The silence continues. Polina surrenders to the pleasure of savoring a moment of a sort no one had ever really allowed her before, so quick people were to trade words, first one sentence, soon another, and instantly a third, regardless of the content, just so long as the speech continued and a wicked glint remained in their eyes. But here Polina makes a mistake. She hasn’t given a moment’s thought to how her story will continue, to what she actually wants to say. That she liked drinking wine, cognac, and liqueur at home in the evening?
Polina’s silence has unpredictable consequences. There are silences, and then there are silences. This silence, which gradually spread through space like fire, was of the latter sort. It destroyed the nub of her story, burning it to ashes, despite how appetizing the subject was. Too late Polina realizes that the pleasure of expectation cannot be dragged on forever.
Here on the other side, however, measuring the length of silences is impossible. A minute or a year—who is to know? When nothing around changes, when the sun doesn’t rise or fall, when nothing within any of them moves or makes a sound, when no heartbeat counts pace and no breathing raises their chests, what would they do with time? There is no such thing. It is only a word. A stomach complaining of hunger is a clock. A pulse is a clock. Pain is a clock. Now everything else is gone, everything except words. Conversation, no matter how clumsy it is, no matter how loaded with misunderstanding, maintains time, nurturing them, helping them remain people in some incomprehensible way. Talking, prattling, even arguing: it isn’t a question of entertainment. Words offer them safe chains, something to keep them afloat, causes and effects, although not yesterdays or tomorrows, which have become meaningless expressions, but continuums, continuums all the same: that is what speech gives them. The evergreen groves of memory, from which they can draw both the feeling of the past and the expectation of the future. And if anyone can’t keep up, at least she has the melodies: Shlomith’s deep, somewhat hoarse tones; Ulrike’s bright, sharp voice; Polina’s squeaky, nasal speech; Nina’s soft, slightly childish elocution; and Maimuna’s eager, gushing, and quickly ebbing energy.
Why doesn’t anyone ask Polina anything?
Polina, what triggered your need to drink?
How much did you really drink?
When did you realize drinking is a problem for you?
Did you lose your job?
Did you die of drink?
Silence, this particular silence, is eerie, although no one except Polina seems to notice it. Apparently the others think there is something arresting in this silence, in these mute, dead calm moments that have escaped the orbit of time. Something they want to throw themselves into, despite the fact that with a few small follow-up questions they could turn all of this into the best, most realistic, most tragic, and gut-wrenching story ever told here.
So is the issue, once again, with Polina? Had Polina’s opening, even in these conditions, been too heavy, too dumbfounding?
Polina lets her gaze move from one woman to the next. Wlibgis dozing under her wig, Maimuna hidden under the arm of the sable fur, Nina nodding behind her mound of flesh, Shlomith meditating in the lotus position, Ulrike lying on her side . . . How impolite they are! Good manners mean saying something, even just sighing sympathetically, when someone offers up a confession like this. It is downright indecent that they have all gone silent at once like this, with their eyes closed no less!
Polina feels a familiar gate begin to open. How, with trembling legs, offense shoves its muzzle through the hole, pushes it wide open, and, shaking its numb limbs, joyfully strides onto the flat spring pasture. This isn’t about her alcoholism. This is, once again, about her in persona! A beautiful woman can lob whatever sleaze she wants into the world. “I’m Ulrike from Salzburg, and I’ve been mainlining heroin for five years.” People want to listen to beautiful women, without exception. “I’m Maimuna from Senegal, and I’ve been selling my body since I was sixteen years old.” For the first time in this otherworldly emptiness, a feeling resembling bitterness flickers within Polina. For Ulrike and Maimuna everything is still possible. Even death hasn’t made them equal.
Death.
Death?
Shlomith, Wlibgis, Nina, Ulrike, and Maimuna are all strangely frozen, unusually absent. What if it isn’t that this has anything to do with her, with Polina? Could this all, somehow, be about something much, much more . . . fatal? And what if the women are traveling right now? If their souls have gone wandering? And soon they’ll be gone entirely—like Rosa Imaculada!
Polina makes a lightning-fast decision. She doesn’t want to be alone. She closes her eyes. Not lightly but squeezes shut hard, because instinct tells her to keep them open. But what does she care about instinct? She wants to be where the others are. She doesn’t want to be left to watch them disappear!
Then something begins to appear on Polina’s closed eyelids that deviates from the normal light-gray opacity. It is a yellow color, as if the sun had risen. As if light were coming from somewhere, as if day had dawned, as if summer had begun within her eyes. If you place your hands cupped over your closed eyes, if you turn toward a bright light and then drop your hands, you can get some sense of what began to happen on Polina’s eyelids. When your closed eyelids are turned toward the bright light, at first a yellow glimmer appears, then red splotches, then small, black, oily moving circles. Or even more peculiar things if you rub your eyes. (Eye doctors always warn against this: “Don’t rub your eyes! You can do permanent damage!” But they never tell you what can happen. What would break, what could never
