The  evening after the funeral, a pigeon descended for the first time on the window, carried by the noiseless fan of spread wings. At first sight it was ordinary, a grey pigeon with unsymmetrically painted stains of white and blue feathers. He didn’t coo, but with a lazy step he balanced his weight like a tired acrobat on his last walk on the narrow entablature of corroded metal. His open beak was like a sad river trough of sound that dried during an Indian summer. The bird possessed a magnetism that seized the weepy gaze of Mrs. Bela. It was blue-eyed.

Bela had green eyes. The world’s jewels were strewn all over the planet, and the seventh, the emerald, was hidden on her face. She looked at the pigeon through her emerald’s crystal that bode the tide of cognition which blurred the hidden recesses of hope: My Petar has come back!

Petar couldn’t have come back, because yesterday never comes back. His yesterday is buried under a heavy concrete block in an atheist graveyard that defies with its cremated bodies the idea of God . His former friends, each and every one of them failed students and latent alcoholics, generated inspiring superlatives for the deceased in a self-promoting display. They talked of him (and themselves) being irreplaceable and grand. And Petar remained a child forever, gazing toward the blue sky of his native land which gently licked the green plain in the far off  view of the horizon. He loved airspace, dragons, zeppelins, and other things related to aerodynamics, Bela’s breasts, for example. Two raindrops were hidden on the woman’s breast, which he clumsily caressed one distant student winter. The blood clover on the sheets, the shared footsteps on the beach, the songs from the Hungarian Csárdás, the cities in black and white photos, twenty years of two lives together gone imperceptibly.

The blue-eyed pigeon didn’t show fear. He was standing with a clear look of lust formulating a naked woman’s body covered with a dead husband’s shirt. The touch of the cold cotton calmed the pigeon’s sweaty tissues, offering a fresh asylum to the restless soul.

Bela knows all the wisdoms from the people from whose seed she herself is a flower. Take the hair of the dog that bit you. She puts two spoons of dark powder and lets a liquid melt the blobs of instant mixture. She enjoys small sips of the hot beverage, while the tiny drops of sweat fall from the neck rolling toward the firm canyon of mellow female breasts. She inhales a hot steam that rises in swirls above the glass cup as if she wants to suck in its every molecule.

With every new sip of the liquid Bela felt they were blending and becoming the parts of one being, a great jigsaw whose sense could finally be perceived.

The heat of the Indian summer dried the air above the wedding bed in which Bela laid for the last time. She poured hot water in the cup, added the last spoon of the powder from the metal urn, drank it in one gulp, and closed her eyes.

Bela raised her hand towards the bird and let the words bring comfort: Come, Petar!

The bird  fluttered silently into the sky, leaving the ban of corroded metal at the bottom of the screen like the plaque from an ancient documentary movie where the history of one unfulfilled love needed to be written.

Translated by Maida Krzović
© 2013 Maida Krzović

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