Trafika Europe 2 - Polish Nocturne

cookies. Then we caught a crunching sound as she nibbled, followed immediately by silence. She must have fallen asleep. That is how she fell asleep on Thursday. Thursday. The objects belonging to the one who is no longer present suddenly assume a disproportionate importance. They hold the person’s smell and touch. My daughter takes great care of his things. She likes to feel their proximity: jacket, wallet, books, notebooks, the presents he gave her, the figurines he bought for her at the stationery store, the wolf of the three little pigs (it was the latest one), the violin strings that were changed last Wednesday. Wednesday. The need to embrace and caress the imprint he made on them is enormous. This is a moment of rapine: his objects spring to mind and you need to appropriate them. Where are the photos? Where are his fountain pens? His binoculars? The notes he left me? Overcome by a sudden frenzy, I search for the notes. I kept them in a drawer. We never wrote letters to each other, just brief messages. Two lines at most. They were our letters, but everything’s mixed up in the drawer and I can only find one of his last notes. It’s a sketch, an elongated worm made of spheres drawn with a quick pen, two words—eternal love— written in German (it probably didn’t sound as corny to him in German) and a message: “I’ll be home at ten.” That’s all the correspondence we ever sent each other. There was no occasion for anything else; we were never separated long enough to have to write.

119