Dogs and Others

by Biljana Jovanović

  My dream about the other uncle took place in circumstances that were no less grim. All the relatives had gathered for a family celebration – there were so, so many of them that they seemed to spill out like ants into Svetosavska Street – both the living and the dead. Uncle K, who was younger and heavier than Uncle F, I castrated with a razor blade; although I’m no longer sure whether it was a razor blade or a pair of those scissors for clipping nails; but it seems most likely that there was a dark brown penknife in my hands – in one hand, just in one hand. First we all played some dreary party game: we hid ourselves in all possible locations. A few of them hid in the wardrobe; Daniel’s and my clothes started falling out; in that part of the dream, a towering burst of rage came over me: I attacked people, with the intention of throwing them out of the wardrobe, or out of the house; After Marina intervened, they remained, there at Svetosavska Street, but now they were hidden; instead of being in the wardrobes and cabinets, they were under all the tables; as if it were a present, I got a dangerous look from Marina – which had to mean, and still does mean, this – ‘if you dare do it, I’ll kill you after they leave, you little bastard, you scourge of God!’ The next dream sequence, the main one, actually, was: sexual intercourse with Uncle K, and immediately afterwards the castration; he didn’t make a peep, just as Uncle F didn’t, when I stabbed that knife into the middle of his back. Uncle K’s phallus was wrapped up in a wad of rags; nicely, that is to say politely, and that means in a soft (courteous) voice, I asked Jaglika to toss it down the garbage chute when she went out. Jaglika merely nodded her head and crammed her son’s phallus into her pocket. After that point, the events got less dramatic: Marina’s husband showed up in a clean white shirt and a tie with dots all over it (red and blue, quite the prosaic combination) and a pipe in his mouth, to boot. In the corner of the room an unknown woman was seated; she was wearing an old-fashioned evening gown and sitting right below the portrait of a man on the wall who was also unfamiliar to me. When I caught sight of them, I went directly over (both to the man in the photo on the wall, and the woman underneath the photo); and a moment later I took down the picture, sliced it into pieces (but I carefully set aside the pane of glass) and then began making a few pictures of my own – which I then later glued to the table. Jaglika in a tuxedo, although perhaps it was Marina, I don’t know. Marina was more corpulent, wider, as if she’d been inflated. She was pulling me out onto the dance floor, and ultimately I felt like we were just hopping around in front of the woman in the ball gown.

  Once, a long while after that, when I told Danilo’s doctor about this dream, he said to me – and good Lord I never doubted his skill, even if I did harbour suspicions about his potency; most assuredly I had no doubts about his skill – he told me that the picture on the wall and in my head was actually my father, and that cutting it up was the expression (what an expression!) of my ambivalence towards my father; and then he went on to tell me that the woman in the evening gown beneath the picture was in part my mother, and in part not, and it was even to a small degree me. Psychiatrists, not all of them, but for sure all the stupid ones, and thus all of them, come to think of it, simply pull a formula out of thin air, as casually as if they were striking a match or having a bowel movement: ambivalence and so forth, right on down the line.

  But what was it that happened involving me and Marina’s two brothers, the skinny, older one F, and the chubby younger one, K? One day, F and K burst (with the best of intentions in their hearts) into the place on Svetosavska: from the moment they crossed the threshold, they were strutting around and bragging about their plans for that afternoon; it was a Sunday, and I think it was at the beginning of spring. They had come to pick up Jaglika, Danilo, and me to take us to Topčider Park. We took a taxi; or, I mean, actually, we should have gone by taxi. From Svetosavska Street all the way to the National Theatre we went on foot, sometimes on the pavement and sometimes in the middle of the road. Danilo was ten at the time, and I was eleven. The first thing we did was go into a cake shop, there in the vicinity of the theatre. I was looking for some cream pie, and Danilo wanted angular baklava and oblong tulumba. Uncle F (he’s the older and leaner one, with the knife in the middle of his back) said, while Jaglika stood there drinking some boza: ‘That’s a lot, Danilo … You’re going to get a stomach ache.’ Then Danilo demanded two more šam-rolna, foam rollers. I ate two pieces of šampita, whipped cream pie, as I mentioned (earlier, at the beginning), and then I was just sitting in a corner of the nearly empty sweetshop, rocking back and forth in a chair. Now Jaglika got herself a lemonade, too (what the heck!); Uncle K was sucking in the smoke from one of his Drinas, a brand of cigarette from Sarajevo, while sitting directly below a sign stating that smoking was prohibited. Then F, the older one, said yet again: ‘That’s too much, Danilo. You’re going to get a stomach ache. You’ll see!’ But once more Danilo asked for some cake; he wouldn’t stop chewing and smacking his lips, so that I had to think that after this Sunday morning there wouldn’t be a single serving of cream puffs left, or baklava, either Greek or Turkish, or krempita, for the children who’d be coming by later. Now the pastry chef placed two pieces of chocolate cake and two mignons of fruit and candy on a plate in front of Danilo; and Danilo spotted the hair, long, black, and sturdy (as if it were from Uncle K’s head, which was, truth be told, impossible, completely ruled out by the fact that Uncle K was standing a good two meters away from the plate, and from Danilo, and from the pastry chef; however you chose to look at it, that is to say, however one might measure that distance – it was not possible that a hair from the head of Uncle K could have found its way to Danilo’s plate and assumed this position across those two mignons). The only link that could be established between the hair in question and Uncle K was the marvellous similarity of the hairs on his head and the one on Danilo’s plate. It certainly did not belong to the baker; his hairs were light brown, thin, and soft. I believe that Danilo would’ve passed over it in silence if the hair had come from the pastry chef’s head; but because it could not have been thus, he was convinced that Uncle K had deliberately placed the hair on his plate, and he couldn’t restrain himself, I know it; he could not do so by any means, and what happened later was necessary; things just had to happen like that. And so, when Danilo caught a glimpse of the long, black, thick hair on the plate (I also saw it at the same moment, and I assume that no one aside from the two of us saw it), he cupped his hand, very calmly, over the mignons and the pieces of chocolate cake, and he simply wiped them silently from the plate – he threw them to the floor, together with that long and magnificent black hair that looked as though it was from his uncle’s head, and then with his shoe he smeared the cakes onto the floor. Jaglika was beside herself with horror at this (this was her second boza, which she ordered after the lemonade: oh, good grief!), while Uncle F jumped up and led Danilo outside, transporting him through the air by his left ear; Uncle K (who was the cause of the entire scandal) asked the proprietor in a very proper way not to be angry ‘at this impudence – the kid’s going to get what he deserves’, and then he paid him for the pastries we ate, and the cake on the floor, and the mess that’d been made, and then all three of us, Jaglika and he and I, went outside; three or four meters away, Uncle F was giving Danilo a thrashing. Jaglika said: ‘He deserves it. This is exactly what he deserves.’ Uncle K lit up another Drina (from Sarajevo), turned his head the other way, and whistled nonchalantly – what a lack of feeling! Then I, angry to the point of danger, went up to Uncle F and, with all the force I could muster, I kicked him in the shin with the pointed toe of my polished, hard-soled shoe, the left one. Uncle F did not seem to notice, or maybe he didn’t feel it, the blow I mean – and he continued beating Danilo fervently and methodically; I struck again, this time in the other leg, and then Uncle F left Danilo alone (such had been my goal); but his next gesture exceeded all my expectations, or to be more precise, it shocked me: he smacked me across the face, so fast (the first slap in my life – is this happening t
o me, and isn’t it always like that?) and so hard, that I burst out crying that same instant. Jaglika said: ‘Dear God, these children – it’s like they’re little demons!’ and she crossed herself. Uncle F then announced that the excursion to Topčider was cancelled, and that we were returning to Svetosavska Street, and when, I was under the impression we were all on the way back to our street, I saw the three of them, Jaglika and her two sons, F the older one, and K the fatter younger one, as they disappeared down the street the other way. To Danilo I said, through my sobs: ‘It’s all your fault. What’re we going to tell Marina?’ But Danilo was happy, and quiet, as if he had not just had the stuffing knocked out of him by Uncle F, and he replied: ‘I really wanna do it. Let’s go across the street, Lida, into that little park!’ We didn’t get back till evening, after having acquired some stamps in the park in exchange for all the marbles we owned, which were a rarity in those days (and which Uncle K brought us from somewhere)…

  XI

  But who could Vespasian be?! That fancy-pants from the ninth floor! No, that skunk with his red tie and polished shoes and the beret – all right, he hardly knows how to write; once, recently, as I recall, when he rang my doorbell frantically, he was looking for the landlord, and he copied my name like an illiterate onto a duplicated set of instructions and at the bottom he asked for my signature – ‘right here you go, where my finger is, and I’m informing you that you’ll be fined if you don’t buy the radioactivity kit…’, no, it wasn’t him, that much is clear as a bell at least. Maybe that mangy old goose down there, from the fourth floor, that bug-eyed cry-baby with the big droopy ass. Who’s always bemoaning, through snot and tears, the way everyone has abandoned her, husband, mother, son, daughter, her friend, and how it’s unbearable to be by herself and how she doesn’t know what to do, or what the hell is the best way to alleviate these torments. No, no… not her, it’s not her either, she is, anyway, uneducated, she is, after all, a pure autodidact in life, but who isn’t! Vespasian must be, for God’s sake – he simply must be a soppy female who’s playing a male:

  Dear Lidia,

  It’s simply fantastic that you’re hearing me out about this; my wife, or, as the wretches say in the obituaries, my ‘spouse’, thought up the following fake theory about ‘emotions’ – she puts it like this, and she has in mind falling in love (which could also be in quotation marks, at least in her case, because when it comes to this, she’s an embarrassing flop), and so: various affairs, and not to mention adventures (of both body and spirit) cannot be explained with reference to blood pressure, high or low, or barometric pressure, or stomach (midsection) complaints or other corporal-spiritual difficulties; seeing as how all efforts, she maintains, in that direction result in big fat zeros, she came up with a charming (she says: logically admissible) revision (in point of fact the outline of a revision of some medical concepts, and systems and taxonomies – things built on those concepts; and all of this, she says, is aimed at regrouping certain phenomena associated with the ‘emotionality’ of human beings, at redefining them and labelling them according to the following classes: erythrocytes and leukocytes, in other words, in accordance with the Latin. Erythrocytes and leukocytes actually comprise the following groupings (with new names, to be sure): 1. Purplish bloody grains – the colour of cornflowers, found in some meadows in the month of June. (To my remark that cornflowers, always and everywhere, at any time of year are, if one looks at them properly, yellow, she responded, if you can imagine, Lidia: ‘The adequateness of perceptions and the objective characteristics of the thing are of no consequence here.’) 2. Blue bloody grains (cornflower again). 3. Very light red (cornflower). 4. Dark red, the darkest of all (cornflower). 5. Moonlight-white and 6. Greyish white.

  The sub-groups of these groupings would be, in regard to colour and other things, artificially acquired nuances: ground, chopped, crumbled, dyed, all of cornflower. Therefore, this grouping would correspond to the so-called erythrocytes. The other grouping (corresponding to leukocytes) would be the colour of early chrysanthemums in several combinations: reddish white, pinkish grey, orangish green, and so forth. My wife, she says I can check and see how little connection all these have to flowers at the florists’ shops in the city, and how conservative they all are and how monotonous. The first set is for the most part inalterable (I told her that’s not possible: for the most part; that she would have to decide, for the sake of theoretical consistency: either it’s changeable, or it’s not!) and the striking presence of certain combinations in which there appeared in the second grouping shades of violet (an unwholesome mixing of white and bloody red grains in some months, even in certain moments – especially then, it will indicate the physiological proclivity to ‘emotional outbursts’, without the possibility of defence (these are the so-called leukocytes that are – in the customary medical definition – blocked, as if they do not exist). The necessary and natural consequences of such outbursts will be an appearance of the colour blue, cornflower blue, of course. Lidia, such absurdities – and more: speaking again of flowers and the components of blood, my wife says: a third group (thrombocytes in the customary medical sense) is comprised of the colours of roses: you can direct your inquiries to the independent growers (of whom, supposedly, there are enough to populate a metropolis) who by means of cross-breeding obtain, it would seem, very frequently for their roses, greyish-black and also the colour of caraway seeds, and every rose (with those novel nuances) bears the name of a famous person somewhere in the world, dead or alive, it doesn’t matter, for instance: the Elizabeth Taylor, Gandhi, Churchill, and Pelé roses. So now, Lidia, why am I telling you this, why am I unloading all this onto you? What nonsense! My wife spent her whole pay cheque, and half my monthly pension, on a handful of books and other things: all of the existing editions of that book, I’m sure you know it, Lidia, it’s called Flowers in Your Home. All the editions of an anatomy textbook, for students in med school, the first revised edition, the expanded edition, the tenth reworked edition. A few treatises on disintegration (a private publication by some private, unknown individuals). Amongst these is one other book, not uninteresting, entitled: How to Prepare for Death Without Procrastination! And in this book there are photos of various machines and devices, but also a completely faithful image of my wheelchair – I even think it’s the same brand. Lidia, she has also purchased, for cash, off the top of her head, all the encyclopaedias, even the military ones, plus an easel, together with oil paints. She never took the time to explain this extravagance to me, especially the textbooks for medical students and the painting supplies, except insofar as she told me, as I was writing you: ‘You get to hear the basic idea, just so you don’t rack your brains about it, and so you don’t give yourself an ulcer thinking we won’t have anything to eat this month.’ Seriously, Lidia, could you lend me a little money? She also said: ‘This is a doubling of points, you understand, this inclusion of you in my intentions, but especially in my life, d’you see?’ Then she scarpered, and slammed the door (quite the regular gesture, she loves it so much) and shouted: ‘Mind your own business, you old fogey!’. But I’m not that old. I just look like I am. The following day, she announced, solemnly (what a stupid woman, what a hopelessly stupid woman): ‘The link between character and the shape of one’s ass is indisputable.’ I told her that that was nothing new at all, that all sorts of rogues, but also honourable people on the various continents, had taken up the issue of such ‘links’, and she replied that various people and various times were a pain in her ass, and she had nothing but contempt for my doubt, she said, and that was heartfelt, and anyway she intended to amuse herself with this ‘link’ all the more intensely, much more intensely than anyone had ever done before, or more than they had occupied themselves with it, and that I was going to be her first example, and afterwards she went on to say that I was to be included in any case – that was a correction of course; other than that, she was already writing about it, and about that first part, those colours, and ‘I’m doing fi
ne, out of spite towards you’, and now, Lidia, you can see that she has completely lost her mind, and you can see, Lidia, what a truly vexing nincompoop I live with. I know, Lidia, I just know, besides which I feel, that you are a much more intelligent woman than this old biddy, and incidentally that wouldn’t be hard …

  Goodbye, my sweet little Lidia.

  What rubbish! Vespasian is a tiresome and persistent bullshit artist, really, and he doesn’t even know it.

  XII

  ‘If the world did not exist, and had never existed … then there really would not be any isolated people, for there would be nothing from which one could be isolated …’