A dream

When and why did she knock on our door, in my mother’s house? I don’t remember, I only know that a purple evening was creeping into the windows, and it cast shadows on her childish face. Dark hair, big eyes. A smile that curves the lips pitifully. She clearly had nowhere to go. And in her hand, she held an old doll, gray with age.

We had dinner together, asked her who she was and where she was from, and she answered all the questions readily, but we still didn’t understand much.

My mother invited her kindly to stay (“where would she wander in such darkness, a child”), and made her a bed on the sofa, close to where I myself slept.

And she stayed. She placed the doll next to her.

She stayed the next day and the next. At first, she kept saying that she was a burden, a bother, abusing our hospitality, and that she would definitely leave tomorrow. But my mother and I vehemently dissuaded her every time, and she never left.

She stayed and ate with us, and slept next to us, and helped with the housework, singing countless songs while she swept, or fried onions, or cleaned fish. We took walks together in the garden, sat on a hillock by the lake, shopped together and received rare guests.

During all this time I should have befriended her, become close. 

But for some reason everything turned out the other way around.

The longer I listened to her voice, uttering only sweet and polite words, the more I peered into the features of her face, the more I heard her sleepy breathing at night, the more scared I became.

Her kindness and readiness to please appeared false to me. In her smile I began to perceive something disgusting, lustful and devilish, as if she was not a girl, but an old witch pretending to be one. Why? 

I began to avoid her, under plausible pretexts, getting off with jokes, inventing non-existent reasons. And she grinned and nodded at me, but sometimes I couldn’t help but look into her eyes, and at that very moment I knew that she knew everything about me, even what I didn’t say, even what I didn’t know myself. And I couldn’t get away from her, there was nowhere to hide anymore. 

At night I woke up in an icy sweat; in my dreams she was plotting something evil against me, but I couldn’t see through it. And I lay in the dark, catching my breath, listening to hers, until  the breathing didn't sound right somehow,  maybe she was not sleeping at all, but smiling instead with her strange, adult, vile smile,  watching me and waiting for something.

Not only I became a wretch because I was afraid and hated her, but also because nothing in her, it would seem, should have caused either hatred or fear. 
And I began to fear myself and hate myself too. And the day came when I thought that I would be myself again only when she left.

But she didn’t seem now to even think about leaving.

I was ashamed to admit to my mother that I wanted our guest to disappear. Mother always wanted to see me generous, affectionate, and putting the good of others above all. And so I kept silent, or small-talked or laughed like nothing was ever wrong. 

But once, when she left on some errand, and my mother and I were left alone in the house, the mother burst out:
“What a blessing that she is not there, at least a little!” 

And I looked at my mother, and from that moment I knew that my fear and hatred were shared.
And together, for hours, sometimes without saying a single word to each other, we dreamed of how she would be gone, and we didn’t know at all what we should do so it’d happen.

After all, it is awful to drive back, into the cold and darkness, someone whom you once invited to your house.

But she still didn’t leave, she just fussed around the house and around us, and her smile was more and more pitiful and piercing, and her eyes were ancient, and eternal winter lived in them.

And it was again a cold, purple evening when my mother called me into the kitchen and showed me a large coil of wire. I trembled all over, and my mother said, “Don’t be afraid, I’ll do everything myself, you just have to help me.” We entered my room together. She sat quietly with her back to us, on her sofa, as if giving in to us, and held the doll in her hands.

I tried not to watch as my mother tightened the wire around her thin neck as hard as she could. “The hair was a little in the way,” said the mother, “well that’s it, it’s all over, now we need to take her out of the house, help me take her...”

And we dragged her to the lake, and her doll, a disgusting, gray doll, remained there clutched in her cramped fingers.

It was completely dark, our house was on the outskirts, and no one could see us. But the fear, the fear that had tormented me so much all these weeks, did not go away.

And I thought that I needed to look at her one last time, at her dead face, before the lake swallowed her up forever - and the fear would pass.

Overcoming horror and disgust, I bent over her.
A scream escaped me. Fled me, like a thousand wounded birds, for miles around.

She had my face.


*************


I finish talking and wait. I bit my lip. But my heart is pounding. 

“Come on, Chennie,”- she says, with her nonchalance she has sometimes in a most inopportune moment, nonchalance that I love and resent.
- “It’s clear like a crystal ball. The only thing that’s obscured somewhat-is why you felt the need to double yourself.”

And I scream again, but she doesn’t know it, because my lips remain tightly shut. 



*************


She is leaving, and Mother is too, and it feels at times like everybody is, and if I could I’d fish myself from that lake and untangle the wire and have a companion, thus, even if such a terrible one-for I am lonely. 

But I tell myself: choose life. 

And I continue to stand, or I try, at least, and the rippling surface of water is still the mirror I do not enter, and images are distorted, and voices become echoes, and the evening is landing upon me and is so magically purple, purple again.