Read an Excerpt
November 7 A letter came.
Just a few lines, jotted down on a piece of copy paper.
Marta, Mart! I’m in Mervas. It’s not possible to get any farther away. And no closer either. Your Kosti.
That’s all it said. And he hadn’t been in touch for over twenty years. Not that I’ve been counting the years; I stopped doing that a long time ago. But now he’d sent me this message and it was like being filled with air, like being hit in the face by a gale so strong it made me gasp for breath.
I read the letter again and again. My first thought was that it was fake, that someone wanted to taunt me. But who would want to do that? I have no friends; there’s no one who would know that such a cryptic little note would weigh on me. No one, except perhaps Kosti himself. And now he had written it. A faint cry from one end of life to the other, a cry straight through the years. And from Mervas. What kind of place was Mervas?
I wept. A sadness so vast washed over me I wasn’t sure I’d be able to contain it. In some ways, it was myself that I mourned. I mourned my own life; it was as if I’d been invited to my own funeral and now stood above the coffin, where everything had been completed and settled, where for the first time my life could be looked upon as something finished and concluded, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could be added to it. And I cried over everything that was lost, everything that had gone wrong and been led astray. My tears were unnaturally hot, they ran down my neck and onto my chest and I felt their entire path, felt how hot they were, strangely, remarkably hot, as if there’d been boiling, volcanic wells hidden inside me, and now they were overflowing through my eyes.
To keep from falling to pieces, I started pacing. I covered every room. The small, dismal apartment became a dreamscape. My tears made everything blurry, almost blotted things out, and in this intense and charged absence, I reached for objects like a blind person. I used my fingertips to see, my eyes were elsewhere.
I must have plodded for hours. The entire time, I thought I would implode from sadness, that I would break like a clay vessel in pressured heat. I touched potted plants, rocks, books, furniture, and lamp shades. It grew darker in the rooms, I could sense the gloam through my skin.
