rat.
And you know that I’m not one to give up easily, so I took down my grandfather’s old atlas, the one with countries that don’t actually exist any more because they’ve been split up, and I asked her to find the place. I even put my finger on the map. My finger moved from country to country, cutting across borders in no time. I flew across all of Europe and even reached Asia by mistake. I deliberately pointed to the tiniest countries in the world, the ones that you couldn’t see without a magnifying glass, like San Marino and Andora and the Vatican in the middle of Rome, just to prove to her that it’s possible. But she said she was no good at geography and couldn’t pinpoint the place. So I said it didn’t have to be the exact spot. Even something in the general area would do, and she said: Let’s just forget it, sweetheart, it won’t work. Still, I took her finger – she has long nails, and a nice manicure, with nail polish and everything – and tried to place it on the old atlas, but she said that maybe the place didn’t even exist any more or that it never had existed because everything was changing anyway at the end of the millennium and none of what had existed before would continue to exist in the next millennium, and that word, “millennium”, sounded strange coming from her, even though you keep hearing it all day on special sales and stuff.
And then she pulled a fast one on me. She moved the atlas and took the notebook instead. She opened it and leafed through it, looking at the cover and asking where I’d bought it.
I said it was from an ordinary stationery store at a back-to-school sale, nothing special. I’d bought a whole stack of them, to last me all year. And she asked if I liked angels. I said it didn’t matter what they had on the cover. You throw the notebook out anyway when it’s full and finished. I don’t even wait till the end of the year sometimes. I throw them out right away when they’re used up and I don’t bother keeping them as souvenirs. She looked at the cover again, checking it out as if she was still an x-ray technician and hadn’t retired.
I said the whole business with the covers was just a fad, and that as far as I was concerned they could put Britney Spears or Winnie the Pooh or the Fox Kids announcer on the cover, and the angel was just by chance, though I had to admit that whenever I got bored in class I’d give it a moustache or add some tattoos, and I’d erase the wings completely, really give it a workup. He’s really smart, that angel, having the time of his life, though I guess angels don’t have such a thing as time anyway.
She leafed through the notebook and I was sure she was going to make some comment about how I hadn’t written anything down, but she actually seemed happy about that.
I tried a roundabout approach, and asked her what language she dreamed in, and she said that some people never open their mouth in their dreams, they keep quiet all through the dream, and then she said she doesn’t dream at all. I said that was impossible, because everyone dreams, even people who don’t realize they’re dreaming. Especially those who suffer from nightmares. Even babies dream inside their mothers, according to scientists. And she said that some people have all their dreams at once. I told her that would be a terrible waste, spilling it all out in a single swoop, because then there’d be nothing left, and you have to save one dream for emergencies.
She didn’t say anything. And I thought maybe even the single dream that she must have had at some point had been used up already, which would really be a shame.
Then she left me for a moment, to the bathroom or something, I don’t know, and I heard her coughing. I don’t know if it’s a cold or something that old people get, but it scared me a little, because I don’t want her to die, like Grandpa, even though my mother keeps reminding me that it’s bound to happen.
Meanwhile, I took down Grandpa’s old dictionary from its spot next to the atlas. The pages were so old they were falling apart, but that’s all there