Graveyard Talk

My better half died in this bed, he just slumped against that wall without saying anything. He died so suddenly that I didn’t have time to do anything. We’d been in the sauna and when we came back into the house again he complained about his chest and said he had a pain in it. I tried to get him to lie down, but he’s never listened to what I say. He just kept walking about, and he looked terrible, I noticed that, for I was keeping an eye on him. I pretended to be watching some sports show on the telly before going to bed. After a bit, my hubby came to bed too, and then he was dead. He didn’t even have to time to pray to have his sins forgiven, he went godless to his grave, even though I told the priest that he’d said sorry for his sins and had called on God. I couldn’t bring myself to ring for a taxi so late at night to take him to the church but fell asleep beside him like I usually did, and only made the call after I’d had my morning coffee. The taxi driver arrived after the school run, put hubby’s corpse on the back seat and then drove it to the church, probably straight to the morgue. I made sure it was buried quickly, and I didn’t bother with much of a funeral. Me and my hubby didn’t have much to do with other folk. We kept ourselves to ourselves and it was best that way. We didn’t run around the village and we didn’t keep the coffee-pot warm for strangers. We were able to live in peace, because it’s a long way from the village to our place and nowadays people are so lazy that they can’t manage to walk more than a metre on their own legs. It was the second half of the winter when he was buried, and I thought everything would go on like before, but right enough there was a change. I started coughing, and the cough just got worse and worse. I couldn’t sleep in any more, for as soon as I went to bed it started, really bad. I kept the radio on loud from morning to night and tried to stop coughing. Of course I knew that it’s not a good sign if you’re coughing all the time and can’t get any sleep. I started taking hubby’s pills, I don’t know what they were but at least I began to sleep again. As soon as I woke the phlegm would come up from my throat in bucketfuls, but I slept as sweet as a baby. I only got up to put more wood in the stove and make meat broth. Then it was summer, and since I didn’t need to heat the place I just lay in bed and drank sour milk and swallowed pills by the handful. Hubby had stuffed the medicine cabinet full of them, for over the years the doctor had prescribed thousands of them for him, but he never wanted to take them. Well, I took them all, and slept like a log. By the autumn I was full of phlegm up to here and the trouble was that I couldn’t manage to get to the medicine cabinet. What else could you expect, since I’d been living on nothing but pills and sour milk for months. I don’t know what I was thinking of, I suppose I just wanted to slip down into the grave and lie beside my better half. That’s probably how I saw it, and I didn’t care about anything, never did any housework or anything at all. I just lay there, listened to the radio and the TV at the same time, waiting for death and coughing blood. But then one day that damned taxi driver came to the door and knocked. I was convinced it was the angel of death who’d come to collect me, but no it damn well wasn’t, it was the taxi driver and he dragged me out into his car. He took me to the health centre and they immediately took me into the clinic and began to examine me. And of course they found a thousand and one things wrong with me. They began giving me more pills and yelled at me for not looking after myself. They even said I’d been on the point of dying. I was that weak, I was practically nothing but skin and bone. And they yelled at me for peeing in my pants and lying in my own shit for months. I mean, there was nothing I could say. I don’t even understand myself how it happened. That it all went so badly wrong. Anyway, I lay in the hospital for months and they fed me through a funny kind of tube and linked me up to all kinds of machines. I put a bit of flesh on my bones there and started to get better. I’m in really good shape now that they’ve sent me home. They send a woman from the council to clean for me and bring me food. The nurse always comes when I need her, so they’re looking after me. And now I understand why they keep an eye on poor old ladies like me. What’s behind it is that the council want my flat, but they’ll wait in vain. I’ve left everything to hubby and he’s left everything to me. When I die, hubby will inherit it all. So then they’ll just have to bury the house with us in the graveyard.

from: Rosa Liksom, Tyhjän tien paratiisit (Paradises of the Open Road, 1989)