The Little Communist Who Never Smiled by Lola Lafon

Author:Lola Lafon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

Unable to breathe

At dawn every day he comes to fetch her at the house in the Deva hills where she is installed with her mother and younger brother; she has refused to live in the boarding school with the others. After an hour’s run, three hours of light training. Then another run, wearing several layers to make her sweat; then she has the right to a massage followed by a muscle-building session, half an hour in the sauna and, to finish, another run. She attempts some routines on the uneven bars but is unable to stabilize any movement.

‘You wanted a normal life, and you’ve got it, you’ve become a fat normal cow, and all your fat cells are protesting! They don’t want you to be this tank,’ says Béla with a smile, slapping her backside so that she starts again.

At night, she cannot walk, and lies in bed unable to sleep because everything aches so much. Flat on her back, she runs her hand over her ribs, impatient for them to stand out clearly once more. Starving, she wakes at four and waits until six before making tea; the migraines she gets late in the evening are a relief because for a few hours the pain lessens the hunger pangs. Everything is as it used to be. For the first days of the training programme, she slept at Márta and Béla’s. They have ‘set her back on track’, salad and fruit accompanied only by iced water, which she drinks in small sips; the liquid trickles down her oesophagus, the transparence of her empty stomach.

If you do as I tell you, we’ll get there. Béla knows. He knows exactly what she has ‘inside there’, and lays his hand on her stomach. The life she led during those months in Bucharest is a distant bank of fog now, reckless nights and rapid sugars. Béla can even foresee the outcome of the World Championships in a week’s time. Nothing. Bronze on the bars, possibly, but not on the floor; because to be cute with all that’s sloshing around her, these titties, impossible, she is unable to breathe when he puts his finger on her chest beneath the tracksuit top.

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