Martina Vidaić

Bedbugs

Martina Vidaić

Translated into English by Ellen Elias-Bursac

The eggs boiled and I counted off the seconds to myself. One hundred. One hundred fifty, Two hundred. If only she'd take the eggs out in the next thirty seconds, I thought. Two hundred twenty. Two hundred twenty-five. Two hundred forty. If I were to take them out now, I thought, she and I would be saved. It still wasn't too late for them to be soft enough, if I were to say: "Do you remember that time during Carnival week..." And she'd flush red, brighten up, and admit: "Of course!" And then Jere, snarky but well-meaning, might add: "Ah, you two..." And then together we'd laugh and take the time to retell how once Kate, not wanting to destroy perfectly good egg yolks and whites during the Carnival the way the other kids did, brought with her hard-boiled eggs to throw at houses, with the plan of going back later and picking them up when nobody was looking, bringing them home and eating them, but then she cooked them for too short a time so when she pelted the house with them they were soft and the egg yolks smeared all over the house. That was our Kate: always was striving to be perfect and always bearing the complications on her back. Or was my memory playing tricks on me? I watched her as she took her seat at the table, bringing a dish full of eggs and two small plates with silverware. She seemed in sync with her own movements and the space around her, as if she weren't at all sorry she'd given up the study of medicine and come back to her folks. I pulled up my chair. The eggs were hard hard-boiled. I peeled them, broke them into pieces and salted them. I looked at the cheese and tomatoes she was putting on the table. Hladna, you cannot imagine how thin she was while she was studying medicine in Zagreb. Why did I see her only twice in those three years? Why didn't I look after her better? I remembered that we got together, both times, in the yard of the student dormitory on the Sava River, I remembered she was like a little bird in the snow in her thick white coat and oversized cap, but I couldn't remember why I was prepared to abandon her there to expire in the cold. Out of fear? Or simply neglect? I devoured the eggs the way the hungry gobble down food, but the chunks of egg had trouble going down my throat. The cheese was fragrant. Its white color perfectly matched the color of the dish it was sitting on, so the cheese looked like a vulnerable spot on the dish, a soft hump exposing the fake compactness of the ceramics. Droplets of water, momentarily tense, burst and slid along the unnaturally regular skin of the tomatoes. And the others across the table from me, I could hear how hear the seeds crunched under their teeth and dropped down their throats into their gut, only to come out again later. All this was so stupid, so pointless. So horrible, Hladna. I put down my fork and covered my eyes with my hands. "What's up?" asked Jere. "Nothing," I said. I put my hands down. "It is a fucking furnace in here," I said, trying to sound upbeat. They looked at me, more surprised than worried. I got up, thinking for a moment that I should collect my things and go, but then I said: "I have to pee." I locked myself in the bathroom, sat on the toilet and tried to pull myself together. "Remember why you're here," I whispered. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't convince myself that there had ever been a clear goal for me to achieve. I set my apartment on fire, then teenagers were partying around the "mosque," and then I went to the bus station and bought a ticket. That's how it was. What lay beneath this, what logic I was following, this was beyond me. The police would find me, regardless, and even if I were to muster the courage to ask for some, there was no money in this house anyway for me to cadge. Why was I here, then? I counted the number of toothbrushes in the glass. Five. Not four. Jere's son was living with them now, too, whose mother had delivered him here from Kosovo five-six years before and left the boy with his father who had never met him until then. I tried to figure out which of the toothbrushes was his, but they all looked the same except Dragan's which looked as if it had been used for years and was not being used any more now. I was consoled: one of the four brushes might be mine. I looked around the room. Everything looked as it always had. Reddish-brown tiles below, light-blue above. The peeling bathtub. The bathroom sink that was too small. The mineral stains on the faucet. The mirror that was missing a piece, yet nobody could remember how it had been broken. The claustrophobic sense of safety of a room with no windows, whose longitudinality always reminded me of the interior of a ship container. While I sat on the toilet, I always felt as if I were on a journey, and that when I came out, I'd be arriving somewhere different. Now I got up and stood in front of the mirror. The makeup hadn't smeared, but by now I could see it couldn't contain the face that was pushing its way out. I found some cotton balls, soaked them in lotion and stripped away the powder, rouge and lipstick. I moved up toward my left eye to wipe off the mascara and eyeshadow, but then I stopped. I knew what my bare eye would look like: exposed in all its vulnerable warmth, without the help of the mask of threatening blackness. If I stripped the makeup from my eyes, I knew I'd be tired and sad, I wouldn't be able to get through the day ahead. I tossed the dirty cotton balls in the wastebasket, drank a glass of water and came out.