#4. Author's translation

“If ever I start again… thinking!”

That will deal with me faster than the cough that, having stopped to hide its vicious intentions, grabs all the air that is trying his best to enter the lungs, even by roundabout ways.

Wrapping up in chequered shawl (it’s so banal, indeed, but it’s actually chequered), Martha wanted to write a letter. In a few minutes a sheet of paper was cut by a pointed pencil till pitch-black, but none of the lines resembled a letter, it was an image, a face. But Martha wasn’t able to draw anyone except triangle ballerinas in profile. Three straight lines go away like the trefoil axes and then the two of them are joined together by a curved line to make brocade that adorns its tutu. A few touches – and a stony sculpture, a sphinx, conquers the space on the sheet forever. The sheet has nothing else to do but resign under the weight of dull drawing.

Between the cough attacks that now replaced the thinking process, Martha was recalling the last-year autumn. She was angry at this astonishing regularity: why on Earth it’s autumn that means so much to everyone? Or has it always been the beginning of the year?

But why the autumn needs so much effort? Its greediness exceeds all bounds, it is even ready to gulp the tears of tiredness and despair. And its favourite… or has it saved this specially for Martha? Its favourite torture was to trip so that, stumbling, Martha could face her helplessness. What else am I supposed to do to realise that there is nothing I can do to help?

Or was it easier last autumn? But then there were illusions!.. Martha smiled wryly, getting her breath after the usual cough attack. It’s so easy, to modify the universe, tailoring it to your own rainbow world. It’s a play of child to break down the barriers and smoothing things. But then the illusions – damn it, it always happens this way – cut these logically built lines and connections, collapse this fragile delicate imaginative world and throw back to the surface to stand firmly.

And Martha decided that it was high time she stopped writing and thinking. As if anybody wanted these heaps of letters, these lines, torn out of my conscience built like a pyramid out of small bricks – everything to be normal, but all in vain?

And Martha succeeded in forbidding herself to write. Almost. Sometimes she has vague ideas, but she tries not to pay attention to them, recalling last autumn, lit by the porcelain white and fragile stranger talent.