THE SUITCASE

I met a girl one day in a lonely street with a suitcase in her hands. When I asked her what was in that suitcase, she simply said “them.” She kept them very neatly in that suitcase, which she carried with her every day. Although she placed a high value on that suitcase, she paid also close attention to not look like a suitcase herself. For, as she had learned as a child from English literature, those people did not appreciate the appearances of suitcases, parcels or travel bags very much. So, with each step she took, she emphasized that it was in fact the suitcase that belonged to her and not the other way around.

Her suitcase had six distinct departments in order to separate them properly. She did not want them to touch each other, to get mixed up and all confused. She did not want to be like her parents. Nevertheless, when she got excited or stressed, the suitcase would slip out of her trembling hands and some of them would get disorganized. This would cause her to panic, she would get flustered and thrown off balance, nervously trying to arrange them back into the right order, hoping secretly that nobody had noticed.

I am not entirely sure if I am telling this story the right way around. Like a circle, it is approachable from any point, and also unapproachable from any point. Maybe we need to cut it open in order to create a single line. Certainly a deformed one with the quality of a circle, but still a line with a beginning and an ending lasting at least for a while.

We start at the point where she moved places. Coming to this new country, this new city, felt like being an uninvited guest to a wedding. The funny part about it was that it was her own wedding she attended, as a stranger. After the wedding came the marriage, the life she chose for herself. Before the wedding, in her place of origin, she had spent weekdays in her familiar places. On Mondays and Tuesdays she did something specific, something important, met specific people, important people. On Wednesdays she went to nightclubs with her friends to make her former beloved jealous, on Thursdays she went shopping. On Fridays, she apologized to her beloved. And on Saturdays and Sundays, she made love to her beloved. And after the wedding came her new married life with the new nation, and the weekdays disappeared. Seven days became one, which was repeated again and again. In a place that did not belong to her, she could not risk reckless habits or break out of this week that had become a single day. The abandoned place was no longer hers, the new place never would be.

She never told the new one about the old one. She only told me since we discussed her marriage quite often after the first time we had met. We took the habit of going for a daily walk in the park together, talking about our lives for hours. She felt too lonely in this relationship but not alone enough to leave. Still, she asked herself, why, out of both of them, she was the one to be solitary.

“Well, what did you marry him for then?” I asked her on one of our walks.

“Oh God! Don’t look at me like that. You know what he used to tell me? He told me it would be just like in the books. Imagine that! He told me books meant a great deal to him. Can you imagine? What a prick! He always says he has a favourite author, a favourite novelist. And then I ask him who it is. You know what he says then? It depends on the day, my dear. Christ, what nonsense! That’s what he told me.”

We sat on a bench this time, she was too tired to walk that day.

“EURGHH, it’s still wet!” I cried out, but did not stand up from the bench.

“Anyway, I don’t think there is anything wrong with having several favourite authors, is there?”

“Jesus, I don’t know! You really should hear him talk. I mean, he only talks about his goddamn books when his nose senses something resembling a piece of literature. I bet he never actually reads them, he only ever talks about them, it’s insufferable! Beautifully written, excellent words, magnificent story… managing only to avoid to mention the splendid paper and the fabulous page numbers. It makes me sick, you know. That’s what he says. I bet he only reads reviews about them, picks one and adapts his opinion about his goddamn novels.”

“You’re being too critical.”

“No, you should hear him talk, Christ! Every single time. I didn’t come for some book explanations, I want it to be just like in the books, you know. The way he talks makes me so sick. The way his words are so heavy. He adds to every sentence another one. A better one. The most significant one. And he does this with a look of disgusting satisfaction on his face, as if he knew everything…”

“I wish I knew why you think it’s so important to be so emotional about such things as books anyway.”

“Oh God, shut up! It’s just so unfair, you know. The most frustrating thing is, he DOES know everything better. It is his place and not mine.”

She stayed silent for a while, gripping the suitcase tightly. I recognized it from the first time we met on that street. I also stayed silent. Together we observed the post-rainy park, getting filled up with people. Mostly families with their kids and couples passed by, as well as some pigeons. A group of teenagers were hanging around near some other benches and laughing loud, mocking the pigeons and scaring them away.

“I mean, he has some nice traits about him and all,” she continued, “and it was nice to believe him that it was going to be just like in the books. Like in MY kind of books. That’s what I came for.”

“I still think that you came for love; you do love each other, I mean.”

“Oh stop that! These types of feelings are too different, I am just his goddamn company, you hear me? His company when no one else is around. I wanted it to be like in my books, you know, it’s just that no one writes it the right way, I guess. That's pretty damn unfair, if you ask me.”

Tears started rolling down her face and I moved closer to comfort her but my hug felt weirdly empty.

“Oh God, everything is getting me so sick!” she complained, not looking at me at all. “You know, I never meet his eyes. I mean, I try to look at him, searching for the reason I came and stayed and… his eyes just don’t look back, but I try. It’s just nothing personal or emotional for him. I am nothing personal to him. You know that I try, you know me!”

She still would not look at me as if I was not truly there. She was focusing on the group of teens who were now feeding some pigeons. A crowd of other pigeons looked quite interested and decided to join the feast. Then, the teenagers scared the big group once again away.

She stood up, as if she wanted to leave.

“I really wished that they’d stop doing that,” she said, looking now at the pigeons that flew away, “because it really makes me sick to the guts. This treatment I mean. The poor pigeons don’t deserve that. They feed them and throw breadcrumbs at them because they only want a few cute pigeons to come and take the crumbs like an obedient pet or something like that. It’s disgusting, really, when you think about it, and sad. I mean, they give other pigeons hope as well because they see the breadcrumbs. So a swarm of pigeons will come eventually, hoping for the same treatment as the first ones. And that’s the point where it gets too much for the people, they didn’t want a whole swarm of pigeons to come. So they get scared by that crowd and shout at them, scare them away in disgust, calling them mean names. You know, how they call pigeons the rats of birds and all. It just makes me sick, this kind of treatment.”

She walked away, heading in the direction of the birds holding her suitcase tight in her right hand. She lost herself in the new place when she realized that she didn't belong anywhere. The place didn't belong to her either, of course it didn't, after all it was a place, it belonged to everyone. Whilst it had always been there, she was just discovering it.

It just cannot be right, she thought, coming to this new place all alone. All of them getting mixed up and lost like different types of candy in a box. She liked her candy separated. Orange flavoured in one corner, lemon flavoured in the other one. She had to put down what she knew for sure, in outline form, using a practical list:

A suitcase containing:

3 Alphabets containing:

6 Languages containing:

Language 1

Language 2

Language 3

Language 4

Language 5

Language 6

1 was her mother tongue, her family’s voice which she only heard from far away, the real one.

2 was the language of the land she had left, the vibrant and the living one, the voice she heard in her head.

3 was the universal and neutral one which she heard in public.

4 was the beautiful one, the language that required to be seen with its shiny surface.

5 was just there, stuck in the mould and almost impossible to take out entirely.

6 was a technically dead one.

She clung to her suitcase tighter than to her own life. Suddenly her arms felt incredibly empty. But she had no one to hold on to but herself. Nevertheless, she feared that she herself was not enough and so she did not hold on to herself either. She looked back and did not see me sitting on the bench. I was no longer there.

The girl hadn't met anyone on a lonely street. I was the girl.

I remembered what I had thought during the wedding when I looked at the new place: “I'll simply rot in your arms and occasionally, every two weeks, you'll poke me to see if I'm still alive. But in the end, you'll get tired of it. And I won't like you anymore. But only because you like me even less. And I'll make myself smaller in your arms and hide my face. And then you'll ask me whether everything is alright. And I will say yes first, and then, after a short break, ask why you don't love me. And then you will tell me that you do love me, that I have only created a false image for myself, that I am only living in an illusion, that it is unfair of me to think such things of you, that you have done nothing, that I have assumed lies for no reason, that I am full of ill will and so on. And I would reply that you wouldn't understand me, that I didn't feel loved by you, that you were a liar, that you said mean things, that everything was your fault and so on. And then our conversation will be over. And we will lie in bed in silence, under the same blanket, but with our backs to each other. And the next morning, one of us will be the first to get out of bed in silence. And then in the evening you will tell me that it's hard to love me. And we will break off from each other. And I will think that none of this would have happened with my old place.”

But I didn't say it at the time. I hoped it would not be that way.