Emptiness

Two shadows in the empty room formed a right angle. one of them
stretched across the rotten floor with tiles spaced out just enough to
insert one of those thinner books in them, recognizable by the layer of
dust underneath it, so much darker it looked wet  as if it was splashed
with water. another one was what remained of a skinny girl right befo-
re herexistence poured into a shadow. She stood with her back towards
the opening that once served as a window. Behind the girl one could see
a small square of lightened up sky bruised by redness of a burning sun
vanishing in the mouth of the nearby hill. Her eyes reflected disappe-
aring shades of flames of her former life that one might think she squ-
andered away.
a moment earlier, in a narrow alley, full of gaps and scattered gar-
bage, she paused for a moment beside him, piercing him with a look,
through which she wriggled to the icy lumps of anxiety hidden deep
within his pupils. She signaled with a slight movement of her eyes to
follow her through the opening where the door once used to be. They
found themselves in a ruined room with beams of spring afternoon
light sifting through the wracked roof and sporadically broken ceiling.
He remained near the entrance, while she approached the hole on the
opposite side.
– I know you. You are Ivan Chabrilo – an empty voice interwoven
with nicotine clanged through the gaps of a damp room.
He had nothing to answer on that, he knew he was Ivan Chabrilo.
He pulled the cigarettes out of his pocket and started approaching her
to offer some, when she stopped him with a stretched out hand. Ivan
returned the pack into his pocket.
– I am nadine.
That was news to him, but he did not feel the need to comment on it,
just as he didn’t a moment ago when she said his name.
nadine could have been seventeen, twenty, or thirty-five years old.
It wasn’t just the darkness in the room with walls long blistered with
mortar where nothing but contours of her face were looming up by
sunset behind her back that made him doubt her age. It was her dried
lifeless body, worn out shabby clothes and rough voice more suited for
someone whose bones witnessed many decades.
He noticed something behind her heels, right where the two sha-
dows (shadow of her body and its reflection on the floor) formed an
angle – there were three or four plantlets peaking an inch from the dust
and striving towards the hole that served as a window. It must have
been the birds who carried the seeds in their beaks or feces, he thought.
Perhaps the wind brought a few drops of rain through the opening
so the seeds started growing and rushing to escape their prison of
tight membrane that was suffocating them the same way tight walls
suffocate the man trapped inside.
If a plant – he was surprised how he even thought of this – has a pa-
rent, is it a seed or is it a plant that creates the seed? Perhaps, in this
case, the parent is everything around – it is the rottenness from which
plantlets draw food, or the morning dew that moistens the dry rot.
Maybe it is the light itself, as well as moisture and nourishing juices
from the rot that are keeping the plants alive.
all beings have a parent, and even though we often do not know
who that might be, it is a question of more philosophical rather than
genealogical nature, he concluded.
– You do not know or you do not want to answer?
The question slammed into the silence, onto the fragile plantlets –
startling him thinking it will break them.
– or maybe you weren’t listening to me?
– I wasn’t, he admitted without hesitation.
– I asked why you were standing in the middle of the street? Were
you deciding to take a little walk or immediately enter the building
opposite from here?
– Some … something like that – he stuttered.
– I have been following you for months now – she said quietly, and
when he wanted to express his surprise, or perhaps indignation, she
silenced him by placing her twig-like finger on his lips.
– I know that you go to the one-bedroom apartment on the second
floor every evening, I even know the woman's name written on the
nameplate on that door that stands there as a lonely pine on the cliff.
and I know that you leave the building before midnight, slowly dra-
wing the front door behind yourself so that the creaking won’t wake
up the neighbours.
The sun is now long gone, devoured by the hill at last. In the black
corners of the room the cobwebs of darkness started taking their toll.
– That really doesn’t…
The thin dry twig-like finger on her even thinner ash-violet lips
stopped his sentence before it even entered his thoughts.
Penetrating creak ruffled the damp darkness in the corners. a mo-
ment later there was another one, and another one…
a tiny mouse ran by the girls heels. faster than a blink of an eye. Su-
ddenly a bigger shadow rushed after it. Must be a mother, Ivan gues-
sed. Mother always feels when something is wrong, when her children
might be in danger f and she is ready to rush after to protect them.
– I saw you going to liberators Street, I had followed you for months.
His thoughts left the couple of rodents and plunged back into the
void to return to the face of an ambiguous figure similar to gaps in gray
darkness. Her face.
– You went there in the evenings but this time you didn’t go upstairs
because it’s a one-story building with no nameplate on the door. I
couldn’t find out the name of that woman with weather-beaten face