one
It is impossible to live your life in isolation, cut off from your neighbours. You can escape your mother and father, leave your wife or husband, tell your friends not to call you anymore, disown your child, bid your acquaintances hasta la vista, but one thing is for sure – you cannot escape your neighbours.
He is not sure whether he is more appalled by his own predictability or the fact that others know him so well.
“There you are!”, nonna Sylvia screeches as they both emerge to collect the morning papers.
“No, it’s not me. I’ll tell him to call you.”
“Don’t play stupid, Peppi, better come and look at my computer, it’s been squeaking for a week now. I turn it off and on again, it stays silent for approximately an hour, but then it starts again. We can make pancakes after! Make use of me, I am in the mood today.”
It is a thin line between initiative and harassment. Nonna Sylvia does not know that, but she sure knows how to wake up the dead with that voice that is a peculiar combination of cacophonous screeching, childlike joy and old woman’s intolerance. There is also very little that most people do not find adorable about the old Italian woman who emigrated to the US a long time ago and loves to flaunt her liveliness and temperament (in that dichotomy, Peppi is unlively and untemperamental), but her initiative sometimes goes overboard, as does the smell that often spreads from her house, a smell she does not notice anymore because she is used to it, but others are not and never will be.
Cleanliness is a matter of self-respect, Peppi thinks. He cannot understand how someone did not notice an eggshell or pieces of runaway vegetables that ended on the floor in the cooking process; that is why he rarely agrees to go into her house, and when food comes into the equation, he tries to come up with any excuse not to attend, always doubting the cleanliness of her dinnerware, table and groceries, though she cooks often and invites him even more so.
Per Samuels is thirty-five and works for NASA. He’s got Asperger’s[1], his psychiatrist is more and more certain of it, but claims that it is a mild form of the syndrome, and in any case, it is not that bad because he also believes that half of NASA has Asperger’s. He started going to the psychiatrist because of lack of sleep and occasional bouts of anxiety, but the situation improved when he started going regularly to the pool. He would get there every morning at the same time, so punctual you could set your watch by him. He would swim several lengths, get out, wipe off and go to work.
There are some things Peppi likes more than anything, he enjoys them and considers them his haven. The pool, beautiful weather (about 18 degrees Celsius, perfect for a pleasant walk), fruit yoghurt, writing emails to Christina (a girl he never met in person, only via the Internet), controlling his spending and making lists of all the objects in his apartment so that at any given moment he could know how many things he has. If anyone were to ask him how many paperclips there are in his apartment he could say 264 immediately, without thinking. He could tell that it was not a matter of great significance, but it relaxed him and he did not feel the need to justify his actions as long as they made him feel good.
two
He saw Christina’s photos on a social web and he immediately wanted to let her know how he felt about her face. He liked what he saw in it; he felt that it was not seductive or sensual, which in his head he associated with the wish to manipulate, but a very specific one, maybe even a little rough, almost as if something ancient and raw resided there, something primordial seeking and forging its way from deep inside, emerging through her eyes and the lines of her jaw, slightly more prominent than in other women, giving the face a somewhat tomboyish but endlessly compelling and kind look.
He sent her a very direct email containing all the thoughts her face triggered in him, supposing that it would lead to one of two possible outcomes: she will either understand him from the get-go, or she would peg him forever as a lunatic who unnerved and scared her. At the bottom of the letter he said that he completely understood if she did not want to reply.
Though she found his email strange (no one had ever addressed her in that way) and utterly unexpected, she was hooked, as would probably most women, even loosely, when the bate was nothing more than attention; the fact that someone took the time to analyse her, that someone wanted to get to know her and build a unique impression of her, as if at that moment she was the only one in the world, that she was worth it.
They spoke about so many things. Soon completely addicted to the Inbox(1) situation, they exchanged short emails, just a couple of lines, about ten times a day. He found out that she lived in Odesa, is twenty years of age and studies linguistics. His questions were always about her studies, everyday life and plans, only at the end of the email, or as an aside, he would dare to include a question revealing interest in the intimate details of her life, feeling like he was coercing her, but sometimes Christina herself would start telling him about something that occupied her at the moment. She was often sick and he loved the day when she did not go to lectures and stayed home to do her thing, and write to him more often than usual, mentioning completely irrelevant things such as the names of the medications she was prescribed, the food she ate, informing him about the weather in her city or how many oranges she had that day.
And sometimes, with an abundance of everyday, banal information that only people acutely and irrationally interested in you could find important, she would mention something that was not medicines or oranges, and he would absorb her words as something crucial and almost holy and mull over them, fitting that piece into the bigger picture about Christina, one which he built diligently and obsessively, unable to explain to himself the roots of the obsession with and care for someone whom he had never met in his life, let alone its meaning or purpose.
He just felt that it was important to him to get messages from her, though he was not sure whether, how much or even just how he might be important to her, feeling that it was more likely that changes in her life, rather than his, could put an end to their correspondence.
three
“Take some lettuce or I’m going to give you some myself”, Sylvia warned him.
“I don’t like lettuce”.
“Don’t be stupid, everyone likes lettuce. I know you won’t take any because you think it was not washed properly. I washed every leaf individually, Peppi. You can’t live like that, let me tell you…You have to trust people more.”
“Who says I don’t trust people? I just do not like lettuce, that’s it. For God’s sake…”
“Peppi, men like you will never know enough about life. And that’s not good. What if, heaven forbid, you end up alone, what would you do then? You make enough, but you don’t want to be one of those people who pay for a marriage? You have to toughen up, let me tell you. Take the lettuce, relax and learn to live like the rest of the world. I am a hundred years old and if anything is to be the death of me, it definitely won’t be unwashed lettuce.”
“Thank you for lunch, it was excellent”, he got up to take his leave with the somewhat acerbic comment and headed to the veranda door.
“Silly boy”, Sylvia mutters, letting him go and taking the breadbasket from the table to put the remaining slices back into the bag before they dry up.
He crosses the road from Sylvia’s to his house very quickly, enters his kitchen and takes vanilla yoghurt from the fridge. He tips the bottle and drinks everything left in it, and then goes to take a long warm shower. He feels good in there. Almost as if he were somewhere extra-terrestrial. Holy, alien place.
Wrapped in a big, soft towel, he leaves the bathroom and looks through the window. The sun is low, it will soon disappear behind the horizon. He feels the urge to go to bed and sleep until the next morning, but he does not do it only because he fears that he might wake up around three in the morning, unable to fall asleep again and just as unable to get up and do something else, and he does not even want to think about the potential anxiety or troubled breathing that sometimes catches up with him at an ungodly hour. He’d better postpone sleep, he thinks and laughs at himself and his eternal attempts to optimize physiological processes.
He sits at the computer and tries to work. He has not taken his glasses and, unwilling to get up and go get them, he curses the god in the detail who obviously does not know about his mismatched myopia. He has always had bad vision in one eye which he did not know about until they told him. So the other eye was slaving away for both and he often worked it so ruthlessly, bursting its little capillaries.
He looks at the numbers popping up on the screen. He thinks about how the zero increases the value of the figure next to it, yet on its own means nothing. Four becomes ten times as much when coupled with a zero. How generous of an empty set.
He is shocked to realize he has not thought of the email earlier. He opens it and is surprised by the lines Christina wrote while he was away:
It’s terrible to spend a lifetime without a soulmate. It’s like walking without touching the ground.
He looks at the screen for a while, as if expecting another word to spring up on it. He is still half-naked and wet at the creases, he feels a gust of wind at his back and bare feet, coming from the wide open window; the colours in the yard have become perceptibly darker because it seems it will start to rain in a couple of minutes.
Very stunning image, he types, deeply aware of her words and what is more, the feeling she tried to convey. It is walking in vain, he thinks without writing it and remains seated at the desk for a while longer, his elbows on its surface and eyes lost somewhere along the wall, where the boundary between movement and thought lies for the people whose lives mostly transpire in closed spaces.
four
For a time, they write to one another pretty intensively. He learns about the things she deals with every day, her professors, friends, how there was a small fire in her parent’s house the other day and how her father heroically saved Christian the parrot from it, how her parents might be getting a divorce, but that is not a sure thing, how she would be writing a paper entitled In a time where change is a legacy unto itself, we seem to be running out of legacies, at the proposal of a professor, and how she is worried whether the paper would be up to snuff, about the seasonal fruit to be found in the green market near her house, the best music she heard recently and that she would send him for a listen, in a world about everything and nothing; as if, unlike him, she felt the need to see the clear contours of her life by offering it to someone on the other side of the globe, through connected and unconnected stories and images, while, unlike her, he rarely did that, speaking mainly about the one and the same, not because he felt he needed to protect himself, but because he did not have much to tell. Sometimes, feeling tedious and monotonous, he would apologise for writing about the pool all the time, sleeping troubles, medicines, yoghurt, weather and work, but say that he was very happy about all the information she shared, encouraging her to continue writing to him in as much detail as she wants, assuring her that her letters were a special part of his day.
Not necessarily a rule, but people who can write and write often do live more dynamically than others. In time, the intensity of her letters dwindled, leaving him lonelier than before. As they had a very open relationship, he had no qualms about reproaching her and telling her that he noticed she was neglecting him, to which she responded with an extra line, but he believed she did that out of a strange sense of guilt and probably would not have done it if he had not asked her. He decided to distance himself, suspecting that she had probably found better company, though she was vague about the people she was seeing at the time, a guy who he could not figure out was just a friend or something more.
He started to open the account from which he wrote to her less and less. He was more disciplined about his swimming, got a promotion, watched the sunset from his window imagining that he was descended from a Native American though he had no way of being it, tried to cook, then read about raw food diet and decided to try that regimen.
He liked the word regimen. And the interest in words reminded him of linguistics. One morning, before it was time to leave for work, about three weeks into their correspondence blackout, he wrote to her, telling her that he had made gazpacho.
I’ve made gazpacho. Have you ever eaten anything similar?
How are you, by the way? Long time no hear.
P.
When he got home that night, sure there would be a message from her, he was surprised to find that she had not responded. He was a lot of things, but tedious was not one of them. He tried to take a shower, closing his computer. While the warm water flowed down his head and back, he was thankful for the healing, sweet routine he had always surrendered to before, thankful for his ability to find solace in little things from the terrible anxiousness that often dominated him, or to curl up in the well-known corners of his daily reality, hidden from himself and his own life.
five
He took a few days off in May. He pitched a tent in his backyard and spent a lot of time gazing at the sun. He would wake up at daybreak with the first rays of the sun and stared at it, believing that it imbued him with its energy. Sylvia would occasionally visit him in the tent, trying to ascertain whether he was still sane. He told her not to call him Peppi anymore, but Dichali (Native American for: speaks a lot), at least while in the tent, and it was his little joke, because they both knew who kept silent, and who talked incessantly. Occasionally, he went to her, wearing a single feather in his hair, just to let her know who he was and where he was coming from, he would sit there, and she would give him the vanilla yoghurt she bought just for him, feeling that it was a way to lure him to come and keep her company more often. On several occasions he talked about Christina, and she rolled her eyes saying that that type of contact was not natural and nothing good would ever come of it.
“You need somebody real, Peppi, flesh and blood.”
“Dichali.”
“Sorry?”
“Dichali, that’s my name.”
“Oh, stop acting silly and listen to me. You will thank me one day, when you start living a real life.”
“Real life?”
“Yes, real life, alright!”
“I’m not sure real life is ready for me. If it were, maybe it would have already started happening a long time ago.”
Cooperative to the last, she brought over another bottle of vanilla yoghurt, put her hand on his shoulder and looked wistfully at his back just so, in a way he would not notice; she mourned the life he could be leading if he only knew how or wanted to reach out and grab it. She seemed to understand that most of the time he really was one who speaks a lot, but silently, in his head, so that others cannot hear him, as if somewhere deep inside he was calling for someone to come to his aid, but it is not entirely certain that he would accept the helping hand even if anyone were to offer it.
One morning he came into her garage and discovered a world of dusty, sleeping objects, lying like unburied soldiers, once well-known, but now completely forgotten, undignified, scattered all around, pressing one another or leaning against walls so they do not fall and break into smithereens.
He asked her to join him and they spent hours digging through the stuff that for the most part belonged to her late husband. Most of her stuff was still there in the house, alive and in use.
“I do not have much, Peppi, but I use all of my things. It has always been like that. You’ll never see me have something and not use it, or heaven forbid, leave it to rot like this. These are Larry’s things… I just never wanted to clear them up or give them away. They were his and stayed his. I don’t even know what is in there…”
“Look at this licence plate. Ha, or this bottle. The shape of it… Could I maybe have it?”
“Sorry but no. Though, what do I know… If you want. He probably would not mind my giving it to you. Who drinks from the filthy thing is probably not one of his biggest worries in the great beyond.”
“I do not intend to drink from it. I’m not crazy, it is horribly dirty… I just wanted to clean it up and keep it in my room. And this hairpin, that is definitely not Larry’s…?”
“Will you look at that… It’s mine. I don’t know how it got there.” She rushed to take it and put it in her pocket, rubbing it against her apron. “This goes into the house, of course. I have no idea how it got here. You know, Peppi, things are there to be used… I have no idea why I didn’t give these away or sell them. Out of respect I guess… But when I think about it, maybe I would have shown him more respect if I regularly cleaned these things or gave them to someone who would use and more importantly love them. I am a bit stupid”, she says looking at him like a little girl who has done something wrong, putting a ridiculous accent on the word so that it sounded more Italian than English. “Yes, yes, I have always been a bit stupid… But that’s okay, Peppi, it is up to the rest of you to be smart, right?”, and she starts cackling, coming closer to clap his back or hug him – in any case drag him into one of those situations where the ever warm and smiling person A corners the socially inept and awkward person B who does not relish being touched, clapped, patted, hugged, pinched, even shook by the hand if the circumstances do not strictly demand it.
After twenty minutes of digging though the stuff, over the course of which countless expressions swim across the two faces, the younger male and older female one, Peppi finds a memory jug[2]. Exulted, he offers it to Sylvia for closer inspection, asking her if she is familiar with it and whether she knows when it is from.
“It’s Larry’s. Oh, it is old. Will you look at that…” She takes it and turns it this way and that, carefully peering into every detail and starts to do the one thing she was never good at… staying quiet.
Peppi finds it peculiar to see her inspecting the discovered object in such minute detail; he almost feels responsible for upsetting her and making her sad, if indeed he had. For a moment he wishes he never gave it to her.
“It’s Larry’s. I think he would like this jug to be in the house, but I do not know if I would feel comfortable with it.”
“What’s the problem? We will clean it up the best we can, it won’t be dirty and you can keep it in the house.”
“I don’t want it in the house if it’ll just stand there… It is a bit repulsive, don’t you think?”
“It is not repulsive at all. I think it is beautiful, but do as you wish.”
“You see… Things that just lie around remind me of people who do not live. They do not have to be dead, Peppi… There are a lot of people in the world who are dead before they die. Larry was a bit like that… Especially since he lost his job and later, before he began to vegetate in this house and die. It was always my job to bring life into his life… That is not easy, you know. To live for two, breathe for two, move for two… Sometimes I have the most wonderful memories of him, but sometimes I remember the effort, Peppi, insistence on life, and sometimes he seemed to make it difficult on purpose to defy me… As if he wanted to let me know that all my efforts were in vain because we would all die at some point anyway, as if he could not understand why I don’t just let go, chill, relax a little, like he was annoyed by my struggle, so to say… For which, to tell you the truth, I believe he did not have the strength.”
“Okay, but, you know, I have also noticed that you try too hard. Maybe you should just accept the fact that everything will pass and really just chill…”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I just want to live my life to the fullest, you know? I hope I am allowed that much, sir.”
“It’s okay… Forget it.”
“No, I won’t forget it. And you know what? You are annoying me now. I know what I’ll do… I’ll rip all the knickknacks off the jug, wash it and keep plants in it. It will be used! That’s actually a great idea… Sylvia, you may be stupid, but you are the smartest stupid person of them all”, she told herself with a smile, tapping her finger against her forehead, “And these bits and pieces, I will take them off one by one and send them to his friends who are still alive and who I remember contributing to the jug… That will keep the memory of the old fool alive, right? That’s the right thing, Peppi. Not rotting away in the garage. That’s the right thing to do…”
“Hum… Oh, well, whatever you want… Though I still think it is a pity to remove the things from the jug.”
“And I will still do it… You know there’s a lot of talk about recycling these days, right? It must be doing your head in too. So, nonna Sylvia is gonna recycle, Peppi. And you know what? It will be one of the most useful recycling ventures ever, and it is up to you to figure out why.”
“Because you say so?”
“It’s simple, Peppi… You take the thing that hurts and you recycle it into love, well, as much love as it can yield. That’s how things go. Around and around and around…”
She turns in a rapid circle, rubbing her hands against her apron as if trying to clean them before she continues on her small private archaeological adventure.
A smile lights up her face.
Peppi sits at the entrance and continues to dig alone for a while. He wonders what Dichali might put on a memory jug.
A few days later he takes down the tent and goes back into the house. There was work to do.
six
A year later he marries a woman he has been working with for years. He wasn’t sure if he was in love with her but he believed that it was much more important that she had the patience for his dark moments. He was very committed to her and convinced that he would spend the rest of his life with her if she was willing to spend hers with him.
They worked a lot. They were the kind of couple that leads a life in some sort of an alliance, there to cheer each other on in the parallel projects they were involved in, more than stare into each other’s eyes, entranced, seeing in everything around them a necessary evil that only distracted them from being together, because that was at the top of their list of priorities. The former live in a time that passes, satisfied to have someone suitable to pass it with, while the latter do not think about time except when they really wish to make it stop, frozen in a moment of unadulterated exultation, imagining what it would be like if it never continued on its way.
seven
Then, quite suddenly and for no evident reason, an email came from Christina, asking him how he was and what he was doing. He said that everything was more or less the same, except that he got himself a wife and a more responsible position at work. He asked how she was and whether she was planning to come to the US by any chance to continue her studies. He started to list all the opportunities for future research. She responded that she was planning to go somewhere, she just did not know where yet. She was very surprised by the changes in his life, but she corrected herself later saying that they were not that surprising because that was the way it went with men. She believed that most of them ended up married quicker and easier than women ever did, especially if they had been cultivated first by some other woman, before their wife.
She seemed a little frustrated, but he did not wish to ask her any further questions about her life and current circumstances. She herself did not open up to him like she used to. The conversation lingered on the surface.
It seemed to him that she had returned for the attention, to the place she remembered she found it once, like an animal in the woods returns to its hiding holes for leftover food. But now he no longer wanted to offer it.
As their correspondence floundered for a few more days, forced and not making much sense, he noticed that just the time before she spontaneously stopped to write to him, leaving to search for what she really needed somewhere else.
Peppi continued to go to the pool with the same dedication, to drink litres of yoghurt and take handfuls of medicine, comment on the weather forecast and try to find out what the weather held in store as far ahead as possible. He did his best to spend as much time as he could outside, tired of the walls and screens, with only partial success. He was very busy at work and he had a lot to deal with at home too, taking only occasional food breaks. Sometimes Sylvia brought them her roulades (at one point he started comparing regimen and roulade, trying to figure out which word he liked more, and finally he chose roulade because it sounded almost baroque) which he had started to eat again, having quit the raw food diet, still leaving the parts where he glimpsed an undefined ingredient or Sylvia’s hair at the edge of his plate, horrified by his impulsive Italian neighbour’s sloppiness.
eight
The summer went by, followed by the autumn and the colours in the yard darkened, while the sunsets paled and came earlier and earlier.
One day, as she stretched to reach the flour, Sylvia fell off a kitchen chair and suffered a serious head injury. She died, but like she promised – it was in no way because of the lettuce. Peppi often sat on the porch looking toward her house, thinking how she used to annoy him, though for years back she had actually been the only constant in his life.
Ironically, he felt as if she had abandoned him, though he always believed that he would be the first one to leave the neighbourhood.
Three weeks later his wife woke up and did not find him in bed. She went to the kitchen, looked for him on the porch, but Peppi was nowhere to be found. She doubted that he had already left for work because they always went together, and all of his footwear was neatly stacked in the back of the closet. Nothing was missing.
Not wanting to get too alarmed and firmly believing that he would just appear from somewhere, she went to make coffee. Still, her mood changed in a flash when she saw the message by the sink, written in his illegible hand:
It’s terrible to spend a lifetime without a soulmate. It’s like walking without touching the ground.
She had to sit down and think to try to remember whether she had said something that made him write that; she replayed all of their recent conversations, but could not come up with an answer to the situation she found herself in.
Not sure what to do, whether she should first call a colleague to see if he was with them, go outside and search for him in the neighbourhood, hoping to find him in one of the surrounding streets, or do something different altogether, finally, she hesitantly approached his computer where he spent most of his time and in a sea of opened tabs found a website still bearing the confirmation of a successful purchase of a one-way plane ticket to Odesa, one adult, economy class.
[1] Asperger’s is a syndrome on the autism spectrum, characterized by difficulties in social interaction, often in the form of preoccupation by one specific theme and repetitive patterns of behaviour. Unlike other disorders on the autism spectrum there is no significant delay in language or cognitive development, intelligence is normal, but there are restrictions in nonverbal communication, reduction in empathy, and sometimes physical clumsiness.
[2] Memory jugs – jugs covered in different tiny items – shells, jewelry, keys, badges etc. The culture of making memory jugs, originally from Africa, had a revival in Victorian times and in America in the 1950s and 60s, especially the south.
Translated by: Mirjana Slavkovski
VERNAKERA 