Glorious People
I have a recurring dream in which an endless line of people stand in a queue. They are naked. I can’t see the beginning or end of the queue—only that the people are standing on a convex surface; you can see the curvature of the earth beneath their feet. They don’t resemble one another. They have long hair and short hair, curly hair and straight hair, green, blond and black hair—I even spot the scurfy pink of some bald heads. Their arms are crooked or straight, sinewy or flabby; their legs knock-kneed or so stiff as to seem jointless. I know none of these people and nothing about them. All I know is that they’re mothers and daughters, each woman the daughter of the woman in front and the mother of the woman behind. It isn’t the lines on their skin that tell me this; these women are ageless. Or rather, their ages change, depending what angle you look at them from, as if they’d put their faces into that app that shows you what you’ll look like when you’re older—the same woman has a grandmother’s face one moment and a little girl’s the next. I can tell they’re mothers and daughters from the way they look past one another. But they’re looking for one another, too—seeking each other out with their eyes. Each touches the woman in front of her, trying to get her attention.
With a tightly curled forefinger, one woman taps the shoulder blade of the woman in front, like a woodpecker with its beak—tock-tock-tock, tock-tock-tock—while behind her, another woman with a long, tightly curled finger taps her between shoulder and spine—tock-tock-tock, tock-tock-tock—and she in turn is clawed on her downy neck by the woman behind her—brrr-brrr-brrr. The skin is already starting to turn red, and she puts her hand to the itch and looks behind her, but just as she glances back, the woman who’s been tapping or clawing her glances back herself at the woman behind her—her daughter—and so the women’s eyes never meet, and they all stand there waiting for whoever’s in front of them to turn her whole body, rather than just peering over her shoulder and swatting the offensive hand away like a mosquito.
Translation by Imogen Taylor
