Oneiron

each woman dumps out the contents of her pockets. Total: two crumpled tissues, a silver ring that Hanno had bought for Ulrike, a ring that didn’t quite fit (Hanno imagined Ulrike’s fingers were more slender than they are—they are slender, but not that slender; her ring finger diameter is seventeen and a half millimeters), a frayed piece of string, a two-euro coin, three ten-cent coins, one fifty cent, one dollar, one greatcoat button, a lighter and some shreds of tobacco (Ulrike tries to strike the lighter wheel, but it only scrapes without sparking, and no flame appears even though the reservoir is still halfway full); a mobile phone (also Ulrike’s, from the large back pocket of her corduroy trousers)—“1 missed call”, but the buttons don’t work, the phone won’t do anything no matter what she pushes, and the phone clock has also stopped at the same mysterious moment as Ulrike’s watch: 21:03—a wine cork that is red on one side, which is Polina’s, along with lip balm, a slightly rusted flat snake forged of iron, which is Maimuna’s totem animal, and a colorful superball you can fit in your fist, which is Shlomith’s. The pockets of Shlomith’s long black caftan are like the pouch of a Tasmanian tiger or the beak of a pelican: you can find all sorts of things in them; in theory, half the world could have fitted in there, but now all they find are the super ball, a measuring tape, and a small pipette bottle. Was that what poor Shlomith had used to eat her daily meal, one drip into her mouth at a time? And what would it have been, tepid broth or only water?

The women donate their possessions to the common pile next to the wig and the sable fur sofa. Do I need to give away my gold teeth? Shlomith mutters, but only Polina understands the joke, and it doesn’t amuse her in the slightest. Wlibgis smiles in satisfaction and waits for even bigger sacrifices: disrobing. Soon she won’t be the only one who has been forced to give up something too personal, something that has functioned as a cover for something esthetically indecorous. Few women pranced around in society with their heads shaved completely bald. There was that beautiful Irish singer, who had a symmetrical face, doe eyes, and a perfectly shaped skull, and there was that athletic actor who killed space creatures. But most of them needed hair much more than breasts. Without their hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows, they looked like death’s own. People averted their gazes and wished they didn’t exist. And soon they wouldn’t. Soon they would all die. All except her, Wlibgis. She hadn’t died. Of all the miserable denizens of the terminal ward, she alone had avoided death. She had been promised a deep, blue sleep and eternal peace, and what had she received? A bright, white endlessness, constant arguing and hullabaloo. Where was her death?

Wlibgis’s downturned lower lip, the smothering of her initial good mood under a somber blanket of disappointment, goes unnoticed by everyone. Nina is caught up in her work, and everyone else is enjoying watching her. She places all the objects in a half circle in front of the wig like a fireguard. Even the used tissues she sets out with care, because everything has value. Then it is time for the base layer. Clothing off! Nina cries. The clothes are to become the walls, the boundaries of the rooms, and boundaries are what they need now, because without boundaries a person becomes a panoply of pirouetting panic. Like a child who gets everything she wants. For whom no verbal edifice of opposition is erected.

Wlibgis, who now stares at Nina’s belly as she kneels, had known even before her son was born how not to act with children. The lines have to be drawn clearly. She raised her son with this knowledge as her guide, although Wlibgis found it was difficult on her own. Without a companion she had to say NO with the force of two people. She had to set herself (sometimes quite literally) crosswise to the little hoodlum. You do not go there. You do not touch this. You do not do that. The prohibitions never had any effect. Wlibgis screamed herself hoarse yelling NO NO NO, and her son just threw himself against her with all the force of a little boy, then of a larger, sixty-kilo youth, and then a young, gangly adult. What had gone wrong? Her ancient, now rather hoarse NO worked even more poorly in the final years than when the boy had been two, three, five, seven, eleven, fifteen, and twenty years old. Wlibgis didn’t know how to say a “no” as a suggestion to another adult who was as stupid as could be and utterly at the mercy of evil. He just continued crossing all the lines, and she got the bruises. His requests for money were accompanied by a twist of her arm. When he went to prison, all she felt was an astonishingly deep sense of relief.

But because Wlibgis was from an upstanding family, the boy must have taken after his father. Whom Wlibgis didn’t know at all. What kind of profile could she draw of a man who had wanted to lick the soles of her feet? Who had wanted to take her in the bath after being urinated on?

When her son was in prison, Wlibgis gradually worked up the courage to go out in the yard to smoke. The move from the corner of the stove, out from under the range hood, first to the kitchen window, then to the balcony, and finally out under the maple, took time. But in the spring, when she finally stood under the nearly leafless branches, under bursting flower clusters, utterly ignorant of the exceptional versatility of this noble tree, she felt a wondrous triumph. (Everyone knows about maple syrup, but how many have tried maple soap? This palmatisect deciduous tree is