The house is empty. Olga moves through the rooms, looking at things. She is back early today, with a headache that sends big shivers all through her body. They let her go home. All the way on the bus the headache beat her, like a stick beating a drum. And then the driver shouted at her because she pressed the button too late, and he put the brakes on hard so that she was thrown against the rail. It hurt her: she has a red welt on her arm. Why did he do that to her? If she ever meets him again she will ask him. She has no friends here, no family, no language to express herself in. Why was it her he chose to hurt?
She stands in the room with the velvet sofa, where she is never invited, where they sit in the evenings and talk. There are chairs, a leather one and another one with an old-fashioned flowery cover. There is a table all piled up with newspapers and magazines and two dirty glasses. There is a piano, old, brown-coloured. The curtains in this room are green. She likes the material, raw silk, and she likes the gold mirror above the fireplace and the things that stand on the mantelpiece, a little gold clock with tiny engraved pillars like a temple, a paperweight with a blood-coloured peony engulfed in the glass, a sky-blue china vase with a narrow neck. There are little white figures engraved on its sides. They are dressed in tunic-like clothes, like gods and goddesses. They are dancing and talking and feasting all the way around. She looks at the books, leaning higgledy-piggledy on the shelves. They are dusty, as the piano is. But the chairs and the sofa look friendly, like people talking, and the curtains make her think of the ball gowns actresses wear in old films. It is a good room, a warm room, but they never ask her to come in and sit down.
She goes upstairs to their bedroom, dusty too, clothes everywhere, the bed unmade. One night she heard them shouting in here. She does not like people who shout. But in the morning they were normal again, as though nothing had happened. The bed is like a rat’s nest with the covers all tangled. It is strange, that two people would agree to leave it in that state. It is mysterious. She herself would refuse to get into that bed. She doesn’t understand why they don’t make their room nice. It is disgusting, to live like this. She opens a drawer, glances in. Men’s underclothes, neatly folded. She is surprised. He is so untidy, so lazy, and yet in his own drawer where no one can see, everything is in order. She has come home at three or four in the afternoon and found him lying on the sofa, reading a book, while downstairs the kitchen is full of terrible sights and smells, flies buzzing around the dirty plates, the unswept floor crunching underfoot, pans with burnt food at the bottom left sitting there for days. She would never have guessed that he folded his underpants.
In her own room everything is clean and orderly. The white winter sun is coming through the window. There is a bluebottle swimming noisily at the glass. She swats it dead with a rolled-up magazine. The headache has left a hollow behind it. She touches the red mark on her arm with her fingertips. She feels lonely. She sits on her bed and dials her mother’s number.