Archive >VOL. 20, NO. 1

D. Nurkse

Anika

I fell in love with the suicide. I bribed her super for her name. I wrote a note. I told her how much I admired her angora cat, how brave she was to go for walks in the furnace of summer. I invited her for a cappuccino at an outdoor café. The setting sun was merciless. I insisted on paying — I never act like this. The waiter winked at me and I didn’t tip. But she invited me to her apartment, strewn with books and papers. She was writing a thousand poems, would she finish one?

It is not me you love, it is your own death, she said firmly. I was afraid. I had just been thinking of putting my hand on her knee, imagining it to be cold as marble. You are just a child, she said. You don’t know yourself.

It was August. All she had was a fan. All the thousand pages of the thousand poems were turning of their own accord, yet it felt no cooler. Her bedroom was cramped, but that tenement was huge. The walls were just plaster on chicken wire. We could hear people arguing — lover against lover, parent against child, brother against sister, anarchist against Shachtmanite, White Sox versus Red Sox, when one voice subsided another rang out, ecstatic with hate. Then we heard thuds.

Should we call the police I asked. Those are the police, she said.

It was late. She let me sleep at the foot of her bed on a pallet with the cat. At dawn she fixed me coffee and thawed a croissant. You will have to go now, she said.

As I walked down those steps — the caged elevator had stalled — I realized I was entering the past. In the street, there were the soldiers who died in the war, the senators who grew old promoting it, the protesters who were jailed, milling around, glancing at their watches, waiting for their lives to begin. How they hated each other, and themselves more! I tiptoed among them.

The carpet bombing would start soon, then the French and Indian War, then the Crusades. We kept our mouths shut, not to let our allegiance show before the shooting began.

In the dusty trees, the birds were singing, to birds who died long ago.