newfangled ideas, the Oneidans believed in eating each other’s food and fucking each other’s partners. Land of the free, home of the depraved.”

It occurs to her that he hasn’t asked her why she’s here. Nor does he appear to be politely concealing curiosity. She wonders if he’d be happy to sit here all day and keep slinging bullshit in her direction. “I’m thinking about killing myself,” she says.

“Of course you are. And you came to see me because I attempted suicide when your mother was young. That’s a real gripe of hers, I’m sure she’s mentioned it more than once.”

She has to hand it to the old man, he’s quick on his feet.

He gestures toward her. “All done?”

It takes her a moment to realize he’s asking if she’s done eating. “Yes.”

He carries plates, cups, and cutlery to a small sink next to his cooking counter, squirts soap, turns on water. He says over his shoulder, “If you want me to talk you out of it, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“I don’t want you to talk me out of it.”

He rinses, dries, and stores the dishes away behind a door under the counter in a matter of seconds, sits back down at the table. “So what then?”

“I want to know why you did it. And whether you failed on purpose.”

He gives her a small smile, and himself a little scratch on the beard. “I could say it’s none of your business.” The bottom lids of his eyes rise slightly, making his gaze look more intense, maybe “piercing,” owing to his light blue irises. Mette dimly imagines that some people would find this mesmerizing. “But I’m not sure that I would mean it. I like the way you talk openly about suicide. I don’t share the Christian attitude that it’s a shameful thing. On the contrary, it’s the greatest freedom we humans possess, our only god-like power. It’s no surprise that a wannabe omnipotent bully like Yahweh would proscribe it. And capitalist societies happily go along with the taboo. Underpaid workers must stay at their posts. Finally, most people want to believe that suicide is shameful, or a betrayal of loved ones, or an act of cowardice, because the real cowardice is that they don’t want that freedom. Their terror of it shows what a profound freedom it is.”

He pauses. Mette doesn’t say anything.

“To answer your second question first, I didn’t fail on purpose. I didn’t fail at all, and if your mother says I did, she either doesn’t know what she’s talking about or she’s being malicious. Seppuku is supposed to be completed by an attendant, who has taken a vow to perform that duty. My attendant was your grandmother, Lauren, and she broke her vow.”

He pauses again. He seems to be waiting for an objection. Mette has no interest in making one.

“I will say, however, that I’m glad she did—I mean, break her vow. Because my decision to kill myself was a mistake.”

“Obviously,” Mette says.

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugs. “You’re still here. Despite plenty of opportunities to kill yourself later. You’ve clearly decided it’s better to live.”

“That’s right. For me.”

“Of course for you. It says nothing about me.”

“That’s right. But maybe you’re confused in the same way that I was, so let me continue.”

“Please.”

“I was confusing the desire to suffer with the desire to die. Many people make this mistake. They want to suffer, and death looks like the biggest dose of suffering available. But it’s nothing of the sort. Suffering has to be experienced, whereas death ends experience. Cutting is a far more rational response to this desire, and I applaud the kids who thought it up. Cutting is a modern phenomenon because modern life inflicts far less physical pain on the individual than many people want. On the other hand, there are people even in modern life who are unwillingly suffering, either physically or mentally, and they want to end that suffering. For them, suicide is rational.”

“Why did you want to suffer?”

“Why does anyone? I thought I deserved it. I had let people down. I’d tried to lead them to a better way of life, and I’d failed.” He glances out the west window. “The sun’s about to go down, let’s take a walk.”

The old man likes to give orders. But Mette came to him for help, so it’s reasonable to accommodate him. She puts on her jacket and shoes and follows him out the door. Circling around the mill, he steps down to the stony beach and calls for the dog, who comes racing along the waterline. The old man fondles her ears and turns west. Lila heads in the same general direction, dipping in close to sniff a hand or back of knee, then swinging wide to explore tufts and hollows, tail high and happy. The sun is a bleary smudge behind thin clouds, hovering just above the sea line. The ice, Mette now sees, stretches away from the shore for only about fifty yards, even though the water in the Baltic is of low salinity and here quite shallow. It has been a mild winter, on the whole.

“Any suicide that’s painful or disfiguring is likely an expression of self-hatred or shame, rather than a true desire to die,” he says. “People with terminal illnesses who decide to kill themselves don’t blow their brains out or slit their wrists, they take an excess of painkiller and tie a bag around their heads. Your mother has always been angry at her mother for not fighting the cancer. But Lauren made the decision to end her suffering. That’s a healthy attitude. When people tell you that you should continue to suffer so that they won’t be ‘abandoned,’ or ‘heart-broken,’ or whatever manipulative formulation they choose, they’re being selfish. That this isn’t obvious to everyone is a tribute to how effective the propaganda against suicide has been.”

A small hole has opened in the cloud cover right at the horizon, and as the sun’s full diameter passes it,

Вы читаете The Stone Loves the World
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