The Remains of Love Read Free Page A

woman would look at her sadly, her eyes fixed for some reason on the perky incipient breasts of a twelve-year-old, covered by a grimy blouse. My poor darling, how neglected you look, she would say, as if she herself hadn’t been doing most of the neglecting, and at once she would try to placate her. I was sick for a long time, Hemda. I was laid up in the hospital and that’s why they cut off my hair. I had a kidney infection and my face swelled up, and Hemda searched in that face for the familiar scars of chickenpox, two tiny craters between chin and cheeks. You’re not my mother, she declared again, disappointed, you have no scars, and the strange woman fingered her chin, I have scars, you just can’t see them, here they are, and Hemda burst into tears, where is my mother? What have you done with my mother? – and at once she fastened on her father’s scrawny thighs, don’t touch him, don’t do to him what you did to my mother, he’s all I’ve got left now, and the first nights she used to writhe on her bed in the children’s house and see in her mind’s eye how the stranger, the woman who swallowed her mother, was now chewing her father’s thighs as if they were roasted chicken legs, sucking the marrow from his bones, and soon she would tuck with relish into her meagre flesh too, perky little breasts and all.
    Two breasts, two thighs, two parents, two children, and in the middle she herself, more obsessed with her dead parents than with her living children. A son and a daughter were born to her, a pair of children, the expanding mirror-image of the couple who created them, while the third pair in the family, she and her husband, always seemed to her like a transit station between two capital cities, and now when she places her feet on the floor, still cold although outside the air is blazing, she sees them there before her, the first couple, her father in blue working clothes and her mother in a white silk blouse and pleated skirt, the braid adorning her head like a soft royal crown, and they stand on the edge of the lake and smile at her, pointing with their hands towards the calm water, the colour of milky coffee.
    It’s late, Hemda, time to wash and go to sleep, they say, pointing to the lake as if it’s a wash-bowl meant only for her, look at how dirty you are, and she hurries towards them, out of breath. If she doesn’t get a move on the lake will disappear again, the young parents will disappear, but her legs are heavy, sinking into the sticky mud. Mum, Dad, give me a hand, I’m drowning. Tentacles of viscous mud wrap around her waist, drawing her body into the depths of the swamp. Mum, Dad, I’m choking.
    Crawl on your stomachs, she remembers the instructions of the nature studies teacher when they went out to look for swallows’ nests and the mud attacked them, enfolding their legs. Her mouth, open to scream, is filled with compacted earthy mush and she’s choking. Give me a hand, but her parents stand and watch her without moving, smiles on their lips as if she’s putting on an entertaining show for them. Can’t they see she’s sinking, or do they want her to disappear? Her body lands heavily on the floor underneath the window. It seems she’s been taken from this place, as the entrails of the mud eagerly digest her ankles. How welcome she is in the depths of the earth, she has never felt so warm a welcome, but she’s still struggling, trying to hold on to the legs of the table, the time hasn’t come yet, too early or too late, the time hasn’t come yet, and with the last remnants of her fading consciousness she crawls to the phone. Crawl like crocodiles, the man shouted, otherwise you’ll drown. Her parched throat is blocked. Dina, come quickly, I’m suffocating.
     
    Dina is standing motionless before the kitchen window, gazing in astonishment at the pine needles that have joined together, interwoven, stretching out to her like empty hands, begging alms. She has taken the eggs, the