To Mervas Read Online Free

fate, your sentence. It took seven, almost eight years. That’s how long my respite lasted. Sometimes I watch nature films on television. The moments before the lion catches up with the gazelle, the fox with the hare, the wolverine with the reindeer, those are the glowing moments, the moments of life’s ultimate freedom. Then come the claws, the teeth, the fall. It’s as if I already knew it, as if it were etched into me; I was the prey.
    I remained sitting by the big table in the library with the map open in front of me. I tried to conjure up an image of Kosti and the way he might look now. I even tried to picture him laughing up there in Mervas, if that’s where he was. I wanted to know why he’d written to me, what had made him want to contact me after all these years. Could it be, I asked myself, almost petrified, could he be waiting for me?
    Looking back at my life, I know I’ve ruined it. Sometimes I wake up at dawn to something that closely resembles a vision. I see what life is. Withpiercing clarity, I see it as the unbelievable miracle it is: a tiny bubble, shining in different colors, sailing all alone through a vast, encompassing darkness. It’s a bubble in time, a brief moment on a frequency quickly rushing past, a scene performed only for an instant. I awaken at dawn as if touched, as if burnt by this unfathomable truth. The next moment, I am filled with pain, a sorrow so powerful that it almost suffocates me. It’s not simply that I haven’t made the most of my life; I have also done violence to it.
    Perhaps that’s why I’ve decided to go to Mervas. In some way, I already knew this when I went to the library to look through the atlases. I’m going to sell everything I can, get rid of my furniture, the apartment, all my possessions. Then I’m leaving. I’m going to enter my life, enter the shiny bubble. That will be my penance.

November 29
    Mom died giving birth to my youngest brother, and with that, you might say our family was dissolved. The baby boy was put up for adoption, despite Dad’s protests, and the rest of us were placed with various friends and relatives. We weren’t even allowed to attend Mom’s funeral; the adults thought it would be too traumatic. It was better for us kids if everyone pretended that nothing had happened. I ended up with Dad’s mother, together with my sister, who is two years older. Our three younger siblings were taken in by Mom’s brothers, and they didn’t want anything to do with Dad’s family after what had happened, so I didn’t see the twins or my little sister again until all of us were grown.
    I became obsessively organized in an effort to keep everything in place. Nothing could be changed or go wrong; my sense of order in the world depended on it. I was twelve years old and every paper clip and eraser had its own assigned place in my desk drawers. I devoted myself entirely to studying and being good and completed all my assignments, even the extra ones, according to instruction. I was so careful with my brand-new schoolbooks that I hardly dared open them; I sort of peeked in between the pages through a three-inch opening. I was also reluctant to erase anything in my pristine notebooks. Instead, I tried to train myself alwaysto write correctly from the start. Everything in my life had to be at once transparent and impeccable; there could be nothing to remark upon or criticize. This applied to my hair, my thoughts, my schoolwork, my desk drawers, and my feelings; everything had to fit into the same mold of perfection. In a diary from this period, I’d made lists of “reasons to be happy” and “reasons to be sad.” I found the old diaries a few years ago when I cleaned out the upper cupboards in the hallway, and they made for miserable reading, which definitely belonged in the second category. Getting a perfect score on a math test was an obvious reason to be happy,