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but being second best or one point off was a reason to be sad. Overall, the reasons for being happy were few and rather vague: “nice weather,” “cabbage pudding for dinner,” “funny movies.” There were more reasons for being sad or upset, and they were more detailed. “A letter from Dad” was high on that list, along with “praise from people I don’t respect” and “stomachache,” which meant I was having my period. I’d also written down “nightmares,” but that was in parentheses, and later crossed out. Dreams weren’t reliable. Neither was my body.
    I regarded my body as a repulsive feral animal, and I tried to keep it at a distance. I still remember how I tried different ways of moving so I wouldn’t feel my clothes against it; I couldn’t stand feeling how my body stuck to me and sort of groped me. When my classmates arranged dance parties, I never went; dancing seemed gross, and I wrote a lot about that in my diaries. Girls who wore makeup, miniskirts, or tight clothes I secretly considered sluts. If one of those girls addressed me in school, I turned away demonstratively. It was as if they carried a plague, those who danced and wore makeup and dressed up, a corporeal plague I had to stay away from at all costs.
    It was harder to protect myself from my own body, and the plaguethat it spread. I got my period early, at twelve, when I’d just arrived at my grandmother’s, and the smell rising from my blood-soaked pad was enough for me to understand that everything originating in the lower regions of my body was appalling. To be neat and live secluded in the ordered world I’d created around myself was my protection. Black water lapped underneath that order, deep as an abyss one could fall headlong into. My life was either/or, order or chaos, so I had to be very stern and careful, and for years I kept refining my sense of order, all through high school. At twenty, I was firmly determined to live the rest of my life as a virgin. I would devote my life to study and perhaps later in life some big research project; marriage and children were something I never even considered. I was twenty-two when I met Kosti, and he just laughed at me when I explained my position. It wasn’t a scornful or mean laugh, but glittering, almost loving. I was completely disarmed and felt incredibly relieved.
    â€œYou,” he said. “You want to be loved. From all the way in here.”
    He pushed his index finger deep into my belly button and I stood still as if paralyzed, drinking the joy that bubbled like sparkling water from his eyes. Later on, when we’d known each other for a while, he teased me and asked if I wasn’t willing to share my virginity with him.
    â€œJust a tiny bit,” he pleaded, “so I can become a virgin too!”
    He didn’t call me Marta, but Mart, and he said it with a pronounced “r” and a soft “t.” You might say that he made me into Mart, that he came and opened and released me from Marta.
    We studied archaeology together. In the summers, we excavated and traveled. We were inseparable. Sometimes we got upset with each other and argued, sometimes we had nothing to talk about, but we were always together, we were meant to be together; it seemed our connectednesswould never end. It was during the last year of our relationship that I became obsessed with the idea of having a child. I wanted a child with Kosti, immediately. But he didn’t, not yet.
    â€œI want to turn thirty first,” he said. “Then we’ll have kids, plenty of kids.”
    Even though he didn’t quite understand it, Kosti probably knew that our conflict was about something besides having children. It was the old fear, the fear of the plague that had risen inside me again. I wanted to protect myself against something, but I didn’t know what it was, and I grew desperate. We lost sight of each