to say dalliance. My husband found me jumping through puddles. I was embarrassed. I said I was just fine and ran back home.【缺少答案，请补充】
My first memory of the baby outside me is from the porch of my house. Night is falling and so it begins: the decline, the anxiety, the descent into an altered state. I’m afraid of the harm I could cause the newborn, that’s why I’m sitting here in the wicker chair counting fireflies or the cries of animals. I don’t join the others at the table when they call me to eat – leftovers, still, from the Christmas holidays – or sit with them when they’re gathered by the fire the way they are now. I hear forks entering mouths and food being swallowed as I begin to lose my mind, though I don’t know if that’s really what’s happening. No one does. Not me, not my man, certainly not any doctor. My mother-in-law is addicted to doctors, I need only sneeze and she’s ready to call one. She loves them, idolises them. I bet she gets wet even saying the word. I don’t know what she thinks they can do about her ruined pancreas, though. My mind is spent, it’s lost on the river bank. When I finally go in, the food will be cold on the counter and there’ll be a note in his writing saying ‘Enjoy your dinner, I love you’. By the end of the night, I’ve built up so much rage that I could drink until I have a heart attack. That’s what I tell myself but it’s not true. I couldn’t even down half a bottle. My days are all like this. Endlessly stagnant. A slow downfall. Now my mother-in-law is serving dessert, the spoon scraping the bottom of the bowl. Pears baked in brandy, or covered in chocolate. They no longer ask why I don’t sit with them. Why I don’t share the bed, or the table, or the bathroom. Sometimes I go out to kick at the air, and even if I saw my in-laws spying on me through the window I wouldn’t stop. I’ve already counted three fireflies and there must be more. From out here, I can see it everywhere and that’s why I don’t go in. Death is present in the fire, in the carpet, in the curtains, in the stuffiness of the old furniture and the silverware. In the flowerless vase. Death seeps out of the umbrellas piled up near the door. I lie down and get up so many times that I don’t know when I did what. The baby’s so small he gets lost among the sheets, like a tiny fish. Everyone will wear black, even the children. The night is scaring me. I’d put Glenn Gould on in the background to make myself feel better but classical music sends my husband to sleep. It knocks me out, darling, he says. The fact that my father-in-law died in his sleep doesn’t help. The sky is like a velvet stage curtain that stops us seeing what’s behind it. However hard I try, it just closes me out further. His last words before going to bed – ‘My grandson will follow in my footsteps’ – were meant as nothing more than a sweeping platitude, but they only make matters worse. As I stood in front of his grave, a sudden, perfect image of his teeth came to me. He was always either complaining that they hurt or picking food out from between them as he spoke. I noticed some people, only a few, on the other side of the grave tearing up. Others felt obliged to keep a respectful distance from the body. He’s gone. He’s now a man who’s passed. That’s that. Like a horse trotting through a town and no one even remembering the clatter of its hooves. I hug my husband and our baby smiles at the graves. I thought about my mother-in-law opening up the house to air it out. Throwing away her dear husband’s spectacles, smelling him on the backrest of the rocking chair where he used to doze. My sweet little mother-in-law. Cooking for herself, from now on, with the same pans she used for his fried eggs and porridge. Giving her husband’s socks away to the neighbours who have the same size feet. While they lower him down in his coffin, I see her going from the bathroom to the bed, I hear him speak, cough, snore. I see her nightgown revealing her dark purple nipples and swollen ankles. My mother-in-law covering her mouth with her hand, clinging to her husband’s bedpan. My mother-in-law in slow motion, an elderly woman gasping for air after sliding a door shut or closing a skylight. She tells the family that her husband squeezed her hand tight just before he died, but that the doctor said it had only been a reflex reaction. It was then that I felt close to her for the first time.【缺少答案，请补充】
Now I’m speaking as him. As him, I think of her and my mouth goes dry. I don’t know what she’s doing lying on her back in the thick, light grass, tossed aside like a piece of junk. She’s wearing the same shirt she had on yesterday. Pink, sleeveless. The same black trousers she had on last week. He sees everything: I recognise every piece of clothing in her wardrobe by now, he says to himself. She has wellies on even though it’s not raining. She wears flared skirts to give herself curves, but they disappear as soon as she puts on denim shorts. She ties her hair up in a tight bun like an imitation classical ballerina about to walk on stage. I know her positions off by heart. She sits hunched over, her head hanging between her legs. Or she lies down, like now, as if someone’s just dumped her there and forgotten about her. She eats with her hands, straight from the pan, but only when she’s alone. She winds handkerchiefs around her neck like a Burmese woman does metal coils. Her bra straps show. I can’t smell her and I can’t tell if she’s breathing heavily. I don’t know what it feels like to touch her back. I’m missing the details. The closest I came was the time I drove my motorcycle up to her front gate, but the sound of the engine scared her and I had to drive off. Did she look at me? Does she ever think about me? Her eyes are what intrigue me most, not knowing exactly what colour they are. I’d say they’re grey, but sometimes they seem closer to the colour of hay. What would it be like to have her eyes fixed on mine? I know she has broad shoulders and her fingers are slender. I know she almost never laughs, that she walks with such large strides it’s as though she’s marching in a military parade. She doesn’t smoke. Or at least I’ve never seen her smoke. She doesn’t listen to music, at least not in the late evening just before nightfall when I stop by after work, my mouth already dry half an hour before I mount my motorcycle and put on my helmet. Half an hour before knowing that I’ll see her sitting on the swing with her baby, blonde like her. Frail and long. Throwing him up into the air and grabbing him clumsily on the way down. Though once she missed. I’ll see her cry, see her fury in the way she holds her mouth. I don’t know her name or her age. I don’t know anything at all. I heard her singing opera in a deep baroque voice once and it’s obvious she wasn’t born here, but where was she born, and when? If someone had told me this story at work, I wouldn’t have believed it. A man like me. The person in charge of the X-ray department at the city’s health clinic. A radiologist who graduated from the public university, class of ’83. Married with a daughter who’s different, who has special needs. An easy-going guy, a man of the house. Born and raised in the city closest to here. A man who spent all his childhood and teenage years in the same flat in the same region in the centre of the country. Spellbound by a woman who wears flared skirts and spends her afternoons sprawled out like an amphibian on her lawn. I see her for as long as the slowest speed of my motorcycle allows. Those few fatal seconds. I think about her and heave with desire. A man like me, not particularly good, but not the devil either. A man like me who enjoys running his fingers through his wife’s soft hair, who makes love to her slowly, respecting her moods and her menstrual cycle, and only when our little girl’s asleep. A sharp, fun guy who doesn’t overcomplicate things. And now the hazard lights are on and I’ve pulled up on the side of the road. I’m hounded by this dryness in my mouth, knowing that on my way home I’ll pass her front gate and see her there among the flowers. Those images that will then last the ten miles separating her from my house. Furious images stuck to my palate. Her among the thorns, a dream-like orange vision, and me a crazy fox on the roadside. The farms and animal pens pass by, first I hear clucking and then I see the chicken coop. The same people as always say hello with their hands in the earth or on a cow’s udders or holding some shears up in a tree. This familiar setting with its farm equipment, cow dung, poultry houses and hunting dogs is spoilt by the image I drag home with me like a piece of rubbish. The image that grows inside me, causing chaos. The horror of this desire. Wanting to skin, to flay, to escape what pursues me. I wave to my beautiful wife who’s pulling up weeds with her garden gloves, but the image continues to follow me when I park and go inside. An aura expanding. My tree, insipid and leafless, becomes voluptuous. And she’s with me when I hold my daughter in my arms. Even when I put food in her little mouth and bathe her. And beyond. Far beyond. Today at dawn I cried for her on the kitchen floor, pounding the tiles with my fists and longing to have her finger bones, her hips, the flesh of her buttocks here with me. I fooled myself believing this was the lowest I could go. An image poisons you: the eyes of an owl, and just like that, it’s too late. I push her up against the wall, undo her bun with my teeth and strangle her with my kisses.【缺少答案，请补充】
What would you like us to do with your ashes? she asked her husband when his lungs were giving out. Eh? he replied, his hearing almost gone. Do you want us to bury you, dear, or scatter your ashes? She had to shout. I don’t care, he answered. He wasn’t interested in leaving final instructions about that or anything else. My mother-in-law, who carried on washing her husband’s trousers when he was gone, relived his death day after day. Her house was a big block of solid concrete with a view of the open fields of dry pasture and corn beyond a row of vegetable gardens. The paved path leading to it was dirty, the air tainted with carcinogenic smoke. Someone was burning copper cables to resell. The moles dug deep holes in what was also their land, turning it into a minefield. My father-in-law used to say definitive action needed to be taken by putting gas bottles at the entrance to their homes: the Shoah of moles. She went on cooking for two, changing the pillowcases, mending his underwear that was torn at the crotch. In the morning, still awake from the night before, I’d go by with the buggy and see her sitting there, in a daze, her head inside a bell. She lived in her body as though it were an infested house, as if she had to tiptoe through it trying not to touch the floor. The only time she was at peace, she said, was in her sleep, when the spirit scatters. But she had serious difficulty sleeping and used to sleep-walk. Once she strolled through the village in a nightie shoutingFire!Another time she used a shoe as a phone and conversed with God by means of it. This was when she wasn’t doing the hoovering at four in the morning. I saw her breakfast consisted of white bread that had been left out in the kitchen for days. She didn’t check the expiry date on the medication she started taking the day of the funeral. She didn’t scare away the flies or remove the eggs they’d laid in the jar of homemade chestnut jam. She watched the fingers bringing the bread to her mouth as though they belonged to someone else and she choked, because time doesn’t pass for the person who’s left behind. It’s a perpetual limbo. Like a wet shirt, clammy against the body, something that doesn’t go away, that won’t come unstuck. And although her life partner had never been one to spend long hours embedded inside her, entire afternoons, summers, clinging to her, nor days in the countryside entering her, satiating her; although he didn’t even consider whether or not she got aroused (she was that hollow, that bare), he’d been her companion nevertheless. Instead of a vagina, he thought his wife had a stone in the depths of a cave. He always imagined her covered in the little shawls she embroidered. He got used to loving her as though she’d been born that way. And she got used to being loved that way. When she saw her husband’s washed corpse she was shocked because before it turned to ash, it had the shape of a body born in the autumn of 1940. And it, and his pedantry, his monologues from the head of the table, his laughter from atop the tractor he drove, all ended up locked in a pinewood coffin. As did the little secrets, the visits to the local brothel, the time his roving hand found its way under the skirt of a secondary-school student on the bus and it was the talk of the town. In it, too, went the heroic exploits from his time in the navy, the deaths he tracked with marks in his groin, the game of cards in a train carriage at the age of thirty-two and the time he made her laugh so hard she wet herself and had to hurry off to change. It was a run-of-the-mill wake, a quick goodbye. An excellent father and husband, said the guests. Better than excellent. The procession then made its way to eat at the inn where the dead man had been a regular. He was there every lunchtime, drinking his beer and his aperitifs, telling witty tales of his time on the front line. The guests remembered him as a man among comrades, but his widow revealed that he used to sit for hours in the semidarkness of the living room facing the lit-up tree. And it wasn’t so much my father-in-law’s death that affected me, but rather the loss of his words,In all my born days, his turns of phrase,Well, I happen to be rather good at that,and his thick, spit-filled tone. So much screwing around, so many memories of bravery from the war, so much debauchery, but in the end no one really had anything to say about him.【缺少答案，请补充】
The night was high, black and smooth above us. An unwelcoming, pretentious darkness. The fan was rotating. My wonder - daughter was dreaming inside the white netting, soft as a fish with no scales. I was obsessed with sleeping. My wife had been dreaming away by my side for hours and the mosquito coils had disintegrated, leaving behind the smell of teenage holidays. I got up and tiptoed to the door, taking with me the clothes that were hanging on the back of the iron chair. I got dressed in the darkness of the hallway, carried my shoes to the door and tied my laces below the open sky. It wasn’t until I’d pushed my motorcycle a block away that I got on and started the engine. I saw the trees that had been chopped down by a single blow from an axe. I saw the rabbit skulls riddled with holes, scattered like flowers at the entrance to the woods. I saw a cluster of nocturnal butterflies that fluttered around my head, into my ears and under the collar of my shirt. They gradually got tangled in my hair and flew up my nose. The fresh air coming off the hill and the road didn’t take away the feeling I had of being smothered. I rode on along the motorway, passing peaceful men carrying rifles and machetes. I was getting closer to her in large leaps. I passed the houses that came before hers. The house with the boarded - up windows, the one with the fake roses outside, the one with the twin Siberian huskies. I turned off the engine, left the motorcycle leaning in the grass and moved towards her front gate. I walked there and back, seeing and not seeing into her garden and house. All I could make out through the foliage were fragments. Then a light pierced the pitch darkness. Someone had just woken up. Or was it the baby, shaken by the images in his dreams. I put my hand on the gate latch and set foot in her territory for the first time. Her house standing before me looked like a landscape. My shoes flattened the earth. I took a few steps forward, careful not to be seen from either of the two small front windows. I ran my hand along the wall that was cracked as though by lightning, and made my way round to the back of the house. The light was still on but nothing more than the aggressive shhh of the barn owl could be heard. I was expecting to see her come down through the air in a white nightdress, possessed by spirits. I was expecting to see her appear in the window with red eyes. Or floating above the roof dressed all in black. There, in her space, I could feel the hatred that dug at her womb and I begged not to be infected by the depression she felt at having to live. Because she’s infectious, the bitch. Infectious and so beautiful. Another window opened. A sudden gash in the wall. Too scared to run away, I stayed put and waited for something to happen. For her husband to come out or a dog to bite me. Or for her to appear, which would be more frightening still. Then I heard creaking thumps on a wooden staircase. Her feet were metal talons. Her long hair hanging down to the floor was made of particles. I stood there like a statue with wet feet. She appeared. She rode the wind towards me but was pulled back by a strong gust. Suspended in mid - air, she opened her glorious mouth as if to scream but nothing came out. I could hardly restrain myself. I found her irresistible the way she was, even though she was a few steps away from the septic tank. Despite my violent lust, despite my desire to gobble her up, to inhale her, I didn’t move. Neither did she. I’d say that was when we met for the first time, there among the shadows. In that instant, we shared the tragedies of our lives. That was us talking about the past, about why we were in this pit, this insect - infested hole, and why we were running away in the middle of the night. Grab a knife and slice your lip open, she told me. I obeyed while she galloped into the house, and even with her back turned she was watching me bleed. I escaped on my motorcycle, waking everyone up.【缺少答案，请补充】
On rainy days in the city, people consume films, plays, restaurant meals. Out in the country they tell each other stories, thinking they can fight off the boredom that way. After the wedding, they were on the upper deck of a sleeper bus. They were still dressed as they had been for the party, with glitter in their hair and confetti on their clothes. They’d taken off their shoes, placing hers inside his. They were going on their honeymoon in the south, staying in a cabin on the edge of a lake. ‘Looking out onto a mirror’ was how the brochure described it. She was sleeping on the shoulder of the man she’d just married. He watched the road come rushing towards him. The skid marks of wheels on tarmac. And the oil stains. And the animals flattened until their fur merged with the pavement. And the clouds that were no longer red but grey. It was cold because of the air-conditioning. His wife had covered herself with his suit jacket and the bus driver was coughing. The man looked at her and then stared at his reflection in the window against the backdrop of the night. At the petrol station, he got off and left her asleep. He asked for a light from the bus driver, who was leaning against the hot bonnet, puffing on a cigarette and blowing the smoke towards the passengers. The man walked around the mildewed station and saw an entire family crouching down and eating among the buses. He also saw some elderly people sleeping on a row of benches, and wondered if they knew each other. He noticed that a large part of the petrol station was in darkness. They hadn’t told anyone, and the ruffled dress hid it well, but she was pregnant. They were pregnant, she’d say. My future husband was being carried in that womb. The man saw that the bus driver was halfway through his cigarette, and walked farther away so it would take him longer to get back. He reached a wooden shed among the weeds, went behind it and unzipped his flies, but nothing came out. He was dry. He could make out a town like a shadow beyond the petrol station. The bus driver stepped on his cigarette butt and cracked his spine, and at that point the man began to hurry back. Buses don’t wait. He climbed the vehicle’s curving staircase with another passenger who must have been his age but seemed much younger. He looked for his seat, running his hands along the ceiling to keep his balance. She was sleeping as if she were in bed, her mouth half-open. She had her hands on her belly, replicating the abundant gesture of pregnant women everywhere. He got comfortable and again the road came rushing towards him. And the crosses with names of the dead on the roadside. And the rubbish tips with their birds. And the power lines carrying electricity to and fro. And he cried the whole way. First, in front of the churned-up earth of a stretch of wasteland. Then, on a bend in the road that opened onto the sea. Later, upon hearing the gallop of hail on the roof. He cried and cried. When the bus reached the final straight, he was still watching the landscape as it gradually lit up, having barely slept. She stretched, smiled widely and said, Good morning, darling, without moving her hands from the belly that by then contained the seed of what would become my lover. This is the story I heard about my in-laws’ honeymoon. This is what will remain for their children, and their children’s children, and beyond. A dog crouched defecating by the side of the road sees a bus go past and light up its shit, and a man inside, against the glass, crying.【缺少答案，请补充】
Lying on the lawn, I yanked out clumps of grass, over and over, green and yellow, worms and soil all blending together in my hand. A beautiful palette. For a pretty gruesome painting, that is. I yanked and yanked, frantic. But it didn’t calm me down. I ran inside and when I got to the bedroom I threw the old wooden chair at the mirror, wrenched the door off the wardrobe in one movement, and then the shutters off the window with another swipe. My ovaries wring themselves out and there’s a blood clot in my knickers that runs down my legs. I don’t think I’m pregnant again, it’s just pure rage. I run spastically, the cuts pulling tight. I’ve never done any sports. At school I used to jump off the diving board and sink to the bottom of the pool, not even trying to come back up, while above me they acted out the whole pantomime of panic. My classmates shouting, I hope she drowns, I hope she drowns! Where are they now? I grab the folds of fat still there from the pregnancy, and it occurs to me that the clot is actually a miscarriage, but no, that’s not it at all. It’s the remains of my body. My husband is cutting down wood next to the baby in the buggy. I hear the chainsaw. The child watches intently as the pieces of wood crack, detach from the trunk and fall. The child watches his mother fall apart, break down. But he smiles when he sees the particles of wood in the air; he thinks they’re flakes of dark snow and isn’t worried about me. He’s pleased to see the preparations for winter. He must think he’s got a normal mother to give his first kindergarten drawings to. Beside him, a tree that was once full of life is now fraying. I’ve never been so far away from him. Tiny conscienceless body. Tiny ignorant mind. Mummy, i.e. me, runs and leaps from a pit full of rainwater into the tall grasses of the unkempt pastures. My body will remain undiscovered for years and years; it will become forensic evidence. My buffalo breath suffocates me. I could fog up entire panes of glass, the large windows of a castle, cities mirrored in narrow rivers. I’m a beast who breathes slowly and heavily, leaving no air for anyone else. I stare into the night; it’s like a locked trunk. An old railway carriage on its way to hell. I search the thick air for the crack that will let me through. What more do you want from me? says my husband. What do you need? Is there anything I can do? And he places a cushion in front of me. But a cushion won’t do it. I punch the air. He runs off and returns with a pair of red boxing gloves he had as a teenager. He puts them on me. I throw two wild cross punches at his nose and then take them off again. I don’t want gloves or a boxing ring. I don’t want a chest guard. I want to see my hands made of bones firing in every direction. Fuck me, I say in a scream like a bark. Fuck me already! But what I really felt like doing as he came towards me with his hard-on was eat poisonous flowers, poisonous mushrooms, stones. I wanted to put an end to this long, scattered, turbulent day. He threw me onto the bed and the baby was still in the buggy, next to the chopped wood, reaching for the chainsaw. He opened my legs wide. He poked around with his calloused hands. Desire is the last thing there is in my cries. And when his piece of flesh entered my hole (if that’s what making love is), I longed for a white room with a sea breeze blowing through it, the salt stinging the cuts on my shredded tongue. Someone heals my eyes, trains my gaze and leaves me in a place infinitely more peaceful than this pigsty. The other man digs around in me, searching. Because there’s something to be found. But no one knows how to dig. Not even him. When my husband shrank and pulled out of me, I could feel him throbbing, and although I’d bitten him I loved him. The chainsaw started running. ================================================== It doesn’t matter if I spent the whole morning wondering how to translate my state of imprisonment. It doesn’t matter if I walked the length of the dry, dirty-green riverbed, running through a thousand words in my mind without finding the right one. My mother-in-law stood in the distance with a bowl of chicken feed, complaining that I don’t do enough exercise. What is it you do all morning? You could go and take the free yoga class in town. I’d look after him for you. It doesn’t matter if your mind drifts to a Shakespeare sonnet, or if you rummage through your consciousness looking for a minute in which you were free and fail to find one. None of it matters. The brain doesn’t matter, nor do its reference points and elucubrations, its ways of processing symbols, its eagerness. It only matters what you do, where you go, whether you keep busy. In the end, they’re like my neighbours, locked up between unpainted wooden walls. These gypsies who stepped straight out of a brutal universe, one with no morals or laws and far removed from modern shops with electric lighting, pop music, capitalist democracies and the abolition of the death penalty. Melisa is thirty but looks more like fifty. She has a thin mouth closed tight like a slit, and long ginger locks stuck together in clumps that expose the skin of her skull and make her look like a creepy doll. Melisa’s twelve-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, lost her virginity in the abandoned house by the lake, that Gothic den, lifting her skirt between drunken moans. No doubt they filled that doe’s belly with bones, born and raised as she was in this sordid place full of dingy cafés and people on welfare, the physically disabled and men wearing hand-me-down linen suits and espadrilles. Where were you? What are your plans for tomorrow? What time did you get out of bed? Have you been practising your pronunciation? And your vocabulary? You’ll never get through a job interview at this rate. Where are you going? I heard the question as I entered the woods, panting. A mule in labour wouldn’t have moved any slower. ================================================== And then I saw the air saturated with invisible sexual tension. Rembrandt. The acorns fell and fell and fell so lazily, so heavily between the treetops and the earth that they seemed to be asleep in the air. To be cutting the air with golden rays. Caravaggio. That spell, that somnolence that comes over you as you watch leaves twirl once, twice, a third time before reaching the ground. One leaf falls, then another and another. An atmosphere that leaves you open-mouthed, that turns your saliva into fresh water. Farewell to mould and darkness. The death of summer turned the woods into silence and sighs. With the buggy off to one side of the path, I lay down and slept. I dreamt it was drizzling, but it wasn’t. It was the sound of butterfly wings flapping together. That light sensuality of nocturnal butterflies. My heart was beating in my ears. I leaned forwards to look at my baby and forgot that he’d come out of me. Good morning, child of the forest. He looked at the capybaras mating and copied their motions right away with his tiny pelvis. My baby was screwing, an animal like the rest.【缺少答案，请补充】
Iwanted it all to be over quickly, or to happen in legitimate self-defence. It’s not that I was seriously considering killing him, but at that moment, in that light, I was tempted. And on top of everything else the dog wouldn’t stop barking. It barked and barked and barked. The stupid thing even barks at the wheels of parked tractors. Someone please slit its vocal cords once and for all. A quick death and then on to something else. It’s not that I was going to kill him under that moon, but everything’s a matter of seconds. And those seconds were… how can I put it. During those seconds, I felt comfortable with danger. A sort of erotic communion with a spade that was lying around, with a rake, with the blade of the rusty knife that hung from my husband’sgauchotrousers, swinging like a bell. Just to be clear, I’m not a killer, not even close. I don’t fit the profile, nor do I have some sob-story that would help me get off scot-free with ashe acted in a state of high emotion. I wasn’t raped by my grandfather or my uncle. I did have a childhood, though I’ve forgotten it now. I don’t remember anything before yesterday, when I fled the scene. The experts are going to have their work cut out for them with my case. I’m the product of a normal family, too normal. The prosecutor rubs his hands. A normal family is the most sinister kind. Bullshit. Or there’s nothing more sinister than being the product of a normal family. These demons are all mine. I raised them, fed them, fattened them up. You’ll eventually marry him and have three kids, because one child leads to another, like lighting one cigarette on the end of the last. You’ll buy this house or a bigger one you find online, one with a real pool and a security barrier hooked up to an alarm in case a child falls in. That’s what I think. Give me a second here. While he’s strutting around behind me, I ask: If I fall to my knees and hurt myself, if I break a bone, if I learn to pray, is there a chance I can turn back time, turn it back to nowhere even, or will this story simply end with the mother who forgot to set the alarm? And it was then, after that thought, which I’d say was realistic, insightful even, rather than dark, that I reached the highest state of lucidity and felt around for the gun. Lucidity needs to be treated with extreme caution. Those moments when the mind, no matter how poorly it functions, sees clearly. I’m not laughing at him, but he’s just ridiculous behind me, his pelvis jutting out, while my eyes focus on the green tarp the neighbour uses to cover his pile of crap. It’s unbelievable how much stuff people hoard out here in the country. The more space they have, the more shit they cram into it. Crates, shelves, sheds overflowing with knick-knacks. We should really have a bonfire. It’s not that I’m assuming I want to slit his throat. I’m only saying that submission pisses me off. The dog keeps barking. Who knows who it’s barking at now. My body is dry. Dried up. Dried out. Must be the cold. I walked away, not knowing if I was stepping on its head or some manure. Just as well everything was over quickly. Very quickly. ================================================== She woke up to the sight of her husband sitting in a striped deckchair reading the paper. She listened as he turned the pages, saw which article he was reading and in which section. She heard him clear his throat, saw him uncross his legs. When will I start feeling like he’s dead? When will I be able to pray for him? These are tricky questions to answer at four in the morning, Mum. Why don’t you take something so we can go back to sleep? And he huffed and puffed with impatience. My mother-in-law’s bed shows signs of her battle with sleep. You go ahead, go back to bed. But for her it was impossible. Her eyelids were leaden. What does it mean for a man to die? she said from the heights of her aged lust. You’re asking me? I said, sunken into my pyjamas. The framed pictures, the prayer cards, the photographs. The piles of clothing, the towels, the perfume. And the toothbrush, the comb, the socks. His ointment, his talcum powder, his underlined books. And his armchair and his pipe and matches. And his underwear, vests and shaving cream. And most of all, none of this. The way he breathes, the mark his behind leaves on the cushion, his morning breath, the goat noises he makes when he chews, when he stretches and cracks his knuckles while talking to you. His still body in a chair or standing up. Or leaning against the wall. And so much more than all of this. An intangible, inscrutable way of looking at things, at a blowfly, a baby caterpillar, a stretch of barren land. An unfulfilled desire that’s ferocious enough to set an entire village on fire. The figure of a man in the road. From afar we can’t quite make out what it is. A head. A skull to put on the mantelpiece. My mother-in-law asks question after question. What am I supposed to do, son, stare at the sky? Drink your tea, Mum, go on. The son worries about her health. Parents become children when they’re in pain. I’m still curled up on the sofa by the fire that’s gone out. I look at myself in my slippers… I want to be Heidi. I understand my mother-in-law so well that I want to run over and climb into her chest. Stick my fingers into her eyes. I understand her so well that I want to get inside her dressing gown. We could have four hands, maybe that would comfort her. I don’t say anything. I play the role of daughter-in-law, but really I’m a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Dazed, I stare at the cupboard full of jars of jam made by the man who was buried, summer ’94, summer ’97, autumn 2002, each with its label. Understanding one another is too violent. It’s better to keep quiet, play dumb. That’s what I do. My husband stirs his mother’s herbal tea, refusing to put sugar in it, and while he rubs her shoulders he says, There’s nothing you can do, Mum. Dad’s not here any more. There are no words, nothing I can say will bring him back. Let him rest in peace, he tells her. Pffft, boring. I can’t stand the things people say about the dead. He doesn’t know how to stop the bullet that will reach her sooner or later. He thinks that by doing things for her he’s actually helping. The guillotine’s blade has been raised, but no one can see it’s about to fall. Mother and son hug each other, but the mother is no longer there. This balloon moving in the breeze is unstoppable, this airy thing that wafts across the vacant sky and is snatched away by a gust of wind. Shrugging my shoulders, I look at her without thinking, the way you look at a person who’s ill, a person who’s fading away while the rest of us remain on our feet sneaking glances at our watches. I wish she hadn’t stopped cooking for me, filling the house with delicious smells and bringing bread and butter to her offspring. What does it mean for a man to die? What became, what didn’t become, of his life? It’s six in the morning, dear. Let it go. Then we stopped answering her questions. There was simply no point.【缺少答案，请补充】
When I’m almost at the slope that drops down into the woods, I hear a woman discussingMrs Dallowayon the radio. The programme’s already begun, but I still know they’re talking about her. How far are you planning to go? My husband gets out of the moving car, pulling the handbrake so I don’t end up in the lake. You did well today, he says, your driving’s getting better and better, you just need to learn how to control the car around curves and how to reverse. I see him walk off to bang nails into the new terrace. I stay in the car, the windows foggy. I turn up the volume and take my foot off the clutch. ‘Mrs Dallowayis a novel about time and the interconnectivity of human existence.’ How long has it been since I’ve heard that kind of language? Interconnectivity. Fucking hell. I try to turn the plastic cog but the seat won’t recline. My husband watches me swear from afar, reading my lips and smiling. He has a cigarette behind his ear like a shopkeeper. I wonder what I’d make of this very woodland, this rustic setting, the half-built house, the man nailing down planks of wood, if a critic said my writing dealt with ‘the interconnectivity of human existence’. I burst out laughing. It’s nervous laughter. The other day I was trying to read something when I heard little footsteps going tap tap tap and saw a mouse calmly making its way under my bookshelf. I had to call the neighbour, who came by armed with a stick. Then they brought over a grey cat they’d found wandering around by the sewers and let it loose in my bedroom. It sniffed the whole place and covered my bed in fur, but didn’t do a thing. So these days I read surrounded by mouse traps. They’re talking about Septimus, the traumatised war hero character who also battles manic depression and madness, and who really does throw himself out of the window. I think about the palliative effects that writing, or throwing myself out the window, could have on my life. Those who write don’t need leather jackets because in their universe it’s always summer. I grab the handbrake. On nights like this, I find it comforting to know that when I get home late with my tongue all furry there won’t be any snakes coming out of the taps. And that there never will be, because it’s impossible. A tiger in the living room, though. That could happen. The thought of someone discussing a character I’ve created the way they do Mrs Dalloway. I turn off the radio and try to hear the birds talking in Greek, though what a poisoned inheritance that would be. And what would it be like, really, what would it be like, I repeat to myself, kicking the steering wheel. Fucking hell. And then I fell asleep in there, the seat half-reclined, my legs making marks on the glass. Much later I opened one eye and saw a blackbird with a bright yellow beak hopping towards me. ================================================== I’ve been needing the loo since lunch but it’s impossible to do anything other than be a mother. Enough already with the crying. He cries and cries and cries. I’m going to lose my mind. I’m a mother, full stop. And I regret it, but I can’t even say that. Who would I say it to? To the boy sitting on my lap, sticking his hand in my plate of cold leftovers, playing with a chicken bone? No! Leave that alone, you’ll choke. I chuck him a biscuit. He gives it back. My mouth is full of his saliva, of crumbs. My arm has a piece of tomato stuck to it. I put another biscuit in his mouth before he’s finished this one and he chokes. I take no responsibility for anything he might think of me. I brought him into this world, and that’s plenty. I’m a mother on autopilot. He’s whining now and it’s worse than his crying. I lift him up and give him a fake smile, clenching my teeth. Mummy was happy before the baby came. Now Mummy gets up each day wanting to run away from the baby while he just cries harder and harder. I need the loo, but his interminable clucking and grousing makes it impossible. What does he want from me. What do you want? He doesn’t let me leave him. He arches his back. Yesterday I had to take him with me to the loo, but today I’d rather shit myself. I call my husband. I need reinforcements. While I’m dialling, the baby hangs off one of my shoulders. He’s going to tear me apart. He sticks something viscous to my bellybutton. Please pick up, please pick up. Hello, listen love, I need you to come home now, I can’t go on like this. No, you can’t be a little while, you need to come now, you don’t understand, you don’t even want to understand, I won’t last till tonight. I hang up because he’s pretending not to understand. Maybe he’ll get worried and come home at once. We linger near the phone, tangled up in the cable, just in case he calls back. I carry the baby to the door to see if there’s anyone passing by that I can give him to. But we don’t have the sort of neighbours I need. All we have are bastards. What if I knock on the door of the elderly woman with the barred-up windows and aggressive pet turtles? I’m sure he could entertain her. It’d be like having a television, like going to the cinema. No one goes past, no one wants him. Nothing moves and the air is still, possessed. I leave him lying at my feet. He twists, stretches, screams at me, takes off his nappy and unbuttons my shoes, chews on the leather straps. I look at him the way a crab looks at a child. A racing car carrying a family drives by. Their heads are sticking out of the windows. It’s nighttime and I’m still leaning against the gate. I see myself when I was pregnant, thinking I was carrying a gargoyle inside me. I see myself giving birth, expelling him. We’re getting bitten, I should go inside, get the fire going and clear away the lunch plates full of red ants loading up on food for the winter. The father didn’t come home. I load the sweaty, hungry, sharp-nailed baby onto my back and take him inside. I should probably make him some pasta or soup, pull up some vegetable or other from the neighbour’s garden, but I can’t be bothered. Being a mother is so very unexciting. I can hardly keep it in. Then I feel this pain inside me. I drop him and cross my legs. I run off to shut myself away. He wails hysterically as though mourning the loss of a loved one at a Chinese funeral. I can’t cope with it and let him in. I think about how disgusting it all is.【缺少答案，请补充】
You’re never cool, you’re never zen. The same words the entire journey. You’re never cool, you’re never zen. I’m a mess. I cross and uncross my legs, and don’t even get me started on what my chest is doing. My son’s in the back in his car seat. Out of the window, tiny town after tiny town and the hill showing off a landscape that could be beautiful. Act normal, calm down, he says, and gets out to go to the bakery. I get out too, cross the road and then look back at the car. The son doesn’t take his eyes off the father, who’s buying pastries, selecting them from behind the glass. What kind of chocolate is that one made of? Are there any with cream? How many should I get, love? The baker, her eyes drooping down around her nose, waits with tongs in hand. Her fingers are covered in icing sugar. A quick look inside, and I turn and head back to the rubbish. No idea what I said. I pace up and down the street. My husband comes out with a cardboard container that he puts on my lap. Careful with the box. I bought six. Three and three. Two of each. I keep hold of the door handle. Trembling. Burning. In a garden I see a threesome of animals, one at the back and another smelling the arse of the one in front. Which gets rid of what little appetite I had. My stomach churns; imagine having sex in this cold. The car takes a curve in the road. I drop the box. There’s cream all over the seat. Shouts. I do what I can to save the pastries, to put each back in its place. My husband looks at them with contempt and says: They have your finger marks all over them. I try to fix this and only make it worse. You’re never relaxed, he tells me. I never see you cool and calm. You ruin everything. And he lights a cigarette in the car, something that’s not allowed in our family. And I don’t say anything because whatever. What kind of a family is this anyway? And the window’s open, the cold breeze going straight for the baby’s throat – the baby who’s still on antibiotics. But what can you do. All three of us are coughing by the time we reach our friends’ house. A thick beige carpet, a little door that opens onto the autumn leaves, the children’s rusty bikes and a few spare tyres. A tent set up in the middle of the living room, a white dog licking the children’s mouths. A teapot, more boxes of pastries, napkins, teaspoons, gossiping guests. Isn’t it lovely here. Where other people live. I’m amazed at the sight of so many civilised people. Their hair’s combed, they smell nice. Hi, how’s it going, hey, it’s been forever, how’s everything with you, all good thanks, and how about you? Hugs, pats on the back. More patting. More hugging. Everyone around the table saying happy new year, though that was a while ago now. There’s a mirror in front of us. No one looks like they’re in pain, no one’s gone mad, no one’s summoning the dead. Streamers from the last time one of the kids had a birthday party. Titi, don’t put that in your mouth, get out of there! No! The stairs! It’s snack time, kids! Who wants some milk? Time for food, children! And how about you guys, what do you give him? My husband and I look at each other for the first time. What do we give him? Anything. Whatever the other children are having. I didn’t bring his snack. I forgot it. I brought the nappy cream, the changing mat, an extra pair of pants, the drops. The children eat their snacks together and the house looks like a kindergarten. My baby laughs, I don’t recognise his laughter. They go out onto the patio, climb things, roll around in the leaves. We grown-ups help ourselves to little platefuls of food. My husband is too embarrassed to open the box of pastries we brought and leaves it off to one side. No one touches it. The six pastries melt. The afternoon wears on and it’s a lumbering animal, a giant seal entering the water. Behind us are the vineyards, the stakes stuck in the earth. Someone asks what’s in the box. No one notices my fingerprints. Children crying, children hitting each other. The parents look up to see if the crying child is theirs so they can go to the rescue. My husband is eating a piece of sponge cake and suddenly feels sick. A stabbing pain in his ribs. Everyone stares at him and eventually someone says: Call a doctor! and they go out to look for one among the donkeys and wineries. Ah, doctors. I watch the scene from my chair. They don’t call me over, they don’t involve me, they don’t consider me up to the task. A doctor, they shout, a doctor! The rest of us are a useless bunch. They go from house to house, coming across all sorts of people, but a doctor is hard to find. You’ve got to study to be a doctor. They finally come back with a vet who’d been helping a cow give birth, his arms and hands covered in amniotic fluid. They lie my husband down on the carpet. The vet, who’s used to treating animals and not humans, puts on latex gloves. The kids form a circle around the two of them, hoping something will appear, thinking it’s a magic trick. I do too, I think I’m about to witness a birth. I don’t want the scene to end, don’t want to go back home. See you soon, take care, my regards to the family. See you later, see you, see you soon. My husband says to me: My heart almost stopped. Is that my fault? I ask. It’s a warning sign. And what do you want me to do about the warning sign? I want you to pay attention to it. Okay, okay, I say. I want to take my shoe off and throw it at him. No one tried any of our pastries, he says. I bought them only to throw them away. I want to take off down the street, limping. Someone did have some actually, I thought, but there’s no point in arguing. You don’t respect me, the box is just one example. Do you deserve my respect? There’s no point in arguing. He went on to say something about the box representing marriage, the family, and how I dropped it, how I try to fix things but it’s always too late. I’m barely listening. I don’t understand his metaphors. It must be that I don’t have the brains for them. My mind is somewhere else, like I’ve been startled awake by a nightmare. I want to drive down the road and not stop when I reach the irrigation ditch. I want to run over the flowers in a yellow race against myself. What’s up with you? he says. I look as though I were a daughter with no parents. Can’t you raise him on your own? I ask. If so I’ll jump out of the car this very minute. The baby was in the back, smiling and showing off his three teeth. I’ll jump, I shout, I’ll jump, and I open the door and stick out a leg. When we get home, he asks: What should we have for dinner? I put the apron on and chop onion after onion after onion into thin slices until I cut my finger open. And I laugh. The more serious things are, the more I want to laugh. I throw myself down onto the mud-splattered floor. The whole pastry ordeal strikes me as hilarious, for example. Cover your mouth when you cough. Cover your mouth when you sneeze. Cover your mouth when you smoke, I hear myself say. I spend my whole life covering him up. I’m so dirty, so stubborn, so mean that it’s scary. The house reeks of onions.【缺少答案，请补充】
Iuse my sleeping husband’s hand to touch myself. He’s not looking at me, he’s dreaming. He uses my dead hand to touch himself. I’m not looking at him, I’m asleep. We’re in separate bedrooms, on separate mattresses. There’s been a mistake. We’re not meant to be one. No one wants to be a Siamese twin, to have their organs stuck to someone else’s. He smiles while he dreams. I don’t make him smile. I swear at him. I punch him, on the shoulder, in the face. He’s had it up to here with me and vice versa. We’re too much for each other but we carry on. I give him the finger, fuck you, as soon as I get up. Morning, what do you want for breakfast? My outstretched finger in his face. I’d love to break his teeth. The restless child is singing softly between his mum and dad. Who do you love more? asks his Dad, about to explode any second. Is it so difficult for him to say how was your day yesterday? Apparently it is. How was your day yesterday? I ask myself, and answer, fine thanks. I proceed to tell myself about my day, chatting away. I leave the table and he eats my croissant and finishes my coffee. He lets me go, obviously, but then he regrets it and bursts out, You’re evil, leading me into the pastures where the vegetation is taller than us. He doesn’t give in. He makes me walk blindly, the grasses hitting me in the face like thistles, like the bones of a skeleton. Then he decides to take advantage of the situation and presses himself up against me, but it doesn’t go anywhere, and he pushes me further in. I start to speak, I don’t know what words come out of my mouth but I keep them coming and he tells me, When you speak it’s like the car alarm, it goes on and on, it’s unbearable. So I carry on speaking, and now I’m shouting, though I don’t know when I raised my voice. Can’t you speak without shouting? Can’t you give the verbal diarrhoea a rest? He doesn’t understand that I can’t. Control yourself, he says, I don’t understand a thing when you speak non-stop. Why don’t you take a pronunciation course? Why don’t you do a language exchange with a local? We stop somewhere. Now what? But when I go to say something he snaps at me and walks a few feet away to where I can’t see him. I press my fists into my eye sockets. It hurts. What’s the point of crying? I’m a startled deer, a sad, sensitive deer. A cool breeze picks up. He doesn’t come back to me, but he hasn’t left either. I’m just another patch of grass. Nothing happens until suddenly we hear grunts and mooing. I run around in circles and end up on the streaked tarmac. He’s there too, watching the show. The cows have been separated from their calves, when just a second ago they were all grazing together quietly, stuffing their faces. These bovine mothers are causing a massive scene, mooing so loudly they grow hoarse, doing everything they can to resist. But their babies get taken away just the same. See you later, calves, I say, waving goodbye. Bon voyage. The cows are still there by the side of the road, stunned. The vultures arrive in time for lunch with their collars of feathers, holding their cutlery and napkins. We go home together, arms around each other. We love each other so much. We sing a catchy little ditty,why oh why, tell me why could it be, that when a cow’s tied up, her calf won’t leave.Someone else’s misfortune is a swift kick from a horse.【缺少答案，请补充】
On the first morning of all the other mornings, I was lying with my fingers hanging off the edge of the bed. A doctor came over. His crooked eyeglasses above me, his four pupils. I dreamt I’d left my baby asleep under acid rain. I dreamt I hadn’t been able to bring him with me and he was looking at me from a long way away. I’m sorry. What’s that you were saying? What was I saying? You were saying sorry. No, it was just a dream. Do I have to get up? You don’t have to do anything. So I can stay in bed? Do people here go about their business during the day? You can do as you please. My husband paid for me to do as I please? You’re free to leave whenever you like. Isn’t this the new world? It’s just somewhere that’s a bit calmer than other places. And off he went, dragging his feet like all tormented doctors do. I lay there watching a small iridescent fly hit the glass of the window again and again until it collapsed, scattering pieces of its bright blue wings over my bed. I didn’t see anyone else breathing nearby. No one was spying on me. Except for me. Getting up, I felt happy to be in the care of an establishment that wasn’t unlike a hotel and seemed perfectly clean and comfortable. I went down to the dining hall feeling alive. I was alone. Someone had come back to life. I said hello to everyone and even asked their names. Normally, I don’t care what people are called, what difference does it make. I kissed some cheeks, shook some hands and gave some encouraging pats on the back. They all seemed to be saying things like God help you or blessed art thou. The nurses and other health staff covered me in saliva. Mwah. Mwah. Someone was yelling that they wanted Rohypnol. Interesting. I crossed the dining hall with its smell of instant soup and went out into the grounds. There’s a high wall separating us from a villa and its pack of German shepherds. The pornographic lyrics of acumbiasong float towards me from somewhere. One man’s reading a newspaper. A president’s been in a plane crash. Another man says something about a father killing his daughter in the middle of the Christmas holidays. Only now, as I play with my hair, do I realise that I haven’t seen any women around; that is, with the exception of two females I wouldn’t exactly consider to belong to the category. My husband has shut me away with men. Shaved heads are all I can see; they look like walnuts. I smell of testosterone. One man coughs and another clears his throat. They’re all smokers. Nothing but deep, leaden voices. And if the doctors and patients conspire to keep me in bed? A man dressed in white winks at me. Why did my husband bring me here? To see how long I can hold out. To sicken the nymphomaniac. I drink my angel - hair soup at a round table and when I finish the plates are replaced with a game of cards which appears to keep us all entertained. A teammate pretends to be signalling for a card and looks at me with eyes that telegraph cock. At night, I hear barking come over the wall like something that belongs to another life. I slip away through the sheets. How many of the people who’ve slept here are now dead. Then he appears. His jawbone in my mouth. His eyes on my arse. I want to make him disappear, go up in flames, but I can’t. I let the balsam of desire carry me away. And I don’t even think about my son.【缺少答案，请补充】
He left and I stayed behind looking at the grounds as though they were a cliff. He left and he took his baby with him. I felt like I’d ruined everything. A breath of irrationality had set fire to my existence and I found myself trying to keep up appearances with a loaded gun on my hands. I wanted to pull the trigger so badly. Unbelievable how much noise those damned birds make. Outside, nature was following its sunset ritual. Some people left the dining hall with a tangerine or a bunch of grapes and a pair of binoculars to watch the birds migrate from the continent. Apparently they find the repetitive flapping of wings moving. They smiled at me on their way outside, but then they realised what was going on and quickened their step. I felt voluptuous as I strode down the hallway, my tits above my shirt collar, slant-eyed, my hair straightened, a victorious smile on my face and the gun raised up high. The professional was close behind me. I saw him in the glass doors and his shoes stuck to me like chewing gum. He was still worried about the way I behaved during the counselling session with my husband. He ran a few steps to catch up and then, flustered, asked me to follow him into his office. Please, come this way. But when he saw my hand in the shape of a revolver, my index finger miming the action of pulling the trigger, he stepped back. What a wuss. Once he’d caught his breath he urged me to enter his office and locked the door behind me. I will allow myself to say the following, knowing it’s an intrusion into your private life, he began, still panting a little, and I yawned. He was tempted to ask me to chop off my hand, but he knew it would be illegal. I hate having to waste my time with people who repeat platitudes, myself included. I see that behind the beige curtain a group of inpatients are chasing ducks around. He says my husband feels powerless against the figure of the unknown man, who’s like a bulldozer. That the air in my house is turning foul. That he said he’d prefer me to stay another week. All of this was discussed behind my back. It’s official, I’ve been grounded. I want the day to end once and for all. I want night to begin, for them to let me out so that I can face the animals. In the end I said I felt responsible, that I was going to rethink my role as a wife and as a mother, that it would be helpful to stay another week, and I allowed my hand to return to its five-fingered shape. He tried to get me to confess, but as soon as he saw the look on my face he opened the door. I went out into the hallway and ran to my bedroom. The steam from the showers blinded me. I called my husband. You have reached the X family. Please leave a message after the beep and we’ll call you back as soon as we can. Thank you. It’s always the same. How do they manage to keep going, how are they so similar. Even a herd of goats can be told apart by the way each animal lifts its chin. I ran through the hallway, took a shortcut outside and leapt over the danger signs warning about the demolition in progress. I walked and didn’t see anyone. What might the father and son be up to. I imagine them naked in the pool under a stream of nice warm water, checking out each other’s peckers. I see them playing with the hose, drawing letters in the air. They’re squatting in the garden pulling up vegetables and munching on the leafy greens. Afterwards, they’ll enjoy a dessert of ice cream under the moon and the father will tell the son the name of each star. The son pointing. The father pushing the son on the swing, the son pushing the father. I see them gradually forgetting me tonight. I see them forgetting me tomorrow night as well.【缺少答案，请补充】
The two of them were on the opposite side of the road with their bags and packed lunches. Apparently it’s better to keep children away from places like this. I went down for breakfast at dawn and found myself in an empty dining hall for the first time. Then I walked outside with wet hair and my swimsuit pressing against my tits and smiled at the two of them. Big day, he said, and we got into the four-wheel drive he’d borrowed from a concerned uncle. For several miles, and until we’d passed the toll booths, we were happy, our faces to the wind, singing along to an eighties classic on the radio and squeezing each other’s shoulders from time to time. Life flows along. For several miles south we were a typical family, mother-father-son with their SPF25 sunscreen, and a thermos and jackets for when the sun goes down. We made it through the police checkpoints and passed a tree nursery filled with tall pines and eucalyptus. Then the road began to smell of salt and we parked and my husband got our little boy ready for his first trip to the sea. I watched myself in the rearview mirror and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. My boyfriend (I liked calling him that on occasion) was telling me something, I’ve no idea what, some story from when he was little. I felt like a good wife listening to him, saying attentively, aha, aha. We opened the boot and took out the polka-dot beach umbrella, the carefully packed lunches and the thermos. He’d taken care of everything. The baby pointed excitedly towards the sea. A good sign. Don’t forget to film the exact moment he goes in, said my husband, as excited as my son about the advancing, retreating hurricane of blue. We were in the tropics. The three of us jumping around in the sand, getting sunburnt and laughing. I saw an elderly woman in a swimming costume and a thick layer of sunscreen beaming at us from her tent, happy to see a family together. Everything was going well. The coastguard’s flag showed the sea was calm and it was safe to swim. Lying on the sand were the unused flags: medium hazard, high hazard, danger (no swimming), missing child. Some people were snoozing in makeshift hammocks hung with coloured rope, and others were sunbathing naked. One of them caught my attention, he was so red that his features had become diluted behind his burgundy skin. There were lots of toddlers running around in circles, stealing people’s shoes and making little whirlpools in the sand. Mine threw himself in with the clan and in no time they became a pack of wild babies. My husband asked me to put sunscreen on his buttocks and then lay down. A second later, he was out cold. I didn’t want to meet the eye of any of the women with books open who were looking to each side in the hope of a distraction. I didn’t want to be under anyone’s watch. So I stretched out alongside him and proceeded to get burned to the sound of the shouting babies running rampant in the background. I might have dozed off for a few seconds, who knows, but the point is that when I turned over on the uncomfortable plastic sun lounger I noticed that my husband, who was fast asleep, had an erection the likes of which I’d never seen on him before. I lay there looking at him, stunned, but his face gave nothing away; I couldn’t tell where the erection was coming from. And this bothered me because I knew it must have been coming from somewhere, this desire that had clearly not been brought on by me, flopping as I was like a crème brûlée by his side. And I believe it was then, if my memory serves me right, that it all began. I shook him a little – he says it was a lot – and pulled his trunks to one side. The woman in the swimming costume told me off, reminding me there were children present, that it was a family beach, and that there were places for that sort of behaviour. My husband was still dead to the world but that thing was so alive it started to cloud my vision and I felt sure he was hiding something from me. I was jealous of his dream and wanted to see more, draw back the curtain. So I shouted: Wake up right now! Tell me exactly what’s going on! And that’s when he looked at me and said, You’re crazy, and I punched him in the chest, and the cloud of children covered in sand froze. And then, because children always exaggerate, they began to bawl. Since we weren’t their parents and since kids are hypersensitive their mothers came rushing over as though their babies were witnessing a violent sex scene and wrapped them up in garish beach towels to cover their eyes and ears. Meanwhile, a group of people taking the whole thing very seriously informed the lifeguard on duty, who took it upon himself to intervene, having found a way to be useful for a moment. My husband had just woken up. He didn’t defend me at all. He threw me to the lions, to the insults, to the string of obscenities that always come out of preachers’ mouths, and carried away the little boy, who had black sand on his nose and was spitting out pebbles. He left me with all those eyes on me. He didn’t take any responsibility, he was a total coward. By this point, my husband wasn’t hard any more, in fact he didn’t even look like a man. It wasn’t until we were driving over the white lines of the road in complete silence that we realised we hadn’t even taken our son into the sea.【缺少答案，请补充】
I had to relive it. It’s all that’s left, it’s my escape, and besides, if there’s one thing I’ve got plenty of in here it’s time. I go over that night, when I went back and forth to the window, first with a lighter, then with a seven-branched candelabrum, coming and going, following his shadow. I turned the lamps on and off, over and over, to see if he was still there, if he was the type who’d weather a storm. My husband was asleep in bed with his mobile on his chest, not the least concerned about radiation. My baby was practically asleep on his feet but he still went on stumbling through the house, holding onto the curtains and the century-old coffee tables and throwing whatever he found to the floor. Ashtrays, cutlery. Maybe he was staying awake to make sure I didn’t spend the night in another man’s arms. It was a long time before I was finally able to put him in the cot, stop his crying, turn the pages of one of his books about astronauts or sea captains and convince him that the best thing you can do at night is sleep. Mummy’s telling lies. When I moved towards the door, my husband appeared in his chequered underwear, hunting for a cigarette. He looked sweet. All men are sweet when they’re half-asleep, as if something has relaxed in the triangle between their eyes, nose and mouth, something that makes them seem less like men. Where are you going? Nowhere, outside, I said. Giving two answers at once is never very effective. You’re going outside? To do what? To do nothing, to take out the rubbish, I say. I need to come up with something more creative next time. Leave the bag over by the door, I’ll take it out tomorrow. He fucks everything up when he acts like a good husband. I’ll have to grit my teeth and stick a pillow between my legs. Or escape as soon as he falls asleep, jump the fence. He puts the kettle on, adds wood to the fire and starts clicking his fingers. He doesn’t seem about to go anywhere. I waited for the water to boil, not knowing where the other man was. I could no longer hear the ting ting ting of the ring on his finger against the fence. I could no longer feel the death rattle behind the windows. My husband looked at me, his eyes narrowed to slits, as he snacked on our little boy’s biscuits. He was acting like everything was perfectly normal whilst standing in my way, blocking my path. I did all kinds of things, like checking the baby hadn’t strangled himself on the string of his toy bunny on wheels, clearing the table, wiping down the kitchen counter. I sat in the open window and took a few drags of the Gauloise covered in marks from his lips. Another woman’s son was sleeping in the house. Why bother giving birth, I repeated in my head, looking at the tangle of weeds beginning to take on the colours of dawn. He was sitting by the fire with his chin in his hands, playing chess alone. After moving one of the pawns, he seemed to be on the verge of saying something like let’s expand our family, or let’s make a little brother for him to play with. But he moved a piece on the chessboard instead, and then said he was done for the night. He wanted to know how late I was going to hang around down here, to which I said, I’m coming, I’ll be there soon, you go ahead. He gave me a peck on the lips but he seemed to be getting further and further away. It was like we were two statues. And just as I was about to leave, he called to me from the bathroom. He told me to be careful. Of what, I said, without going towards him, without letting him see me. You know what I’m talking about. Just be careful, that’s all. And he went straight to sleep. As soon I stepped outside, I saw him and forgot about everything that had come before, about the smouldering house, about my little soldier sleeping with his eyes open like a rabbit, about all those days of anguished anticipation. And I devoured him. Because that, my dear son, is what the night is for.【缺少答案，请补充】
Life does not flow, I thought as they were sentencing me to a series of consultations with various professionals as a result of that ill-fated trip to the sea. One of the exercises I had to do involved shutting myself in a room with a mirror and looking at my reflection for hours. The idea was that when it was over I’d be able to tell them what I’d seen. But you’re all wasting your energy. I don’t need to look at my reflection to know I’m a piece of shit. What’s the point. Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut. Forget I said anything. Why do you say you’re a piece of shit? Is this what you think of yourself, or what you think other people think of you? I almost don’t bother answering at this point. I already know I’m a piece of shit. There was a strong smell of roast chicken coming from outside. Later, they’d watch a movie on human relations and follow it with a discussion. They asked: Do you miss your loved ones? And my head was in a tank of water and I saw my son with the face of a little child, dirty cheeks, red bottom, blonde hair. Do you miss your country? they went on. A Polish country bumpkin. A strawberry-blonde. An exile just like me. And they continued making noise with their desiccated words. They were practically talking over one another, and in my mind: Glenn Gould playing English Suite No. 1. Why didn’t you make it into the sea? they kept asking. It’s symbolic, wouldn’t you say? Why couldn’t you bring yourselves to take the final step? And I saw myself in my little swimsuit, my two pink dots in the wind, my sandy vagina, my haggard three-year-old eyes. I bet it’s got something to do with that, I thought, but didn’t give them anything. If they want to analyse me, they can do it without clues. I’m three years old. I ran away from my family when mummy duck and daddy duck weren’t paying attention. Their argument’s escalating and I wander off, getting lost in the water along the shore that looks like saliva. All of a sudden I don’t recognise anyone around me. It’s all colourful swimsuits and moving mouths but no one knows who I am. I spend the whole afternoon alone, going from tent to tent, eating what I find, leftover pastries, letting my head be petted by men reading the paper with their feet sunk into the sand, knocking down sandcastles, crawling along the sea wall. Until a large man asked me where my parents were and what my name was. Back then it didn’t occur to me to lie. He grabbed me and lifted me onto his shoulders, and the whole beach began clapping their hands to help the missing child find her parents. I’m a little monkey being carried on the shoulders of a lifeguard while all around us I hear clap, clap, clap. What do they want? The tattooed lifeguard pats my knee reassuringly as I ride tall on his shoulders. His hand is very big. I’m still a little girl but I like the feel of the nape of his neck rubbing against my swimsuit while people run around me. They continue clapping and I throw my head back and as we gallop and I see only sky-blue. I’m a Russian circus star and everyone’s cheering for me. I’m an acclaimed child performer. The lifeguard’s already hoisted the missing-child flag. They should also have one for children who’ve run away. And at the end of the pier I see two figures racing towards us so fast they almost trip. I see two elephants stretching out their trunks to inhale me. It’s them. With my legs I cling to my saviour’s neck, but the female elephant sucks me up and gives me a hug. Everyone celebrates the reunion. On the loudspeaker they thank the public for their solidarity, and there’s a murmur of approval. I’m tempted to say, Wait, keep looking, this isn’t my family! But as usual, the thought occurs to me too late. The professionals look at me. What are you thinking? Has something occurred to you? Now I see that my baby wanted to sit down with some strangers on their beach mat, keep nice and quiet, and when they packed up to leave, go with them, following the train of their lives. Let’s wrap this session up, they said in unison, and I kept my mouth shut. I left feeling hungover, stumbling, barely holding myself up by the wall of the corridor. The two chatterboxes had been kicking me in the head. Who am I? I spat out and laughed. Who? I said to myself again, laughing louder. I was that mother who climaxes in front of her son, that baby daughter who catches a glimpse of her father. A few of the inpatients said, Shhh, let us sleep in peace! I staggered outside as best I could and walked around until I reached the middle of the grounds, then I lay down on the grass. The landscape surrounding me was jet black. Something was floating in the air, a feeling of dawn, of childhood, of the morning when I was still half-asleep and they dressed me for a train journey, putting my shoes on opposite sides to correct my club feet. That night, the sky was identical to the one I saw from the shoulders of a giant when I was lost and nowhere to be found.【缺少答案，请补充】
The decorations looked great, I could be proud of myself there. Banners with little bumper cars on them, the table set with mini plates of finger food, a party bag for each guest and the birthday boy all dressed up. Bright colours, music, everything a party’s supposed to have. My little lamb is already two years old and in my mind I’m still pushing, because he’s coming, he’s almost there, you can see his tiny head now. When it was time to blow out the candles, my husband stood behind me and lots of cameras aimed at us. There we were for all eternity in the photo, decorated and walled in. Then my little boy, because he’s not a baby any more they said, spat out his chocolate banana cake and ran away. I chased him, rugby - tackled him, kissed him, breathed him in, and then he escaped again. The neighbours’ children played hide - and - seek, tag, and duck, duck, goose, because games here are the same as they’ve always been. I poured myself the dregs of yesterday’s wine, swirled them around and walked through the birthday party like any host would, my chest anointed. The other mothers showed their approval, tiny threads of banana hanging from their teeth. Everything was turning out wonderfully. I finished my glass in the swing and poured myself the dregs, just the dregs, of another bottle, and then another, and I drank to myself, and to the birthday party I’d managed to organise. And I don’t know why, but at that point my gaze fell on a mound of earth in the garden. At first, I didn’t understand. I kept looking at it the way you might images of events that took place millions of years ago, the past looked at from the present. Then I felt the dog leap up onto my lap and sink a tooth into me. Of course. Poor Bloody was down there. That’s where my husband and I had put the dog, but only at noon, by which time its eyes were full of flies. It had been there the whole night with a bullet in it, unburied. Entrails all over the place. So dead that it didn’t even let out a last howl. And as I was looking at its remains, I heard the gun go off. The kids were skipping over the makeshift grave, singing and laughing and holding hands. And I don’t know if it was that, or the rancid wine, or the mouths smeared with banana, but something made me rush inside and shut myself in my bedroom, slamming the door behind me. I hope you all die, every last one of you. As usual, he came knocking on my door. Darling, honey, sugar, sweetheart, my bunny rabbit, my love, I can’t remember all the names he called me. And I said nothing. Are you okay? And I still said nothing. Come out, all the guests are leaving, don’t ruin this. Where are the party bags? And I said, Why don’t you leave me the hell alone and die. Just die, my love. I thought I could hear the dog barking and snarling on the other side of the door, protesting at my having killed him. I pushed the door open and went out, striding straight through the dining room where the goodbye fondling was already underway, the searching for lost coats, the children crying because they didn’t want to leave, and I got into the convertible and accelerated. I don’t know if I put it in first or third gear. Where are you going? Are you crazy? You don’t have your license, I heard him say from the house. As I drove off, I shouted: He’s all yours, he’s my present to you. I’ll hand him over gift - wrapped, you deserve him more than I do. I’ll give him to you. Our son. By that point, people had come outside to see what was going on and were whispering to each other that I’d lost it again. Then more gates, more sheep, more chickens squashed on the tarmac, more abandoned windmills, more boats sunk in lakes, more chimneys spewing out black, more animal pens, and then I stopped. I jumped out and went inside. His princess was in the window, but there was no one else around. Neither him nor his wife. No trace of either of them. Had they abandoned their special daughter? I looked in every room, looked at the bed they fuck in, looked at their bathroom, at his toothbrush, at everything he looks at from the minute he gets up, and then I collapsed into the embroidered armchair in the living room. Upstairs, the daughter moans. Downstairs, the tick - tock of a grandfather clock. I fell asleep and dreamt of the sweet and hollow sound of an antler, of him on his back, his hair stuck to my skin, until I heard giggles. There they were, coming down the path, their baskets overflowing with mushrooms. Was I ancient history? I went outside to wait for them. The woman looked at me with horror. He gestured for her to go upstairs to their little girl and then took me by the arm. We walked fifty yards away, maybe more. We were face - to - face but we didn’t say a thing. Speaking is so disgusting, after all. We kissed. I saw his face change, maybe he was looking at the marks left by the glass. My tongue on his tongue was a painkiller and I knew that was the reason, that was why he was kissing me. And it was so powerful, that kiss, that taste of salty blood, that stopping of death in its tracks. Then my husband arrived on a motorcycle that was too small for him and made him look like he was fourteen. My two bulls, my stallions, my pawns, suddenly together. No words were needed. My men understood each other with gestures alone and off they went together into the open fields, stopping where I couldn’t hear them. I saw the shadow cast by their bodies, the profiles of the two of them facing each other. Mother and daughter appeared at the window, one paler than the other. I watched them squaring up for the duel, but then the tension dissipated and it was like two long - lost brothers catching up, reminiscing about their childhood in the family home, discussing how to settle their dead parents’ debts. The sun began to set over their heads, the gentle light of dusk slowly tinting their bodies. A soft, steady rain fell on them. And as they talked, my life came and went. I don’t know what was being said, only that they weren’t raising their voices any more. Something about the way they stepped a little to the side, the way they nodded their heads slightly told me they’d understood each other. One of them yawned. The other laughed. They had reached an agreement. The Siamese twins parted and one of them came towards me. I was trembling. Who would it be? Who would be my black - market buyer? What would become of my life, in which home would I live, what would they call me, whoever had chosen me? He coughed and I knew it was my husband, the most loyal of the two. We walked towards the open - top car in silence. It was a silence more complete than all those that had come before it. As we drove home in the rain, I noticed a row of cypresses. Are those new? I asked. They’ve always been there, he said. He didn’t stop at the front door but I could tell the party was over because a few blue balloons were drifting over the minefield that was our garden. Is the baby asleep inside? He’s not a baby any more, he said. But what I understood was, he’s not your baby any more. We drove into the woods, the wheels leaving tracks in the earth. Not many animals were awake. The stag didn’t appear, but I was there instead. He turned off the engine and relaxed, letting out a breath he’d been holding in for too long. So what do you want to do? A question was the last thing I’d been expecting. I thought the outcome had been positive, or negative, and that he’d tell me how much time I had left, in weeks, in days. I thought he’d cry. I hadn’t been expecting a question. What do you think? But I couldn’t say a word. Poor thing. And my whole life was a shrill whistle piercing his silence. The trees in the wood were like tigers in heat. I won’t be able to【缺少答案，请补充】
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