Hair Everywhere Read online

  And here it is. It says that to make love is the same as to be an animal. It says we must all avoid this so that we can become more spiritual. So spiritual so that we will no longer have to be born again. What if we all became so spiritual that no more children are born? How would the last person on earth, for whom it was still necessary, be reincarnated? How can I give birth to my mother, if I don’t have sex?

  A Rude Little Girl

  ‘Fuck your mother!’ says the tall footballer from the opposite team to my sister at the school sports day.

  My sister grits her teeth, wrinkles her nose and punches her right in the middle of her face. She gets a red card and mother’s hospital smile.

  ‘She’s not going to insult you,’ says my sister, and mother smiles. Outside there are little sparrows and wasps, shining little rear-view mirrors and fragrant little cakes. Sunshine and just a few little clouds.

  Spirits

  The parquet floor had started to creak more than ever before, so we called the priest to come and cast out the spirit, whoever he was; out of the house. Grandma said:

  ‘Besides creaking, it’s knocking on the door at night! And turning all the pans upside down in the kitchen!’

  The priest took out a special prayer book. He uttered some words, sprinkled all the furniture with Holy Water and as he was leaving, he said:

  ‘Please, keep quiet about this.’

  Mum said she thought the cast-out spirit was Grandma’s Mum. Grandma said that was ridiculous because she had been a very religious woman:

  ‘She died with a cross on her breast, you saw that yourself.’

  ‘But she died in this house!’ Mum continued.

  Grandma believed it was our late cousin because he didn’t care about God, and he got sick and died at Christmas time. I said it was a woman with no skin and a man with needles in his head, but they were invisible.

  Dad kept quiet about all this.

  The Doll

  There was once a doll. A white porcelain face and a coloured, flowery satin dress. During the day she sat in the middle of the double bed. At night, on the armchair. I had never seen this doll before.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me play with her?’ Mum would ask.

  ‘It was just for decoration,’ Grandma would answer.

  There was this belt, too. A wide, brown leather belt. Day and night, it hung on the hook on the back of the door. Mum did not want to touch this belt, and neither did she want it to touch her.

  Chocolate Pudding

  Today she is sitting on the bench in front of the hospital, smoking a cigarette. She says she is not cold, and that she would like to eat chocolate pudding. I used to steal it from my brother and sister when they were little. Mum would say:

  ‘Chocolate pudding isn’t for grown-ups!’

  In Room Number 135, a tall man is sitting next to the bald girl’s bed, and directing good energy at her. Mum does not believe in energy healing. She has a syrup made from delicate and expensive mountain plants. And chocolate pudding. Natural and good. She is not going back to her childhood. She simply cannot swallow anything harder.

  The Old Man who Pissed his Pants

  There is a man who goes out onto his balcony every day. He lives in every town. He lives alone. He does not like to go down onto the street because the braver children shout after him that he has pissed his pants and that he smells. His bones and muscle give him poor support and he can’t run after them. What he wants more than anything is to hit them with a thin stick. When he used to go to school, children did not sue their teachers in Court. IN those days everyone had the right to participate in children’s education.

  Timid and imaginative groups of children think up stories about how he eats cats, how he broke the postman’s fingers with his door, how he can be heard at night speaking to the devil. Once, while he was sitting on the balcony, they pointed their yellow, pink and blue plastic water guns at his black clothes. He became angry. He called their mothers wanton whores. Just like that young woman who lived with her son in the apartment of the man who had missed the step once and for all. When anyone asked that unfortunate neighbour why he had taken her into his apartment, he would say:

  ‘Because the whore listens to me.’

  And in the end, it seemed to me that the old man wanted to tell the story of his life, even if only to a whore.

  Massacre in Colour

  This war, it seems, really happened. There is a docu­mentary film on the TV, with footage from 1941. Unlike all previous versions, this massacre is in colour. A boy in a greenish shirt is hugging his mother. She has an orange dress and a rifle on her shoulder. A little further on, lying on the floor is a body dressed in a brown top and brown trousers. A skinny dog is sniffing at it. He is the only one who is black and white.

  The next snapshot shows an aeroplane dropping bombs that are falling somewhere down below, into a thick forest. In the picture you can’t see that the forest hides squirrels, owls, foxes, people and our vision. When the bomb reaches the ground, it won’t matter whether the man down there was a good teacher. Or that he exchanged his coat for a sack of potatoes. Or that the slaughter of the squirrels caused God-knows what disruption in Nature. The green trees survived.

  And now here we are, staring at such trees through the window of Mum’s room.

  Fiancé

  There weren’t many good-looking young guys at second­ary school, or even outside it. From the window I watched them chasing the ball and my adolescent sadness. It seemed to me that God, my fiancé, was somehow too old. So I left Him to wait. Until I too became old and then we would have things to talk about.

  Grandma’s Life

  ‘I used to have a donkey, whose cheek was pierced by a grenade so that everything he put in his mouth would fall out through the hole. And later he was so hungry he started to gnaw his own stall! What do you know about hunger?! About life?! War?! My sister, God rest her soul, hid a Jewish girl under her skirt in the camp!’

  ‘You could hide a tank under such a big skirt!’ my brother would say.

  ‘Just you make jokes about it! God forbid you would ever have to suffer what I lived through!’

  Grandma is eighty-seven. And has at least three serious illnesses.

  Mum (Wants to Come Home Again)

  When Mum is lying in bed with no make-up on, then she becomes fractious. When she talks to me, I stare at the tip of her tongue. It’s white. I tell her to write everything down on a piece of paper. Then she writes how she needs painkillers, which nurses are rude, or what she has eaten that day. When she asks me, writing on the paper, if she will be going home for the weekend, I am both happy and unhappy. But that decision is not mine to make, it is up to the white coats of Olympus who shake the neck of my faith.

  They are still saving money on the lighting in the corridors.

  Death on a Gentle Wind

  I can see all those pretty gardens from the balcony. Benches on which no one sits. Flowers watered by who knows whom. Calm boats on a calm sea. Cars that glitter. The only things moving are bed sheets hanging out to dry. Sheets, and an old man gently tapping around his red veranda above the red garage.

  A little bird lies dead on the balcony. A piece of eggshell is stuck in his thin blue neck. I touch him with a little stick. He doesn’t have any feathers.

  Bartholomew

  One day, when I was old enough to move not far away from my family, I decided I didn’t want to enter a silent house every day: with no one there to talk to. So I went to the shop and bought a male Australian budgerigar. A common thing to find on some Australian bushes and over here in cages. He ate mostly different coloured seeds and twisted his little body around the links in the curtain rods. When he began to shake and sneeze, I took him to the budgerigar doctor who prescribed him antibiotics and said:

  ‘Once they get sick, it’s hard for them to survive.’

  I took him home and with a syringe I squirted the medicine, mixed with water, into his beak. Then I put him, together
with the cage, on my desk and sat in front of him. When he fell from his perch, I would put him back. I picked him up many times, until I fell asleep in the chair. In the morning he was back to normal.

  Then I bought a girlfriend for him. A female Aus­tral­ian budgerigar. I called her Fiji. She was the dominant one and often hit him. Soon afterwards, he died.

  His name was Bartholomew. I couldn’t think of a shorter name.

  The Lady with Cancer

  The bed of the lady with cancer is older than Mum’s. No one visits the lady with cancer. Except on the weekend when they come to take her home. They don’t live in this wet town.

  The lady put a white doily on the table, and on it a plastic Madonna. You can unscrew Our Lady’s head with her halo and then pour some Holy Water in her body. The lady with cancer likes pear juice. She has a red bathrobe and a tumour that affects only women. I am sure she would like Mum if she could talk with her.

  The lady was not in the room today, so we turned the radio up and opened the window. That doesn’t stop Mum’s hair from falling out.

  Hair in the Drain

  When Mum opened the drain in the bathtub and pulled a lump of hair from it, she said to me:

  ‘Look, this is your bloody hair! I’ll cut it short.’

  In her wet hand were long brown strands, once adored, now loathed.

  ‘It’s like having a dog in the house!’

  Once we did have a dog in the house. I found him in front of the school and brought him home while Mum and Dad were at work. He ate all the soup and all the bread. He was big and hungry, as was Dad that evening. So he had to go.

  Hair Everywhere

  Hair is everywhere. On the pillow. On the floor. In her hands and mine. We talk about coloured Indian scarves. About thick soup. Bad weather. Discipline. We talk about dry skin. We talk about everything, but still we feel sad because of the hair. It is a symbol of the greedy animal in her head. Her skin is flaking off her too. When she changes her vest, tiny flakes waft through the air.

  Grandad

  Grandad a liked his ceramic mustard pot. Once during a game we broke it and had to buy him another. He liked to buy all sorts of things from Czechoslovakian and Polish people at the market place. That’s how he bought a Czech lock for which not one locksmith in the city could make a key. He also bought an object that was supposed to thread needles. Grandad liked scrambled eggs, wine with water, the card game Briscola and one or two silk ties. More than anything he liked to annoy Grandma, even the day he died, when she was not at home. He lay down on the bed and departed. After his funeral, Dad and I were smoking in the kitchen. Mum and Grandma were crying, each in her own room. The others were sitting, eating smoked ham, drinking beer and telling jokes.

  Then Grandma said:

  ‘I’ve been left all alone.’

  Newspapers

  It says in the newspaper that the hospital doesn’t have enough money to treat very sick people and that because of that the director is going to resign. It also says that some skier fell into a hole in the snow while training, broke her ribs, lost consciousness, got up and then won the bronze medal in some competition. There are also photos of people in the obituary section; people who lived in this town until a few days ago, and I never even met them. Under the photos, it says “suddenly” “tragically”, “after a short and severe illness”. I don’t know what to do with that. I mustn’t think about it. From tomorrow, I shall begin to shower Mum with shining balls of light.

  Radio Show

  Mum normally likes to listen to romantic rock bands. When my brother and I got to know which was the “record” button on the cassette player, we decided to have our own radio show. We accepted musical requests, talked about school matters and activities outside school. We recorded all this over Mum’s longhaired rock heroes.

  Then one day she wanted to listen to her favourite band. She put the cassette into the cassette player. What she heard was:

  ‘Hello! This is the radio station for kids and grown-ups! Today we are going to talk about freshwater turtles…’

  Mum (Listens to the Radio)

  Mum is listening to the radio in her room. It’s too loud. It bothers the others. They say this is not the place for it. She doesn’t care. She adjusts the stations, carefully chooses the songs. She doesn’t like it when the presenters are talking.

  The lady lying next to Mum has a straight smile. She says:

  ‘It’s a nice song, just a little too loud.’

  Mum doesn’t hear this. She puts her cigarette and lighter in her pocket and we go to the toilet. We smoke behind the closed door. When someone knocks, we shout: ‘It’s occupied!’

  After that, we return to the room and we smell a little. Then Mum says that the radio is no good anymore. That the battery keeps running out.

  Visible

  ‘Visits time is over, can’t you see I’m washing the floor!’

  ‘Lady, don’t be angry just because you have a job.’

  In the building they call the New Building, people walk around in their bathrobes and dirty the floor with their slippers, their saliva and their fallen hair. They don’t clean up after themselves. They wrinkle the sheets; spill fruit juice; wet their beds. Sometimes they cry, and sow bad energy around themselves. They have been given brochures in which it explains how to manage their illness.

  The people who visit the people in bathrobes come every day to dirty the floor with their feet. And today it rained.

  Going to the Doctor’s

  There was a time that I liked going with Dad or Mum to the doctor’s. He would give me a prescription for cough syrup, pretzels, special soup and rice. For sick children, he would prescribe bed rest, watching television, someone to feel my forehead, and many good wishes. I liked having a virus. I would be given the little sticks for looking at my throat, too. I liked to have a sore throat! My throat would swell so much that they kept me at home away from the sick world, protected by perfumed blankets and kisses. The only thing I didn’t like was chickenpox. They multiplied in the light so you had to sit in the dark. Usually alone.

  The Home for Hanging

  When I was born, Dad broke the chandelier. By hanging from it by his hands. Afterwards Grandma often said that men, when they are in high spirits, act strangely. She would say:

  ‘That’s what men are like! ‘

  Once a young ambulance driver man received a call. A lady in the five-story building had hanged herself on a coat rack. That’s how tiny she was. That’s how sick of everything she was. Just like an old raincoat she hung at the entrance to her drab apartment. Grandma said:

  ‘Women don’t hang themselves for no reason.’

  In Mum’s hospital room there are no hooks on the wall, so we often sit on her bed in our jackets and coats.

  Brother

  Mum once found five little books in my brother’s possession: the kind that are sold by the bald Hare Krishna people, He said their cakes were very nice and that he liked one of their dark-haired girls with glasses.

  ‘Who is that girl?’ asked Mum. ‘We’ll go to see her parents right now!’

  They went to her parents’ place. Then all of them went to see the bald people. They told them that kind of recruitment was illegal and to stay away from the children, with their little drums and xylophones.

  Mum never baked cakes.

  She baked her own hot words.

  Grandma’s Dream

  ‘I dreamt about teeth.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘You don’t have any teeth.’

  ‘In my dream I do.’

  ‘Witch.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said you’ll be rich.’

  Death on Other Occasions

  Once in the newspaper it said that three Japanese fisher­men had been fishing in the middle of the ocean and that a cow fell from the sky and killed them. The cow had been dropped from a plane flying directly above them. And two more the same way! They were to
o heavy for the plane to fly properly. The unfortunate Japanese drowned, and the bizarre ugly fish continued to circle around, down there in the darkness.

  That happened so far away it was hard to believe.

  Instead of the newspaper I prefer to read Kharms, because with him everything comes, passes and then goes away forever. I read Kharms, Murakami, Agota, Houellebecq and Carver all together because I can’t concentrate on each of them separately. I lost the ability to meditate spontaneously. And five kilograms.

  It happened so quickly it is hard to believe.

  Hamster

  One day Mum gave me money to buy tempera paints for school. I bought a hamster. I put him in an empty glass aquarium and watched him gathering up carrots and green lettuce and carrying them into the corner. When he finished his work, he climbed up over the stacked vegetables and ran across the carpet. Mum screamed:

  ‘A mouse!’

  ‘It’s an ornamental mouse,’ I said.

  We gave the ornamental mouse away after that, to a girl who had another such ornamental mouse. One morning, that one swallowed him.

  Politely Bad-Mannered Daughter

  ‘Put your hand over your mouth when you yawn!’ Mum says this a hundred times, and I yawn and yawn. I swallow Mum, the sun, the salt cellar, the sea, the mountains! My lips crack. I sing while yawning.

  Once an old lady woke up and yawned so widely her mouth stayed open. All agape and in shock, she knocked on the door of her nearest neighbour. She was so embarrassed to go out in the street that the neighbour called the GP to come to her, to readjust her mouth. Afterwards, she yawned with extreme caution.