‘Don’t take it so seriously! So what if they talk about you? They’re just jealous because they’re so flat-chested.’ Although the secretary’s breasts drooped a little, she still qualified as a ‘woman with breasts’.
‘I’ve never had injections or taken pills.’ A deep wrinkle wormed down the girl’s smooth forehead.
‘Times have changed. Those old matrons have been left behind. They’re jealous of you, that’s all. You’re only twenty. So what if you’ve let some boy squeeze them bigger?’ The secretary cast her eyes over the girl’s ample bosoms. She could guess that they had incited many illicit events. Looking at them brought to mind episodes in her past, and the pleasure she felt when her husband squeezed her own breasts. ‘As soon as men get near us, they want a feel. But I only let my husband suck mine before we go to sleep.’ The secretary couldn’t help revealing a few more details of her private life. Noticing that the girl was still frowning, she glanced towards the direction from which the bus was due to arrive, and swore at it for taking so long.
‘Why do they have to talk about me?’ The girl’s voice was still faint. Nothing the secretary said could console her now. ‘I was born this way,’ she muttered quietly.
The secretary smiled at her and said: ‘Don’t take any notice of them. Those women are past their prime. I understand you. I wouldn’t be shocked if you told me you were wearing a padded bra. There’s nothing wrong with big breasts. Those women would still be flat-chested even if they wore ten padded bras.’
‘I’ve never worn a padded bra in my life,’ the girl sobbed.
The young woman didn’t believe her for a second. ‘You don’t want them to be too big though, people will notice. Big breasted women like us don’t need to wear padded bras.’
The bus finally arrived, and the girl was carried aboard by the surging crowd. She felt as though her throat were stuffed with cotton wool. She carried her two heavy breasts back home and as soon as she opened her front door, ran to her bed and burst into tears.
‘Let the mirror be the judge,’ she whispered to herself as she stood in front of the rectangular mirror. For the first time in her life, she stared at length at the two large globes of plump flesh, each one crowned with a dried strawberry. The truth was, no man had ever placed his hands on them. At fourteen, when they first started to grow, they had caused her some pain. At university, they gave her a sense of pride. When she walked down the street and they shook up and down, they both annoyed and pleased her. From books she discovered that her type of breasts signify a good wife and able mother – exactly the kind of woman she longed to be. In her dreams, she would give birth to hundreds of children, and then stand in the middle of them, handing out apples. She would dress the children in pretty clothes and nourish them with the infinite streams of milk that flowed from her nipples. Her breasts could feed a multitude of children, and give men joy and pleasure. But today, these dreams were shattered. In other people’s eyes, she was a fraud, a girl who tried to entice men with fake breasts. They thought they had seen through her games. Everyone had reached the same conclusion, even the young man in the office who read books every day preparing for his postgraduate exams.
‘Let the mirror be the judge.’ She kept her voice down, because behind the curtain her entire family were eating dinner. Her bed lay in a corner that was blocked off from the rest of the room by a curtain. She stayed awake all night. The next morning she swallowed some sleeping pills and took the day off work.
(As the blood donor discusses her story, the professional writer is suddenly reminded of the actress who jumped into the tiger’s mouth. He asks, ‘Do you think that the girl was trying to escape this world too?’
‘No,’ the blood donor replies. ‘She was too young. She had nothing to escape from yet. She crumbled, not because of outside pressure, but because of her own weakness. If everyone were as feeble as her, we would have all lost our minds ages ago. She only ran through the streets naked once. It was no big deal.’
‘Perhaps her story is just not worth writing,’ the writer sighs wearily.
‘You’re wrong to think that every story must be connected with death. The problem is not death, but life, and life is just an act of endurance – you have to grit your teeth and get on with it. Just like I do. I put up with everything that life throws at me. I’ve suffered much more than you ever could in your carefree existence.’
The image of the girl’s large breasts is still flashing through the writer’s mind. The two raisin-coloured nipples stare at him entreatingly. Had the girl realised that it is already impossible in this world to distinguish the real from the fake, then perhaps she wouldn’t have reached for the sleeping pills so frequently.)