Wlibgis waves Ulrike over closer, points to Nina’s turquoise trousers, and makes off-off gestures. Ulrike understands: it’s her turn. With her fingers, which have retained slightly more feeling than the others’, she takes hold of the luxury fabric, the cotton satin, and begins with two hands to roll down the front panel, which is made of sturdy stretch jersey. When the trousers are at her ankles, Maimuna comes and on her own initiative lifts and bends Nina’s legs. She grabs the pure white panties and pulls: Mamabel Basic Maxi, in the gusset a panty liner, on the panty liner a tiny rust yellow stain. Nothing else.
Nina’s vulva is also very clean. No bloody mucus and no one coming out either, head or toes first. Her inner labia fold nicely, slightly asymmetrically. The clitoris is covered by a small hood with a slightly teasing lift, and a halo of fine hair covers the mons veneris. Wlibgis, Shlomith, and Polina stare, wistful at the sight. But Ulrike can’t take her eyes from Nina’s stomach. A skin-colored mound like that attached to a human, and it’s supposed to be natural! Where does it all go once the birth is done? Does it collapse like a soufflé, its dreams disturbed by opening the oven door at the wrong time . . . ?
Shlomith carefully places her gaunt hand on Nina’s belly and smiles. The other women nod, murmuring encouragingly: the babies are absolutely safe. But they’re wrong. Nina knows better. She’s stopped wailing, because that’s the kind of person she is. In Nina’s head, someone has already pressed Rewind, then Play.
And so it went: they took each other by the hand and tried to recite the magic word together, but they couldn’t reach the end. Their mouths were open in confusion, and just at that moment some power inside of Nina shifted slightly. It was no normal physical sensation, no complaint of the internal organs: her stomach, lungs, and heart had all long been silent. The babies had been quiet too, but she could almost bear that, because Nina believed (ultimately perhaps stronger than anyone) in the theory called “death”. That was the only sensible explanation when she inspected the issue from a sufficient number of viewpoints. However, the babies had still been inside her. Of that she was sure. She was their tomb. That thought was macabre but also strangely bewitching. They were all of the same substance, one and the same after-worldly dust, and even so something continued—death did not mark the end of EVERYTHING.
The rainbow shimmering soap bubble burst when that power, which only made itself known by moving, shifted inside Nina. It was as if it lurched to the side, leaving in its place an emptiness, the most phantom of phantom pain. Then Nina knew: Little Antoine and Little Antoinette were gone. She had ceased to carry them.
Nina’s imagination burst into flower amidst that catastrophic crisis following the babies’ alleged disappearance. The women stare at Nina, almost angrily. This woman with the distended belly is insisting adamantly that her babies are gone. Are they supposed to believe that? At this, their whole miserable world, stitched together with assiduous chatter and good will, begins to crumble. There are far too many unanswered questions—above all, why? Why are they here, why has Rosa Imaculada faded away from them, and how can fetuses simply disappear from a womb? Why hasn’t the prospective mother surrounding the babies disappeared with her children? In general: where are the boundaries of transition and dislocation? If they are dead, they are strangely untouched, uninjured. They are wearing their clothes (or at least some of them), and nothing much else. And when they really start thinking about all of this . . .
Shlomith lets her tongue sing again. Why, for example, hadn’t the bed the dead person had been lying on come with her, the white mattress the corpse lay on, with its purple-red knee joints, its blotches, its livid palms? Why not the floor that touched the bed where the small, withered body lay, the corpse with the purple back and its purple knee joints? Why not the whole building connected seamlessly to the floor, first one wall, then the second, then the third, and finally the fourth, the ceiling, the corridors, the other levels, and the stairs? Why not the whole hospital where all the incurable patients are brought, the ones for whom nothing more can be done? Why not all the sick? Why not the whole city, the whole country, for example Holland (for some reason, mute Wlibgis is Shlomith’s favorite example)? Why not the whole continent, Europe, and the waters that led to America? Why not the whole world?
Why? Why? Why?
Nina is unique in that she has never surrendered to that line of thought or anything similar. Not even out of peer pressure. Just as she doesn’t laugh if she isn’t really amused, she also doesn’t go hysterical if she doesn’t see any cause for hysteria.
Nina knows that too much thinking is harmful. That simplicity is beautiful. The way to calm a rebellious child howling over the agony of existence and tormenting her parents with whys is through creative diversion. And this is the method that Nina now intuitively adopts to soothe her afterworldly sisters as they approach the brink of mass hysteria. Suddenly, interrupting everything, she says, We’re going to build a world. Right now. Right here.
With the eyes of her
