Malina

Because dinner is all ready, I’ve put on makeup and combed my hair. “For it is futile to try to feign indifference concerning inquiries whose object cannot be indifferent to human nature.”

For if Ivan should no longer belong to me, the way I belong to him, then he will one day exist in some normal life, which will make him become quite normal, he will no longer be celebrated, but maybe Ivan doesn’t want anything other than his simple life, and I have only complicated a piece of his life with my silent stares, my flagrantly bad playing, my confessions constructed out of fragmented phrases.

I’m staring at the wall, which is showing a crack, it must be an old crack that now is gently spreading because I keep staring at it. It’s late enough, I could get a chance to make a phone call, and I pick up the phone and want to say, are you already asleep? Then it occurs to me just in time that I’d really have to ask, are you already awake? But today it’s too hard for me to say good morning, and I quietly
replace the receiver, I can feel the scent so distinctly with my whole face, so strongly that I think I’m buried in Ivan’s shoulder, in that indispensable scent I call cinnamon, the scent which always sustained me, which staved off all drowsiness, the only scent that let me breathe more easily. The wall doesn’t yield, it doesn’t want to give in, but I will force the wall to open along this crack. If Ivan doesn’t call me at once, if he never calls me again, if he doesn’t call until Monday, what will I do then?