The Vital Needs Of The Dead

A Chronicle

A Chronicle

My relationship with this woman resembles the parched proverbial link between a slave oarsman and the galley that is chained to him. However, in our case one could argue about who is chained to whom, the more so because even when she was alive – and also afterwards – we had to take each other’s place more than once. Particularly afterwards.

I am not used to saying out loud her name which is florid and slightly embarrassing, for I never, not once, addressed her by her name.

She had the same surname as me, which is Sidelnikov. She was Rosa Sidelnikov. For a long time this quite mundane fact seemed to me an inexplicable coincidence.

What is hardest for me now is to speak about her in the third person. A doctor who comes to visit a terminally ill or mentally unstable patient, asks the confused relatives in a business-like manner, ‘Has he been sweating like this all the time? What has his stool been like?’ Or he enquires with lazy furtiveness but audibly enough, ‘Has he stopped screaming about the attempts on his life? Well, you’d better not remind him.’ The family stunned by hopelessness and fear naturally reply in the desired key. And then the fleeting reek of betrayal permeates the medicinal stuffiness of the room. Henceforth, the human being in question is defeated in his last remaining rights. The loved and cherished “you” disappears forever from that clammy hateful bed and only “he” remains, abandoned to its own devices.

Calling Rosa “she” now, I can hear the condescending silence of a person present but detached from us all by the same status of complete incurability – or “insanity”. Except that her illness is simply called death.