Dogs and Others

by Biljana Jovanović

  And now this little social game, in this country, in this city, in these times: at the opening of an exhibition of a famous painter, in an equally famous gallery, a large number of people had gathered: the usual suspects: so-called intellectuals. They giggle with one another, turn on each other, flirt around, etc. Later a small group split off, and I was among them; we went to a nearby café: The Twenty-five Lotuses. We sat down at a rectangular table in this order: the female editor of a Zagreb newspaper, with perky hair and face and breasts to match, a theatre and film critic for a Belgrade paper; a guy whose hair was black and shaggy and who everybody thought for some ungodly reason was a cop; a tall blonde woman, she was, I assume, someone’s wife, or lover; that’s six of one, half a dozen of another; the point is that she looked like the perfect orgy machine, and in addition to that, which was not without significance, she also worked in the newspaper business – for the culture section. Ach ja, I almost forgot the actor; he was a renowned stage actor from Zagreb; and around him was a multitude of chicks – oh, for fuck’s sake, no, there wasn’t a single one; that night he would remain confoundedly alone. They all scattered: the interesting ones, the blondes, brunettes, the ones with tits, the ones with arses, with stocky legs and slender legs, and the ones with their cute little eyes, oh definitely, back at the exhibition. I don’t think anyone was as abundantly repulsed by the whole superficiality and emptiness of the exhibition, or of the high-rolling city types, the café, the tomcats – or whatever else you call that breed of man – as I was? But let’s leave sentiments out of this for the moment, even if they are appropriate, as mine are. For a moment the orgy machine looked like a dragon; everyone was quivering behind the table, seeing the way she devoured one roasted red pepper after another, right down to the stem; later he shoved my supper under her nose, too, with the gratitude of a good cow – big, flaring nostrils (they moved rhythmically), and she wolfed it down, in no more than three bites; meanwhile people were conversing about chess, domestic literature, this poet and that poet, Greek libraries, Greek statues, sculptors … I left to go and vomit; then again; the orgy machine dined, if I’m not mistaken, three times, and I threw up three times, or even four, and I had an empty stomach, by way of contrast to hers, etc … The rest of the spectacle isn’t important, nor was the one before it; none of these parades are … To sum up: thanks to the various orgy machines of the female sex, that impotent minority, I believe, that is the male world forces on the remaining majority of the female world – whose orgasms are guided by imagination – the bullshit about their frigidity, supporting and applauding all the orgy machines (which are to be found only among persons of the female sex; persons of the male sex, impotent, half-potent, thoroughly satisfactorily potent, always have imagination). So now, my dears, imagine the fabulous connection, the civilizational link: between the trembling simple mass of women and impotent men – whom the most perfect prostheses would not help; but as I said already their weakness passes thanks to their imagination; the female orgy machine is a unique kind of perpetuum mobile. So there’s no confusion, so you won’t proclaim me to be the one who speaks rashly about issues that are, obviously how many thousands of years old, thank you very much … not taking into account other things in connection with the first, a third thing in connection with the second, and once more the first thing in connection with the third; and if you please, the one who does all of this from a sense of leisure of an afternoon stuffed with momentary and in all likelihood groundless embitterment, in the fatuous use of skin on the fingers of the left and right hand (from yellow fire ants one should make crumbs, transform their otherwise living crushable crumbiness devoutly into actual dead little crumbs, little brownish dots. I mean, and instead of into an ashtray, after a sufficient number of them have been assembled, pour them imperceptibly into the bun of hair on your wife’s head; although this appears, this only appears to be the cleverer variant: to pack them away in big bags together with the winter clothes and some lavender), therefore, in order that no confusion might arise, I offer myself up generously for all possible future discussions on a similar theme, if not an identical one, without corporeal favours, if you don’t mind, in that sense I’m pretty much useless, and besides, we need to draw a strict line between theoretical matters and non-theoretical ones. I have about all of this many more thoughts on first, second, and third issues; this should be obvious, thank you very much: on many issues, and not just the ones I’ve written down. It wouldn’t be clever to exclude me or, well, consider my contribution to be antlike, that is to say, crumb-y – hopelessly small, and ridiculous, as the case may be. We’re talking about naiveté; one should not confuse that with good will or hard work. To the extent that everything is together, in the entire run of things both first and second, and third and sundry, it cannot seem like much if the entire future image is the image, actually, of meaningless yellow ants, and then we should not disregard the fact that yellow ants, small and accustomed to extermination (which is the proper relation to have to one’s fate, not taking it too seriously), are nonetheless persistent and enduring. Nonetheless, dear working and non-working women, that would be a strategic move on the level of a tragedy from ancient times!’

  I had a good laugh, and then I was quiet for a similar length of time, and I came across to that guy in the window as a very serious person, and at the end of this parade, as is the case with Vespasian’s wife, and for heaven’s sake I am so much like her in so many ways, I said out loud: ‘Fie, fie, fie’ – there was a threefold similarity to her, and it was solidarity, for Pete’s sake. I swiftly signed the letter, both parts of it (that first part addressed to me as an intro, and the second one, which they did not print in the newspapers) and crammed it into the drawer. I don’t know – I would not dare confirm or deny (in the hour of judgement, the difference is effaced), whether I suspect something or do I not, but after this letter that is, I must admit, rather hysterical, nothing else came, ever, not one single letter, and not just not from Vespasian. Through some infernal channel, had Vespasian managed to find out about those three sequential utterances of ‘Fie’; or did he simply assume in advance that I would say them, those three words, three times, loud and clear? Or did he devise the whole thing as a deceit? Maybe Vespasian disappeared, flew the coop, died, met Jaglika – but how would he recognize her? And so, he’s just gone away – under the earth or to another country, which comes out to be the same thing. However it happened, and whatever happened with him, Vespasian has earned on account of exaggerated hysteria his bit of scorn, like a little yellow ant, squished between your thumb and forefinger; due to his malice, too, and the rest of what he did not show but was visible; such figures, although they are made of paper, should be pushed aside with one hand then the other, and very loudly, but without any cursing or spitting (that is so unnecessary), one should say: Fie. And then … start in on other figures, even if on paper, to the last: Fie.

  XXVI

  ‘Then he sat down in the boat, betrayed his friends, his fatherland, and his brothers … It’s permissible, sometimes, to submit ingratiatingly to the powerful ones and deceive one’s friends because of them – but only at a moment when we know clearly and reliably that it’s the only way humanity can be saved. Up to this moment in time, Noah has been the only person to face this dilemma.’

  (L.K. N.K.)

  And just as things already following some mysterious orbit, like a path between the moon and that which is in its unyielding power, to which I succumb every time, over the years ever more similar to the first occurrence – in this way measurements of abridgement are foreshortened, and they slowly disappear. One person whom I trusted was Danilo’s doctor. Doctor Kovač. How would Vespasian put it: a famous personality of this city, this era, this country; in connection with dumb things like this, and plenty more, the help of any and all miracle workers might come in handy, like Stefanida and the Armenian; using an alchemist’s skill to transform everything, and what is left over from it all, into a pile of matter as incon
sequential as dust – devoid of any value whatsoever, so that the whole affair is not, however, the calling down of the last judgement, or some similar era, and of the features associated with it, the devil is merrier in the Armenian’s hands, in Stefanida’s eyes, whoever needs more than that, let him or her seek it from God, the left-hand one or the one on the right! With Dr Kovač I was not making an exception of any kind; it was like that with other people, too; however, now, even to me, that selection appears rigged: Dr Kovač, and that means he’s a psychiatrist, is Danilo’s doctor; that very combination of words shows that I should have avoided this; but haven’t I already said that these are the paths between sleepwalkers and the moon, and they’re nothing but incomprehensible to others? And incidentally I have been, for a long time, since I’ve been aware of myself, outside of myself, outside of my own power – if that’s to be understood as rationality, or something very similar to it. I told him all there was to say about myself, going from the end towards the beginning, bogging down around the mid-point; everything that was inside (but that ‘inside’ is, with me, not sealed, as it is with other people) I tossed out: I slopped – like a bucket of spit, rancid and stinky – all of it straight into Dr Kovač’s face. More than anything else, Dr Kovač is a man firmly pinioned somewhere into his profession, with nails of iron: and he merely wiped off his face, politely, and he even smiled. He could not understand. He lacked the imagination – as Vespasian said, and therefore he was not capable of fathoming that the non-existence of power over himself (precisely because of that unusual distance and ambiguity) entails the existence of power over others. I was outside myself, but Dr Kovač was in my hand, later even more so. In this way I would spare anybody, in this case Dr Kovač, of the labour of deciphering my personality – I tipped it out unsparingly, together with the seeds, like a big busted watermelon, and simultaneously I was depriving him of the possibility of interpreting it. It seems like there is cunning in this, a pre-formulated guile, like you find among tomcats great and small, the phosphorescent slyness of a desperate individual. If a desperate individual (in this case, me) doesn’t conceal his or her desperation, but on the contrary disseminates it across the entire field of vision, and the experience of others, then desperation blends into pure profit: other people are roped in with their parochial, closed, sealed souls, carefully tucked away like the wallets in their pockets. Therefore, setting people up, lying, tiny acts of devilment, everything in the name of desperation, results in a constant distancing from their own desperation and also their fear, and it goes so far as to resemble a form of freedom. After my unsuccessful fuck with Dr Kovač, not just because of the missing orgasms on his side and mine, but also because of the racking ordeal of the whole event; apropos of that, he had two or three almost painful ejaculations, but not a single orgasm; I started talking (and that wasn’t bad, and it could even be considered rather good, when spitting outwards towards another face, onto another face, begins with nausea, even if it’s physical). First of all, I recited a dream, which was, with a few changes, with little digressions from the real dream, submitted to him, like a picture, and thus: I was dreaming of Milena’s mum; she was wearing some horrid light-coloured dress; she was bringing in children’s shoes, and said: ‘From Italy,’ and she continued: ‘Somebody should try them on, for heaven’s sake; it wouldn’t be right for me to have purchased them for nought.’ Later on, it’s unclear what became of those shoes. We went into the flat, on Svetosavska Street; a bunch of people turned up: Marina’s husband, inter alia; Danilo leaning on a large pole. I curse (but without anger) at his mother, father, grandma, and at Mira, one after the other. We go into Jaglika’s room, and someone is whispering in alarm, well nigh hysterically – and it turns into a shriek, how he or she has to get up early the following day because of some important errands, and that everyone, at that very moment, without any unnecessary delays, must lie down and go to sleep. But damn it, all the beds disappeared as if by a magic trick; in the next moment, which was unconnected to the previous goings-on, Danilo is taking a piss next to my head, and then he laughs, and a moment later he tries to have sex with me, thrusting himself on me in a way completely identical to how it was done by my boss’s doppelgänger, my boss. Then, a few scenes from the beginning get repeated, the same way it works in a film; like in a montage, for example; more or less. Dr Kovač demands that I continue the story and he wants additional information: who is Milena, who’s this, and who’s that. And then he utters, with a smile, an obscurity: ‘Those, Lidia, are your symbols, and only when you tell me more stuff will I be able to…’

  Ah, how attentively that bald, heavyset psychiatrist with the loose blond hair listened to the following: in the evenings I am not able to close my eyes, for I am 100 per cent convinced that I will die if I do so, and when, finally, I do close them, after tremendous effort, then I am not able to open them; I will catch sight of myself there on the chair, across the room, on the floor, on the ceiling, several selves, large and elongated, and with her there, smiling at me, making fun of me, and then the guy on my bed whispers something to me … and so I die a number of times in the course of the night, and what should I do, what in God’s name should I do, I ask Dr Kovač, the man who’s famous in this city, and who people claim is famous in all the other cities. Danilo’s psychiatrist asks: ‘And you, Lidia, do you take drugs? Speak freely. We’re friends, aren’t we?’ His hand lightly touched my knees; from the moment my stretchable vagina (they’re all like that) swallowed his pink worm, the way the sea swallows an unskilled swimmer, forever and irreversibly, he was getting things confused, and I could even suppose that that wasn’t unusual. At one time Danilo had been treated for excessive drug use, by this moronic nut-job from the Military Medical Academy, who later published these fascistoid articles about drug addicts, condensing in this way his medical experiment and his hatred, both reserved for the weak, eliciting the glittering support and solidarity of the strong. Therefore Dr Kovač mixed up a few things, not intentionally, it’s true, but owing to an inadequacy of imagination; this shortcoming of his can picture hallucinations existing only in the realm of hallucinogenic drugs, if not in the sphere of outright insanity, and assorted other variants live outside his scope, permanently and definitely. The distance is indispensable, and so I swept away his bloated, damp hand from my knee, which was still there and bare, and said to him, ‘Now, now. Please. You don’t have to read Castaneda to grasp that Eastern societies and drugs have nothing in common with Western societies and the Freudian problems of our childhoods, our later impossibilities, and bad communication, and I think all this has been harmful to you. Somewhere along the line, you got all mixed up.’ Castaneda’s book lay open and face down on his desk, and a little farther over, standing stolidly on its plaster pedestal, was the plaster figurine of Freud. In order to get beyond himself, I advised him to experience it, the sooner the better (beyond literature) – it will be just as fine for him as it is for his little cock in my big pussy; drugs are not required, and even less so the mystical and phony connections of East and West, and least of all – or not at all necessary – is a move to the East, because it remains for all time separate: the Eastern world has its Eastern shifts and escapes, and the West has the rest and sometimes escapes, too, the Eastern way. But after it was all over, while I was pulling on my underwear, my spread legs were right next to the Castaneda and then directly (that blessed symmetry: West-East – and finally Danilo’s doctor understood) above the head of the plaster statuette of Freud (this all took place in his office on the fourth floor). I say: ‘And anyway this was all a load of shit, and unpleasant, and therefore unnecessary. I can’t talk with a man who hasn’t experienced any of this; the rationality of your science is as impotent here as a lamb before a slaughter; if you haven’t ever felt that, then you don’t have a chance, or better, you don’t have an imagination; if you had just a stub or butt-end of talent it might still work; I mean, I could leave here at least with the illusion that it was worth it, fucking and tal
king to fill up the hour.’

  But Dr Kovač, understanding everything at that moment: ‘Stop. Don’t go. I was thinking of prescribing you something, something mild, but now it’s obvious to me what’s going on … wait …’ I left, as is required, with a civil: ‘Goodbye, Mr Kovač. You should forget the Castaneda, though … It won’t mean anything to you … Goodbye.’

  Dr Kovač told Danilo that he had slept with me, and that way the doctor won him over to his cause. I didn’t doubt his medical intentions; obviously, he had to try somehow to wrest Danilo from my embrace, since he had fallen, headlong and hopelessly, into my arms after Milena and Jaglika left us, and he had entangled himself, embroiled himself with the chances of his ever being able to extricate himself growing ever slimmer as time passed. It was indispensable, it was, I swear by everything that’s holy, hideously massively necessary for Danilo to start hating me and for my one-hour therapy session with his doctor to be a welcome thing for him, and for Dr Kovač too, but not for me. When we look a little more closely, two opposing and mutually exclusive feelings in Danilo’s heart and soul could have resulted in either resolution or complete and definitive confusion. I believe that, all things considered, Danilo had very little chance, or no chance at all, in Kovač’s disgusting racket! I would have loved to see Kovač take his esteemed right hand and castrate himself, voluntarily, with an expression of bliss on his face (bliss that is the result of recognition that one is once and for all being emancipated from the problematic needs of the body, of one part of the body if not all of it, and also, comprehending that other denouements are possible, not just those involving semen), and later he could give his member away as a Western relic, to some famous Western scholar, and they would rejoice in his sacrifice, never quite grasping that he had defrauded them in this matter, falsifying his false wish as a victim and thus wringing out of them yet another kind of admiration, by deceit. All the patients of both sexes, in their sessions of so-called group therapy or work therapy, would draw the face of the saintly psychiatrist, and they’d write his initial all over the place: K. And they’d knit that same countenance, and make little wooden carvings of it.