Ana

 

When we were younger, my sister was always stronger and faster than I was. While I spent my evenings reading in the armchair given to us by our grandfather, who hoped one of us would use it to broaden her horizons, she would be off prowling. At the neighbours’, in narrow valleys, under haystacks, among the ruins of the old factory. I envied her never truly getting tired. I envied the rosy glow of her skin when she returned from these rambles. Whenever we were getting ready to go to bed and she was brushing her long, heavy brown hair, I’d wish, if the night was particularly hard on me, for all her hair to fall out. I’d hope she’d wake up like I was, with a sensitive scalp, dandruff, with problem skin that took on an ugly reddish hue with greasy white lines whenever I worked up a sweat. I envied that dad, whenever she ran in to hug him, would nimbly lift her up and spin around with her until they were both delirious. One afternoon he arrived back from the supermarket and she jumped on his back, and despite being caught off guard, he held her aloft, and they spun around for so long that he lost his balance. He fell back against the radiator, fell on top of her, and her head just missed the sharp corner, so that the fall wasn’t lethal, merely extremely painful. The scar would be overgrown by hair, and the memory of danger by laughter.

 

 That laugh. So full of life and sparkle. Laughter that I was invited to share in but kept choosing to remain outside. She was the first of us to start growing breasts. She carried them with pride, like she would wear the girly necklaces that dad brought back from his trips. While my chest was sporting nothing but odd, fatty little buttons (which I liked to press my thumb into, checking whether they’d pop out again), mam was already buying my sister her first bras. ‘30B,’ she’d boast. Thanks to her breasts and the playful hair that tumbled over them, thanks to her narrow waist which hinted at womanly hips and thanks to her sense of humour, driven by a waking libido and flirtatious nature, she was popular with boys. Back then I thought the worst of her, but my anger had nothing to lean on. Her actions, her answers, her jokes – everything was straight and average, silly as one would expect of a teenager. Only now and then did a glimmer of adulthood shine through in her behaviour. Like the time she accompanied me to the hospital when I got salmonella and remained with me long after our parents had gone to sleep; or when she confronted the Slovene language teacher who had called a child from an immigrant family a baby for being so scared of school that he barely ever uttered a word.

 

The only thing my anger could lean on was her beauty. I tried my best to conceal this with other justifications; I told myself I was bigger than that, bigger than myself and my vapid impulses. But such efforts tend to be fruitless. Beauty has no force of its own, it always uses that of another to hurt, it always pays back what it receives. When it receives hate, it responds with injury. When it receives love, it responds with the illusion of its immortality.

 

In the last days of August before we entered high school, her body overtook mine once more. As we were running around the shops looking for clothes, she got her first period. She reported that it arrived unannounced, with no burning sensation or cramps, and that euphoria came over her as she felt her first pad scrunch between her thighs. She requested ice cream. As she stared into the colourful containers, mam lectured her: ‘It’s all going to be different now. You’ll be adult and responsible. At least I hope so.’ I resented her again. Her breakthrough to the next level filled me with a dismal sense that life would never pick me up from the closet floor, that I would always remain pitiful and forgotten.

 

This was her body’s last victory.

 

I often ask myself whether I’d even have noticed, towards the end of the first year of high school, that her face had been contorted by unhappiness if she hadn’t been so beautiful. I watched her intently, like a rare, precious insect under a magnifying glass; the twitching of the wings, the flutter of the antennae, the squirming, the quiet crackling voice – I reacted to everything. I noticed details. I noted how the regal arch of her brow drooped ever so slightly. In a couple of months, the skin around her eyes took on a greyish tinge, as if her velvety green eyes were set in a spider’s web. The vinyl sheen of her hair was now merely greasy. Her hair was falling out like an animal’s winter coat, in clumps, which I discovered in the unlikeliest places: on the edge of a refrigerator shelf, between the pages of a fashion magazine, in the kitchen sink. Muscles were stripped from her arms by an unknown wind, stripped from her bones, upper arms, shoulders. Her palms became comically elongated and her knuckles protruded. One evening I saw her naked, just for a second, before she wrapped a towel around herself in panic, fastening it above her still round breasts. Her ribs stuck out crudely, making it look as if the breasts were hanging from a grating. Her torso seemed thirsty. Dry. On the screen of my memory, I can still see the sharp round edges of her pelvis, into which her transparent skin was desperately sinking.

 

I took these changes for innocent erosion and enjoyed them. After all, they were just details, slight deteriorations, fluff balls of ugliness. I hoped my time would come. The time for the sister who was born first and thus received less. For the first child, the one that’s taken for granted.

 

She started hiding. Even from me. She knew that the density of her body was an intimate concern of mine and often sneered at me that I was crazy. ‘And if you aren’t, you will be,’ she screamed and slammed the bathroom door. I remember hearing her yelling at the top of her voice for the first time that spring, at dad, who was the first to voice his concerns. His dear daughter was no longer his ally. When he hugged her or placed a firm palm on her shoulder, she froze. Dread descended upon her face and her sternum tensed and jerked towards the ceiling as if the heart beneath it was trying to escape. She never told him about school, never talked to him about her girlfriends. One night she ran into him in the hall, wrapped in a thick bathrobe. I heard him ask: ‘Been relaxing a bit, huh?’ Afterwards she spent the night sobbing and twisting in her bed. I didn’t try to console her, as I couldn’t understand what perfection could possibly be grieving.

 

Her voice grew dark, bitter like coffee. She started wearing baggy clothes and leaving her lacy lingerie in the drawer, having convinced mam to buy her a pack of cheap cotton briefs. They had argued in the store, because my sister wanted them to be a size bigger than necessary, to cover the crease where her thighs met her buttocks. Mam hadn’t relented, arguing that this was all a weird phase that would pass and leave her feeling sorry about being stuck with a dozen pairs of panties the size of a tent. To avoid further conflict, my sister started leaving home looking like mam wanted her to, only to change in the school toilets, let out her bun and fluff the hair around her face in such a way that it was almost totally covered. The weird phase didn’t pass, it unfolded over years. Our mother couldn’t yet distinguish adolescent foolhardiness and vanity from frantic threats. From the final stretch of the path.

 

She started smoking. By sixteen, she was smoking a pack of the strongest cigarettes a day. I avoided her if I saw her in the schoolyard. The sight of my sister sucking anxiously on a cigarette butt disgusted me, which our schoolmates had, only half-jokingly, already started associating with her. She had rejected her beauty and now spoke in a caustic tone. And her constant rejection, her dedication to an incomprehensible goal stirred within me a terrible, self-righteous rage, a dark state in which everything that she did, she did to mock me, to gloat at my deficiencies. Those who have are able to reject, while those who lack can never patch the hole with a piece that fits. The pieces that come by are always wrong, too small to cover the hole or spilling over its edges.

 

I can still see her, nervous from nicotine and thin as a beanstalk, leaning on the metal frame of the bike shelter behind the school: she steps on her cigarette, searches in her bag for a bottle of water, drinks it all and then turns away from the audience, slumped in her gloom, again reaches into her pocket, and brings her hand to her mouth. Perhaps she sticks it in. Perhaps she just swallows. A mysterious ceremony, and the most brutal of my rages.

 

 She quit running. Mam was told that she’d stopped going to practice by the coach. At home, the air was buzzing with rebellion. ‘I want you to leave me alone! I’m never going back!’ In a display of foolhardiness, my sister lit up in front of mam and blew smoke in her face. Mam froze. Her eyes darted around, her lips opened like the beak of a panicked bird, her breathing was shallow. When her daughter blew smoke in her face for the second time, she slapped her. The girl’s cheek showed a bloody, bruised dent, the mark of mam’s wedding ring. The scar remained, making her a little bit uglier.

 

My sister pushed our parents away while I grew closer to them. Mam kept saying she always knew that I’d grow up to be the level-headed one. She never interrogated me about my sister, likely sensing how complicated were the ties that bound us. She was probably feeling pangs of conscience, realising how hypocritical she’d been, thinking about the neglected relationship with her daughter, the weird and ugly one, realising that she, as a mother, had measured out her love for us, giving more to the beautiful one. My dad followed me around like a forsaken dog, expecting me to provide him with the sort of warmth that he’d received from my sister with the sort of ease with which she’d offered it. I’d always yearned for closeness, but when a connection did form between us, it formed in perverse circumstances. I was a substitute, and she was still the one they wanted. I wrapped myself in hatred. I dreamt about my sister never having been born, that all the beauty that had accumulated in her was instead infused in me, the single child, that all the loveliness and grace of the accepted, the beloved daughter had settled on me. My hatred burned persistently and dangerously. It was interrupted only by a chance event.

 

I was in the third year of high school and it was the last Tuesday before the summer holidays. After classes were over, I headed off towards the gym locker room where I’d forgotten my things. The hallways were empty but faint muttering could still be heard from classrooms here and there. The locker room was in the basement at the end of a damp, cold staircase that echoed with every breath I took. As I descended, the amplified vibrations of my steps drowned out any other sound, but as the noise of my steps died away, I heard a deep male voice emerging from the storage room that I recognised as the gym teacher’s. I walked towards the  room to explain what I was doing here. His commanding voice gradually coalesced into words and sentences, but I was so focused on my mission that I didn’t really understand anything. I was only halted by a forceful ‘Do you understand?’ synchronised with a scene in which the teacher’s spade-like hand was grabbing the thin shoulder of my pale sister, bent over in hunger and hysteria. She wheezed out a resigned, tired ‘yes’ and turned towards me. Her eyes stared like the eyes of dead livestock, with pre-death horror frozen in them. I don’t know whether she recognised me, it seemed as if all her life force was channelled into the word that she’d spoken and that all that was left of her was a flimsy, ugly, decrepit frame. The teacher spoke to me, but I was nervous and confused and kept looking at my sister. As she slipped past me, I managed a fractured ‘Ana, what’s going on?’ I retreated backwards from the room without really registering what the huge man was saying to me. In a panic, which I was unable to make sense of but which gripped me in its clutches, I ran upstairs. But I couldn’t find Ana.

 

I asked her about the incident again before going to sleep. She muttered, facing the wall: ‘Leave me alone, it’s none of your business.’ 

 

All I’d wished for came true. My sister’s beauty and joy had withered. People started turning towards me as if they’d just discovered me. A new continent, a rugged, unexplored area that had always had a lot to offer. My sister wreathed herself in darkness, and a land of new opportunities for happiness opened in front of me. With every layer that evaporated from my sister’s body, my will and power grew. But that night something burned in my chest. That night, the magma of my wrath cooled abruptly, even though I hadn’t yet vomited it all out and it hadn’t yet burned everything down. Maybe my sister was suffering, I thought. Maybe her body, porous at that point, was not trying to take its revenge on me. That night, I listened to her breathing and tried to percolate down its column into her mind, her memories, her experiences and sensations. But I discovered nothing; I didn’t know my sister and in my envious, insidious Schadenfreude, I never saw her as human. Sympathy could not bridge the distance between us, because I couldn’t provide it with any substance. In my imagination, the afternoon incident grew to terrible proportions from which I gathered every possible reason for my sister’s bitterness. In hallucinatory oscillation, the incident’s contours grew hazier and I burned with intuitions. Worry appeared, the worry of one wanting to redeem herself, of one who’d seen violence in her own hands. A selfish worry.

 

The summer that followed was marked by a game of ingratiation and avoidance. I was convinced Ana’s silence was just that – a game. That she would soon lower her shield, as her strength had all but been depleted. She only carried the heavy armour and defended herself to punish me for the torments I dealt her in my thoughts. And I was ready to serve my sentence. I never shared my intuitions regarding my sister’s unhappiness with my parents. I didn’t want to waste the opportunity to be the first to bond with her after her fall. And at the same time, I didn’t know the actual substance of my intuitions. Had I called what I spun out in my sleepless nights by its true name, it could come true and then I’d be overwhelmed by responsibility for a new injustice – and I could barely carry the one. I was afraid.

 

I kept quiet in front of my parents, mostly to protect myself. Because sooner or later, Ana would tell them everything herself. I kept quiet when they took her, dehydrated and delirious, to the hospital and fed her concoctions of butter, sweetened cocoa and milk for a week. As the pale brown liquid flowed into her, tears of disgust streamed down her face. I kept quiet when mam took cotton pads from the handbag that was hanging over the side of the bed and burst into tears. Dad held her to his chest silently, staring at the daughter who no longer lay on the bed, but was draped over it like a frayed piece of fabric. I looked upon the despair that they walked up and down the floors of our house with the patience of the disgraced. I kept quiet when she spat in the face of the nurse who brought her a high-calorie beverage and drew blood with her nails. I didn’t lose my faith in her even when she couldn’t walk anymore and still refused any sort of food. There was no reason to be afraid, my sister was good, in her core she was good, and she’d make things right. She’d deliver us from suffering, she’d absolve me. I kept counting on her goodness long after she’d ceased to be human. I held her hand tightly and watched the lanugo on her face, the grotesque tangle of blue-violet veins on the palm and back of her hand, the rise and fall of her sharp clavicles. Her lively wet body had disintegrated like old paper. I touched her absent face and placed my hand on her abdomen. I wanted her to feel the pulse of my flesh and know that we could start again. My young hand would not crush her, would not finish what had been started in hatred against life. I hoped boundlessly, disguising my guilt as hope that she’d explain what I saw on that morning in June, that she’d tell me just how innocent it was. I kept quiet until her eyes glazed over. I stood by her, and kept quiet so resolutely that I heard, in the tranquillity of her room, the exact moment when her heart stopped beating. Mutely, I stood by the body of my twin sister.

 

 

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Ana Schnabl is a Slovene writer. She has published a short story collection and three novels to date. In addition to her literary work, she translates from English and contributes regularly to The Guardian.  

 

'Ana' was translated from the Slovene by Jernej Županič and David Limon.

 

Photograph credit: Katja Tomšič. Model: Ana Schnabl.