And it isn’t long before all the women are hard at work building their home. Peace and good will reign over the land, once again thanks to Nina. Mothers, especially excellent mothers, have a special talent for sweeping big questions under the rug and redirecting the attention of children confused by too much asking. At this task they are more imaginative than anyone else in the world.
N°10. The gift of love. At times it seemed that Jean-Philippe loved his old leather jacket, with the holes worn in the elbows, more than his wife. His feelings toward people were of a combustible nature, alternating between flames and ashes. Symptomatic of this was the way Jean-Philippe took it as his right to enjoy freedom more than was appropriate to his class. However, far-seeing Nina understood that it was best to give her husband a long leash, to a certain point. That point, which was frequently tested, was located unambiguously in the genital area.
Despite it all, Nina loved her husband, for better or for worse. She had a gift for loving that not all do, just as not all have perfect pitch or a poker face. Nina sensed that the gift of love would burst into full flower after her children were born, and so she, with ant-like diligence and determination, arranged the surrounding conditions to be as favorable as possible for the maternal love that awaited her. Nina and Jean-Philippe had an excellent marital contract. They had 220 affectionately decorated square meters in an awfully beautiful house on a lane lined with lindens, and ten thousand euros of IVF babies on the way—love was one thing they wouldn’t have lacked.
THEN THEY MADE A HOME
Nina was right. They need a home and walls around them as protection. Space is unbearable. White causes blindness. White will drive you mad. Another person can also drive you mad, even if there are more than two people, even if there are seven people, six for each to look at in turn. So they need a kitchen. The heart of a home. Sitting around the campfire is beginning to feel insecure; walls behind their backs would do them good.
But where will they get walls? What will be the construction materials? Each has her clothes but not much else. Nothing beyond the odd little thing that happened to come with them when they left; something forgotten in the bottom of a pocket. So they start with the easiest thing and empty their pockets. They all have pockets except for Wlibgis, who is wearing ugly, green hospital pajamas. The pajamas have faded to barely discernible vertical stripes. Really they are prison pajamas. Wlibgis had harbored a bitter hatred for the hospital pajamas when she'd had time to hate, when thinking the garments were dreadful and the buttons most dreadful of all made sense. Yes, those big, white pancakes with their four holes were the worst. Was anything more tasteless than hospital pajama buttons? Sitting on her hospital bed, Wlibgis had obediently fastened them from the bottom up, obediently but angry. “Is this the best they can do?” As if the designer had intentionally made the ugliest possible poison-green clothing so the patients wouldn’t begin to think too much of themselves, secretly becoming prideful and growing lazy as a result of the high-quality, tender care they received.
On the day she arrived at hospital, Wlibgis folded her jeans, sweater, and socks into a nice pile, which was placed in a cabinet with her purse, wallet, and house keys, along with her pocket calendar that contained a picture of her good-for-nothing son’s charming daughter, Melinda, age five. Once the flowers stopped coming, she asked for that picture to be placed on her table. (Have the rest of you noticed this? People bring you flowers if you’re just visiting, if you’re on the mend and returning to the land of the living. And they bring flowers to graves and for caskets. But never for the dying. Whenever a person is dying, as we all are when it comes right down to it, and ceases simply to convalesce, when she begins actively, sometimes even hurriedly, to die, she stops receiving flowers. Flowers suddenly become obscene. Memento mori—that is their nature, being of the same withering substance as the loved one who has now become, to use one popular euphemism, a fighter to the end.) “Would you like to go home?” came the cautious question. Do you want to go home to die? But Wlibgis didn’t; she didn’t want to die alone. She didn’t want to die at all! But she had to die. The cancer was everywhere.
At that point the green hospital pajamas stopped bothering her. They just were, like things just are: the moon and the sun in the sky, worms in the ground, and birds in the air or on the branches of trees or attacking a meat pasty dropped on the ground. The pajamas were swapped for identical, clean ones as needed. The nurses did the buttons, because Wlibgis couldn’t any more, and they always fastened the middle one first. It was the hub, positioned into its stitched, oval hole before tackling the others. It was the central switch, a touch of which closed the patient into her shirt, just so, and then the two below and the two above.
There was Wlibgis with her cancer, properly buttoned and enclosed and well off in every way. Secretly the nurses hoped that the juice splashing would stop, that Ms. Wlibgis would carefully sip her drink with a straw and swallow everything she sipped, that
