Dogs and Others

by Biljana Jovanović

  Čeda of Little River came by after an absence of several years – that’s how his non-appearance for a week, or maybe a day or two longer, seemed to Jaglika anyway. She asked him to tell her next time where he was going and for how long he wouldn’t be available, so that she wouldn’t worry, and so she wouldn’t think he’d disappeared for good. Čeda grinned, shrugged his shoulders one more time, and repeated: ‘No problem, granny! Don’t you worry about anything!’ On the fifth of March, Čeda was a whole hour late. By then Jaglika had already gone half-bonkers; when he got there, she demanded that we all go out to Košutnjak. Čeda arranged Jaglika in the front seat; Danilo and I sat in the back. Čeda the Flow was smoking, and somehow the ashes were always dropping onto the edge of Jaglika’s coat; Jaglika frowned and with her left hand rhythmically (actually it was mechanically) knocked the ashes off her coat, all the way to our destination, even when Little River was no longer smoking and there weren’t any more ashes. On the return trip, Danilo started in with his: ‘So are you sure that we’re not going to get into a crash?’ Čeda, with a condescending smile: ‘Sure? Nobody can be sure about anything, my boy. You can’t ever really know anything.’ After Danilo became flustered, Little River surprisingly enough suddenly appreciated something about Danilo’s anxiety, and he began comforting him: ‘Don’t you worry a bit. I’ve been driving for ten years.’ And then Danilo would say again: ‘But you’re not sure, isn’t it true, that you’re not sure, and nothing can ever be known?’ A slightly annoyed Čeda pulled over to the side of the road, and now without any trace of condescension said: ‘But I am sure, Danilo … Is he always like this?’ All at once Danilo, with a big grin on his face, goes: ‘Look, Lidia, what pastures, and you, you’ve been driving for ten years and you’ve never seen these pastures.’ Of course it’s a given – though not from outside – that there weren’t any pastures there, but Čeda of Little River replied: ‘For exactly ten years.’ Danilo asked again: ‘No more and no less, but precisely ten years?’ And calmly, patiently, Čeda answered (he knew that Danilo would repeat this question several times before they got home): ‘Exactly ten years, my boy, right down to the day and the hour.’

  On the sixth of March I dreamt that Marina, Jaglika, one of Jaglika’s relatives from Ljubljana who was ill-disposed to me, and I solemnly (we were carrying bouquets of flowers) went through the gates at the entrance to the New Cemetery: lots of people about; the entire graveyard forest was cut down, and along the paths, towards the French cemetery and the Russian monument, rubber boxes and short coloured plastic mats had been set up; there were several sealed wooden caskets somewhat farther on, to the left of the entrance; their lids were covered with light blue brocaded shrouds with tassels; Jaglika, Marina, and I approached a casket that was set aside, right next to a big wall, to the right of the entrance to the cemetery. Jaglika laid down flowers next to it, on the ground, and raised the lid; Marina, standing back a bit, said: ‘How are you, Mihailo?’ I squatted; in the coffin lay, judging from the name at least, my father. Jaglika and Mihailo, from out of the casket, were whispering to each other. Meanwhile Jaglika waved several times with her head and opened her arms; a bit later she said: ‘Here, we’ve brought your little girl to you.’ Before anything else, I noticed his huge wrinkled ear; his hair was gathered at the back of his head in a grey ponytail; his face I could not see at all; and then I caught sight of an arm moving beneath the quilt; yellow, wrinkled, then, and not as long as I’d thought it was at first, Mihailo’s arm. Then we exchanged greetings; Jaglika, Marina, and some relative from somewhere kissed Mihailo on both cheeks; I stood precisely as far away from the coffin as his arms could stretch, I touched his fingers, and then I planted a kiss on his palm, and one more on his fingernails. I said courteously, the way Marina and Jaglika had taught me: ‘Goodbye, and have a good day, sir.’ A minute later, some flying dwarf from the time of Erasmus of Rotterdam lifted me into the air with the twisted tips of iron hooks dangling from the belt on his waist. Once again, a moment later, the dwarf set me down on the wall above a suitcase with my father in it. A lot of people were there: they were counting out loud and there were also some pretty little red cards on their upper arms. Jaglika and Marina made their way to somewhere outside the graveyard; I couldn’t tell when they left.

  When I woke up, I told Jaglika everything word for word, picture by picture, including the smallest scenes and even every seemingly insignificant detail. Jaglika heard me out attentively and said: ‘Pray to God that it’s because you don’t believe, and he didn’t believe either and that is precisely why he went through what he went through, and all of it was because you don’t believe; neither he nor you can blame anybody else, and again, it doesn’t bode you two any good; it’s no good at all …’ That was when I saw my father for the first time; later, much later (that little word ‘much’ is necessary because of the utter vagueness of temporal distances: I need to use it more times than I can count, but since that is impractical for obvious reasons, then a certain number of times will suffice as an indication of something infinite) much later I had the same dream again with some varying details; that’s when I saw my father a second time; the third time that I saw him was on the street, directly opposite the library, where some or other person was transformed into him for just a moment, right before my eyes. This was genuine, or at least I thought it was. When I told Jaglika about it, she said once more: ‘That’s bodes no good for you.’

  On the 7th of March, at 10:00 in the morning, Marko rushed into our house. Marko was Danilo’s friend from secondary school. He usually came on Friday afternoons; he had a key. It was all a dull, repetitive story, year after year: let’s say it was winter: Marko would come running into the house, red-skinned and frozen, with his nose running; with a big plastic bag in his hand. He lived in a shack, in a courtyard on Birčaninova Street. He got a decent amount of money from his parents, who lived in another city; nonetheless he was forever doing something on the black: trading in pornographic films, banned books from every corner of the globe, typewriters, tape recorders – things he never managed to sell, and, over time, adding machines and all kinds of other crap, so that he never had anything left over for the heating: there in that shack he would wrap himself up in rolls of toilet paper – which he always carried off from our house. Danilo bought every book that Marko brought by, and every porno film; eventually he also bought a movie projector. One month when we were totally broke, and actually in the red, Marko contributed the money he’d made on a few sales.

  At school, they simultaneously gave Marko a bunch of different names: Eyepiece, Rat, Criminal; the nickname ‘the Bag’ he got as a present from Danilo. It was March 7, and I had not gone to work. When Marko came running in, the first thing he did was wake me up: he sat on my bed, rustled around with his bags (this time there were two other ones, in addition to the obligatory one), spat this way and that through the gaps in his teeth, and whooped: ‘Come on Lida, get up!’ (With his filthy hand he grabbed the thick quilt, underneath which he could not even see me, nor I him, and shook it.) ‘I brought you something. It’s super, Lida! Come on, Lida, make me a coffee, and then I’ll have to run … I don’t have much time …’

  The unavoidable, unerring Marko the Bag, always in a hurry and always arriving at an ungodly hour, is sitting on my bed; I’m asleep; I stay asleep; and he says, ‘Lida, I have a thousand and one things to do today. I can’t wait!’ I extricate my head, and then my arms from the quilt and in that instant I wake all the way up because of his gushing, spit-covered stare (it looked like a huge amount of snot or saliva had been smeared across his face) – from beneath those thick lenses (Marko was blind, so to speak; he saw nothing in the heavens or below them, only tiny shadows) or because of the stink of his mouth, his body, or both of them together? Anyway I was awake enough right then for it to seem like I would never again fall asleep in my life, not if Marko the Bag were sitting on my bed. I dragged myself out, with the speed of a big-ass otter (although it was more Marko who resemble
d an otter, with his snout, and not me) and I sat there for a moment or two, definitely no longer, with my legs gaping wide, rubbing my eyes, right beside stinky Marko the Bag. Meanwhile he was muttering like a madman: ‘Lida, hurry it up … I have a thousand and one errands to run.’ Then he asked: ‘Is Danilo … not up yet?’ I answered kindly, with a smile even, because of the good breeding I inherited from Jaglika and Marina – two fine city ladies: ‘No, he’s not. Go wake him up, Marko!’ I should have screamed: Get lost, you bug-eyed retard, take a hike, beat it, who told you to come over anyway, you shithead … but I didn’t, because of my good upbringing. I repeated: ‘Go wake him up!’

  Then Marko the Bag Rat Eyepiece Criminal, spraying the whole room with his vile saliva responded: ‘You wanna get dressed? Should I leave?’ He ran his tongue over his thin upper lip: I lunged for the bathroom and as soon as I made it – started to puke big-time. An agitated Marko shuffled back and forth in the hallway, whining like a tortured puppy and saying over and over: ‘Good Lord … Good Lord, Lida, what’s wrong with you… Lida, what did you eat? It must be something you ate… Lida, are you OK?’ I waved him away and croaked, faintly: ‘Go wake up Danilo!’ Then I was sick again.

  After his coffee, Marko, who had until that moment been sitting on the edge of his chair, fidgeting, got to his feet and began impatiently pulling things out of the bag: four pairs of spectacles, two chunks of mouldy bread, an onion, an entire cucumber, a little ham wrapped in opaque paper, pieces of string, a couple of reels of film, notes from a maths class, three books about the study of psychology, and a duplicated text about archaeological finds in Macedonia. Marko was studying archaeology, psychology, and maths all at once, and, what was most remarkable: sport and physical education. With the exception of the films, he put all the items back in the bags. ‘Marko, do you want some breakfast?’ – I asked him. He wasn’t hungry; and he hurriedly cued up one of the reels on the projector that Danilo had brought in the meantime from his room. ‘So you can see a super porno, Danilo. I’ve never seen anything better!’ But the film was boring, horribly boring, just like all the other ones that Marko had brought. I walked out of the kitchen, got my bike, and went outside. Marko called after me, crestfallen: ‘But Lida, this is the best one I’ve ever come across. If you only knew how much I paid for it Lidaaa!’

  VII

  At the beginning of April, Little River came over with Milena; he twisted at the waist, pulled his head into his shoulders, smiled as condescendingly as ever, and said: ‘This is my good friend Milena… And this is Lidia, and Danilo. I was telling you about them. Now come meet Granny…’

  Until then, Čeda of Little River had shown up daily on Svetosavska to sit; one day Jaglika had a cold, another time she had a headache, on a third day it was her stomach, but Čeda came all the time anyway; he drank coffee with Danilo; read newspapers that he was never the one to purchase; kept asking if we’d like to buy a Japanese upright piano for cheap, some goat suet, also on the cheap, car tyres even cheaper, a complete set of the photo magazine ‘Football’ totally gratis and a hundred other marvels. ‘But, Lidia, you’ll never have another opportunity like this – it’s an awful piano, so it’s important that you don’t know how to play; you will never be able to buy one so cheaply!’

  I think Danilo fell in love with Milena the moment he caught sight of her blonde hair, round face, and big chest. For me, though, it took a few days (exactly as many days as Milena turned up with Čeda, to drink coffee, talk, and do whatever the hell else the two of them and all of us got up to in the apartment on Svetosavska) to discover, to realize, that the corners of Milena’s mouth rose considerably when she smiled (a child’s hand draws a half-moon the same way, horizontally and with pointy ends) and that the same thing that was happening to Danilo was also happening to me.

  From that moment (when Milena entered our Svetosavska home bashfully) onward (and then when it all looked immovable and enduring) Milena just walked in, she didn’t ring the bell, she didn’t knock, and right from the doorway she began talking; the first thing you saw, the first thing anyone in the world would see, were the raised outlines of Milena’s lips, like a hiked-up skirt revealing a glimpse of leg, (hers, of course), the knit fabric of her socks, and a great flash: ‘Lidka, do you know what happened to me … I was at the dentist’s. I had to wait three hours before I did anything else … and when I finally got to my place in that chair, you know, I closed my eyes in fear. You get it – I always close my eyes, clench my fists, I totally, Lidka, totally tense up my entire body, it’s like I clench my face into a metal rod or a fist, and then for sure it must just look lumpy and… and so contorted… Then it has to be Lidka the ugliest face in the world, but no, not in the world, but anywhere ever… and while I’m gawking in that dentist’s chair, I’m sitting there all tensed up and waiting … and then first of all I feel a soft touch and that’s them tying the white cloth around your neck and then they usually catch your hair in those nickel-plated clips, and then out of the dentist’s mouth it comes… and my eyes are shut the whole time, squeezed shut, all I can do is hear, in truth, what comes out of his mouth: ‘Nothing to be afraid of we’ll go nice and easy here.’ And then, Lida, usually at a moment like that I can also hear little metallic sounds, you know them, the little mirror, the pumps and the other blah-blah-blah and then, Lida … It’s unbelievable but instead of all that I hear somebody like, you know, murmuring something near my face, somebody, you understand, whispering something totally unintelligible, moistly, and instead of the drill and pumps, a little later, in my mouth, the dentist’s huge slimy tongue, Lidka, it was awesome… for a moment my mouth was puffed up by the dentist’s tongue and by those cellulose pads and I couldn’t breathe for just a moment… But it all lasted for only a second, no, no, but even so it had been a good several seconds when the dentist pulled out his tongue. I opened my eyes and with my fingers I fished out the pads and started to giggle, and Lidia if you only could have seen that perfectly confused, 100 per cent confused dentist’s face in that instant, he was holding those you know little tools and in a whisper, he totally like whispered a couple of times that we should get together later that day, it was mandatory that we see each other… and then I, Lidka, just imagine, it’s like, it was hideous, I had to try so hard not to burst, I mean just straight up burst into laughter, and then I just told him sweetly, coquettishly, you know what I mean, you know how it’s supposed to go, otherwise they get pissed off, and Lida he definitely would have been angry. I told him that first he should fix my left #6, my right #3… and then we’ll see about a little rendezvous and then I added once more terribly flirtatiously, that I didn’t have anything against that… So, you know, Lida, in truth I have nothing against it, but on the contrary, it would only be like I’d love to postpone it till after the six and the three and the four and so on, in general… And then, Lida, he got down to business: first of all he washed out of my mouth with that spluttering little pump all the slime and spit since a lot of his spit was in my mouth, I had never seen before, swear to God, seen, and I mean I have never seen, like, I didn’t know that so much spit could be secreted, as if he were a dog, Lida it was so totally loco, I thought that I was going to drown for a second, just for a second… and when he washed everything out of my mouth that way, and with the pads tremendously carefully wiped the remnants of the water off my chin, he picked up the drill and repaired one of my whole teeth, a half hour, I didn’t get up for a half hour, it was unreal, and then Lida, when I started moving to leave, he stood like two meters away from me as if he’d become scared and it was crazy unpleasant for him, and Lidia I seriously thought, first the teeth and then the rendezvous, and he, do you understand Lida, he was beetroot-red and then, a moment or two later, while the nurse was scheduling my follow-up, you understand, when I said goodbye and the rest of it, you know already, he said not a word, nothing at all and so, Lida, it was great fun, the most fun imaginable, if you don’t count the overabundance of spit, but I don’t understand why he ch
anged his mind once things were rolling… Lida…’

  When she finished telling me the story about the dentist’s tongue and all the rest of it, Milena was already naked, with skin that glowed in all directions and filled the entire room, and it took my breath away for a moment, just like with all fools in similar situations, or better: like all fools who have anything to do with Milena, with Milena’s skin; and besides that there was the chill of the room; Milena had goose bumps, and so it looked like the tiny needles on her skin very nearly blocked off the entire room. A few moments later, after I lost my head just as the dentist had done, Milena said brusquely, in a commanding tone, that she wanted to sleep and that I should stop delaying, a big job was waiting, but what job (asks the prisoner – me), and my master (Milena) lifted yet again (the corners of her mouth as if this were about her skirt, exactly like that), stretched out beneath my awkward and unnecessary arms, and went to sleep; very quickly I felt the pins and needles start in my arm, but I was unable, yes, I simply could not be so bold as to pull it out, take it away, to save it from this great white load – the whole of untouched Milena, because she would wake up just as easily as she fell asleep. And the anger of the master and the humility of the slave, of course, work just like that; so then it’s better like this: a numbed arm, underneath the master’s back.

  VIII

  DANILO’S FLY

  Soaked, wet through and through, I go into the house; it’s Friday; no! It’s Thursday; fine, I don’t actually know what day it is; what anything it is; year, season, whichever one it is; location – more of the same – Svetosavska – library, and Svetosavska Street again, and then that little space in between, which I cross every blessed day with my head bowed, my glasses on the end of my nose, and deafened by the steps, the very steps, steps of hurrying humans; my head is bent so that these human figures won’t see me, my glasses too, not for that reason but more for reasons of common courtesy: my head up and no glasses on my nose and, of course, footfalls that were a little bit softer – and everyone would drop dead, they’d all keel over on the pavement from hatred of my face; me, I know that this persistence, with hardly any patience (that signifies foolhardiness) will indeed one fine day end up being rewarded by God: they’ll writhe around, each in their turn, on the pavements, in that same small space, between Svetosavska and my library; nevertheless. It’s the same (and that’s exactly why): library, Svetosavska, day, night, noon, a brief twilight, autumn, an excursion with Čeda, Jaglika, Danilo, and now with Milena – what an ostensibly family gathering: artificial flowers in little glass bottles.