Gabriela Dry Season

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-908236-67-8
Verlag: Istros Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 196 Seiten

Gabriela Babnik's novel Dry Season breaks the mold of what we usually expect from a writer from a small, Central European nation. With a global perspective, Babnik takes on the themes of racism, the role of women in modern society and the loneliness of the human condition. Dry Season is a record of an unusual love affair. Anna is a 62-year-old designer from Central Europe and Ismael is a 27-year-old African who was brought up on the street, where he was often the victim of abuse. What unites them is the loneliness of their bodies, a tragic childhood and the dry season, or 'Harmattan', during which neither nature nor love is able to flourish. She soon realizes that the emptiness between them is not really caused by their skin colour and age difference, but predominantly by her belonging to the Western culture in which she has lost or abandoned all the preordained roles of daughter, wife and mother. Sex does not outstrip the loneliness and repressed secrets from the past surface into a world she sees as much crueller and, at the same time, more innocent than her own. Cleverly written as an alternating narrative of both sides in the relationship, the novel is interlaced with magic realism and accurately perceived fragments of African political reality.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gabriela, Babnik

Weitere Mitwirkende

Grau, Rawley

Leseproben

Chapter 2

‘A bird cannot be angry at a tree.’

(What Ismael said at night, on the other side of the mosquito net)

It’s not that in the desert I miss things – the Chagall girl, Millais’s stained-glass windows, Bach fugues – but there are things I don’t know how to see. Things in a tree, in the air, at the edge of a house.

I brought a chair from the hotel room and put it under a tree. The receptionist and I had reached a compromise. She showed me a fridge where I could keep my yogurt and a bottle of mineral water. Some time had passed since I last saw Ismael. Meanwhile, things happened that we didn’t share. For instance, I called my father and told him I wouldn’t be back anytime soon. That I intended to rent a house and sit on the roof, where I’d watch the grass in flames, the burning birds, whose wings were licked by the fire when they flew too close to the ground, or at least I’d see whirlwinds. Some people here believe that a woman will be born from the whirling wind if you throw a boiled egg in its eye. But I didn’t tell my father that, I mean, I didn’t tell his answering machine. A deep, well-tempered voice came on, sporting dark hair with just a dash of silver at the temples, and said he was out at the moment. Not, I hope, because of the key turned in the latch.

The night before had been unbearably hot, so we all expected a downpour. I arranged myself so I could see half the building and half the avenue. Something static and something moving. Some people were riding motorcycles and creating exhaust fumes, while others merely walked on foot, their light sandals making a clop-clop sound. I looked at my own feet. Here I liked to go barefoot, liked to feel the hot red earth ooze between my toes, liked how, as evening approached, when the landscape grew still, when even the clouds stopped moving and the trees for a time lost meaning, the coolness would touch my ankles and travel up through my body. I might have gone on with this description of the loneliness that had settled in me if a white woman in a narrow printed skirt hadn’t then been approaching from the direction of the hotel entrance. We smiled at each other sourly – she tucked her hair behind her ears, from embarrassment, I suppose; I looked at the ground bashfully, although from the corner of my eye I caught the slight thrust of her hips against the batik, which made me think she wanted to be somebody else. Not a woman walking past me, but somebody else.

I poked at the ground with my foot, as if looking for something, as if some time earlier I’d lost something there, something I longed for, although in fact I was longing to run into Ismael again. He’d be standing across the street, tall, slender, and would be studying me with his eyes. Should he approach, or not? Should he smile, or say simply, you were looking at me? And I wouldn’t say what I said then, but something entirely different.

But maybe it would be better to admit something at this point. Ismael knew the hotel, knew the city like the back of his hand; he would know how to find me. So the ritual with the chair was just a momentary scene, and at the same it wasn’t. It was a good thing the electricity went out in the room, in the whole building in fact. That way my barefoot set-up under the tree was more legitimate. Although I think a few people had seen through me already. Like the man watering the hedge nearby. He kept looking over at me, as if he wanted to ask me something, but I stared past him determinedly and pretended to admire the cascade of green, which then really did engulf my senses. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I took some paper and a pencil out of my bag. The first thing I drew was a lizard, how it lifted and lowered its head. It came down from the line that divided the building and the avenue in half, down toward my legs. I mean, near my feet, where I had tossed a mango, or the tree had tossed it. When it hit the ground it opened, like my hand opened when I gave the young man from the other side of the avenue my bag. I keep it as something sacred. If I had a stained-glass cabinet, that’s where I’d put it. I’m exaggerating – a little, maybe.

But what would I do if Ismael really did come to the hotel? Not just from the other side of the street, but straight toward me, like the white woman in the narrow dress a bit earlier? If he was walking slowly, too slowly, I’d draw him in motion. Then I’d bring him a chair and we would sit beneath the cracks in the tree, where we could see the light-grey sky before the rain. I would ask him what he’d been doing these days when we didn’t see each other. He’d say ‘nothing special’, or say nothing at all and just shrug. I would take the gesture seriously, and to make it even more obvious, I’d slap my forehead – oh right, now I remember, you don’t like women who talk too much. He’d laugh, he’d find it funny, this small detail, and I’d still be drawing him from the side. Pencil on paper, though only in my mind.

My father would say I felt close to Africa because it was so physical, but that’s not true. If I was looking for physicality, I wouldn’t have come here in the first place. It gave me no pleasure when my body was rolling around here and there. I felt how it rippled, but there was nothing I could do about it. After my son was born it spread like ivy. In those days I corrected it with high boots and such things; here, in the glow of brilliant light, kitsch wasn’t an option. My bare feet peeked out from nothing but black, and even that betrayed me.

But none of this was important. All that was important was how Ismael saw me. I wanted to stand up and run out to the avenue because somebody there looked like him, but I stayed in the chair and lifted my feet to the bottom rung. It would still be a long time before evening; the earth was still heating up, the orange, ragged earth, which in the dry season deflected the sunlight to give the landscape a surreal goldish hue, so that people seemed not to be walking but floating. I looked around and noticed, not far away, that the lizard was pecking at the cracked core of the mango. Its stone was lying at an angle from it on the ground. There was nothing around except some grass that hadn’t been run over by motorcycle tyres. It was strange: a manufacturing licence sold in Hong Kong, a partnership in Britain, an upmarket salon in Ljubljana, and I’m sitting here. What’s more, I’ve started drawing like a child. I see things and, in the end, I make a lizard as big as a tree. Then I draw a woman, just as small as can be, a dot beneath the mango stone. A white woman in a tight-fitting African skirt, who is returning from before; her knees give way as she walks past the stone and her outline wobbles slightly, maybe even sways a little toward the ground, but when she regains her balance, she continues on to the hotel room. In the darkness she unlocks the door, steps inside, halfway to the bed starts undoing her zip – my father’s invisible hand would be glad to help, but my father isn’t here, is perhaps still in the garden, tugging impatiently at his field of now-grey hair while his voice on the answering machine announces that he is unavailable – and with her skirt loosened sits on the edge of the bed and reaches behind her neck. There, instead of emptiness, she finds an egg still in its shell.

* * *

At the beginning, we somehow got along – I mean, my husband and me; at the beginning things were possible. He didn’t always wear corduroy trousers and a navy blue turtleneck, although he was always wearing something that, despite the times we lived in, was bourgeois. With a little exaggeration you could even say that with his fine manners and his stories about the family history – his people were supposedly Hungarian Jews who played hide-and-seek during the war and later kept trying to buy American exit visas but never quite succeeded – he was something of a dinosaur. I see that now, from a distance; I didn’t at the time. I remember his mother wearing an antique fox around her neck – she must have worked damn hard to save that treasure from her demolished home, so in the post-war period she flaunted it, almost from a kind of mischief – and I remember his father as a failed industrialist, who in the pre-Communist Neolithic period had managed a company that produced tomato paste. I never gave a thought to that sort of thing, but it won my mother over. A month or two before the wedding she locked herself in the bathroom with me. Literally. She leaned against the tall radiator – I can still see her arm resting there, her long, thin arm, on which, at almost every motion she made, the flesh separated from the bone, the kind of arm I will never have – and asked me if I wanted him. I stared at the ground, my toe poking the rug on the floor. In those days all kitchens were done in orange and all bathrooms in blue, ours included.

I raised my face to my mother, watched her a while motionlessly – that arm and that curly brown hair, which she must have coloured, must have been colouring, I suppose, for so long that none of us, not even she, knew what her natural colour was, will stay with me forever – and then impulsively blurted out that we had already made love and so I had to want him.

For a brief second both of us smiled. I don’t know what my mother was thinking, but I was thinking about that moment of softness that permeates your body after love-making. As if the clouds started moving in a slow-motion film. In the middle of a field, a tree; and a little ways off, a man with an open umbrella. He’s pretending to catch the wind in it, while a naked...