Initially, the president had her doctor sent because of those terrible convulsions that had been tormenting her for weeks, so she was surprised to discover that her pain actually came from ants that were crawling everywhere inside her body.
As a skinny, dried corpse of an old spruce, a bark beetle’s favorite victim: so rotten were her bones and her flesh, her lungs and her stomach, what was left of her heart. She felt her organs descending into a soft, brown powder that one could blow away in one breath, felt her veins and arteries metamorphosing into tiny roads, after which the little red beasts transported their food, their white, minuscule eggs like pearls. She felt them deposited in her flaky meat, where each minute with a screeching, agonising howling another one was born: they drank her sour blood, their mother’s milk, every day, every night, every second. It was just a matter of time, the doctor told her, before they would eat through her skin; it was only a matter of time before they would penetrate her beautiful brain.
In fact, it wasn’t anything unusual now that the heatwave has wrapped the whole city in its thick, sweaty cloth. At least that is how her doctor – a small, round gentleman who never once took a look away from his notes – explained her strange diagnosis to the president, her infestation with ants. Now, he continued, that the cobbled streets of late July are so unbearably hot that one could fry an egg on them at noon, the little red beasts could be found in every corner of the city, especially in places where one has least sought them. You could not even indulge in a nicely chilled soup without the bloody creatures drowning between the pieces of chicken and noodles, whining, squeaking with their tiny feet for life. They were simply everywhere, a red, omnipresent shadow with black eyes of little devils, following behind your every step like the worst cholera outbreak. They did not leave you alone even in the moments when you needed it the most as they shared everything with their dearest friends: Your long siestas at noon and children’s games of hide and seek, arguments about money and confessions of love, the hours long lines for the last piece of hard bread in forty degrees weather, even your tumultuous nights. The ants of the scorching summer months were the falling leaves of October, and their silent whispers, those endless lullabies, were inseparable from June, July, August.
So, weren’t you maybe just a little melancholic when the first cold wind blew your tiny companions away, those creatures who knew you better than you knew yourself? Didn’t the ants do the president a favor when they entered her stiff, cold body that hasn’t felt touch in so, so long? Didn’t I offer her a break from her eternal solitude when I occupied her cardiac muscle with my dark red orchestra, all my personal workers, buzzing, brimming, tingling around me?
The president would not have known about the heat wave if she had not been diagnosed with her infestation with ants. For her, the heat wave, as much as the silence of snow, the first warm air of spring, the taste of rain, was one of the many things that only came and went, and which she observed through her huge glass window from the forty-second floor, the highest building in the city. She could not remember when she has last left her grey walls, when she has last breathed fresh air or talked to anyone other than her servants and sometimes maybe a few ministers. Her whole world was reduced to her view outside the window, a city landscape which she could hold on the palm of her hand and fold like a sheet of paper if she wanted. Like every morning at precisely five o’clock, long before her whole world began to surge from the darkness, she sat down in her chair and watched as each of her turrets, every winding street, every roof came alive. She drank her daily cup of black coffee with three cubes of sugar and smiled because she knew that even dogs and pigeons knew her name, her face of ‘the first female dictator’, as she was called in all the newspapers that she had long forbidden, and that down below belonged to her every little stone, all those people who were teeming below her like ants.
She, the president, the heart of the city, sits in her chamber, and everything flows around her.
But I know it all. I know all the streaks of darkness and sweat and fear, to say something wrong, to disappear somewhere deep under the ground, where there is no light when your teeth are beaten out, and when the room is red and grey and has an iron aftertaste. I know the unspeakable, dry hunger that burns, chokes, folds behind your neck, the stale, hot air of prison cells full of men and women who used the wrong combination of words, the little girls with two messy braids and boys with milky eyes who ask, mommy where is daddy, I want to see him, the fist fights for the last piece of grainy bread in the bloody, boiling streets while ants are eating you alive and drinking your sweat, but above all and most importantly I know her. I know the taste of her flesh, of her organs, of her sour, sandy thoughts that were so difficult to chew through and that had a bitter aftertaste. I know the taste of this world, of her world, in its closeness, in its smallness and therefore in its entirety. You may know a lot about a person according to her life, but nothing will tell you as much as her death. And right now I feel her last thought, which is echoing on and on her fragile bones: How is it possible that the most powerful dictator in the world was defeated by tiny red ants, the minuscule ant queen?
I, the ant queen, the ministress of closeness, sit in her heart, and everything flows around me.