When we came back, everything was the same at before; in the sun there I had forgotten, or it couldn’t be seen, I didn’t notice, I even thought that she was a beautiful and healthy woman, you really could not see it there: her interior constitution; Lidia, her interior constitution had bolts and screws that were visible and audible in her eyes, in her belly, and especially, especially, Lidia, when she walked – like a mechanical doll; never, actually, do I know what is happening until her ‘feelings’ – she calls them ‘emotions’ – start to suffocate, to stink, in intellectualized sentences – she, Lidia, has done nothing but spout bullshit as long as I’ve known her, and she never ever even gets a squeamish look on her face, on the contrary, everything is mechanically graceful, on her face, Lidia, I know that you won’t understand this, because you are most likely very similar to my wife…
Goodbye, sweet little Lidia
I most probably did have one other trait, among all the other ones, that was similar to Vespasian’s wife – as if Vespasian’s wife was only one characteristic, one distinction, let’s say, of one unnecessary man: I was, like her, I presume, obsessively pedantic; I’ve already said that I signed every one of Vespasian’s letters for ‘God forbid’ (the police), sometimes in this colour and sometimes in that colour of ink, and stacked them up, and then I numbered them here in Roman numerals and there in Arabic ones, and so on; this letter was the one I put on the top of the whole lot of them, contrary to my custom up to then – and I had at that instant the firmest of intentions to find out who Vespasian truly was, but in the next moment something threw me off, which Vespasian did not take into account, nor did he ever dream of it in those night-time and day-time nightmares of his, he didn’t take into account, he could not have, even if he is from Rome, that he, by some miraculous happenstance, is the real Vespasian, and this is too great a similarity between him and me, not between his distinction (his wife) and me. He will never grasp this – that it’s between him and me. However, the people from the police station ‘God forbid’, when they get their hands on these letters of Vespasian’s, I have no doubt, that they will be exactly as stupid as God requires and commands and will conclude that Vespasian does not exist, and that I am writing these letters to myself, but once more in accordance (again it is a matter of divine harmony) with how those lords from the station ‘God forbid’ would act: it might turn out to be useful that we, however, lock her up as a security measure for an unspecified period of time, you never know whether instead of writing to herself she might start writing letters to other people, and continue signing them ‘Vespasian’, we have to, we must, what will people think, et cetera…
But did I not say, and I’m telling you again just in case, that they are the only ones allowed to get things mixed up, or, more precisely, it’s only their stupidity that gets to do that.
XVIII
‘No, I did not imagine it, Milena. I remember perfectly well how the holes opened up here in the street on Svetosavska, and green dinosaurs started coming out of them, but I didn’t, I surely wasn’t dreaming, Milena; listen, you’ve forgotten that you at one point said: “Calm down, Lida, it’s all plastic, don’t you see,” and then you turned to Čeda of Little River who was already waiting, quaking and stooped, and red from your white flesh, yeah, from your white flesh. He was a terrible sight. He was scared just like me. You saw it, Milena, even though you’re pretending to be clumsy now, and even if you were pretending to be clumsy then, you did, you saw it, you saw Čeda’s fear, and again later, Milena when there was that unnecessary, bad combining thing: Čeda, sweaty and cold, you, and I, although, yeah, with a lot of effort from you, finished, on the floor, like always. You had concocted, even if you say now that you don’t remember, a moronic game with pinching, tickling, and dressing up in other people’s clothes, something like a masked ball. First I put on Čeda’s clothes; then I took them off, and then you put them on, after which Čeda put mine on, and so on, on down the line. You devised the unsavoury ritual whereby everyone needed to appear in everyone else’s clothes, without any explanation whatsoever; and then, how do you not recall, how in God’s name do you not recall this, Milena, the dumbest thing of all happened: I again lay down on the floor, although that got me all dusty and dirty, and you pressed something, no you didn’t do it too hard, something plastic against my throat, like a knife. Čeda was standing off to the side and trembling, and anyhow you were putting on this entire masquerade for his benefit; Čeda’s fright amused you, when he, after you told him: “This is gentle, bring on the real one,” he, Čeda, still quivering, obeyed and brought it, mortified by fear. You were furious. I got up off the floor. Everything went wrong all at once. Čeda breathed a sigh of relief, even if he was also smiling, and you saw it, I knooow, Milena, that you saw it, even if you deny it now, even if you’re continuing to play dumb, God, such a pile of… You totally know that’s how it was, you and Čeda both … of course it’s true that Čeda’s never admitted he was scared… but he knows, he remembers too, as do I, how you were getting dressed at the same moment that I was getting up off the floor, and you ordered him to get dressed, too; you were saying, “let’s get out of here, Čeda,” and he listened to you, of course. You know, Milena, you could do anything and everything with Čeda, just like with Danilo. Anything…’
Milena said nothing for several minutes (and that belongs under the rubric of her skills: she devises a lie, or she doesn’t devise one, because she already thought it up and is only embellishing, just as calmly as if she were pressing her lips together and then opening her mouth and then encircling it with dark red lipstick) just like she was opening and pursing her lips – a red-rimmed hole appears on the white-moon face, and from there gushes forth, as from a septic tank: ‘Listen, pay attention now, Lidia … There are people who go through doors face-first, who wait for the doors to open for them, and then there are those who sneak in sideways alongside you, past you, edge-wise, and then the people who take a full step backwards after they ring the doorbell and who wait for you to ask them several times to “come on inside”, and why don’t you go in, well, go on, and be careful now, and a moment ago when you rang, you were simply waiting, with your fear there somewhere, you understand, I could not leave you, and then Čeda didn’t get scared and you did, then and now, listen Lidia, you stood there a moment ago like a soldier no like a child you know that child-soldier do you remember the child-toy, the wooden soldier and now I knew listen Lidia I knew about that fear over there somewhere although you were calm do you understand Lidia compleeetely calm, good Lord, the kind of fear that was protruding you know just flat-out sticking out, gushing out all over your disgusting, dumb-ass face and I had to get away from you, although I could have closed the door on you, do you see, Lidia, I had to leave you… and what is it you want now, Lidia, you fabricated all of this, Čeda’s fear, then, my power over Čeda, he didn’t obey me, do you understand, Lidia, you did, Lidia, you forgot, Čeda said: “Let’s go.” It wasn’t me, I listened to him, it was unbearable, Čeda remembered first, he just found his bearings in the miracle of your imaginings, you were talking nonsense, and, Lidia, you distorted everything, you’ve forgotten that you ran naked out of the kitchen with a knife, without any passion in you whatsoever, it is true, but still it was terrifying, and you said: “Come on now, let’s play, let’s try this out,” d’you understand, even though the whole time it was you, you were the one who was scared, you were scared to the point of being debilitated, listen, Lidia, like now, too, and Čeda was, and you’re forgetting this, he was more than anything delighted and peaceful, I mean, he was glad, do you understand, Lidia, isn’t it obvious to you, Lidia… What the hell, Lidiaaa, why did you come why did you call me do you think I don’t know about your deceits, it’s my fault about Danilo, I did this and that with Danilo, but the thing with Čeda was your idea, yours, you’ve forgotten, you had said: “oh, why nooot, Milena, what’s wrong with that, he’s handy,” you arrange all these idiocies as you see fit, I put up with all of it, your random schizoi
d variations on a theme, and Čeda, and this, and that, later you cook up the notion that Danilo was in love with me, but he wasn’t and he hadn’t been, you know, can you see this Lidia, he never was… it was important for you to think so, you dragged him into all this, you were constantly intriguing, just wouldn’t ever stop I never had any relationship with him listen Lidia you know this… you know it’s true about Danilo, Lidia…’
XIX
I’ve always thought that plaits, pigtails, or even a pony-tail – with that bouncy curvy part at the end – need to be at least half as thick as one of Jaglika’s legs. The obsessions with Jaglika’s legs, which I believe belonged to my childhood (to the real one or the made-up one, it didn’t matter), actually never left me, not for a moment, so to speak. When Milena’s mother passed away, last month, in the oncology unit in a really big room with fifty other people (where by the way there were four times as many cockroaches, so, for every dying person four of them, therefore two hundred of those tough black things were there to help the moribunds acclimatize to their future); I went to visit her (the things we do!) wearing a red cap with a small brim – similar to those caps in grotesque little stories – from our universal and mutual childhood schooling, and with one thick plait – I hung down the back of my neck and head. The cap and the plait made me feel safe; it seemed to me (I was almost sure of it) that, instead of my own two legs, I had both of Jaglika’s, big, thick, and firm, and it wasn’t just a heavy plait on my head, along with that red cap. There’s no doubt that the excursion was totally just for show. Before then I had met Milena’s mother a grand total of once in my life. Then, that time in the hospital was the second time. I’m not completely certain, however, that there didn’t exist something in connection with Milena, some need, however inconvenient it was at that moment. And that cap and the plait – the great obsession of my childhood was, however, a falsely interpreted manifestation, falsely interpreted as a manifestation: Milena, seeing (after coming into the room ten minutes behind me) that I was seated at the head of her mother’s bed, quietly summoned me to go out, and then, in the corridor there, in front of that closed door to the room for dying patients, she said, half audibly through clenched teeth: ‘Get lost, you scumbag.’
Much later, a person told me, a person who is completely irrelevant, that she heard from Milena that her mother, at the moment (and this could have been that very day on which I’d gone there with my plait and cap) she was giving up her soul, actually in the instant before she gave up Milena and left her all alone in the world, she said, very distinctly, despite the morphine, or maybe because of it: ‘a big fat rabbit ran between my legs.’
It’s quite possible that these final words are fictitious. That is to say, just garden-variety gossip. It’s also quite possible that a sentence reached my ears via that inconsequential person in a distorted form, or that here, inside my head, it got twisted around a hundred times. What’s the link between giving up the ghost and a rabbit? I thought: well, maybe it has to do with this: the speed of the departure for heaven is equal to the speed of the imaginary rabbit that ran by you, and the fat part means this and the warm part means that and if it squeezes through your legs it…But the cancer ward, and now Milena’s mother, come to think of it, would be the ones to say.
After visiting the cancer ward, that is, Milena’s mother, I went to Svetosavska Street. Danilo and Marko Eyepiece were sitting there, drooling over those porno films, foaming at the mouth and tittering. Marko shouted from the door, ‘Lidia, hey Lidia, you gotta see the new film, it’s fantastic, you’ll see why I’m so…’ Then the three of us stayed there till morning with a little hashish and a lot of ridiculous movies; at 4 a.m., Marko Rat Eyepiece abruptly started packing up the movies, the screen, changing his glasses as he did so; he crammed everything into one of those indestructible eternal plastic bags, pushing it all in amongst the other delicacies: a John Dewey and a Bergson, then three airline timetables, the remaining bundle of hash, which he didn’t want to give us, six pairs of glasses (the seventh was on his face) and somebody’s final dissertation – to trade to a student for cash. I followed him out with the bicycle, with Danilo remaining behind, scared: ‘Lidia, where are you riding off to when it’s all dark like this?’ But: ‘Not into the dark, Danilo. Just going around the block a few times.’ Then it was already past five, and had grown completely light, or six, when totally knackered I pushed the bike down the hallway, carried it up the steps – it wouldn’t fit in the lift, I entered our apartment and found completely awake and tear-stained, sweet Jesus, a snot-covered Danilo, good Lord, what, what would Marina do now, she’d caress it, his face, Danilo’s beautiful face, which was at the same time her own (the two of them resembled each other), but I couldn’t, I can’t, I don’t know how, I won’t do what Marina would. I give my bike a shove and scream: ‘Fuck you all to hell…you moron why aren’t you sleeping why do you sit around puling your whole fucked-up life away you idiooot get lost!’
XX
‘Let’s count on a reward at the going market rate, and not according to how much effort we have invested in our work.’
(L.K. to N.K.)
Around that time it became a certainty that Milena wasn’t going to call or come by. At first I tried my absolute hardest (it wasn’t different in the least from a terminal patient who breathes his/her tortuous final breath) to disfigure, deform, warp, shatter, slice up her image in my head, and the rest of whatever else on me, in me, bore a connection to her; and that childish, a priori failure, everything from which I desired to free myself: Milena.
I’d walk into Jaglika’s room right after work, straight from the bus, running, and every day I’d ask that dying figure from the doorway, wrapped in her fifteen blankets – in her rocking chair with glasses on the tip of her furrowed, likeable nose, her swollen feet in slippers with black tassels, the same thing:
‘Do you love me, grandma?’
‘What’s that you’re saying?’ (The first thing to go is the ears, and then it’s the eyes and the heart, when you’re dying.)
‘I was asking… whether you love me?’ (I was screaming; you have to push a dying person into talking about love.)
‘Why’s that? Do you love me?’ (This only makes it look like a dying person has a greater need for love than the one who’s asking, regardless of the gender in question.)
‘But I asked you that, baba.’ (One should be hard-nosed, avoid pity and other such excesses).
‘I love you the exact same amount you love me.’ (Someone who’s mortally ill needs to be hustled into death.)
‘No more and no less. No more or no less, baba?’
‘Definitely, exactly as much as you love me and not a whit less or a whit more, Lidia, but why are you asking?’ (We have to give the moribund another shove!)
‘But this isn’t like running a shop, d’you know what I mean, grandma?’
‘Yep… Uh-huh, yep…’ (The conversation of the deaf.)
‘But baba, you’re a business person, and when you die, they’re going to ask you over there, God will ask you, what you did. What did you do for those unfortunate souls amongst you, and your answer will help separate the sheep from the goats … baba, like a little leech a miserable pawnbroker hissing through your dentures: I was all business, always thinking of deals, what else could I do when my father and husband were merchants.’ (Cruelty also has the blessing of Jaglika’s God.)
‘Go away, you scoundrel…Go over there!’ (The dying are always braver than the living.)
Jaglika was overcome by a fit of rage, great rage, unsuited to her aged being (and to a mercantile one, too); she took up her cane every time I mentioned a god or anything else divine, and she tried to hit me. I jeered at her from a safe distance; Jaglika’s cane was almost never able to reach the spot where I stood, or sat, or crouched.
‘You’ve been retailing your whole life, baba. Do you hear me, baba?’
In those days the determination of the one who was living (that was me) to demonstra
te at any cost her superiority over the moribund, was mind-bogglingly small, at least as far as Jaglika was concerned, but also in a wider context; no one could forecast when her powers might burst forth – especially when it seemed like all of her reactions, of any type, were absent; all the more reason that her capacities were stunning, like the time she lunged (the immobile Jaglika who lurched forward – really, like in a bad movie) and with precision (concentration) – and without missing a beat or tiring, started brandishing her cane, complete with a copious amount of spitting (it spewed forth like a fountain from her blue-tinged lips) and accompanied by the words: ‘Move when I say to, you degenerate hussy, move on over, you bitch…’
The cane, dying Jaglika’s cane, caught me right smack-dab in the stomach.
Jaglika never did get over that grocery shop of hers in Nikšić; after it was burned down at the end of the last war, she wept as if everything in it were a living creature, or at least as if Marina were inside. Besides, in 1928, the shop was still running well; she sold things ‘at the lowest prices’ (for a trifle, as it were). ‘Šiht’ soap, ‘Marseilles’ soap, and the brand called ‘Vila’, petroleum both in crates and in barrels, and semolina, lard, as well as ‘Karolina’ rice and ‘Gigant’ and ‘Splendor’, too, and top-drawer coffees like ‘Minas’ and ‘Rio’. ‘Blažo, the teacher, did all his shopping there right up until he died, may God have mercy on his soul,’ – Jaglika said. In 1934, she went into bankruptcy; it ‘almost put me six feet under, in two more days it would have all been over’ – that’s how Jaglika recalled the ruin of her shop, like it was the end of a world; and she was right. But then, after two or three years, the grocery owned by Jaglika and her husband was back on its feet, and you could shop there again ‘at the lowest prices in the whole banovina region, either for retail or wholesale, no matter which.’ So how did life unfold after that point for Jaglika’s family, in terms of groceries and dry goods and the rest of it? They grew wealthy, and first they bought up a women’s clothing store; they ran ads for sales, as ever with that ‘lowest price’ thing, in Dubrovnik’s Tribuna up to 1937 and then in Slobodna Misao over the course of 1938 and again in 1940; they got their stock of clothing from a salesman named Šavni, who was from Škofja Loka in Slovenia. Jaglika also used to mention a man named Nikebroker who had some strange connection to their family. In ’37 they went several times to the cinema to watch two movies: Kostja the Shepherd and A Kingdom for a Kiss. But Jaglika said they didn’t see the film The Tsar’s Messenger a single time. Why not? Her uncle’s sister, who married an Armenian man in Istanbul, for which Jaglika never forgave her, used to send them various herbs and medicines for their stomachs from there; stomach-ache was a common malady for Jaglika’s whole family, including those two brothers of her uncle, the ne’er-do-wells who later, together with Jaglika, ran a small shop in Zagreb, for a year, before the war broke out – they fled without a backwards glance, off to God knows where (Jaglika never wanted to say: where, oh where did those lowlifes scram to?), while she returned to Nikšić. Stefanida, her relative, that was her name, thus ended up dying in Istanbul, but the war was going on, ‘otherwise I would’ve gone to her funeral,’ said Jaglika.
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