by Asja Bakić
“I can’t wait!” I exclaimed.
He was supposed to travel to Iceland the next day.
“I’d offer to let you stay at my place tonight, but you know I can’t really accommodate you,” I said.
“I know.”
For my return trip to Mars, I pleasantly surprised the captain with a large payment, using both money and a book he’d requested: a poetry collection by a famous Russian author. Poetry collections and anthologies were of special value because of how popular they were with young people. What the kids did with those books I didn’t know and, to be honest, I didn’t really care.
When we landed on Mars, everything was desolate as ever.
“This is what the apocalypse would look like on Earth,” the captain remarked.
I went to see the Frenchwoman at the restaurant straight away. She asked how things were on Earth, and I lied, saying they were great. I had an energy drink and then headed home. And there, just as on Earth, a bed was waiting for me, and a room full of trivial things crammed into tattered boxes. I turned around, surveying my space: I had an apartment, but I was homeless.
Showering didn’t help. The water was incredibly hard, and I felt like I was scrubbing my skin with gravel. I knew I should start looking for the books I could use to buy food and clothes, but I decided to lie down and rest from the trip instead.
My body was adjusting more easily to Mars, but the same couldn’t be said for my dreams. When I managed to fall asleep for a little while, I was confronted with more nightmares. I think this was due to my chronic depression, my somber disposition on Mars. (Lemke had joked that they’d sent us to Saturn by mistake.) After all, Mars, which had seemed so fascinating on Earth, had become nothing more than a death sentence: dry ice everywhere, a completely inhospitable environment. The frozen geysers at the South Pole looked like intricate webbing from far away, but on the ground, everything became simply monstrous.
As usual, that night I dreamed that Mars was vanishing beneath my feet. Then I woke up suddenly. I hadn’t dreamed of the usual crumbling. Rather, something had peeled off my skin. But I couldn’t think about this too much. I got up and quickly washed and dressed. I owed a rice merchant a book I still needed to find, to get money for my next trip.
I took a half-hour break, sitting in the enormous library. The lighting was poor, like no one had imagined people would actually read there. Occasionally I’d encounter other authors who were searching for something in the dense shelves and piles. We were constantly sneezing, our eyes tearing up from the dust.
To Die By One’s Own Hand was the book I was looking for. I found it funny that the merchant wanted that particular volume, but he’d insisted. He wanted the English edition, but I could only find a Croatian translation. I didn’t worry too much about it; Soldo had given me enough money to cover the next few months’ expenses.
Searching further through the titles that were easier to sell, I somehow knocked a thin book titled Mars to the floor. I took it home. There was practically no text—it was mainly blueprints of buildings, or something else? I couldn’t really understand what the book was about. There was an author credited, Selena, which I assumed to be a pseudonym, and next to it the number 69 in brackets. A year? I couldn’t tell. I immediately called Lemke and asked him to come over to have a look. He agreed.
“This must have something to do with astrology,” he said at once. “Selena is a moon. And 69 is the astrological symbol for Cancer.”
“What does it mean?”
“That I don’t know,” Lemke said with a shrug.
“I didn’t realize you were interested in horoscopes.”
“I’m not. I just know a thing or two about them,” he said.
After Lemke left, I thought about Lev Soldo, the chemistry I was beginning to perceive between us—was that the result of astrology? Such stupid and superficial ideas easily infected people’s minds, and I was no exception.
To his credit, Soldo handled my melancholy well. After I’d first left for Mars, I’d become another person entirely. I’d been happy, constantly laughing, when we first met; now I needed a two-hour pep talk just to make it from the bedroom to the hallway. But he acted like nothing had changed. I was grateful.
I started planning where I’d take him once he finally visited. To the Olympic peaks, the Lunar plains, Prometheus, and, of course, Utopia, which I found especially nice. We’d visit lots of places, and see how depressing what people had built on Mars was in comparison to what they’d found there. I was excited to finally have company—but as soon as I started thinking about the Martian landscape, I couldn’t help but also think of the thin atmosphere, the dusty and toxic air. The thought made breathing more difficult, and I was seized by panic.
While I waited for Soldo’s impending arrival, I spent a lot of time with Lemke and Marina Vojtov, a poet, but our conversations were always filled with grief. We recalled how the censor’s office in Iceland had wiped all literature from the face of the Earth with a single mandate. And we always arrived at the same conclusion: that literature was truly dead. We didn’t know what else to do. We performed our other jobs mechanically, like labored breathing. The Frenchwoman wiped down the counter, Marina maintained plumbing systems, Lemke worked at the port, and I … I sat at home and lived off Soldo’s money and resold books on the black market.
“Have you written anything lately?” I often asked Marina.
Before she could even open her mouth to speak, Lemke would shake his head and answer, “You know she hasn’t. No one writes anything anymore.”
But that wasn’t true. Some young man was taking a census of everyone living on Mars because he wanted to carve the list into one of the walls of the unfinished Imperial Hotel. Everyone laughed at him.
“The dead don’t erect monuments to themselves,” Lemke commented.
The monument didn’t interest me, so I showed everyone the book I’d found. One of Lemke’s friends, I can’t remember his name, thought the sketches depicted a sacred structure of some kind.
“I’m not entirely certain,” he said, “but it seems that this marks a prophesied place for a magic ritual.” He traced part of the drawing with his finger.
“Perhaps,” I said, not yet realizing that I was holding the book upside down. “Anything’s possible.”
When Lev Soldo finally arrived, I wasn’t up to hosting him. I wanted to send him off to wander around alone, or to hang out with my Mars friends. He refused. So I showed him the book. He regarded it with surprise.
“Where is this from?” he asked.
“I found it.”
“Where?”
“I don’t remember anymore.”
I was tired. Soldo had brought me more sleeping pills, the kind we couldn’t get on Mars. As I swallowed them, he took the book and began leafing through it. The last thing I heard was the turning of the pages and the rustling of the pillow he was leaning against.
2.
There’s a preconceived notion that if you don’t wear a protective suit in space, you’ll get the bends and explode from the decompression. We get bloated, it’s true, but we don’t explode. All the liquid in our bodies seeps out from every possible orifice. We lose consciousness. We die in thirty seconds.
It was the first thing on my mind, that kind of death, as I emerged from my drug-induced sleep. My face was swollen, my hands too.
“Are you all right?” Soldo asked.
I wasn’t sure.
After I’d found the book called Mars, I’d begun dreaming of a smooth, curved metallic substance that would change shape in my presence. The thing would tighten and release. It seemed to be gesticulating, beckoning to me. This time the dream had gone further. When I approached the substance, it at first reflected my form, and then began to assume it. Eventually it turned into me.
Plush materials like velvet retain the impression of the wearer. I don’t remember who exactly wrote that, but it’s true—plush remembers best. Because of this, I wore only velvet
dresses and cloaks on Mars: I didn’t want to be forgotten. At the very least, I wanted my clothing to remember me. In my dream, however, the metallic substance remembered me better than the velvet did. It remembered everything I’d ever said or thought, which satisfied me deeply when I thought about it in my waking hours.
Soldo had gotten up from the armchair and moved to my bed.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I had a strange dream.”
My brief description seemed to convince him of something. He looked worried.
“Mars, this book you found,” Soldo began, “is the missing piece.”
“Missing from what?”
He hesitated. He was holding the book in his hand, clutching it firmly.
“The thing is … what you dreamed about actually exists on Earth. You described it perfectly.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “Not one picture in this book matches my dream.”
“True, but I’ve seen it. And now I’ve heard about it from your own mouth. This curved substance you’ve dreamed about—people excavated it when they were digging up Mars, developing it.”
Soldo looked at the title page as he spoke.
“It’s as if the book found you, rather than you it.”
“Maybe,” I said. “It fell off the shelf, even though I wasn’t anywhere near it. Like it threw itself at me.”
I asked him if there was anything else he recognized.
“There are some drawings corresponding to the place where the substance was found, but I’ve never been there. I only know because people mapped the terrain before they left the planet to you all.”
That “you all” was painful.
“The curved substance wants something Earth has no way of giving it,” he continued.
“What does it want?”
Soldo wouldn’t look me in the eye. He set Mars on the floor next to my feet and hugged his knees to his chest.
“Too many people have died,” he said.
“How?”
“You don’t want to know.”
But I desperately wanted to know. I imagined deadly contact, lightly touching the curves with my hand, the quiver of the all-consuming substance. I could envision precisely the shredded human flesh. Even though the thing was very far away, I felt it acutely, as if it were sitting at the edge of my bed instead of Soldo. It was present in the room. It crumpled the space, just like it did the bedsheet I was lying on.
It seemed like I knew more about this curved substance than Soldo did, even though I’d never seen it. It revealed more of its truth to me in my dreams than it had to those who’d had the opportunity to study it.
“Tell me! I want details,” I insisted.
Considering how often I thought of death, what Soldo recounted didn’t sound all that terrible, but I saw that it truly scared him. Haltingly, voice trembling, he described an annihilation that I found comforting. People on Earth had died of the thing from which those of us on Mars had been spared. Everything he told me sounded like poetic justice.
“You all should return it to Mars.”
I didn’t know where that assertion had come from. It was like I’d spoken aloud someone else’s thoughts.
Soldo looked at me. “The thing doesn’t want to leave Earth empty-handed.”
“Well, what does it want?”
He pretended not to hear me. I hated when he kept things from me.
“Mars,” he said, “has two volumes. This is the first. The other is in Iceland.”
“How are they different?” I asked nervously.
A hush fell over us; it was like he’d forgotten what we’d been talking about.
“Well?”
“The second volume is a completely indecipherable codex,” he continued. “All we’ve managed to glean from this alien edition is that someone’s natal chart is printed at the end.”
I knew what a natal chart was, but it seemed foolish to be talking yet again about astrology.
“How does that fit in? Is it the natal chart of the curved substance?”
“No, it belongs to a person born on Earth.”
“That could be anybody,” I said. “Look how many people are down there.”
Soldo went silent again. He was hiding something.
“Many people have died,” he said suddenly. “Soon even more will die.”
Lev Soldo looked me right in the eye this time. He wanted to see my reaction, but there wasn’t one. I didn’t feel any compassion for the people I’d left behind. I was sure Lemke and Marina would’ve reacted similarly. Even the Frenchwoman, although she was usually quite reserved.
What had made us human on Earth had quickly disappeared on Mars. I assumed it would have been the same for anything taken from Mars to Earth. The experience of isolation had changed the substance, as had people’s hostile intentions.
“How do you control it?” I asked.
“It’s currently at the North Pole, deep underwater. Far from human civilization.”
“You switched us out, exchanged us. You brought us up here, and that thing down there. Why?”
“We needed to separate you.”
He explained then that a fragment of the codex was written using the Latin alphabet, simple notes scrawled in the margins that could be easily deciphered. They directly linked the authorial imagination, the power of the written word, with the curved substance found on Mars. The author whose natal chart was printed in Mars was in fact an instrument that would help the excavated substance transform the Earth and surrounding planets, even the celestial bodies beyond the Kuiper belt. In order for this instrument to pass the initiation phase, they would need to possess the second, Latin volume. The megalomania of Earth’s authorities had quickly kicked in—they didn’t know where the second book was, but wanted to get to it first. They wanted to rule over space; they believed they could. Some thought that the second book hadn’t yet been written, and that authors should be locked up with the books so they could speculate in their writing about the excavated substance without having to be physically close to it. The encounter with the thing needed to happen blindly, through written text. No other way. That’s what the annotation said.
“Why didn’t they just leave it on Mars?”
“Mars doesn’t have the proper conditions for studying it,” Soldo said.
His explanation didn’t make any sense to me.
I got up from the bed, my plush cloak dragging behind me on the floor. My hands and feet were freezing, like my blood had stopped circulating. My heartbeat was barely audible. I felt an indescribable rage. In the crooked mirror I’d hung above my old writing desk, I saw my reflection. The circles under my eyes were nearly black, my chronic insomnia obvious to anyone. All of my dreams had become sickening visions; I would wake up even more exhausted than when I’d lain down. My face was the face of a stranger, a person who could no longer recognize herself. I’d always been pale, but now I looked transparent.
“This natal chart,” I said, “do you know whose it is?”
“Now that you’ve found Mars, we know.”
I had my back turned to Soldo, but I could see his expression in the mirror. The difference between our expressions was that his seemed free from suffering. He slept and lived in peace. He hadn’t changed at all. My pain hadn’t affected him, despite us being close. And then, in the throes of the violent anger coursing through me, I finally realized why.
While living on Earth, I’d blamed my ever-changing moods on the moon. I’d attached the entire weight of my humanity, my volatility and mutable nature, to its phases. But on Mars I’d found only two tiny, incomprehensible moons that hardly compared to the one I’d known. I had nothing to rely on anymore, nothing to hold on to. Completely disoriented by the new sky, I’d forgotten how important the earthly one had been to me. On Earth my insomnia was fleeting, provoked by obsessive thoughts about books and people I knew. Now, with no writing, no rest, and no moon on the horizon, I’d lost my identity. I hadn’t onl
y lost Earth by leaving for Mars; I’d lost the moon, I’d lost myself.
Lev Soldo approached me from behind and embraced me. He caressed me affectionately, but the meaning of his touch was lost in my foul mood and the plush folds of my cloak.
“In this divorce between us writers and other people,” I said, “the moon belongs to us.”
Soldo released me. He knew that my relationship with the curved substance ran deeper. The natal chart at the end of the second volume was proof: Mars was ascendant, where Soldo would never be—in first place, in my first house.
Both of us could simultaneously conclude how the thing had found its human half, its shredded flesh. Everything was in its place. Everything except—the moon. In the magic ritual Lemke’s friend had glimpsed, the moon would be transferred to the Martian sky. For this theft on Mars a person was needed who had nothing to lose, who was ready for anything. So it had come to me.
“And people?”
Soldo appealed to my humanity.
“What about them?” I asked.
My anger had finally come into its own.
It was clear now that the planet crumbling to pieces in my dreams hadn’t been Mars, my home, but rather Earth—a place I would never see again.
AFTERWORD
Asja Bakic is a bold social critic, an outspoken feminist, and a provocative blogger. She published a book of poetry (Može i kaktus, samo neka bode [It Can Be a Cactus as Long as It Pricks]) in 2009, and this book of stories, first published in Croatian with the same title, Mars, in 2015. She has translated works by Emily Dickinson, Henri Michaux, Alejandra Pizarnik, Klaus Mann, Emil Cioran, and Jacques Rancière into Croatian from English, French, German, and Spanish. In addition to writing at her blog, U carstvu melanholije (In the Empire of Melancholy), she was one of the editors of Muf, an online magazine. She was born in the city of Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and now lives in Zagreb, Croatia.
Until a generation ago, there were very few women writers published within the literatures of what was then Yugoslavia, besides several notable poets and a small group of prose writers, mainly novelists, diarists, fairy tale tellers, and travel writers. During the 1980s, in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars—first in Croatia, then Bosnia, and then Serbia and Kosovo—this suddenly changed. A powerful, unprecedented generation of women began writing primarily fiction, but also poetry, plays, and essays lambasting nationalism, domestic abuse, politics, war—some explicitly espousing feminism, all championing women’s voices. Whether through their example, the broader cultural context of women writing all over the world, or both, these literatures were transformed. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is women whose writing leads the way, offering the most engaging voices and explorations.