When I woke up in the morning, it took me a good ten seconds to remember where I was. Oh, right, I hadn’t slept in my bed that night either. I got up and warily made my way along the corridor. No sound could be heard apart from my own footsteps. Manbun must have been still asleep. I hoped he wasn’t dead. I peeked around the corner into the living room with all the dread of a baby gazelle approaching a sleeping lion. Not there. I was gripped by one of those “horror film” kind of feeling where the bad guy suddenly appears behind his victim. I checked nervously over my shoulder. Not there either. The whole place was completely devoid of Manbuns.
My brain definitely wasn’t up to dealing with that kind of situation so early in the morning, so I went to the kitchen to make coffee. There was only the instant stuff that you dissolve in hot water, but it would have to do. After burning my tongue on the first sip, I saw a note on the counter. Manbun wrote as legibly as a blind monkey having a seizure, therefore it took me some time and effort to understand what it said. Here’s what I was able to decipher:
Hey, I had to leave early. If you find anything in the fridge, feel free to eat it, although I wouldn’t if I were you. Don’t do anything stupid until I’m back. Also, lock the door and put the keys under the rug when you leave.
“Don’t do anything stupid until I’m back.” How patronizing of him. For one, he wasn’t my babysitter, and second, he hadn’t even written when he would be back. I didn’t bother checking the fridge. Five minutes later, I was out, locking behind me and hiding the keys under the rug as instructed. I guess I should have tried to check on Manbun, see if he was ok, but I really had the feeling he didn’t want to have too much to do with me. He probably had stuff he needed to figure out on his own.
I’m afraid that this juncture is going to be a bit awkward. What with the holidays and having to visit my mother, I had to leave fairly abruptly as well. The ideal thing would have been to stick around and deal with this tricky situation while it was still hot. The thing is, I had absolutely no idea what to do. And to be completely honest with myself, I was pretty relieved that, in a couple of hours, I would be gone from this city. I went back to my place, packed my stuff and hurried to catch my train, half-hoping that everything would solve itself while I was away.
I was going to spend my holidays at home with my mother. To get there, I took a train that dropped me in a neighbouring town, and then my mother picked me up by car. Once there, the problems that had plagued me suddenly seemed very distant. This place was like a bubble, frozen in space and time. Stuck somewhere in the past and filled with old ghosts. It was a secluded little cottage that my mother hadn’t been able to trade for a more convenient place when my father had died. Over the next couple of weeks, I would help her shovel the snow around the house, do the groceries, and then I’d spend the rest of my time reading.
The grandmother who had passed away the previous July was from my father’s side. It would be our first Christmas without her and it was difficult for us to shake off the sadness, even though we were all giving our best shot at pretending we weren’t bothered. My grandfather especially was having a hard time. He had now lost both a son and his wife, and looked like he wasn’t sure anymore what this was all about.
And then, there was my own case. With my friends and acquaintances, being quiet was nothing more than a trait of my personality. Among my family, however, this only brought attention to the elephant in the room. They had all heard from each other about my… what I had done when I was younger, but no one ever talked to me about it. My aunts and uncles merely treated me with more kindness than was natural. My younger cousins kept their distances. I learned later on that they were a little scared of me, which I found both unbelievable and sad. You know, when people say something like “x % of people are y. If you’re in a group and you can’t figure out who is y, then you’re probably it.” Being among my family was a perpetual situation of me figuring out I was this y. The crazy one, the loser one, the one who’s too quiet. I know those words are pejorative and I shouldn’t use them like that, but they really reflect the way I felt about myself at that time.
The evening trudged along until we were almost done eating. The exchanges had been going on pleasantly for a while between the patriarch and his offspring, with minimal input from myself, when there was a lull in the conversation. Then, my aunt asked my mother, “You still live in that cottage over there, right? Have you ever thought of getting a place closer to where you work?” My mother played with a piece of bread pensively, a polite smile drawn on her face.
“No, I like it there. It's going to be nice once I retire, with lots of space for my grandchildren to play around.” There, she had done it again, sneakily molding my future. Then, the moment I dreaded the most came. My grandfather turned toward me and said, in his most grandfatherly tone, “Speaking of grandchildren, Damian, do you have a girlfriend?”
I stared back with an embarrassed smile. “No, I don’t…”
“No one in sight?”
“No… no one.”
“Well, you've still got time. How old are you, nineteen?”
This kind of interrogation never failed to make me uncomfortable. When I was younger, it was simply meant to tease me, but as the years went on, it gradually became more pressuring. My mother glanced at me understandingly and replied, “Damian is a very serious boy. I’m glad he’s focusing on his studies for now.”
“Don’t worry too much about your grandfather. He’s just curious.” During our ride back home, my mother noticed I was being particularly silent.
“I know.”
Outside, the road was dark. Our whole world was restricted to that bubble of light created by the beams of the car. I thought there was a subject I should broach with my mother.
"You know, mom, there's one of grandma's former student who became a professor at school."
"Really? Who is it?"
"Daniel... Daniel Lewis. Did you ever hear of him?"
She made a face as if she’d been eating an omelette and had just bitten on a piece of eggshell. For some reason, she didn't seem pleased with my answer. "I remember him. He was your grandmother's last and favourite student. Very smart. He showed up at her funerals, didn’t he? Is he teaching any of your classes?"
Noticing she wasn’t too keen on him, I smiled in an attempt to soften her, "He was. I had one class with him last semester. He's really good..." I was about to mention that I had also started working in his lab, but I thought it best to wait.
"Well, at least you'll be applying somewhere else soon."
"What?"
"You might as well try your luck again in med school. I heard of some people who only got in after five trials. Your grades aren't the best, but they're still pretty good."
I nodded. "I'm not really sure I want to be a doctor."
"I know, but you always spoke of becoming a writer, and yet you ended up in psychology. Where's the logic in that? At least, if you had done the auditions for the music conservatory..."
A couple of years earlier, my teacher had suggested I tried getting in a music program in college. Apparently, I had the level, but the motivation really wasn't there.
"I don't know... playing piano... it always reminds me of dad." My eggshell-chewing mother and I fell silent, our eyes on the road in front of us.
"Let's go visit his grave tomorrow," she finally said.
It was bothering me that my mother had been so unenthusiastic when I told her about Daniel. I had expected that she would be glad to hear from him again. But she apparently shared Manbun’s distrust, even though I considered him as some paranoid lunatic who should have minded his own business. Nonetheless, I decided not to pay too much attention to these signs. Maybe I was being stupid, but I was tired of always skirting around embarrassing subjects, and having to read between the lines. If there was something I needed to know, then they should just say it.
As promised, the next day we went to the cemetery. We left the car by the road and paced silently among the graves, looking for my father’s tombstone. All was silent, covered in snow, as if the whole world had been wrapped in a cold shroud. It was the same ritual every year. This year, we might be coming back again in July to visit my grandmother, I thought. I put a bouquet of white lilies on the snow by my father’s grave. White against white, silence upon silence. Nothing but two figures standing in contemplation in front of a cold slab of stone. As usual, my mother rested a hand on the dark marble. She might have been praying, but I never asked. Eventually, she said, “I’ll go back to the car. Take your time.”
The soft sound of her footsteps in the snow grew fainter and fainter. I always felt a little uneasy when she did that. The grey sky that stretched on and on above me was much too big and seemed on the verge of swallowing me up. Every step I took in this world, I was just getting more lost. What would I tell him if he could hear me?
“Dad, I met someone…” The sound that escaped my mouth was so dim, it barely rose above the cold wind. Hesitantly at first, in a whisper I struggled to hear myself, I told him everything that had happened last semester. The bits and pieces that were scattered all over the place, I gathered them in that one moment. “I’m sure you would like him if you saw him… Maybe you’ve already met. I haven’t felt this happy since you…” I stopped for a moment. My throat was too tight and the words wouldn’t come out. “I’m glad you didn’t see some of the stupid things I’ve done, but… Sometimes, I wish you were still here, even though I’m scared you would be disappointed in me.”
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