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By Root 794 0

the librarians were always watching me and I lost my nerve. Then I would spend my afternoons in travel agencies, leafing through brochures, marvelling at how wide the world was, imagining myself inside hotels, in front of castles, hiking through mountains. But the staff of those travel agencies quickly tired of me and, accusing me of dirtying and creasing their multi-coloured destinations, would send me back out onto the street, barring me from the world. So then I began to revisit the Central Train Station, looking nostalgically up at the ceiling, seeing the trains as they arrived and departed, trains that had travelled beyond the borders of our country into other lands where different people lived different lives. I would watch those passengers arrive and depart with a silent envy. I would press my hands against train carriages, trying to learn from their touch the feeling of freedom. I would pick up train timetables and pin these to my bedroom walls also. I even once bought a train ticket and even stepped on a train, but the moment I sat down I began to sweat and tremble and had to clamber outside again, breathless and terrified. And what a look of resentment Irva gave me when I returned home that day. I wasn’t able to leave. Not then. Not yet. I couldn’t.

THE PADLOCK on my bedroom door refused Mother sleep. It disturbed her. Now as she journeyed to the post office every morning, she could see locks everywhere, locks to people’s homes, locks to garages, locks to business premises. In the post office she regarded the numbered rows of boxes of those people that had their post delivered not to their home address but instead ordered it to wait for them in the post office hall itself. There’s so much secrecy in the city, Mother thought, everybody’s hiding something. Why can’t it be like it is in the country, she thought, where she’d heard that locks don’t exist, where people are accustomed to the far more sociable latch. The city was locking Mother out and she would not allow it. So one day she bought a hacksaw and went up the stairs to my bedroom. That evening, I came home to find Mother sitting outside our home on the entrance step. Miss Stott, I noticed, sat on her entrance step across the street, watching eagerly. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ Mother said. With tears in her eyes and matches in her hand, shaking the box in a very different way than Grandfather shook his matchstick boxes, she set light to my collection of photographs, some from books, some from newspapers and to my numerous train timetables, and to several tourist brochures and to sheaths of maps and whole countries from various atlases. And then our mother, burning the rubber soles of her slippers, did a little jig in the ashes. ‘No one is going anywhere,’ she said, ‘families must stick together.’ Mother rid the world of its maps, sending it in her efforts back to times before navigation—indeed, she would rather if Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and James Cook had never been born, and if America, India and Australia had never been discovered; if they must exist, very well, let them exist, but not in her home. She would not have them there. It must be understood that in our Veber Street home the world beyond our city became as dark and unmapped as those many potential worlds beyond our galaxy.

In the future Mother always inspected my uniform and my room for maps everyday, she searched through pockets, she lifted up carpets and mattresses; I was not allowed to enter the house without first being searched. In Mother’s mind my maps were as poisonous to me as father’s foreign stamp collection had been to him.

So then I’d store maps inside my post office locker. I spent more and more time in the locker room. I was not the only one there, some of the postmen liked to play cards in the locker room or to smoke or just to talk, and other postmen I noticed liked to store private things in their lockers too—for example, Postman Pirin kept his magazine of naked women in his locker, and in Postman Olt’s locker I once briefly glimpsed women’s clothing, tights and