Mars by Asja Bakić

Author:Asja Bakić
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2018-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

What was that supposed to mean? I hadn’t a clue. I couldn’t remember if Vanja read poetry. It suddenly seemed very important, maybe the most important element of all.

It turned out that Vanja was still using her old email, that nothing significant in her life had changed—she still used the same phone number, the same email address. Since I couldn’t stand talking on the phone, I decided to write her an email. I didn’t want to reveal too much. I asked whether she felt like getting together, we hadn’t seen each other in so long, blah blah blah—the platitudes piled up. I’d even written Dear Vanja at the beginning, which wasn’t a lie, but sounded insincere.

It took her three days to reply that she didn’t have time, but as soon as she did, she’d get in touch about meeting up for a drink. I was nervous. I wrote back saying I had something important to discuss with her. I should’ve known she would call me right away. She asked what all this was about, but I didn’t say. I proposed we meet that night. She declined.

“I can’t meet before tomorrow,” she muttered.

“What you can’t do today can wait till tomorrow,” I said, laughing like a moron.

I tried to prolong the conversation. I had to clutch the receiver with both hands—my palms were so clammy, it was like trying to hold a bar of soap.

“Tomorrow in the main square?” I asked.

“Okay, be there at five. We have a lot of work to do, so I can’t stay long.”

“We?” I asked.

“Yes, me and my husband.”

“I didn’t know you were an old married lady,” I said, on the verge of tears.

“Don’t you just mean married? I’m nobody’s old lady.”

“Tomorrow at five then,” I said, quickly hanging up.

I’d forgotten to say goodbye, see you, or take care. I’d forgotten such formalities. Before my eyes appeared Vanja’s husband, that disgusting creature who couldn’t possibly deserve her. I’d never met him, but already I hated him. However much I tried, I couldn’t recall the face, or even the silhouette, of the man I’d seen Vanja with at the book launch. I imagined him with small, hairy hands and oily skin. Then I started fantasizing that Vanja had actually left the event with a lover. The idea of Vanja lying to her husband brought me a few minutes of pleasure. If it hadn’t been for those thoughts, I wouldn’t have gotten a wink of sleep.

I slept fitfully. I dreamed of my high school physics teacher, vividly recalling her face, and even more her hair. She’d been a surprisingly intelligent and sophisticated young woman who specialized in electromagnetics and optics. In the dream, I was trying to convince her that physics could actually predict the future, that the task of physics was to show how two bodies with the same charge could attract rather than repel one another. The teacher—whose hair I remembered, but not her name—wagged her finger and fumed that the principles of physics state that positive and negative attract, and negative and negative repel.

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