XV
‘At the foot of the city, in the time of King Ateas, a ten-story slaughterhouse was erected; not a single animal was sacred; especially not dogs; later this ornate structure was converted into a storehouse for traditional weapons from prehistory (arrows, spears, various daggers with short handles), and others.’
(P. I. S. a)
For the first five, or even six, years of his life, Danilo would chase birds down every street in the city; in Knez Mihailova, he would charge into a peaceful flock of pigeons, white ones and grey ones, and in a moment’s time he would have dispersed all of them; the people out for a Sunday stroll, casting crumbs with such ludicrous care and all their Sunday refinement, taking pictures of themselves, some of them anyway, got mad as hornets. To whom were they shouting, without any trace of refinement, all of a sudden: ‘Watch out for the little monster! He belongs in an institution, not on the street…’ Doubtless they thought that the so-called home for delinquent children, and that street with the pigeons, formed the apotheosis of those little starched Sunday dresses, the white petticoats, of their children, the polished booties, and the equally starchy grown-up smiles; and in their pockets, on Sundays, they always had handfuls of crumbled food for the birds, right there across the street from the American Reading Room. For a full five, or six (no one knows precisely), years of his life, Danilo drew birds in the corridors of our building on Svetosavska, in improbably resistant colours; none of the caretaker’s silly efforts at daubing paint over them over the next six years bore fruit: the birds, on every floor, and on every standing wall, they could be seen, and some of them were still quite distinct, despite layers of paint. ‘The building is intolerably grubby,’ said all the folks who lived in Svetosavska. For those first five or six years of his life, Danilo also left birds behind on sheets of paper, on newspapers, on wardrobes, tiles, and doors… Every day Jaglika would throw away countless clutches of bird-paper, and she believed quite firmly that this was a divine punishment. She crossed herself both ways, just to be on the safe side – propitiating first one God and then the other. Right to left, and then again: left to right. When Danilo started school, the bird thing stopped; at last, the Sunday strollers could relax, and they would never again see ‘that holy terror running like a madman into the birds on the pavement, waving his arms and pretending to shoot them…’ The building council, too: at last the great horrors on our walls of Svetosavska Street were covered by an extraordinarily thick layer of paint.
Danilo, however, started to stutter; he stuttered more and more, and turned red and cried, and would cry again; Marina took him once to see this famous man who knew his way around such things – there weren’t any results to speak of but I guess it was worth it – but maybe it was for another reason, too, so that the dude who was famous for children’s tribulations would become one of the first of Marina’s lovers and would almost never leave our house on Svetosavska. Jaglika made the sign of the cross in amazement with both her left hand and her right and she mentioned a church – to which she that very minute needed to take Danilo. Not once did I hear her say, in that croaking way of hers (because of her dentures which were loose and unstable): ‘He is to blame for everything … That’s easy as can be, and anybody could do it … It’s like yanking off someone’s ponytail, and staring wide-eyed but leaving the others. You can’t do that. You just can’t…’
It took several long years, but I came to know the overall meaning, and finally the content, of these things that Jaglika repeated. Her whisperings. Uncle K mentioned to me briefly, one day when I was seventeen (he had dropped by for a coffee), it was in the morning, a half hour before I was supposed to head to school: ‘Your father strung himself up in prison when you were four years old. Danilo was younger; they had arrested him several days before, for some kind of check; in those days tons of people were arrested for routine checks, but he turned out to be a coward, a major coward. He had slipped away from the special police all during the war, and afterwards, but then he hanged himself like the big pussy that he was.’
Before she left for Ljubljana, to her relatives – that was in the same year that Marina had brought that guy home to Svetosavska – Jaglika told Danilo, in the same moment that he, for Lord knows what reason, mentioned our father’s family: ‘You poor fellow, can’t you see that they’ve all disappeared? Like bitches in heat they raised their tails and off they went…’ But Danilo, not comprehending how hard-headed Jaglika was, said: ‘But, Baba, they aren’t alive, you know? They’re all long since dead.’
‘The hell they aren’t. They were alive, and while they were alive they never thought of you two, they never came to see Lidia or you since you were both bastards, and they never gave you anything …’ That was Jaglika’s response, delivered with a full dose of malice, as if the fact that no one had ever given us anything comprised everything; when Danilo, forgetting for a second about Jaglika’s shopkeeper mentality and past, tried to explain to her how none of them, but none of them, had had an easy time of it, she jumped all over him. Enraged, she screamed at him: ‘Shut up! Shut up about this! Things weren’t easy for them, but were they easy for us? I know that nest of vipers quite well, sons of bitches… Your father would’ve been exactly like them if he’d stayed around by some miracle… You have nothing to regret.’ After this, Danilo hit Baba with a pair of kitchen tongs; Jaglika raised hell, cursed, threatened us, and, in the end, locked herself in her room; she remained angry for precisely two days; she got her things in order, supposedly so she could return to Ljubljana – ‘no one insults me there or screws with me.’ On the third day, Jaglika erased from her heart every bit of anger, like an eraser on paper, and soon one could hear this around the house: ‘Oh, where’s my little Danilo, my sweetie, my little chick-a-dee, granny’s favourite, her little man, the pride and joy of his granny…’
XVI
Milena’s body, velvety, smooth, and warm; no, it’s her skin; it’s quite possible that it’s a matter of my imagination; which nevertheless is also warm, radiant, and smooth. The colour of her slip (it encircled her legs like a silk army parachute – that kind that the hippie kids make dresses, skirts, and other stuff out of) was ivory; ivory and jade, green and yellow mixed, or so it looks from here in bed: the slip on the floor and Milena naked.
Milena steps out of her big army umbrella-slip, and lifts the blanket on my bed: ‘But you’re still dressed, Lida … Why all the stalling!!’ I got naked in a hurry then; but I left on my underwear, green – it belonged to Milena’s long and impatient fingers; I also left on my tank-top, blue with green shoulder straps – now that belongs, too, to Milena’s ready nervous fingers; it goes unceremoniously over my head. Rapidly, Milena’s mouth, all of it, on my sex, all of it. I think about my own skin, rough, darkened by numerous illnesses, (Milena seldom skipped a chance to mention the unbelievable whiteness and softness of her skin, over against mine, which was hard, rough, and nearly black; she would say, for instance, ‘easy-to-light charcoal and quality-controlled [brilliant white] rational lust, nothing worse than that, right Lida?’), and I think about Tsvetaeva’s neck in Dagestan, after she squeezed it through the noose, bewildered and moving fast (but who would’ve stopped her?!), immediately, that same instant (only nobody saw this) – her neck turned jade and ivory, yellow and green like Milena’s skin and unyielding, unyielding like mine. I knew that Milena and Jaglika don’t understand these things; I know that it’s not as easy as falling off a log; whether, for example, Mihailo, my father, or Tsvetaeva, no matter who, but let’s say Mihailo anyway, ‘that man’ from the many years of Jaglika’s whisperings around the house (Milena’s teeth, then tongue, then teeth again, and then just her lips all over my dimpled thighs; and the room, by the way, is unheated), whether he, the moment before his legs bucked and buckled – since he hanged himself from the radiator – whether he thought about the world, about the skin he was abandoning, or whether his field of vision was completely restricted: how to pull this off as fast as possible: tighten the
belt, stick his head through, closing his eyes first – no one should see the whites of those eyes, of course, since people love to say, and even Jaglika said it: ‘It just looks like he’s asleep’ – such a crock of shit, like this too: ‘He’s so handsome it looks like he’s only sleeping.’ That is so fucked up for Christ’s Sake. What does Milena know, white Milena, about whether Mihailo or Tsvetaeva, whoever, looped his or her head through the noose rapidly and skilfully, or was mystified and scared, embarrassed at the outset, more and more certain as the pace picked up, and then slow for the pleasure of it, disgusted perhaps, feeling repulsive the whole time, or was it the way it is under a pillow or into the gorge? Maybe Mihailo’s neck was just like Milena’s now: tensed-extended with no end of sinews, veins, and bruises. Milena came and put her mouth on mine; Milena brushes her teeth twenty times a day and constantly says: ‘You’ve always got a lake of spit in your mouth, Lida. It’s like you don’t swallow … for God’s saaake, Lidia, what do you do with it all? Learn how to swallow, Lidia. I’m choking over here … Lidia!’ And shortly thereafter, crossly: ‘Why are you gawking at me like that? I don’t know what to do with you.’
In the morning (with her long arms out over the blanket), while she drank coffee and spilled some (it ran out over her chin) here and there, Milena didn’t talk about dreams as some people do, or as all people do – it was the same every morning, with the same long arms (all arms are long) out over the blanket, or with her hands behind her head – so that her elbows jutted out to the sides, she would finish some mundane thoughts from the previous evening, or from some night out, talking from morning till noon – always the same thing, with tiny and inconsequential changes:
‘The most useless thing in the world, no, wait… the saddest thing, for real, Lida, is when you are fucking some loser who’s flailing around down there and doesn’t know where anything is in the huge space, you know, it’s true, and when a misfit like that says to you: does it hurt, and maybe you’re thinking Lida of something that won’t insult him, you totally just don’t want to offend him with something that will trample the illusion he has that his cock is big and has stamina and is powerful and clever and everything it should be but his dick is like a worm, the fucker, and it makes you want to cry, cry from nausea at his torment, and now look here… listen, where does this compassion come from, Lida, on which everything rests, do you understand Lida, it’s on this compassionate relationship to worms, the worms, Lida, would croak the moment they knew, Lida, if only they knew they were worms, in other words, that everything around them is not also a worm, do you understand, Lida, it’s simply impossible.’
‘What’s impossible?’ I ask. Milena sets her empty coffee cup on the floor and says: ‘Worms, Lida, worms are impossible… But Lida you got divorced I assume because of that?’
‘Because of what?’ I ask.
‘Because of his worm.’
‘No, Milena. It was boring, the way it is with you. It was insufferably boring, do you understand, Milena?’
‘That means he left you. He found somebody better. I mean, somebody with softer skin!’
‘You don’t understand, Milena. There are things under skin level.’
‘I know Lidia but what’s under the skin shows up on the skin, and skin is important.’
XVII
Vespasian again:
Dear Lidia,
I’ve been away on a trip and that’s why I haven’t contacted you for so long. I spent hours at Gundulić Meadows, always keeping my eye on two, or at most three, scenes at once, while my wife carried on nude under the water, in the hotel room, in the bathtub, on the terrace, in a grove of trees, etc. Incidentally, you know, I couldn’t do anything, or more precisely, maybe I could have if she’d wanted. But, as you know, my face disgusts her, as do my immobile legs and you know it to be true, Lidia, about this type of revulsion, I don’t think you’re utterly dissimilar to my wife – I don’t mean to sound like I’m saying ‘all women are the same,’ but close to it you know? As for Gundulić Meadows, I wasn’t in a position to see how far I could shoot my load – I’ve never done that before when I was surrounded by other people, but actually maybe I have, if I consider my wife to be, you know what I mean, consider her as a multitude, as different persons. I sat there for hours, and at some point my wife came to get me – she was returning from the first round of fucking that day, her face red as flame, with wet hair and her face beatific and, Lidia, ‘terribly hungry’ – and it was all ‘let’s get a move on, c’mon, I’m starving, I’m dying of hunger’ – and then she pushed me towards the City Café.
I had made friends with someone who was half-hippie, half-peasant – he was selling watermelons. You know how they do that, Lidia: first they spit several times into their hands, as if they are using sorcery to heal somebody; then they rub their pooled sputum all over the watermelons – later he explained the reason for that to me: so the watermelons would shine in the sun and in order to get the dust off. ‘Why don’t you wash them with water, at the fountain,’ I asked him. And he, Lidia, so persuasively said it was very complicated to take already unloaded watermelons one by one from the stand to the fountain. After washing them with spit, with one long fingernail (he has two of them, one on each pinkie) he scratches numbers onto the melon’s rind. He keeps his money in one of his socks, and he also has two big boots adorning his feet. Somewhere around one o’clock, or one-fifteen, every day, the time comes when he knows exactly how much he has sold and how much he’ll still be able to sell by three o’clock, and he cracks open a watermelon (he splits it on the edge of the counter, eats a little, and tosses the rest to the pigeons) and then when we struck up our friendship, he started giving me a piece, too, and I took it – it did not gross me out, Lidia, didn’t gross me out in the least, but there’s no way for you to understand that. The Eastern and Western tourists, and there were other kinds there surely, they didn’t take any notice of how this guy cleaned his watermelons, and he sold so many of them every day that when he left at three or three-fifteen at the latest, he also had to use one of his boots to store part of the money. Until I got to know him, I had been observing hideous scenes for days: female tourists with ghoulish sunglasses and really big noses and totally square derrières who are practically squatting in rows, stubbornly trying with a few scraps of corn to entice the already satiated and disgustingly fat birds, and off to the side, two steps away, stood the stubborn and patient husbands in columns counted off like their wives, with cameras held at the ready; the women and the pigeons, you have no idea, Lidia, the kinds of nightmares I had, every day, every afternoon, and every night, too (except when I was sitting on Gundulić Meadows, I spent a half hour after lunch in the City Café, and all the rest of the time I was asleep); I have not ceased dreaming about those filthy birds and the human heads, the bodies; the repulsive, fattened pigeons as they drilled out my eyes with their beaks, and the human figures suffocated me with their square derrières, with several of them sitting down at the same time on my neck and my face.
But the watermelon guy grinned and giggled whenever he’d relate the adventures he’d supposedly had with the foreign women. I didn’t believe a word of what he said; anyway he looked too unpolished, too much so even for that so-called Balkan virility. He’d say about one woman that she could fart loud enough to be heard over on the island of Lokrum, and about another one he’d say her pussy was unbelievably large, but of course he still banged her just fine, it actually fit him, and in general this watermelon guy bragged about himself; I thought my wife would think the same way about this guy, for sure, if he were maybe a little more polished: if he didn’t spit into his hands, for instance. But there’s no doubt that he didn’t do it with her, that is, that she found someone who never did that, because my wife suffers from a certain complex: she only fucks around with so-called intellectuals, even if those brainiacs of hers are not only impotent but unattractive, pockmarked and whatever, in the first place…
Dogs and Others Page 9