I

For a longish, and rounded, amount of time (like a lie on Jaglika’s lips), I took, with the certainty of an idiot, her stories and those of Marina to be images from my own childhood; and of course I believed unshakably in my ownership of those images. I’m not sure when that all went up in smoke! All efforts up to this point have been inaudible (unsuccessful), like clacking one’s dry, untrimmed fingernails together or timidly scratching the edge of a table with a pin; there was a huge tangle in my head and I felt it whenever I tried to remember something, or with inappropriate ambition tried to recall anything at all with complete accuracy; the bit that I could get my hands on was quickly lost amid the concentric braid of other pictures, and there was no way for me to find the beginning or the end. And then everything snapped, went off like a bomb; no; like a hundred and twenty glasses tossed from the tenth floor; and nothing remained; not even anything like the rubber stub that’s left behind when a balloon pops or, you know, an inflated plastic bag explodes.

I was free! I realized that I remembered nothing, that, instead of me, Jaglika and Marina were doing the remembering; that I had never recalled anything; and that the two of them were swindling me and, sneakily, and stealthily (kisses and baby-talk), pulling me into the mutual family memory. I thought: such gratitude for emptiness! I could shove everything inside (where it’s empty, like into the biggest hole in the world); falsehoods from anybody; even the most far-fetched, random fabrications. That’s how I started off inventing my own childhood; with no malice and no vanity; with empty space inside myself, around me, all around, everywhere…

Everything that I would think up and narrate to myself, in a whisper at first; once or twice – depending on the length of the story; and then I would repeat it out loud, before going to sleep, with my eyes wide open, in the dark; and the story (an image from childhood – which only appeared not to exist) would settle into its spot in my brain.

The next day I checked: I would sneak up on Jaglika, and start up a conversation first about her glasses, then her aching joints, homeless women and cuckolded men; and then, in the middle of the conversation, I would say, as if by chance: ‘Hey,baba, do you remember that?’ Or: ‘What was that like,baba? You used to know that…’ Jaglika would ask what I was getting at, and wriggle joyously in her seat – happy that I had faith in her memory, and that’s how she fell into the trap. I told her only the basic framework of a story (the picture), devised the night before, leaving out the dates and more detailed parts; otherwise Jaglika would discover my deception. And so she could continue the stories one after another to the end.

For several days running, I carried every fabricated story (in my arms, in my mouth) to the half-deaf and half-blind Jaglika. The fact that Jaglika took part wholeheartedly in it all only showed that it was realistic to assume that all the pictures (stories), from this point on, as far as the eye could see, all of them made or invented by night, happened or were happening, or were just about to happen, at some time or other and to some person or other, or even to me!

At that point it took me a great deal of time to realize that I imagined some of these things as: freedom of fabrication, t