The Last Bullet Is for You Read Free Page B

often, the country of your childhood , the magical city where you grew up with Kafka’s castle, the Charles Bridge and the Church of St. Nicholas. I’ll stop conjuring up men drunk on absinthe, sauerkraut and dumplings washed down with great tankards of beer on a wooden bench deep in some uproarious hospoda . I’ll read the messages I received and delete them, one by one, except for the last one where you said you loved me and didn’t want to lose me. I wanted to believe that until it wasn’t possible to do anything but face the facts because things weren’t going to change, you wouldn’t change, and I had to leave you no matter what, even if I still loved you. It was a crime against nature, and it was going to hurt me until I let go because there was no use hoping any different, there was no bridge between us, just a border, we didn’t share the same grammar.
    I write to linger with the man I knew, and whom I lost almost as soon as he came into my life because I had made him up. I saw the tip of the iceberg, but I couldn’t imagine what lay beneath the surface and I crashed head-on into it like the Titanic in the dark Atlantic night. A gash opened up in me and the water rushed in, salt water, undrinkable, the kind that dries up the marshes where rice grows, the kind that gives hope that our thirst will be slaked yet only makes our need infinitely greater, that perverse, icy, awe-inspiring water, carrying bodies down into instantaneous sleep, laying them on the ocean floor with the remains of the bridge and the bow, porcelain plates and chandeliers, wood inlay and satin tapestries.
    Sometimes I dive back into those images, I throw bravery overboard and choose cowardice, I throw myself upon your mouth, I take your saliva and bang against your teeth, I hold your head prisoner and bite your lips, your cheeks, your forehead, your eyes. I moan with the pleasure you have stopped giving me. Nothing can satisfy the hunger I still have for you, not you inside me or my thighs wrapped around your hips, not my hands that run the length of your chest when, in the marriage of our skin, I don’t know whose body is whose.
    I remember a friend who told me how his lover would sit on him and jerk off their penises together, how my friend would put his hand on his lover’s hand and take pleasure in not knowing which hand and which penis was his.
    He admitted he still took pleasure picturing the scene after they broke up, when he made love to other men or when he touched himself.
    Sometimes I have to make myself come to be able to cry to be able to write to be able to go on writing this novel, this farewell, once and for all.
    Sitting in the seat next to me on the flight from Amsterdam to Montreal, a young globetrotter on his way back from Vietnam described that feeling of urgency he had just before landing, when only a few minutes separated him from the arms of his beloved. If he couldn’t hold her in his arms immediately, he told me, he was afraid he would start screaming.
    So many times I was sure I would die if I didn’t feel your hands on my body, right away, right now. But today, I would die if I saw you again, if I didn’t let time and space do its work of separation and fashion me a shield against this senseless love.
    After you left, everyone had a disaster story to tell me. Everyone had one hidden away in a drawer and they took it out so I wouldn’t feel so alone in my despair. With a look of tender compassion, they told me it was a fact, Slavic men are a real goldmine, nesting dolls of unhappy love affairs.
    Julia told me about one of her girlfriends, a psychologist, who went on a mountain-climbing vacation to Siberia. Her guide was a magnificent Muscovite who hit on her the whole time, his hand firmly on her thigh during meals, his hip innocently stuck to hers during a heated conversation complete with a bottle of vodka, his fingers in her hair when they were away from prying