He was fuming. He thought he could see her soul, but he still didn’t know who she was. She was so sexy, but he couldn’t reach her.
“Look, it’s just that one thing,” he said abruptly.
“But this one thing means everything. I’ve been going against this my entire life. Avoiding boss types.”
“Are you trying to say I’m sexist?”
“I’m a bit angry. Never mind . . . I did care about you, you know.”
“I cared about you, too,” he said stiffly, frowning at her.
“Fine. I can tell,” she said, making to turn around.
He used his hand to stop her and pleaded, with a grimace, “Tell me what you do. That’s all I’m asking!”
“You’re crazy. Honestly,” she said, looking at him in disbelief. “No. That’s not how it works!”
She moved away from him and left him staring at the drink in front of him on the bar. He wanted to smash his head into the glass. But he couldn’t do that here in front of the workers, Sobotka, Oleg. He couldn’t do anything.
He finished his drink and ordered another round. He could see that Šeila hadn’t left, but was standing near Sobotka and the American. But what could he do with that?
At that moment, Lipša, who’d been mingling, emerged in front of him.
“Look,” she said. “Don’t stare, be subtle . . . I think there are three of Ragan’s guys here. Over there, at the table in the corner.”
Nikola glanced over. He hadn’t even noticed the three before with all the smoke and people milling about. He shifted position so he could take a better look at them. They were dressed in sports clothes. Yes, they did seem somewhat apart from everyone else, alone.
“I remember faces, and I used to work there,” she said. “I’d say they’re his men.”
“They’re just what I needed. I could kill someone tonight, really.”
“Hey, what’s up with you? Oleg is clearly not himself, but I’d thought you’d be acting more normal.”
“You’d think.”
“You’re running a factory here! Have you all gone nuts or what? Four beers and that’s it—crazy? C’mon, I’ve seen my fair share of crazy! For God’s sake, remember what you’re supposed to be doing here!”
Nikola looked at her . . . and thought how she’d just earned her paycheck.
“Okay,” he said.
He sent a text to Erol: “Come over here, but make it casual.”
Lipša was still standing next to him. “Has Šeila been giving you the runaround?”
“No, no.”
“Sure she hasn’t.”
“You know her?”
“Sort of. Nerd.”
“Really? You know why she is in town, what she does?”
“Nope, I didn’t even know she was here. She was gone for a while. She was supposed to marry some American guy, that’s what they used to say. Who knows, maybe that’s the guy.”
“I see.”
“On second thought, it can’t be,” she said. “I think her guy was black.”
With that, Lipša left.
Erol leaned over to Nikola at the bar. Nikola explained the problem.
Erol eyed the guys in the corner and said, “I don’t know them. They’re not from the war.”
“What do you suggest?” Nikola asked.
Erol thought hard.
Nikola added, “How many men do you have here? If we’re going after them, I’m coming with you.”
Erol sized Nikola up and concluded that he was quite drunk. Still, it was nice to hear this from the boss.
“You’ve become a real man of the people,” he told him.
Nikola sighed and said, “Ah, I don’t even know anymore. . . .”
“Look, they’re not doing anything. If we make a fuss we’ll be asking for trouble.”
“They’re sitting very close. Breathing down our necks. That’s what they’re trying to tell us.”
“Me and the guys will go and stand closer to them, just so they understand we’re not scared of them. You stay out of it, whatever happens.”
“Do you think they’re armed?”
“So are we. We’ll see how well informed they are,” he said.
Just then live music struck up, coming from young men who’d walked in with their instruments.
Those from here who’ve gone away
I used to see them in my dreams
I don’t believe they’d lie to me
It’s better for them there, they say.
The band of four had with them small drums, a concertina, a saxophone, and an acoustic guitar.
“Who are they?”
“This is a band called Turban-Rap. I have no idea what they’re doing here,” said Erol.
Oleg was meanwhile toasting Sobotka with his glass raised high.
Nikola was watching the musicians and the rollicking hubbub, while stealing glances at Ragan’s men, who were busy looking at each other around their table. They seemed to be the only ones who were not taking part in the festivities. Then one of them moved his head so as to signal something, and they started to rise. Nikola’s eyes followed them as they walked out.
Look, the music made them leave, he thought.
At that moment, Oleg came over to Nikola and said, “I told Lipša to get some music for Sobotka, and she got these reggae-rappers. . . . Crazy woman!”
Sobotka was waving his arms in the air.
“He seems to like it,” said Nikola.
Oleg was looking at Sobotka as the man was standing with his arms outstretched, immersed in the reggae-rap-sevdah music. Then he said into Nikola’s ear, “I don’t think the Yank’s a problem.”
“How do you know?”
“He seems to be some kind of scientist.”
“A scientist?”
“Yes. I kept calling him ‘captain,’ so he got tired of it. He told me he was a scientist.”
“You believe him?”
“Well, yeah. . . . I mean, when he said ‘scientist’ he looked at me, like, as if he were apologizing for not being a captain. And he didn’t tell me what kind of scientist, he went all quiet, like it was something secret.”
“And that doesn’t sound suspicious to you?”
Oleg looked at Nikola like a drunken professor planning to give one of his last lectures. “It sounds suspicious to you, Nikola, not to me. You should know that’s not how a spy acts. The guy is totally confused . . . I know spies. If he were a spy, he’d know I was checking on him. I mean, if he were a spy, he’d tell me what kind of scientist he was, he’d have a perfect cover story in case anyone asked him something, you know? He wouldn’t just say scientist and then shut up and raise his eyebrows, as if he wants to say, I’m not saying another word. Remember, I have training. For fuck’s sake, those stories were a part of my training. I always knew exactly what to say.”
“You weren’t a spy!”
“I wasn’t a spy, Nikola, goddammit, I was smuggling arms! You can’t say you’re smuggling arms. When you can’t say something, they make up a detailed, logical story for you. You don’t say you’re a scientist when you’re in some fucking godforsaken place and then clam up. You don’t do that. You know? That’s suspicious.”
Nikola was already slow from all the booze. He also wanted to make sure, because of Šeila. “So it is suspicious, but it’s not suspicious?”
“Yes! It’s suspicious to you. It’s suspicious to amateurs, not to me. See?”
“All right, I’m an amateur.”
“That’s fine. You’re better off.”
Nikola took a sip, lost in his thoughts, and then he started laughing. “A scientist?”
Oleg liked seeing Nikola laugh; he had looked very glum the entire evening—in fact, for some time now.
“A scientist!”
Nikola couldn’t stop laughing.
“Yeah, I know!” Oleg was also laughing now. “He came here to study us, I guess.”
“Holy shit!”
The rappers were getting silly:
The old poet’s dead now, and so is Emina
All that’s left for us are turbine machines
The poet’s returned, a baby for Jasmina
The craft of the turbine will never leave us . . .
Sobotka was dancing, waving his arms.
Nikola headed over to Šeila.
22
DEAR SIR,
You, who are reading the letters I’m writing to Pops, you’re just one instance . . . an unexpected parapaternal formation . . . micro papa, para-papa, paraphernalia . . . truly, the missing link between . . . between me and . . . between us . . . and you say, “The house exists.” This caused in me an incredible laugh that has been here for days and because of which I have resorted to trying out some pills, because it is pretty awkward, you must admit, when you are walking down the street laughing because a house exists. And the house exists and you can’t stem the laughter, you can’t do anything about it, the house exists, there it is, I got what I wanted, you fucked up my conception of everything and the immaculate conception of my mind, because the house exists. It’s not true that I don’t have anything, a father exists, a crazy one, he doesn’t know about me, that is who he is, it’s a tragedy, and a house exists, a normal one, a brick house, not crazy, but a normal house, mine, it’s just that it is occupied, so I’m here, preparing for battle, armoring myself with armor, picturing the battle, the battle where I’m coming to throw all of you down there out of the house, my mouse house, which exists.
Dear sir, you gave me this gift, as heavy as a house, and now I’m like a snail with a hallucinatory shell, a ridiculous snail, a little snail that is creeping, creeping slowly down the street against time. Is there an animal more beautiful and more ridiculous than the snail, I ask myself while I’m laughing because the house exists. What should I do now, sir? Should I come home? Should I return to take care of my father-father? Ah, such a fucking ridiculous feeling of anxiety has been produced in me because the house exists, such a ridiculous crisis; just a crisis, they tell me “it’s just a crisis,” but still, I had to take shelter here again because the house exists, fuck, the house exists, the house is looming over me like the shadow of a mother, of a megamother, and my mother, mommy. Do you know how my mother died, do you know how those with cancer who have no house die, even though the house exists? Ah, it was so beautiful, in a hospital, a white one, I came to visit, always wanting to escape and always wanting to stay, to stay with her and to escape, to be with her and to . . . The fear of death is life itself, it is not actually fear, it is the deepest urge to escape, into the vastness of pure animalistic life. Imagine me running, sir, you who are reading these letters, you who were, until now, missing, imagine me running across a great vastness, a vastness as green and gleaming as happiness, imagine, because I am imagining, too: it never looked like that, although that is the image, the real image. The reality, which is a disturbance, made it all take place in concrete. The coming and going, from my mother—yes, she was mine, as opposed to the house, she was mine, it’s you who made me say that, well done, she was mine, although she was so, so hard to handle, so unbearable that it still makes me sad, it was so hard to deal with her misery, which dribbled about endlessly like a leaking bag. There is something in that leaking bag, and I’m a child-child and don’t know what it is, because there is nothing left that would tell me, nothing but a language with no background, distorted stories, stories distorted by silence, because she wanted to stay silent, because she didn’t know how to talk about it, how to say it all, I mean, she talked, but she didn’t know how to say what kind of life this was, I mean, she spoke, but then you could tell she didn’t know how to create a story out of it, she would keep saying, you just can’t imagine it, that was her saying, you just can’t imagine it, because she couldn’t explain what that world was like, I mean, she could and she couldn’t, she had a couple of stories of hers, but she couldn’t, couldn’t explain what that world was like and what the death of her son down there, in that world, was like. She couldn’t talk about that world, she could not, nor could she talk to our people here, we would avoid them, but she would say to me “they should be making movies about it.” Movies, what kind, about what, who would explain it, sir, do you understand, movies, movies I haven’t seen—and that haven’t even been made yet, as far as I know? That’s what it’s all about, an empty tape, about the fact that I’m a foreigner making guesses about that fog, that white, even though the house exists, as you said, and my father exists, kinship, blood, similar head shape, long limbs, short body, all that biology inherited from the Fatherhead.
Ah, sir, you’re so damn real it is unbearable, you really do exist, and that’s the fucking problem, and all that does exist, with you as the ambassador of existence, the existence of the house, the house my cousins have occupied, my cousins, evil puppets.
Oh, sir, thank you for taking care of my father-father, you are truly a great man-man. I must confer upon you a medal, I mean, I’m actually awarding you one right now as we speak. You must be a good person, you’re from that world I’m unfamiliar with, which I thought didn’t exist, because these relatives of mine don’t surprise me, evil clowns, I reckon that’s normal, everything I hear and read leads me to the thought, evil clowns, but you’re something else, you’ve fucked me up on all counts, I can hardly be ironic with you, it’s so wonderful of you to take care of my father-father whom, now that you’ve told me of his existence, I don’t know what to feel or say about, since he exists. How am I supposed to address him now that he exists? The fact that he’s crazy makes the whole thing easier, the fact that he doesn’t read the letters helps only seemingly, because you do the reading instead of him, you crawled in here in order to be and said the house existed, but you can’t fix all that, you sir, as far as I can see, think that you can undo the harm, you are trying really hard, but maybe you need a bit more power, a bit more power to patch up and refill this hole that’s been opened. You, sir, resemble a character from those stories about good old folks of ours, which my mother used to tell me, unable to explain in what way exactly they were better or how they became bad, you probably know all these secrets, but I don’t. I don’t know what to do with you now that you’ve contacted me from this world of yours. Have I already told you that I imagine your world as hell? Maybe I have, but this has nothing to do, you know, with art and such imaginings, the thing is that I thought I came from hell, you understand, there was plenty of evidence for that, there is no need to tell you about all the crap we heard from survivors at the court hearings I attended, and which those evil clowns on your TV channels deny and don’t deny at the same time: I mean, they deny, but they don’t really deny. By winking, winking devilishly. My house is over there, the house that exists.
You’ll have to send me a photo, of the house, I mean. You’ll have to, there’s no other way now. Because the house is what I remember, although no other part of it more vividly than its interior. I’ve always remembered the house from the inside, in my dreams I’ve remembered the house that you say exists.
23
I KNOW, YOUR FRIEND TOLD ME.
I know, nothing is easier than going crazy, I know that, I know. It’s not like I’m ignorant of these things. It’s difficult at first, actually the hardest part is when you’re crazy, but not officially crazy yet, and you know the feeling when you’re still behaving as if everything is perfectly normal, but are at the same time slightly afraid because you know you’ve gone crazy, you have to stop participating, because it’s easier that way, much easier than listening to all the idiots and their meaningless words. It is a living hell you simply have to shrug off, nothing is easier than going crazy, but then again, I know, I know that it’s not really so easy at first, you’re struggling to
hear them, to assign a certain meaning to them, to the words uttered by the fools of the world, to their constant prattle, those untruths they keep forming, sealing, and perpetuating, those untruths they impose and make binding upon others, those untruths they repeat and repeat, repetition is the worst part, everything they say is repeated, and they keep saying the same things all the time, for heaven’s sake, they keep saying the same things over and over again, they establish those untruths as binding and you start feeling bound by them, it’s not just like that, you feel bound by those untruths, by the reality that actually isn’t real, because you’re not in it, which means it isn’t real, for if it were real you would be in it and wouldn’t be sticking out like a firearm from a shelter, you wouldn’t be peeking into the hole and into the sky, you wouldn’t have to be so silent in that language, if that were the reality. But this is just a veneer, just a coating sweetened to the point of bitterness, in its thinness, just a coating of words selected to describe that two-millimeter-thin world in a proper manner, as is appropriate, no word is more abominable than propriety, it means that something is appropriate, it isn’t proper on its own, it is appropriated in a way, it is just an appropriety, what a disgusting word this propriety. It could be also called pouriety, it could be called changiety as well, this is enough to drive you crazy, and I completely understand you, I know quite a lot about going crazy, you know, so I could clearly see you going crazy after your son died. You wouldn’t if it were me who got killed, you’ve completely forgotten about me, but you’re not to blame, he was your son after all, the designator, the propagator of your name. Because you’re primitive, you old mathematician, I have to tell you that, although not as primitive as the normal people, because craziness does spiritualize a little after all, you probably conceive of yourself as a spiritualized person with a predilection for the sky and the stars, and the reason you’ve forgotten about me is that I’ve never been part of your idea of lineage, the extension of your being into biological eternity by means of posterity, which is what every animal craves, and the only one who actually existed in your primitive vision was your son, as the heir to the lineage, as the propagator of our glorious name and integrity, of which not a vestige has remained, may its memory live forever, and as for me, why even bother giving a fuck about me? It was obvious from the get-go that sooner or later someone would fuck me, wasn’t it, so I simply wouldn’t be able to preserve the intactness of our family name, nor the integrity of my body, as if this being fucked meant I was multiplied by zero in your mathematician head that had been seized by language, name, symbol, rather than numbers. Not those numbers you swear by, but language, language is the reason you’ve gone crazy, your son’s death seen as the death of your name is what has driven you off the deep end, because if biology and mathematics were the only things that mattered you would remember me as well, I’m a number myself, but I wasn’t a name to you, I wasn’t a designator in your primitive head, despite the fact that my books are published under your surname. But this means nothing to you since they are about that downfall of yours, that fucking of mine, as well as the body of our lineage irrevocably lost, the body without a cock which you regard as the beginning of mathematics, this is that prime number, Daddy’s son and his weenie, there’s nothing mathematical about a pussy, wouldn’t you agree, you old reckoner? A father and his son are what count, everything else equals zero, that’s why you’ve forgotten about me, and now I’m supposed to take care of you in your own fear of hollow language, in your act of taking refuge in the void. I tell you, nothing is easier than going crazy. I completely understand you, swallowing pills won’t help you, only my slapping can, incessant slapping until you finally notice me, until you start noticing the rest of the world outside the tin can you crammed yourself into like a dead sardine, and you’ve always been in a can, you’ve spent your entire lifetime in a can, you’ve seen nothing of the world apart from the little part of it you’ve managed to see since you went crazy, you’re nothing but a canned fish needing to be fed, what a scoundrel, you’re exactly what I thought you’d be, the only good thing is that you’re crazy, because if you were normal, it wouldn’t even be possible to talk with you, if that were the case, you’d be the only one talking and would hear no one but yourself, and this way you’re silenced with contentment, a madman. But this isn’t really madness, you just keep yourself aloof, waiting to be activated, because you don’t know what to plug yourself into in the empty world replete with words that pinch, upset, babble, everyone keeps babbling about themselves, all those castles in the air, those pathetic identities and self-persuasion, all those people, incomplete in every aspect, perpetually roiled around by the sea, the sea one hundred times more powerful than they are, so they make up their spurious stories about the subject, saying one thing one day and another the next, depending on where the waves carried them, always cursing yesterday’s delusion, that nonexistence remaining hysterically unacknowledged, which tells more blatant lies each time, which wounds and kills, which murdered your son and my brother, who died for an illusion and in this illusion your name is inscribed, I can see that from here, I don’t know what it’s like up close, but I know, nothing is easier than going crazy, it is easier than watching all of it, being in it with words and participating with words in the humiliation of everything, even of death itself, which they’ll still be lying about tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow they won’t even remember what happened, why it happened, who fired at whom and why, just as they don’t remember the past, destroying their own monuments, because they say those monuments aren’t theirs, so they’ll eventually begin destroying these things as well, because they aren’t theirs, they’ll say. . . . When the wind starts blowing from the east, west, north, or south, when a powerful gale starts blowing, everything will be reversed, as it’s always been with the clowns who destroy and don’t remember, as you know so well, for you lived in the period which nobody seems to be able to explain to me, in the peace that can’t be explained, so you can’t even explain yourself. The only way you can explain yourself is by lying, so everything tends to be explained by recourse to lying, and everything is actually explained by lying in the end. I’m aware of that, and everything is a phantasm, everything that was and everything that is, and nothing is easier than going crazy, stepping aside and saying nothing, walking your dog and walking yourself, being walked, nothing is better than walking. I used to walk through cities, I would walk all the time, we homeless walk like that, and I try to stay away from those who don’t walk, those who keep looking down from their windows and from the embrasures, those who glue themselves to their observatories and who hate walkers, us, me and you, you old lunatic, we have common suffocators, those observers from windows, which I can sense every small town abounds in, there you have to resort to madness in order to go for a walk because it is well known that one shouldn’t walk aimlessly, diagonally or sideways, and purposeless walking is forbidden except for strangers. And lunatics are also strangers, a lunatic is nothing but a local stranger, someone who grew up here but walks like a stranger and no one knows what he thinks and talks about, this is the reason why it pays to be crazy. You know what I’m talking about, because it’s easier to go crazy than stay attached, attached to the language of those endless greetings, the only thing they do is greet one another, saying, “I’m here, I’m here,” “Here I am,” but you’re not here, are you? You’re not here at all, and your greetings are deceitful, your existence is deceitful in this language you’re attached to, and you have to flee to a foreign land. It’s difficult only in the beginning, because going crazy is a disgrace, we both know this, not a small disgrace but a vast one indeed, everyone is wondering, everyone is looking for you, and you’re not there, and that’s a disgrace, but you have to disgrace yourself, there is no other way, this disgrace becomes freedom, it becomes freedom and a stamp, it means you’re getting erased from registers and records, erased from accounts, and this disgrace comes as a huge relief, just like when a boy and a girl finally
undress each other and have sex for the first time, when they forget about shame and decency, when they fuck themselves lewdly with language. With the exception that you’re all alone in this, once you go crazy, you wouldn’t go crazy in the first place if you weren’t alone, never has a person who had the society of a few friends, who had someone to share language with, gone crazy, but you couldn’t stay in language. I respect that, you didn’t slog in the mud of language, although, following the death of your son, you could have accepted that role, embraced the language of great sacrifice and gained the admiration of others, greeted and been greeted with great respect, but you stayed silent, which is more sacred, more honest, but you didn’t see me, you didn’t even notice you’d forgotten me, and I have nothing for you from this oblivion but slaps that won’t wake you anyway, it’s only my hand smacking in a void as if slapping, this story is only mine because we don’t keep each other company, you can’t keep company with anyone in that deceitful language you’re hiding from, unable to hear anything, and each of us is alone, without truth.
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