1.

“Am I dead? Or am I living?” – he questioned himself. Times and times again, he recollected the final battle, the commotion, the flurry, the people in animal skins, short and yelling, bleeding, tearing up and dying. He was not any better: a dishevelled sailor with a sharp knife; some called them pirates. They lived from battle to battle, raided what would open itself to raid, then went on, with whatever they could get. They lived, then, they died. It mattered little who died, it mattered much how many stayed.

“Am I dead now? Or am I living? Is my body alive?” – he searched further for recollection. The three men on their ship, in front of him, stumbling, throwing their nets, then waving their blades, then…. then…. Nothing. He could remember nothing then. He tried to concentrate, to recollect, to construct, to guess, but the picture would start from the beginning again, never ending, never changing.

Outside this picture, there remained a question, a burning cycles of invisible blood rushing through the nothingness, pushing, pushing through the dark, turning on itself like a stream returning to its own source: “Am I living, or am I dead?”

Time did not pass. It curled up in a circle of blood and questions, of missing remembrance, of wonder and urge to flow and burst out again in a straight line, of what once meant life, or perhaps death too.

Living or dead? The circle of no-answer kept on repeating itself deafly, until the opposite sides of the circle flattened out into unheeding plain. “I am a living death, I am a dying life, I am a knot urging to burst out in a river, I am a living one wanting to die, I am a dead one wanting to live…” The knot straightened out. A plain spread open, a thin, dark-blue film, around the questioning current coming from darkness; the current suspected itself, seeking a window in the plain to look at itself.

Then he found it. There was an opening in the plane, a white whirl of thick light, billowing upward and back upon itself. He flew toward the opening. Through it, he saw: a child curled at the root of the light-whirl, a child whose arm was missing, crying and wanting something to fill up that awful void in the shoulder. A helpless child. Helpless. Asking itself the same question: “Should I live? Or should I die?”

He went down in a downpour of shadowy fog. He stood beside the child - an alien dream in the child’s own dream. He replaced the arm with his cloudy self and stood firmly. He looked at the world of colours and shapes through the child’s eyes, sensing full life through the child’s skin, finger and heart and breathing life though its lungs.

The child stopped crying and retreated into what was left of its dream’s body, into its un-hurting part. He bound himself to the child, to live in its life margins, posing the question “Am I dead, or am I alive?” to Life itself. To drive the child toward answering it, toward life or toward death, their death; to accompany the child as faithfully as that strange half-death held him, as the urge drove him to answer his question.

2.

The child, Amrie, grew up into a fragile girl. As early as eight, she was diagnosed with fatal illness. She died after she turned fourteen. She was the eldest of two children.

Her mother, Anka, could not remember a time of not worrying about the girl. Pale, and withdrawn, the girl carried the air of a hollow presence inside. Amrie could not think of the future. Amrie did not understand the naturalness of hope. Amrie never planned anything about “when she grows up.” Amrie’s eyes were sometimes turned somewhere far away, timid and questioning, as if waiting for a permission. She was not an unhappy child. She laughed sometimes. Her laughter, the creaking girlish voice changing into that of a boy, was strangely disturbing. But the girl was always slightly strange, they said. Her mother loved her, as deeply and seriously as mothers need to love.

Amrie was three when her mother and father started falling apart. Frequent fights, with hidden blades lashing out of bitter words that only despair can render. This went on for months, it simply went on. What was not poured out in one day, grew into a mad river bursting the dam of the following day. Restrained bitterness turning into poison, not meant to kill but to invalidate and bind, to cut and push away the other to a controlled distance. The husband and the wife were fighting, they were not separating.

The child was there, in their minds, in the room or the next room; they were in the child’s mind. She saw them sawing each other’s limbs, slashing each other’s skins, careful not to kill, careful to hurt masterfully. Their words lashed about with sounds, of which the tails were red flames of emotions. The word-tails hurt. Amrie had to stop it before she herself were to die twice by the blows of both parents.

She stood between them. She put her hand in-between them. She pledged her arm to stay there, in the torrent of tears, to stay there, so that they would hurt her arm and not each other, and so that the arm would grasp the word-tails and hold the speakers together by holding their words firmly. She made her pledge. She made herself a part of them, so much that they could not separate without tearing her apart. It worked. She grew so weak and ill that her parents forgot their fights in the concern over her.

“Am I here, or there? Am inside this swirl of word-tails, or am I apart, alone and cut off? Is life this being alone, or is life being amidst a battle of word-tails?” – she questioned the space around her. “Is life a clash of mom and dad? Or is it life to wander off unguarded in this dark blue film, alone and aimless? Is life a clash of the living, and is death their absence? Am I living, or am I dying?” – she wondered.

In the ensuing years, although her parents had already ceased fighting a long time ago, her arm was still between them, to separate them, to hold them together, and to hold Amrie bound to her parents.

Before she died, she was suddenly afraid of death, as if something came to tell her alarming news of it. She never said a word about dying though.

3.

Anka. Life was not always easy for her. She married at an age considered to denote maturity. She expected little from life, but expected it firmly. She knew what she wanted, and what she would reconcile herself with. She had decided not to waste her life on anything else but her minimum requirements of life.

Amrie came first, then, five years later, a boy. The boy grew up more quickly than the girl. For such a happy, self-sufficient boy there could be no worry. But there was always worry about Amrie.

Her husband. Yes, he was alright, after the first year of getting used to each other’s shortcomings, learning to tolerate failed promises and fallen pretences, the flat crudeness that stayed after the masks had melted off. There was always Amrie to worry about. After Amrie died, the boy was left to connect them, in a ritual of bringing up the only remaining child together, and nothing else.

Anka was smitten by Amrie’s death. One of her offspring had died. There was something unnatural in the thought that her daughter died before her. It was meant to be the other way. Anka wondered if she had done everything to save her little girl. She doubted it. There were pangs of pain, aggravating suspicion and guilt when she thought of her little girl.

She could not accept Amrie’s death. It was against all reason, against all rights and promises of life. It went against everything Anka believed. She tortured her mind with breaches of reason with the mastery of an inquisitor. Until one day, four years later, breathlessly, she met her in a dream. It was a world of dull dark-blue gleaming, endless, without height or depth, an infinite even plain.

She saw Amrie just as she was prior to her death, touched by a pale circle of light. The child was not alone. A man’s shadow was standing beside her, bending over her shoulder, benevolent and concerned. Anka spoke to Amrie, ignoring the unknown man. “Amrie, my child,”  she called.

“Mummy…” Amrie gasped out. “Mummy… am I alive or am I dead?” Anka felt her heart shrink to a solid diamond. She knew, she had seen Amrie’s body lying on a couch, the closing of the coffin, the lowering of the coffin in the cold earth. She had no tears left.

“Amrie, my child, you are dead. You died, four years ago.”

“Mum… I don’t remember. How is it that I am dead when I can still see you, and talk with you?” – asked Amrie in a confused and slightly hurt voice.

Anka was speechless for a moment. Yes, Amrie could speak, but life was not there. She looked at Amrie’s body, and realised that her feet were missing, her calves dissolved in a whiter light. The man beside her also had his feet melting away into the light. Anka looked at her own feet. Her feet were distinct and solid, very much there.

“My dearest, look at your feet, where are they?” – she asked her daughter.

“My feet?... They are missing,” – Amrie looked down stricken with the discovery. “Then, am I really dead?” She turned to the man beside her. “What about your feet? They are missing too. So, you are dead too, aren’t you?”

The man looked at her taken aback by the realisation. He gasped for breath, and looked around wildly, as if seeing the evenness of the dark-blue plain for the first time. Something happened between them. A dark flicker of recognition. They looked at Anka with a concentrated gaze only the dead are capable of. They looked around, they held hands, the little girl and the man. “We are dead,” unspoken words echoed through the space. “We should go home,” agreed to two figures hand in hand. Under their gaze, the plain started to transform.

Layers of transparency appeared, like petals unfolding from a core, each with a different hue of blue and light. The man and Amrie stood up, sunk to their waists in the petals. Bright streaks appeared in the layers of light, soundlessly connecting them, passing through their bodies, Anka’s body too, spreading upon infinite plains, paling away in the distance. The three people looked below in the unfolding layers. The silvery streaks grew clear.

The man and Amrie, still holding hands, saw the streaks of light forming patterns at each point they traversed. Each layer a semblance of a pattern. Each pattern unfolding differently upon a different layer. Crystal-clear structures formed out of light. They were standing at a crossroads of snowflakes. Their bodies in the heart of it. Their bodies shone clearly, changing colour from deep grey, to blue and then to light. They looked far ahead, holding hands. There was something like a dawn everywhere around the horizon. They let go of each other. Then the mist ceased, and the dream ended.

Anka woke up in tears. Her heart was bursting in an outrage of happiness, a heavy, serious, incomprehensible happiness. Her child had finally gone, and that was good.

Yes, Anka was helpless. Helpless toward death, helpless to turn back the tide of time and bring the dead back to life. But it was alright. Human beings are not meant to do so, she thought. They are meant to bow slightly and with grace, or without it, and enter the tides of life, and of death. The difference between the living and the dead being merely in the side of the heaving wave. Above the wave, life, beneath the wave, death. Or was it the opposite? It did not matter. It was alright. It was a snowflake, an infinite, precious snowflake made of the most beautiful substance without a name.

Skopje, June 2006

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