‘Don’t say that,’ she said. ‘What kind of life do I wake up to, for that matter? Do you want me to wish I were dead? I have wanted that, I’ve stood on the bridge and almost thrown myself off, I’ve put needles in my arm without knowing or caring what was in the syringe. But deep down inside I’ve still always wanted to wake up again. Do you think I did what I did back there because I wanted to die? You’re wrong. I just wanted to get away for a little while, just to have a moment’s peace. No words, no voices, nothing. I remember when I was growing up that there was a little black pond in the forest nestled in between the high trees. I always went there when I was upset. The water was absolutely still and shiny like a mirror and I used to think that that was what I wanted inside. Peace, nothing else. I still crave that sense of peace.’
Tanya stopped talking and looked around for something in her backpack. Humlin counted the phones that she laid out on the bench: seven. At last she found what she was looking for, which was a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t seen her smoke before. She inhaled the smoke as if it were oxygen. But just as suddenly she dropped the cigarette into the gravel and killed it with her heel.
What I don’t understand and what I will keep asking myself all my life and won’t even stop when I die is the question of how it could be possible for me to feel any joy after all the hell that I have been through. Or hasn’t it even been that bad? Yesterday, when Tea-Bag and I were lying on the police chief’s bed, she told me that I haven’t had it any worse than anyone else. Then she fell asleep. Is she right? I don’t know. But I don’t understand how I’m supposed to be able to laugh after all the humiliation I’ve been through. And I’m someone who thinks it’s necessary for people to be able to feel an uncomplicated, simple joy in their lives since we are going to be dead for such a long time. Death is not what is frightening to me, not the fact that the flame goes out, but this fact that we are going to be dead so very long.
I still think about that time four years ago when we stood out by the main road, four girls in skirts that were much too short. We were the East, nothing more. We knew how Westerners saw us, as those poor Easterners, those wretches. And there we were in our short skirts in the middle of winter, still mired in the poverty and misery that was our life in the vodka-stinking hole that was all that was left after the Communist collapse. Four girls: fourteen, sixteen, seventeen and nineteen. I was the oldest and we were laughing as we stood out there in the cold, wild with joy — can you understand that? We were so close to being free! When that old rusty car came down the road it could just as well have been Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad come down from the clouds. It was the car that was going to carry us to freedom, no matter that it stunk of mould and unwashed feet.
