(L.K. N.K.)
1.
Milena, as always, with her feet planted wide apart, and with one red, chapped hand on the handle of the door leading to the outside: ‘But listen, Lida, it should not have been like that. You know that thing about how everything has to be done twice, and Danilo should have given that bus conductor another slap, and then when, for example, the first one gets erased, there’s only one remaining, I remember that, and so then could a third, you get my meaning, Lidka, then a third could have its uses, so like, you understand, Lidka – it remained unspecified, somehow without cause or motivation, Lidka… Say, Lidka, did you know I got hired… totally dumb thing to do… I’m replacing a woman who’s pregnant in the accounting department, you understand, such bullshit, Lidka, the expenses for the hospital, the one over in Banjica, I mean, I was telling you about it yesterday, I don’t want to repeat myself, how can I recall, how can I always remember whether something started yesterday or some other day, and what’s the harm of repeating myself around you … but get this, Lida, yesterday, no, the day before yesterday, this guy Ivan came into the room where I work. OK, maybe it wasn’t Ivan … so, like, who’s Ivan? Listen up, Lida, Ivan’s a patient, he broke his arm badly, here, like this, and what’s more he’s deaf and dumb, d’you know what I mean, Lida, and mentally… neglected… so listen up, Lida, he came in all slobbering and barefoot, but all smiles, you know, Lida, and I’d just been there like a day or two… I slept with him, just locked the ol’ door… so, okay, Lidia, why is that so terrible? So what if a mentally ill person has normal needs, and if you could have seen his transfigured, smiling, narrow little face, never before in my life have I seen a smile such as that, do you understand, Lidia… and get this part – when I asked him how old he was, he showed me on his fingers, like this… four fingers… there’s no way he’s forty, and he still looks like a boy, laughing and drooling and afterwards he got all his slobber wiped away, Lida… his insanely handsome face in my skirt and those eyes, totally calm and round like a slaughtered lamb’s, Lida, covered with a film of some sort… He didn’t want to give me the key, he hid it in his slipper, and oh, what he was like afterwards, you know, that goofy expression that he had on his face – when I ordered him, flat-out commanded him to give me his key… and okay, Lida… what’s so bad about that… why is it crazy, you don’t understand anything, nothing at all. Come on, Lida, could you make me some coffee… and where’s Danilo?’
The first time was just like the later ones: calisthenics, theatrical gestures, exercises in fact – carried out with great skill. First of all, Milena, always, just like always, relates her latest insane amorous experience, and it’s the same seduction technique: if I thought of someone’s neck, then it was Milena’s; somebody’s body or face, then it was Milena’s; right away she could tell when I was looking at her and when Danilo was doing it the exact same way: she turned into a supple, tall, white Milena, in Danilo’s eyes and in mine. In whatever she was doing, the line of her neck was twice as long and radiant as usual; she knew all about how to do that dazzling trick with her neck, with its whiteness and its gleam. But I never grasped why she had such need for the bizarre stories in that whole game of hers! The extent to which it was some kind of repressed need of hers, perhaps, and beyond all calculation, I was not able to discern – that is to say, what kind of need it was.
The narrow, gleamingly smooth and slick surface of Milena’s body (the blade of a knife that I see on her belly, leaning against her navel), while we are falling over each other, and Danilo timidly, or conspiratorially, knocks lightly on the door and walks in, pauses in embarrassment for a moment, goes out, and then comes back in, angry. He screams; he howls.
It’s always the same technique of seduction; the only part that changes are the degrees of success: touching (walking the beam), together with a focus on the ‘inside’ – that’s what Milena says; every touch, every onset of a touch has to be quiet and slow – drawn out; and then: the skin on her calves and just a little above them, it feels best with only certain parts of your hand, and you have to know exactly which ones; at which angle and under which fingers (it’s never all of them) right at first, and which fingers later; the offset of her waist, at the base of her back only comes after touching the recess of her neck, behind the occipital bone and a bit below it, and with the tips of her fingers carefully, and completely tremendously slowly, like when you touch the edge of a piece of unworked glass, the line of her backbone.
Milena did not hide her superiority, and she said: ‘Lidia, you’re like those miserable guys with whom everything is over before you can blink twice, or at most three times – before you start.’
Aside from that, which is definitely not without significance, Milena also possessed the same indentations and angles, the high line of her derrière, like looking at a competition gymnast from the side; handstand, risky moves several times over: rotations around herself and others. I have no doubt that our relationship was like this: Milena, who gathers polyps, and me, a polyp or a jellyfish, although, if it occasionally looked as though Milena were the polyp and I was the polyp gatherer – that was merely sleight of hand, on account of the radiance of Milena’s skin and all the other stuff hidden beneath it. And with regard to that, it does show how often it is possible to come out successful in many things while being guided by base motives.
2.
Jaglika settled her accounts, in a whisper, for days on end, at times with God (whom she believed to be an omnipotent and perfect being), and at other times with the devil: she never ceased holding conversations with the one and the other: ‘I never did anything to hurt anyone and I always paid back my debts’, and Danilo laughed while bustling around her, teasing her by hiding first her cane, and then her glasses, and then her newspaper, but there was no point: Jaglika had ceased looking for her spectacles, her paper, her cane, or anything else. She slept little, ate nothing at all really, and demanded, straight-out demanded, to go home. Sometimes she called Danilo by our father’s name, she mixed up Marina’s name with that of her own sister, and as for me, she didn’t address me at all except with: her. Or: this one. Which was the same thing.
3.
The whole town was under siege (this is not a reference to Camus); Jaglika is to my left; she has a white kerchief on her head, edged in silver and gold thread. I’m helping her walk, and she’s grumbling about how all I want to do is send her sprawling (I’m just waiting for the right opportunity) down into an empty lot (she means the stairs leading up to the fortress of Kalemegdan). All around – (in front of, and behind, Jaglika’s eyes and mine, but not to the sides), there’s an unusual army, with the same white kerchiefs over their yellow plastic helmets. Convoys of food are rolling past, like well-supplied supermarkets. Rain is falling; the most conventional rain; after a few steps – which the two of us took with much greater effort than usual (Jaglika’s entire weight hung on the left side of my body) – we ran into Marina, who was weaving from side to side, and almost falling, drunk as she was; her husband was walking along a step and a half behind her, stiffly, blindly, in actuality he was indifferent. From an alley nearby Danilo burst forth – he was chasing a woman who was pretty but older than his mother, Marina, and he was calling out: ‘Mother!’ They passed us, Danilo and the woman; I called out to her, as they moved by, ‘Good day, ma’am, how are things?’ I make a random stop at a roadside stand (a glass-walled grocery store, separated from the food convoy). I buy Jaglika two meat pies. Jaglika was always insufferable when she was seriously hungry; later on she announces that she’s tired and I take her in my arms (she’s big, and just like a foetus). We ascend a set of steep, twisting stairs, up we go, to the fortress, and we cross the two bridges, with Jaglika saying the whole time: ‘Don’t you go and accidentally drop me … Don’t slip and fall, Lidia, for God’s sake,’ and she crossed herself, both ways, one after the other (Jaglika had, since time immemorial, and I know this for a fact, wanted to reconcile her father and mother, with one church
in her left pocket, Catholic – and the other church, the Orthodox, in her right pocket – that was her father’s). And then: off we went.
I dreamt all this one night, after Danilo slapped the conductor in the bus, or after Danilo’s crying. Same thing. But it was cold comfort to Jaglika to think that God created the world for his own glory, out of deeply felt isolation, and that he makes up for this lack of modesty with sincerity, generously, abundantly – as Kolakowski thought. And so, ultimately, it was not difficult to conclude that her isolation (Jaglika is dying) could definitely not be any bigger than God’s, at that time when he was considering (and when he was not yet thinking it through – much earlier than that, before everything) creating the world for his own glory.
And what did I have to offer the dying Jaglika! Like water to a thirsty dog! Aside from inconsequential stories about God’s isolation! Or, in the same vein, minor relics from nearby churches, and from that self-serve market in the neighbouring street: do I ask her whether she wants, along with the candles and the other stuff, whether she wants a gleaming brass Catholic Jesus? Or should it be a wooden Orthodox one – that very modest Eastern-rite kind? Which side are you on, mother’s or father’s? Or, perhaps, she would like (I assume she’s a sensible old lady) a plastic one, a life-sized Jesus, if, and this is not out of the question, at the moment of decision her little being is overcome by fear and thinks: a plastic, life-sized Jesus is blasphemy, a shameful fabrication, but with wood you’re always safe: natural material; with brass even more so: durable material, radiant to the max.
XIII
It was hard for me to grasp, even late in the process; at any rate this was exactly what suits my mind: the same things happened to Danilo and me; we loved the same faces, all the same ones, including our own; there was, however, in everything just one itsy-bitsy difference: Danilo acted, he thought about these things, these people, but I shrewdly (cunning is a distinction of the stupid) took up the role of a non-existent person who does not think about these things, who doesn’t act, and is narrow-minded and scorns these things and these faces. I poured forth a torrent of insulting words, curses, and everything I could onto Danilo’s otherwise superior being, at his otherwise more beautiful face; and no matter how much the tide of insolence and imagination grew, I grew correspondingly crueller. More and more – for Danilo’s beautiful face continued to be beautiful and calm…
Never, not for one instant, did I believe even a single one of the words with which I usually pushed back at Danilo’s daydreams, at Danilo’s deliberate tomfoolery; but I spoke with authority, with my mouth full, clear-eyed and with my hands loose at my side; although with my palms slightly turned out, too; like a self-assured person who is unaware that she’s uttering the wickedest lies that are both as heavy as a ton of stone dropped onto someone’s head and as sharp as a metal blade used to slice, in a thin line, precisely, the throat of a lamb or a human being. When Danilo would say: ‘Lidia, I had another dream about long, narrow hallways. The way they make you dizzy with their curving and twisting. (I felt like I needed to vomit.) And it made me want to vomit, Lidia!’ – I would slip him a lie, like a piece of chocolate in a scrunched-up hand. Actually I would slap it onto his confused face and smear it in: ‘Don’t be a drag, Danilo. Other people have dreams, too, and they don’t make a big fuss about them. Stop thinking only about yourself. Other people – ’ And ad infinitum about those ‘other people’.
To all appearances this thing about ‘other people’ seemed like a harmless fabrication. When he asked, the way all children do: ‘Lidia, are you sure, really really sure, that there’s nothing for me to be scared of?’ I would also tell him a story about the other people who aren’t afraid, while I myself wondered, really, what he had to be afraid of.
I too, however, had my bus incident, my faux pas in a bus. Danilo had been in a crowd, in the throngs of people, other people; he had never been afraid of the extreme proximity of human bodies, and of lousy human smells, menstrual, ammoniac, faecal, urinary … Therefore that thing between him and the female conductor could take place right there in the presence of ‘other people’. In situations like that, all I have are the instincts of a frightened dog; I had always been afraid of those sweaty, anonymous packs of flesh who jostle me from behind and press against my back, against my pelvis my stomach my head. Although other people are just a deftly prepared illusion, I did truly fear that they would gouge out my eye, like on a slaughtered lamb, that they would spit in my mouth, down my throat, like in a public urinal, spilling their stinky syphilitic semen down my leg, the way a dog pisses against a tree …
Because of all that, I only rode buses that were almost empty; that time, when my incident happened, there were barely even ten of them there, other people, in the bus. Next to the entrance door, a girl was standing with her back to me; I could not see her face; in fact, I couldn’t see anything save her tall, elongated figure and the small, round, perfectly round butt in her pants; their eyes, like mine, were glued to the fabric of her pants, but I alone reached out for it, with my hand – I think I wanted to verify one very simple thing: whether the curve of that perfect ass differed under my fingertips from the same lines and same ass that people had before their eyes – mine and those of the others. And as soon as I touched it, everyone on the bus – all of a sudden there were a thousand of them – began to croak, maliciously: ‘Shame on you!’ and ‘Throw her off the bus!’ and ‘Pervert’ and ‘Yuck, a lesbian!’ but I don’t think the young woman even felt my touch. Ultimately, that rear-end, round and petite, had no connection of any kind to the girl’s body, and not to mine, either.
When I told Milena about this, she waved it off, laughed at me, and said: ‘Oh, get real, Lida! We both know that the satiny little ass in the bus is made of meat. Tender or chewy, it’s all the same!’
XIV
Our friend Milena only came over so she wouldn’t have to be alone when she talked to herself. Later I realized that this wasn’t self-infatuation, nor anything along those lines; now I can even affirm, although it doesn’t do anybody much good now, that it was Danilo who first sensed the seriousness of Milena’s isolation. Milena’s ardent penchant for humiliation (never once did I try to hit her; several times I pinched her (blue streaks remained); I told her everything that a person can say to herself, to another person, to no one, everything that can be thought up, imagined, and then forgotten) proved to be a grave matter. After all, only out of a sense of seriousness is it possible to permit the things that Milena permitted.
The one person who felt repentant was me, always me; Milena was constantly sombre; Danilo worried, and sometimes he cried.
I fantasized that it would be possible to spend the rest of one’s life without moving: Milena and I, as a double static figure in Svetosavska Street; Milena with her legs hooked – her hips around my neck, and her head between my legs – never-ending wetness, and all around – the moving world: Danilo and his bug-eyed Marko, whispering, prodding each other, and walking on tiptoes, going, coming, the both of them peering through all the keyholes; Jaglika and Čeda sending postcards with their regards, walking around the big park at Košutnjak, Little River sticking right by Jaglika’s side; my boss issuing various orders, going out to the cinema with his wife, never failing to reflect on the fate of the world in front of the shop window featuring fancy leather goods, and yawning in the library; and Milena and I like stalactites.
Of course, I was not able to avoid ensnaring myself in Milena’s serenity; no matter what I did, no matter what I said to her, Milena would always just curl up the corners of her lips, grinning, sneering at me with those gleaming front teeth of hers that were so large, and the big, retracted lower jaw, which she would then pull back even more, always but always repeating: ‘Oh for God’s sake, Lida!’
And when I slapped her one time, Milena said: ‘Oh for God’s sake, Lida!’ – and she left with a smile on her face. From the balcony I shouted down; I asked her to come back; and she turned around once and grinn
ed again, as if she were waving, but said again: ‘For God’s sake, Lida!’ Creep! I ran to Jaglika; I squeezed onto her lap and cried and kissed the backs of her wizened, gnarled hands, slobbering and whispering into her lap (my head was moored to the bottom of her stomach – and her lap was right there on that itsy-bitsy spot way down low): ‘Baba, may God help us, you and me,’ and Jaglika would say, bewildered, ‘Get off me, child … Why me? I didn’t do anything to anyone. Go on, move over. Move over when I tell you to!’
A Story from Childhood
It was in the coastal town of Umag, where we were spending our summer vacation for the second time – precisely there, and because of that – and Danilo and I were still little; Marina was laughing and sunbathing with this dark-haired guy. Uncle K was hanging around. In the evening the three of them, Uncle K, Marina, and the swarthy guy from the beach, left us to sleep; they headed out to a nearby tavern. After Danilo and I determined that there was no danger of their swift return, we stole out of the house; Danilo put on his bathing trunks and a thick sweater; I had on pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt; we went down to the beach – it was a few hundred meters away; other than that I just had a rubber band on my head; my hair was tangled and damp – tied up in a rubber band (after the day’s swimming) – Marina didn’t even like (she simply hated to have to mess with my hair, in the evenings) to touch my head, my hair – and therefore I always went to bed with my hair uncombed. When we got down there, to the beach, I told Danilo – whom I had carried on my back from the halfway point (he was complaining that his legs ached an awful lot) – how nice it would be if we could also take a swim – and I added that that’s why we had come out of the house in the dark. I assured him that there was absolutely no reason to be afraid, since I had in my mouth an unusually long piece of twine – which we would use to tie ourselves to one of the boats so that we wouldn’t be lost to the waters, or to the darkness. Danilo was still on my back; I set him down, on the sand, and he started crying that very instant – he was always crying – both when he should be crying and when he shouldn’t; I sat down beside him and begin withdrawing the twine from my mouth; it was astonishingly long – I pulled it out length by length or (at those places where it was tied) knot by knot, and it seemed like it had dropped deep down my throat – I wasn’t anywhere near getting to the end of it out; and when I got sick, I vomited up the final little knot and all my food, a heap of food – which had been stewing in my stomach for days; Danilo never let up crying; damn brat, it’s amazing how strong he is! I got into the water a moment later, ignoring Danilo (he was shrieking by now, and it sounded like animals from out of the darkness were ripping him into shreds of varying sizes) and without the twine. I swam around a little bit and then quickly came back out; Danilo only grudgingly agreed to give me the sweater – only when I promised to carry him all the way back. By the time we were a few steps away from the house, Danilo had already fallen asleep; the three of them: Marina, the dark-haired guy and Uncle K were waiting with cudgels in their hands; Danilo didn’t experience the terrible judgement himself, the holy trinity: the fury of this midnight trio descended with full force on my small weak back, without mercy, and all of it ostensibly for this reason: ‘We were worried to death here.’
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