You Are So Mine

1.

I have been a stranger for a long time. For longer than I thought it possible to be. When I first arrived in this place, I thought that strangeness was a transitory quality: a quality that, like a tongue of mercury moving within a glass thermometer, could be measured by degrees of intensity. By heat, by fever: the body’s natural reaction to contact with a foreign agent. I believed that, although I happened to find myself in a situation that caused the silvery liquid to climb up, up, up through the transparent bar, there would always be a countervailing tendency for it to fall back down again, toward some imaginary black line.

Toward a condition called normal.

But now, after having been strange for such a long time, I am no longer certain that this point of equilibrium – this black line – really exists. I am no longer certain that the mercury must fall.

2.

Years ago, before I came to the place where I am now, Marat used to make love to me at my place. Or rather at the place where I lived then which wasn’t really mine at all, but a tiny living room alcove in the apartment of a married couple who needed a little extra money to help pay the rent. Back then, I was oblivious to my surroundings. I was an invisible drop of water in a sea of invisible drops of water. That is until Marat appeared on the horizon: a tiny red sailing boat, a speck of bright color in the uniform blue. In those days, Marat, with his beautifully twisted nose and his beautifully twisted English, was the one strange and marvelous thing in my existence. And, on the rare occasions when we could find somewhere to be alone, the one strange and marvelous thing inside of me.

I used to call him from my office when I knew the apartment would be empty.

“Three o’clock,” was all I needed to say.

Or: “Half past five.”

Or: “Nine fifteen tonight, but only for an hour,” and he knew exactly what I meant.

Be there. Then. And he always was.  

When Marat made love to me in the wide marital bed of my absent roommates – their long-sleeved flannel pajamas tucked carefully under the pillow where I lay my head – he would lean in against me, press his body on top of mine, and whisper my name into my ear. That was always the first thing he did: before he kissed me or touched any part of my body with his long handsome fingers. My own name. In my own ear. Yet somehow his foreign tongue changed the shape of the familiar word and made it his own.

For me, the sound of my name on a lover’s lips has always meant the first step toward possession – his of me, mine of him. And it was no different with Marat. Only more so: perhaps because he mispronounced it.

Marat talked a lot during the course of our lovemaking – he was a real talker in bed.  He started with my name, then phrases in my language and then, as his pleasure grew more insistent, he seemed to be pulled back toward his own language, toward some inner reservoir of expression. Then strange words poured out of him in a warm liquid rush, odd little incantations:

“ti si tako moja, ti si tako moja…”  

I never asked what they meant. I liked not knowing. But the peculiar rhythm of the funny little staccato words ended up dislodging me, slowly and surely, from the one place I knew in the world. Bereft of meaning, the nonsense syllables acquired a power of their own.

3.

Today I don’t have an office. I don’t have an apartment. I don’t pay rent to cash-strapped roommates. I don’t even have a telephone though, with a bit of luck, one may be installed in the coming months. I live in an old stone house on the island in the northern Adriatic where Marat spent his childhood. The island is actually two long slender islands: an abbreviated archipelago of sorts. On the map, the islands look like two dark worms hanging down from the mainland, consuming each other. A tiny bridge lies between the two islands. The bridge reaches a length of no more than ten feet or so, and can be opened with a hand crank so that high-masted sailboats can pass between the two islands and into the open sea. A sturdy young man, who as far as I can tell has no other function on the island, performs this odd little operation twice each day.

Marat is renovating the old house where we live, and he also runs his family’s tourist agency. During high season, he goes out on one of those high-masted sailboats nearly every day. He takes tourists on junkets: trips to the mainland, trips to other islands, trips to the famed blue grotto. The comings and goings of the boat must be timed to the opening of the bridge, or he has to sail around the tip of the island to get home. During high season, virtually nothing gets done on the house – no improvements, no telephone installations, nothing – because, not only Marat, but every man, woman and child on the island is dedicated to the surge of foreigners that overwhelms them for three months each year. Houses are emptied for renters, private cars converted to taxis, fishing boats into pleasure crafts.  

On days when I don’t go out on the boat with Marat, I take walks, swim in the sea, and rattle in and out of the odd-shaped rooms of the old house. I feel like the only soul on the island that is not part of the binary equation of this place: neither local nor tourist. I belong to some strange in-between race.

It can happen on such days that the island and the sea suddenly, and with no warning at all, change places. And then I feel like I’m drowning on a solid piece of land.

With no little red boat in sight.