Chapter 28 No Longer a Person
NO LONGER A PERSON
Iwas weightlessly relaxed, suspended momentarily in the warm, cosy state between sleep and wakefulness.
I became aware that I had rolled over to Einar’s vacated side of the bed; the pillow and the sheet held faint traces of his male scent and a vague hint of sensual saltiness, a reminder of last night.
I stretched my limbs and wrapped the covers tighter around my body.
Einar had gone hunting early in the morning with Albert and Russ, kissing me goodbye before leaving.
I looked forward to his return, imagining that he would join me in bed again, his body warm despite the cold outside, smelling of snow and exertion.
Then I finally noticed a disturbance in my comfortable limbo, the one that was annoyingly pulling me out of my pleasant, boneless state. Knocking on the door. A voice calling my name.
“Be right there,” I shouted in response, opening my eyes.
“Let me in, Ren, it’s freezing,” said Dave’s muffled voice.
And suddenly I was wide awake. I jumped up and rushed in the direction of the door, only to realise halfway there that I was, in fact, naked, having fallen asleep in Einar’s embrace the night before, too drained and satisfied to put any clothes back on.
Cursing under my breath, I pulled my nightshirt on.
Still extracting my hair from beneath its collar, I finally opened the door.
“What the hell are you wearing?!” Dave asked instead of a greeting.
“Uhm, it used to belong to the lady who lived here,” I explained. “She probably was a bit bigger than me and older, but it’s warm ...”
“Looks awful, darling.”
“Thanks ever so much. Did anything happen to Monika? Is she alright?”
I could hardly keep still. Dave looked tired, like he hadn’t slept all night, but a Cheshire grin true to its name spread across his face.
“She gave birth to a healthy little girl. They’re both well.”
Not a day had gone by since Monika shared the news of her pregnancy with me that I hadn’t pictured that very moment.
In fact, I had spent countless hours silently practising an appropriate way to respond, the way a normal human being would.
Because I knew that I was nothing but a shadowy shell.
I had been turned into a hollow stone, nothing in the void within but grief and jealousy.
The toppling wave of joyous relief that flooded me was the one and only thing I had not prepared for.
I leaned forward with a choked groan, my hands gripping my knees to keep me from crumbling to the ground.
“She’s alright? She did it?” I asked in a trembling voice as I straightened up.
A shadow flickered across Dave’s face, and I searched it anxiously for a sign of anything having gone wrong despite his assurances. And there certainly was something, burrowed in the shallow lines of his rounded brow.
“Yes. It was very quick for a first-time birth,” he said, nevertheless, reassuringly.
“She didn’t need the C-section?”
“No, Ren.” He put both hands on my shoulders, steadying me. “It was a natural birth, and it went as well as it could have, truly.”
“And the baby’s completely healthy too?”
“Absolutely. Screaming her lungs out. She’s the perfect weight, started breathing immediately, and has already nursed. Oh, and shat all over her mum shortly after.”
I snorted, but the rising laughter froze in my throat with the crawling suspicion that there was something off after all.
“Why do I get the sense you’re not telling me something?” I narrowed my eyes at Dave questioningly.
“Because ... Monika has bruises all over her arms and thighs.”
There was a swampy smell in the bedroom, the air moist and heavy with a tang of blood and faeces.
Monika sat perched in her bed, propped on pillows, with her hair up in a messy bun.
She barely took her eyes off her newborn daughter, Ella, resting in her arms. After she told me in graphic detail what the birth was like, we fully exhausted the topic of just how perfect Ella was.
After a momentary silence, I finally broached the subject of Albert’s treatment of her.
“Even if I vant to leave him,” Monika said, “vhere I go and how? There is nowhere. He will find me on Corsica. I can’t sail to Europe just like that vith a new baby.”
Her face was pinched and sallow, with a slightly yellow tinge that made her freckles stand out.
“And do you? Want to leave him, I mean?” I asked gravely.
“I’m not stupid. I know vhat is going to happen now that I’m not pregnant.” She shook her head. “He tell me all the time that only my pregnancy stops him.”
“Stops him from what?” I could already feel the anger bubbling up inside me, but I kept my voice low not to wake Ella up.
“From beat me the vay I’d deserve.” For a split second she raised her eyes, meeting mine. “He say my parents didn’t taught me how behave.”
I scoffed disgustedly and got up to walk around the room because the outrage I felt at her words wouldn’t permit me to sit still.
“I don’t know, maybe he’s right. Before him, I only have boyfriends at school. Maybe I don’t know to do this, this adult relationship. I make him angry all the time, vhat I say or do.”
“Monika, stop.” I paused in my tracks by the window, turning to face her again. “He’s not right!”
“Not before, no. Before he go to jail for this. But now no jail. It’s different.”
I turned away and looked outside. Monika and Albert resided in a two-storey house with a thatched roof and a spacious balcony. The bedroom was on the second floor and allowed for a magnificent view of the village, nestled comfortably in the last remnants of snow.
“No, Monika, it’s not. Most men, most decent men, don’t want to treat their partners this way even if there’s no law stopping them anymore.”
I said this without looking at her to resist the urge to grab her shoulders and shake her. It wouldn’t do to wake the baby, after all. But then I did glare at her as intently as I could have, trying to make her understand, to make her realise.
“Oh, like Einar never do to you ...” She looked back at me pointedly with a mildly accusing expression.
“Never!” I said emphatically, but shrank away, disturbed by her expression, which conveyed her doubts clearly even though she said nothing.
She merely pulled Ella closer, rearranging the baby in her arms, and looked back at me pointedly over her lightly freckled, narrow nose.
Could she have ever overheard something that she misinterpreted, perhaps?
Or seen a stray contusion somewhere on my body and mistaken the mark of passion for something sinister?
The very thought made me want to disappear on the spot.
And yet, careful as Einar and I had been, it was not completely impossible for her to have unwittingly breached our privacy only to take things wildly out of context.
An uncomfortable silence ensued, during which even our soft breathing sounded loud. I fidgeted with the strings of my sweatshirt, trying to think of anything to say that would allow me to extricate myself from the situation and leave. My mind was blank, however.
“Can Einar talk to Albert?” Monika asked after a few minutes had passed.
I exhaled deeply with relief.
“He already has, dear. I asked him to do more than just talk, but he said he wasn’t willing to interfere more forcefully.
” I smiled at her apologetically. “Then I spoke to others, too. Fin when he was still with us, Russ, and Dave ... but it’s Albert we’re talking about. No one wants to go against him.”
Monika nodded, and a few strands of mousy hair escaped the constraints of her clip.
“Oh, vhat to do? I don’t vant that Ella grow up like me, parents always fighting. Vorse than me. My dad never hitted my mum.”
“We’ll think of something. We have to.”
Ella stretched luxuriously and opened her eyes, emitting a noise much like a little duckling’s quack. Hot wire cut into my heart at the sight.
“Dzień dobry moja ksi??niczko.” Monika’s face lit up, the harried expression gone entirely at the sight of her baby.
Immediately after her face crumpled, though, and tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Darling, what’s wrong?” I asked, mildly panicked, engaged as I was in a furious battle with tears of my own.
“I vish she can have a normal, safe life. Like before. Toys and school and friends. Vhat if she hates me? For bringing her to this hell?”
I laid my hand on hers. It was clammy, and the bundle of clothes in which the baby was swathed squirmed.
The infernal wire in my chest tightened like a noose.
Outside, the sun hid behind a cloud, and the modern whiteness of the room suddenly seemed bleak and dull, rather like a hospital room.
But hospital rooms were the last place I needed my mind to wander into.
“She won’t,” I tried to say encouragingly, but my voice was brittle like shards of shattered glass. “We will keep her safe and bring her toys whenever possible. And there are and will be other children. And in time, the world may actually return to what we were used to. Or close enough.”
Monika looked up at me hopefully, lighting up.
“You think?”
“I do. And so does Einar. But if it doesn’t, then this world will be normal for her. There is happiness to be had even now. I am myself much happier than I was before the pandemic. Perhaps she, too, will be more content this way than she would have been in the pre-pandemic times.”
“I miss before life so much all the time. You really don’t?”
“Hell no.” I shook my head vigorously. “Of course, I do miss what family I had, my friends, and even Petr. And hot showers and the comforts. But I don’t miss all the .
.. nonsense. The ads, the social media narcissism, mortgages, and job contracts, and societal expectations, and man-made conflicts over money.
It never made sense to me, everyone talking as if we lived in the best times in history, as if human life was at the peak of what it could be.
And yet, an increasing number of people had to be on pills for anxiety or depression just to cope.
Everything used to feel like a competition in who gets to live the most perfect-looking life. ”
I paused to take an agitated breath. Monika’s brown eyes were very round as she looked at me with something akin to concern. That didn’t deter me from carrying on breathlessly,
“The Outbreak ended all that. And god, isn’t it liberating!”
“You hate your life, and so you’re happy that now everybody hates their life too?”
I blushed. But before I could come up with a sensible reply, Ella started crying, and Monika looked as though she wanted to do the same. She said nothing while nursing the baby.
“You vant to hold her?” she asked me just as I readied myself to leave.
And I was a hollow stone once more, a pillar of salt. My practice of normal human reactions would not come amiss after all.
“Of course, I would love to,” I lied with a wide, brilliant smile as the hot wire inside of me sliced my heart into a dozen bleeding pieces.
Everybody knows that unrequited love is a gut-wrenching matter, but it is love that is, by its basic premise, unrequitable that is the real tragedy.
Loving someone who has died. Yearning for romance whilst living in solitude.
Knowing yourself capable of bottomless parental affection for a child you can never have.
The object of such love is simultaneously like a phantom limb, something that is missing yet always there, and like a tumour that grows and grows with pain, a malignant hardening of an emotion that would have been beautiful if only it weren’t forced to stagnate inside you, proliferating like diseased cells until it becomes your destruction.