Baltimore Read Free Page B

breasts in the end? Are they marking their territory? What is it, damn it? I’ll never be able to understand.
    Click.
    Go away.

There is an old photograph of my mother and me: We’re sleeping, both with curlers in our hair. She’s wearing a thin, summer nightgown, which is rolled up around her thighs considerably, and I’m only in my bathing suit bottom. We’re lying on a king sized bed in some rented room at the seaside. I’m, let’s say, five or six-years-old. This means my mother is barely thirty. At that moment, my father is also thirty and he is watching us taking an afternoon nap in a house on the seaside, tired from swimming all morning and being out in the sun.
    I try to picture him: A thirty-year-old man watching his wife and daughter. A scene both tender and erotic. And comical, of course, because of our curlers. He’s probably bored. He reads the newspaper and then takes out his little magnetic chess set and plays out the game published that day. Now he’s sitting there, waiting for us to wake up so that he can take us out for ice cream. What made him want to take a picture of us? What were his feelings at the time? Did he wake us up as soon as he took the picture? Were we awakened by the sound of the camera? Did my mother look at my father sleepily and say something like:
    “Are you crazy? Taking a picture of me half-naked?”
    But still, more than anything I would like to know: What was he feeling while he was taking our picture? For, if he took the picture because of something other than mere boredom, then I’m inclined to think that maybe we could have found a way to be happy after all. And we weren’t. I hope you’re not going to say he took our picture only so that he could make fun of my mother later? Or so that he could, from that moment on, claim that the two of us were only different versions of one and the same principle?
    If this were a movie, whose main concern was for the characters to ultimately find peace, I would go to my father, reconcile with him, after so many years, and ask him about the photograph. And he would remember everything. He would say something like:
    “Yes, I remember. Dubrovnik, 1966. The blinds were half drawn and the two of you looked so beautiful and peaceful in your sleep. I wanted to eternalize that moment of beauty because I knew it could never be repeated in the exact same way again. You were there, the two people I loved more than anything in the world….”
    We’ll stop here. Both you and I know things like this don’t happen in real life. Not in your life, right? Nor in mine, believe me.
    In real life, I will never find out even the basic facts like: Where we were vacationing; what year it was exactly; whether or not the break-up was already a subject of conversation, or if it just hovered over our plastic plates on the beach.
    In real life, I certainly wouldn’t go to my father. And if I did, a conversation about an old photograph would not be possible.
    In real life, we would only get into another argument, over something trivial and with a certain outcome.
    I remember there was a dirt road near that house, leading down to the beach, and that all the shrubbery was dry and scorched by the sun. I remember the small branches of these bushes were completely covered in miniature snails, which were hanging on the twigs like buds. I remember taking one of those branches back with me to the room and how, by the next morning, the little snails crawled all over our beds, chairs, the floor, our clothing. And I remember my parents being extremely angry with me because of this. That photograph and those snails, I could almost swear it all happened precisely then, that summer. They were angry the entire time. And it was always my fault. And from then on, whenever I go to the seaside and I see small snails stuck to dry twigs, the same feeling of sadness comes flooding back.
    And since you insist, I also remember this:
    Last summer I was tidying up my garden. It was