Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

Aleksandar Prokopiev
III
I don’t like the black pansies in the window box: sticks and stems. But
you could make a ballgown out of the unusual big poppies behind them.
I’m not sure my father liked poppies (they’re smaller in Macedonia
than in Izzy’s garden). Even in his last years when he preferred flowers to
people.
He sunbathes in the garden in a deckchair. He’s become speechless:
eating fruit, spitting the pips. But he can’t liberate himself from thinking.
Mumbling, frowning and swearing: »People are like wasps: - fuck them
all.« But even though he wants to, he can’t be a hermit. Sitting in the
deckchair, his eyes wander and then stop at a poppy only half a metre
away - not a clump as in Izzy’s garden, but only one - its petals ajar. A boy,
Monchillo, peers out of the cup of the flower. Little five-year-old Monchillo,
who choked on flowers. The evening after the funeral, the broken-hearted
mother finds my father and his sister, mouths crammed with wild flowers
and flowers stolen from the garden. Their open mouths are full of
twigs as well as leaves and petals and smeared with poppy juice like blood.
»We want to ride our tricycles up to join Monchillo in heaven.«
Monchillo’s face is unconfused, his open eyes come from the Coptic
mosaic on the floor of the velvet cup of the poppy. Monchillo’s face is
partly sun, partly shade.
Izzy goes to water the flowers. She’s brought me an elderflower cordial.
In its sweetness there are grains of pollen. Did my father reach out
his rheumatic hands to the poppy, to little brother Monchillo? Did he feel
the closeness of two worlds? It wasn’t his time: he still had six months
before he would join the happy little family on their tricycles.
»I love you lots. Love me.«
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