The house made of books.

"This could have been my house," she said. Maybe yes, maybe no. She looked at the other house.

“Probably even this could have been my house.” It was not her fault that she got confused. All the houses in this town were almost the same except for one of them and she had been lucky to live in almost all of them, even for a few minutes. When she was a child all places and days were like the repetition of each other and she was afraid of this uniformity of her days. She needed a detail not to be confused, to understand that today is today, that yesterday was yesterday, and tomorrow will be tomorrow because in her childhood,  the days looked almost the same. The same places. The same people.  They used to answer and keep silent in the same way.

And now she doubted whether the people of this city really resembled each other or in the eyes of the child all the adults resembled a little. Or they simply resembled because she could not recognize them, for her they will remain just strangers forever. Now that she had grown up, were they similar to each other?   She looked around, in the faces of passers by, only to find no answer, it seemed she had already forgotten them, maybe they did it too, at least it seemed so, but could she forget herself? And it cannot be said that she had not tried. She had gone everywhere to escape from childhood and to expand the boundaries of herself, getting to know other places, and other people, assuming that leaving the city meant leaving that part of herself who thought she had surpassed.

She tried to fill her days with as many people as possible, with people who she did not care about, with people she did not even like. She stayed with them just to not have time, time to fall in memories. And she tried to listen carefully, she must necessarily listen to them to have the opportunity to discover something new, something that would make her think she had left the past behind, to go so far from herself, as far as the word could lead you, but she got surprised when even in the most ordinary conversations and actions she found traces of the past. Now that she returned to this city, it seemed as if in front of this city and these people she was taking the look and the habits of her childhood, and noticed how step by step they came up with actions that she thought were forgotten.

II

I do not remember how we came to this city because we were moving from one city to another and in every new town, our father had one less friend. While in this city as his friends, as his family, as his “all”, our father has us, his two daughters. It should not be denied that our father sometimes exchanged New Year wishes or called relatives on the phone, but these came and became rarer, as in my memories it seemed as if these people had never existed. We were told that our father had many friends once, but I didn't remember any at that time, any that could be called really a friend. It was strange that Lea constantly approved:

“Yes, my father had many friends”, and she insisted on her words, even though she was younger than me and could not have known these things better. Our father had no friends, but he did not have a profession like everyone else either. I mean, he had one, but could we survive in that profession? And as I said, apart from literature he knew no other thing. That's why we changed houses constantly. We moved from a larger house to a smaller house, and then we moved to an even smaller house. Every time we moved house Dad had to find something to say, he told us that one day we would have a house of our own, the house we deserved to have, while we just had to show a little patience and wait. And we used to wait. 

And he told us that we would live temporarily like that and then he emphasized it only for this month, and then he said it for now, and he said and he said ... until we went to the house of books, where my father gave up from his promises, maybe he gave up even from us, maybe even from everything. The house of books was small, so small that we had no opportunity to profit from selling it, then all we had to do was to sell the household furniture, not so much to survive, but more to buy our father's books. 

"Because everything could be postponed, but not the books. If we don't buy them, who else can do it," said Lea.

And the more the house was emptied of objects, the more the number of books increased. We were buying them ourselves, selling, and taking something out of our lives, and giving them to people going door to door, house to house, and again we were not sure if anyone would read them. Despite it all, no one wrote an article about him, nowhere his name was mentioned, in any newspaper, in any magazine. No one came to shake his hand, to tell him that they liked his book, just to awaken his old hope. Apparently, people did not know that in that city where all the houses resembled there was also a house with rooms completely empty of ordinary furniture and decorated with books. Lea proudly told me that our house was special, better to say her house because the role of housewife was taken by Lea, creating the items we sold through books, with books she formed the table, and with books she formed the bedside table.

“Look, now we lack nothing.”

It was not known if she was trying to convince me or herself while I had to say something to her so that it did not seem as if what she was doing was completely irrelevant to me.

“You will become an architect when you grow up,” I said this to her often and she would have really done it if she had grown up.

While our father felt as if he had lost his words, his voice those times. It seemed as if he could not express himself other than writing and then he became more and more silent, but when no one read his books, then with whom did he speak? Then who did understand him? Now I realize that my father spent his life talking to people he had never met, to people he could never have known, and perhaps to people who were never fortunate enough to exist. And he came completely overwhelmed, from those meetings of writers, where everyone was talking and where everyone was pretending to listen. They say that artists have countless reasons to suffer, while our father suffered because he did not exist, criticism was not the worst that could happen, the worst was not to be counted when people know you are dead when you are alive. I watched my father during his writing, the way he looked at his papers, the way he was forgotten for minutes on it, and at that moment I felt that he would never look at me that way.

And it hurts to realize that he will never want me more than that piece of letter. And I had no hope that it would ever change because it is impossible to compete with art. He was only interested in words and nothing else mattered. It seemed as if our father did not belong to this world, the world for him started and ended in his mind while we were there just to remind him of his connection to our world. From then I felt that maybe not everyone had left him, he was the one who had left everyone to forget what he had been or could have been, we were the only ones who could remember who he had been. Now he had to leave us too. He remained isolated from the rest of the world, he seemed to have created his island, the place where he lived freely away from everyone, but in fact there in the house of books, the real torture began because he was there alone with himself. And just like me, he could not escape from himself. Maybe he hated himself because he could not be other than literature. He was so confused at that time, that he could neither write nor read. And we looked at him on the doorstep and did not dare utter a word.

“Being a father for him requires more than he could do. While our father could not even write anymore.”

One night he left the letter and while he was thinking, he saw the house once as if he had not seen it before, as if he had been missing for a long time.

“We have made changes”,  he commented as if we had not been living that way for months and he saw me as if he was no longer convinced that I was his child as if he had once been convinced but not at that moment. He asked how old we were. I said: “I am 9, Lea 7.”

“How slow the years go”, he told me and was totally forgotten in what he was writing. That was the last conversation I remembered with him.

III

“Finally, I found my home.”

In fact, the house of books was the only place she could call home, though she had not lived there longer than elsewhere. The house had remained the same as once. It appeared to her for years, nights, in dreams, as to remind her that she had forgotten something there or as if she had taken something from that house with her and now she had to return it. After so long, Rachel realized that she would not be freed from dreams if she did not go there, so she returned. She approached a book and the desire arose to do what she had never done before.

Over the years she had created many variants of the past and now she was leaving behind, to understand what in reality had not happened but was more true than every memory, that every possible variant. That book was the only place two foreigners would meet for the first time, without others, without circumstances, without outsiders, the only place where father and daughter would meet to get to know each other. Through the books, their father had thought about tomorrow because within those books are all the days, all the words. And then she opened one of the books because some books sometimes are intended for one reader only.

Short story prize for “The House The People Built”

*Featured image by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash