Around the heart in eleven years. Epp Petrone
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again, pack my synthesizer and head off… Where to, I don’t know, but I’ll be back and I’ll see her then.”
I listen to her explaining this to Salma as well. The girl pleads: “I’ll come anywhere in the world, as long as I can be with you!” – “No, you have to go to school. Anyway, I’ll write to you this time!” Djellah promises.
“Everything has its price,” she says to me later in that dry way the British Djellah speaks. “My sister is jealous of me because I can travel and move around, go wherever I want. Many of my female acquaintances have said: “Oh, our Djellah’s life is a never-ending vacation! She gets to sunbathe all day!” They don’t think about the fact that all I have in this world amounts to about twenty kilos of clothes and books, and a musical instrument. I’d say that’s not much for a middle-aged woman. What do you think?” She squints her eyes as if she’s about to break out laughing. And then she adds, “But that’s all you need to live. Some clothes, books, an instrument, air and freedom… Or maybe there is a little girl missing from that list, huh?”
I put the notebook aside and stare off into the distance. Children, that topic again. How much did my own “unborn children” push me into coming here? And where is Djellah pushing me now?
The bus is coming!
On flying here and in space
I like sitting in a plane that has just taken off – even though I know that this is precisely the moment when this miracle machine is most liable to explode and even though I know that flying is environmentally the most harmful pastime that a single person can undertake.
There’s nothing I can do about it: leaving the ground and heading for the skies is a kind of addiction. I think I know what Leonardo da Vinci felt while drawing people and machines in flight. He must have had an especially strong longing pulsating within him, something that jolts you up from sleep at times, something that must reside in each person. You wake up fully knowing that you could fly, but then the harsh truth of it comes back to you: you’re not a bird, you’re human. Leonardo could physically never feel what most people today have experienced: the force of the plane upon lift off, the energy in your body that tugs at you like a giant swing propelled towards the sky.
Each time I hope that once we get above the clouds, I’ll see that same strange atmospheric phenomenon I saw with Harri one morning, when we were flying from Riga, Latvia to Warsaw, Poland to catch a flight to Tel Aviv, Israel. It was late winter, a humid and foggy time of the year. Clouds covered the surface of the earth, as they mostly do around that time along this latitude. The plane shot through the clouds and…
A pink field spread out below us, as far as the eye could see. For the first time in my life, I fully experienced what it really means when people say, “Above the clouds, it’s always sunny.”
I’m sure meteorologists have a name for that pink phenomenon and I’m sure they can calculate exactly the necessary humidity and temperature required for something like that to occur. But for me, those colourful rays reflecting off humidity in the air was a reward for not losing faith during the long, cold, dark February, a sign of better things to come. At that moment, I was glued to the window. I wasn’t surprised, just full of joy: the bleakness under those clouds won’t get me now, I thought, a pink desert surrounds me, I could open up the window and just go jump around in it if I only wanted to!
Through blind faith, urged on by a strange inner force, I had arrived at that seat in the plane. The bearded man next to me smelled so strongly that I’m sure everyone around us wondered why it smelled like an Indian temple or an exotic incense shop. And when further investigation lead them to the source, I’m sure they asked themselves: who is that odd couple, that bearded, long-haired old man and that wild-eyed, young, blond woman? Where are they going?
I stare out at the clouds behind my window today. They’re just regular clouds, no pink. The energy of the ascent is starting to dissolve and wear off now bit by bit, at a height of ten kilometres. The familiar sounds ring out, the hollow dings, the clicking seat belts and a steadily humming motor in which we all have to trust. One of my children has fallen asleep and the other is dangling in the aisle, neck craned to see when the “plane lady” is coming to bring us food and drinks. Justin is sitting next to our daughter, his dark hair covering his eyes. I can’t tell if he’s asleep or just thinking. In any case, he doesn’t look like he’s up for a conversation. At the moment, I don’t have anything to do. Nothing depends on me right at this moment. The main thing has been done – getting us on this plane, so that we could fly into the past and through it arrive at the future.
The past and the future are always connected, even though sometimes it would be nice to unravel them and think: what if…? What would my life have been like, if I had never met Harri? Is it possible that my first marriage wouldn’t have broken up in that case? Is it possible that I wouldn’t have become a vegetarian and an an environmentalist? Is it possible that I wouldn’t have become the homeless cosmopolitan that I am in my soul at this moment? Would I see the world altogether differently?
Harri was “crazy”, but he got inside my head and changed me.
The time when Harri came into my life – or rather when I stepped into his and demanded to be taken along – was in hindsight one of the most terrible times I’ve ever gone through. On the surface, everything was fine and that, in turn, made me feel even guiltier: why can’t I be satisfied with my secure and nicely bolstered world? I had money, a husband, free time, a prestigious job, but… something was wrong and I felt it every morning when I woke up and looked around: is this it? Is it everything that life has in store for me? Is this how it’s going to be for years and years? That winter a peculiar physical restlessness stirred inside of me. I wanted to jump up, literally tear off my skin and run away. I couldn’t stand still, I had to move constantly, but usually even that didn’t help – I did push-ups at home on the carpet to work off some of the stress. As soon as I sat back down again, it all came back.
That fateful morning started much in the usual way, except I was expecting something more than before. I had just returned from a ski trip to Slovakia, and I was physically and spiritually shaken. At the beginning of the trip, I had fallen and injured my back: it was nothing compared to what had been off for quite some time in my heart, but it still forced me to spend a day under medical care.
However, returning from the clinic, I greeted the New Year lying in the mountains, between two camping sites.
Alone.
There was a group of people somewhere below me and another group farther above. They were my colleagues, who all seemed to be satisfied with their lives and I had no idea how to tell them what was wrong with me. They weren’t my friends, because we didn’t talk about the things that mattered. I was trudging restlessly on through the snow, when I realized that the camp I was heading for was much farther than I had anticipated and I was thankful for it: just think, at this important moment I get to be all alone, by myself!
Alone.
My husband Tom couldn’t make it to the ski trip, because he didn’t want to leave his old and lonely mother all by herself. “I’ve spent every New Year’s Eve with mother, except for the year that I was in the army.” I, however, went on that ski trip with my colleagues to “air myself out,” as I put it.
Alone.
I threw myself on my back. My internal clock told me that I’d been plodding through the snow for about an hour and it should be more or less the moment when the year changes. A new year was beginning. I laid there smelling the snow that was melting around my body.
It was one of those moments that I have longed to return to later on, but it has never quite happened again the same way. I was lying there, exhausted, watching the moonlight reflecting off the snowy peaks to form a halo around the moon while I breathed deeply, like sleeping. It was time for promises to be kept and prayers to be heard, I could feel it from the stars. But the question was: what am I supposed to promise, what