But Wlibgis doesn’t have pockets in her hospital pajamas. Everything, absolutely everything she had once owned had been left in that other world, in the cabinet at the hospital, in her home, or her useless son’s home—some of her things were there too. Although truthfully they usually only spent a short time there before continuing their journey. One rather valuable pocket watch did just such a disappearing trick. Her son had threatened to take it to a pawn shop if she didn’t give him a “loan”. And so she had given him a “loan”. If some memory of her father remained, just one, it could be this beautiful pocket watch with its patina of time, which her father had always taken from his suit pocket to check the time, to ensure that the watch was running, that he himself was on time. That masterwork of antique craftsmanship was, let it be said, a complete contrast to Jean-Philippe’s idiotic Brighella watch, which remained, quite understandably, in its leather box (put simply, Jean-Philippe was ashamed of it). Wlibgis’s father’s watch was old enough, however, that each day it lost about fifteen minutes. Her father was perfectly capable of living with this fact, though. In all aspects of his life he took it into account, standing with his shoes on when others were still eating breakfast.
Wlibgis never saw the watch again.
In her own opinion, Wlibgis has given all she is going to give for the construction of the house. She has given her orange fire-wig, which will of course also become the heart of the new home. That is enough. And the dying games can end now too! Wlibgis is utterly fed up with them. Certainly she participated, listening and nodding, pretending to be interested, but really the whole thing disgusted her. What sense was there in making that sullen teenager gloat over her own end? Was it a big surprise that the girl wanted to believe she was killed out of jealousy? Me, I alone, me, the center of the world. Men mad with passion around every finger!
Wlibgis had never been in a relationship. A man’s stiff cock had entered her a total of three times. Each time it had happened with a different piece of equipment, and none of them had been an experience she would have felt like boasting about afterwards. By accident the last one led to a son, and that was where the game ended, the role play in which she was encouraged to engage by a certain feminist group that proclaimed carnivalistic love. She had participated in some lectures a few times in the early 1980s at the urging of one of her friends at the time. The game proceeded according to a specific pattern. Wlibgis got mildly drunk, alone, and then put on clothes that would make her own mother not recognize her, or, as Wlibgis said to her reflection in the mirror, “If Mom saw me now, she’d roll over in her grave.” Wlibgis was embarrassed. She felt like a transvestite, a lump that had fallen to earth from outer space, with flirty lips and fluttery eyelashes painted on it. She put polish on the squarish nails of her fingers with their swollen joints, and after each smeared, roughly nail-shaped blood-red stroke she took a swig of cognac and allowed the color to dry, until all ten fingers glittered like the flames of hell, and then she was ready to go.
Wlibgis’s lugubrious mien, leaning against the bar sipping a dry martini, miraculously enough aroused a few representatives of the opposite sex. The melancholy emanating from her, the garish clown make-up and appropriately muzzy, uncritical gaze actually drew several contestants. Perhaps it is not completely wrong to say that on these three occasions, when Wlibgis forced herself to go on the hunt, she had her pick of men.
The role play ended, and then came the punishment, the worst possible: a son who hated his mother and a mother who hated her son. And as if Wlibgis had angered all the powers of the cosmos and upset the balance of the entire universe—to top it all off, a cancer grew in her throat.
And what was she left with? An orange-red wig that she doesn’t even get to use any more because these women need a campfire, god damn it, these women need a “heart” for their home. Without a wig, with her pickle-shaped head, her lashless eyes, and her hairless brows, she looks so depressing that it is a veritable miracle that only Rosa Imaculada has thought to dissolve away.
When Wlibgis chose her wig, she truly had no idea what it would end up being used for. But had the wig salesperson sensed it? When Wlibgis lost her own thick, auburn hair (it fell out soon after the chemotherapy began), with a scarf on her head she slipped into a shop whose address she had received from a nurse. The shop had a unique feel. It wasn’t on account of the numerous plastic heads or the false hair on them, and it wasn’t because of the slightly musty, herbal scent (sage? thyme?)—it was due solely to the owner of the shop, who was an altogether extraordinary lady. First of all she was the kind of woman whose age was nearly impossible to guess. Forty or sixty, it was hard to say. Her skin was smooth and clear but simultaneously ancient in some
