EDA KlUSEOV
A
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"What have I got there?" Gibina asked. Jana had tucked her legs
underneath her, and was watching me, unmoving. Hilda, the fragile one,
had rolled up into a ball in the armchair and seemed completely immersed
in the misery of her love. Gibina leaned over to me across the table. Up
close her complexion was oily and porous and her lower lip trembled. The
other seers fell silent. Sonya, who had brought me here, was looking
through a year-old Neckerman catalog.
"What have I got there?" Gibina asked for the third time.
"You have a cliff,"
r
said, "and in it is firmly fixed a bearded man. You
are standing in front of the cliff, and you want to pull him out of it, or
break the rock, but you aren't able to do it. You will have to go around the
cliff."
"So I won't be with him?" asked Gibina again, up close, and her face
went gray.
"Maybe you will be, but in a different way than you think."
"What different way?"
"Perhaps you will make some compromise."
"Not that," said Gibina irritably. "I've had enough of tinkerings. I told
him: either me, or the wife-I won't be your whore anymore. Now he's
bringing me flowers, but I'm not giving him any. I can be tougher than
you can Imagme."
"He won't ever come for good."
"How do you know?"
''I'm reading it in the grounds."
"And you know for sure?"
"I don't know."
"Then how can you say that?"
"You wanted to know."
"Now Gibina," Sonya said, "calm down, or she won't tell you anything
n1ore."
"But I can't live without him," Gibina said. Big tears rolled from her
eyes and their whites turned red. She wiped her cheeks and eyes with her
palm like a small child without a handkerchief.
"Maybe it's not him," I suggested shyly.
"It's him. You said a bearded man, and Fanda has a beard."
Gibina shook with tears and Jana sat down next to her and took her
by the shoulders and comforted her. She rocked her body from side to side,
while Gibina whined softly like a puppy crying in its sleep.
Sonya stood up and took a big key off a hook near the door. She
showed it to me and we went out onto the balcony. The chestnut lit up
the courtyard.
"You shouldn't have said that," Sonya said just outside the door.
