618
PARTISAN REVIEW
and leave the
milk
behind. But you never let it rest and you want to resolve
it honestly and justly. Men aren't like that. It doesn't matter to him, right?"
she turned again to me.
"I really don't know," I answered, thinking of my husband, who was
probably with his lover right then. Will it ever occur
to
him that he
promised me fidelity? Gabina came into the room carrying plates, on
which were skillfully arranged potato salad and fried meat.
"Everyone has to eat," she said, pushing aside the cards laid out for love.
In their place she put white plates with gold edges.
"If only one of us would find a decent man," she said, brushing away
with her elbow the hair stuck to her square forehead.
"Lighten up now, girls! Do you know what an old woman
told
me the
other day while standing in line for liver? The best is yet to come, she said,
because the most beautiful love in life is autumn's. You're old enough not
to suffer, but just to enjoy it and not stake your whole life on it. And when
the old lady talked about love she crossed herself, as if she were going past
a church. And do you know how old she was? Eighty-six!"
We ate the hot meat and the cold salad and my teeth shivered as they
sometimes did during lovemaking. Most likely I gave all I had to my hus–
band. Now that it's already too late, I know. Maybe I should have tried
harder, but I also know that trying wears out love more than anything
else.
While Gabina was cleaning the table she asked who would bet a bot–
tle of wine that Fanda would come the next day wi th an even bigger
bunch of flowers than last time. Hilda and Jana voted in favor. I abstained,
but it looks like Gabina will definitely win that bottle.
Gabina took the upside-down coffee cup and handed it
to
me. I felt as
if I were emerging from the bottom of a pond. On the bottom there were
green runners and half-rotten roots, thickly intertwined in a dark green
muck. I came up, stirring up mud which rose around me like a widow's
veil, and broke the surface with my head. In front of me I saw a big head
floating in gray smoke, with a face pale and pitiful, full of expectation and
uncertain hope. Gabina was already almost drowning, but she held a coffee
cup and she was handing it to me. The evil water-spirit Vodnik was holed
up in the muddy bottom of the pond. She couldn't find him and give him
her soul-that's why she was giving it to me. Where can my husband be?
Is he collecting souls, or only bodies?
"What have I got there?" Gabina demanded.
I searched the coffee grounds and tried to erase all my thoughts-iron
them into the solid whi te cloth of my nund.
Only
then
could
I search for
some story or event in the pictures. A beginning or an end, a chain of cause
and effect. People create the causes, and then wonder at the effects.
