Honor To Whom Honor Is Due

I know a city where at night only dogs walk around. They wander along the sidewalks, lie sometimes in the middle of the street, and they bark, somewhat lost, at the spots of light under the streetlamps.

The silence of the city where, after a certain hour, the people may not leave their houses—must be indoors—is that of a cemetery. In the houses of that city, people hold their breath out of fear; I doubt that the people in the graves no longer breathe. I feel their spirit around me. When you’re dead, your spirit arises. That is why there are so many spirits floating around in cemeteries.

I have driven through that dead city several times—of course, you had to have a car—because I can never leave somewhere on time, never arrive on time. You hunch up, bent over the steering wheel, because you do not know from which ambush they will shoot at you. The people in the houses shudder: “Who are they shooting at now again?”

OK, I am kidding. They did not shoot at people. They had come up with other punishments: cleaning toilets, cemeteries. Cemeteries! Where did you get that? Agnes, Agnes, Agnes—.

(They did shoot at stray dogs. In our country all dogs are loose, but now we suddenly had to keep them in the yard. I had six wild dogs, and I could not lock them all inside the house when I had to go to work. My neighbor would watch to see if the soldiers came. Poor dogs. They all died at the veterinarian, because you cannot take wild dogs along when you leave.)

(Of course, they could have easily killed all the dogs of our country during the evening curfew. Our dogs never sleep inside. But where would you put all those bodies? After they shot fifteen, sixteen, twenty people at the same time, the families had to bury them. Later they dropped sometimes one, two bodies in the sea, from a helicopter.)

Agnes was raised by her aunt.

We mention such things. We always know exactly which children in our country are raised by their mother, grandmother, or the sister of their mother. I even know a boy who is raised by the sister of his father. Of course, there was a grandmother in the house, or was it a great-aunt?

I am talking about a country where I no longer live but which I dream about every night. Even in those dreams I am surprised how light everything is. It is the sunlight, still so fierce that even with closed eyes it is not only visible but tangible; it lightens the whole surroundings.

My house is always standing in a sharp beacon of light, but, when I imagine the house of that boy, I know again how dark it was there. An old woman is sitting in a dimly lit kitchen. The grandmother or the great-aunt. It was an old wooden apartment-type house where the sun never entered, if you ask me.

Our kitchens were always large rooms where you could also sit at an old, wobbly, wooden table cutting kouseband, those thin, long beans, with a sharp kitchen knife into juicy, little pieces. Briefly steam with butter, a bouillon cube, some finely diced onion, pepper. No water. To boil vegetables in water, that was really something for those Europeans.

Agnes and that boy both had a mother who came by sometimes, or they would go by her place, and a father they sometimes ran into in the street. They had many real and half-brothers and -sisters.

Now I do not want to talk about that boy because he is reared and raised with love, so that you do not have to worry about the family systems in developing countries. It’s about Agnes, also raised full of love, who was afraid of spirits, a fear she had inherited from her aunt.

When Agnes grew up, she and her aunt lived close to a cemetery. The graves were behind a high...