“The Dog”
A gray bird is on the window ledge. A yellow-brown dog is on the floor. His tongue is out, his ear drooping to the side. The bird flies away, the dog stays. Why does the dog stay? I ask the dog: “Why do you stay, day after day?” The dog is quiet, the dog is asleep, the dog can’t hear me. The dog is old and almost completely deaf. The dog stays because I feed him. The dog stays because it’s warm when it’s cold outside. The dog stays because there’s a place where he sleeps and his water bowl. I ask the dog: “Why do you stay, day after day, all these years?” No answer from the dog. He’s asleep, with one cheek pushed up toward his eye. That’s just the way the dog is comfortable.
The dog runs in his sleep, moving his hind legs. That’s what he’s always done; he also shakes while he sleeps. Sometimes he moans. It often irritates me, because I don’t want to worry about the dog. Sometimes I just don’t feel like getting into what’s wrong with the dog. But the dog doesn’t hold it against me, I can see that he doesn’t. The dog sometimes sleeps, sometimes eats, there were times when he used to run wild across the fields and maybe laughed sometimes, and now he just looks at me quietly, deaf and with weak hind legs, through the well-developed cataract on his left eye. He looks at me with his whole body, with his soul, the way he always looked at me, but the dog had to go deaf and blind for me to realize that you can look at someone with your soul.
The dog is peaceful. The dog is powerless but he doesn’t feel sorry for himself. In this last phase of the dog’s life I’ve been learning valuable lessons from him. I’m frantically attentive, but I’m not much of a pupil. I’m human, therefore I’m weak and selfish, always thinking about how to make use of things. I’m always thinking that it should be me achieving something. Thinking. Achieving. They’re disgraceful, such schemes and pursuits. But I can’t do better, so I think and achieve the best I can.
The dog is asleep and can’t hear me yelling: “Why are you with me, is it because of the food?” The dog is as deaf as a post, especially when it comes to stupid questions. He can’t hear anything stupid. That must be nice.
Compared to me, the dog goes through life with such good grace that it’s really quite sad. For me, of course; for the dog, it’s the most normal thing. The dog looks as if he has it all figured out, although he doesn’t know anything. It must be a perfect state of mind—everything makes sense, and yet you know nothing.
The dog licks his paws, the dog coughs, the dog barks, the dog wants to go outside. The dog is ready at his place and is watching me expectantly, while I’m writing to myself in vain. In vain do I try to understand certain things. For a brief moment I did, but I forgot what I’d just understood, and then I started to think, and now I’m going to walk the dog, and then I’m going to bed so that, tomorrow, I can achieve something.
Eventually, the dog is just going to die, quietly and meaningfully. And I will be ridiculously heartbroken, I won’t see the plain truth right before my eyes. Or I just might get the gist of it, by a stroke of luck, in honor of that dog.
“It’s Easy”
Standing on the edge between worlds, on a thin, slack rope of comprehensible truth, on one’s tiptoes, dazed or unconscious, stupidly confident, insecure but persistent, staring at something small, at colors, at the way the stage is set, at the form or the content, hypnotized by beauty, sounds, word meanings, sequences of sentences, questions, eyes that meet, movements, enchanted by the gestures and positions of the body, broken by cruelty, discouraged by one’s limits, encouraged by one’s limits, healthy and sick at the same time, washed, with trimmed nails and clean ears, staring through a water drop at everything that there is—it’s easy for the man to survive.
TRANSLATED BY JOVANKA KALABA
[SLOVENIA]
MAJA GAL ŠTROMAR
Think of Me in the Good Times
To my father and to you who believe in happy stories.
No, THIS IS NOT A story. It has no structure, no beginning, and no end. It is but a single wish. Captured in full flow. In the middle of nothing. Between what are mere hints of a beginning and an end. Like the full moon above a Karst forest clearing, like a man, standing amidst the dead grass, keeping silent about the incipient eruption of the sun, unable to cry the word out loud. It is but a word, thrust straight at the ferocious soil, like a stake, hollering with cruelty as it is driven into the sodden earth, until the sun assumes its place. Do not think this is a beginning. It is not; it is but a continuation.
INTOLERABLE BEGINNINGS
It would have been enough if I had fallen. Fallen into the flow. As you might, one summer, accidentally fall into the river that you have for so long been merely contemplating from its bank. For some cogent reason or another (yes, all reasons are always cogent, especially when their purpose is to distance us from something), you never dared step into it, despite being, according to certain statistics, almost at the halfway point towards the point where it spills into the sea. It would probably have been enough if I had at least caught a fish in this river. I call it a fish—it could just as well be described as the befitting thought that hounded me ever since I first stepped into this world. I am not sure when the need to chase the befittingness of the thought actually arose, so I assume it has been there since the start. From the beginning. It occurred at the source. It would thus be appropriate to begin at the beginning. Should I take the beginning to be the moment my umbilical cord was cut? Or should it be the moment my mother’s water broke? A narrow warm slimy stream, trickling down her leg, and Father rushing her off to the maternity ward in our white Fičo, the Yugoslav version of the miniscule Fiat 600. To help her deal with the intense labor pains, he lights her a cigarette. She draws and puffs like mad. Waters, the Fičo, a cigarette, and the man with his back turned towards me. He is driving a car. A beginning that sets off a tremendous pain as the pelvis widens, intolerable pain. Birth as a moment of simultaneous pain and fleeting joy. A slip. A cry. A cut and a cry. A trigger in the lungs, the amniotic fluid disappears and you take your first breath. On your own. Independently. From pain to joy. A cry, a cry of joy. And the man with his back turned towards me. Leaving, standing, or just leading the way, is it not therefore obvious that he would have his back turned towards me?
…
To be honest, it is not the thought which is ripping me apart, nor is it something I want to capture, or particularly wish to put into words; it is merely some sort of tangled substance, maybe an image, something complicated that only rarely offers a glimpse of its comprehensible resolution. Only at certain moments does it appear as a coherent ending and the confusion elucidates. At such times it brings hope, a bright, clear gap of relief. Release and relief. Perhaps this is what I would like to capture. But it only appears occasionally and in abrupt intervals, usually when I’m on the move, driving along in my car, no longer the tiny Fiat, but my own car, my red, sixteen-valve rosso malizioso. Leaving, standing, or just leading the way, is it not therefore obvious that I would have my back turned towards me? As I drive along then, never at home. Never at home, I repeat to myself with surprise. Why never at home? What does being at home mean? To reside? To live? To be? To exist within the four walls of adulthood whilst still roving around the home of your childhood like a stranger, like a secret agent. Snooping about? Snooping on whom?
…
It would have been enough if I started with this: What does having a home mean? The river. A riverhome. Then I could continue to explore where one home ends and another begins, to find out where the river I want to wade into flows. Because until I step into it, I will not flow, I will not pass. This is probably why I stand on the riverbank, stand like a goddess. A belated goddess. Afraid of flowing downstream. Flowing conclusively. Better not start something you don’t know how to end. Is being homeless a sign of weakness?
…
I don’t know why I am writing all this, just as I don’t know why, for the past months, I have been watering and tending an unidentified plant on my balcony. I keep asking r
andom people passing by whether this overgrown thing could be a potato, strawberry, or tomato plant. Something that might be useful. Something that might feed me. It grows vigorously, greedily spreading new leaves, demanding a good bucketful of water every day. It occurs to me that it could just be a weed. Maybe I’m growing a plain old weed. Something resiliently stubborn and parasitic. Something that sane and focused people pull up and discard, suppress as soon as it germinates. Because it cannot feed us? Kill something living simply because it doesn’t feed us? Should the growing of anything be tied in with meaning, self-interest, and premeditation? And here am I, allowing its uselessness to spread and propagate. Waiting for it to bear fruit. Bear fruit or disappoint and go to seed? Do weeds bear fruit?
…
It would probably have been enough if I had simply fallen in. Fallen into the flow. And stopped being an outside observer, an external correspondent on my own life. Perhaps someone could push me. Push me into the river. Push me towards happiness. Perhaps I could even ask somebody to push me, like the time I asked a friend to attach little training wheels to my bike. I was well over twenty. Father never taught me how to ride a bike and I was afraid of just rolling down the hill without anything, afraid of losing control. I needed the training wheels to hold my balance. I asked the friend to adjust the wheels every day without me noticing. I would know, of course, but could masterfully pretend that I still had the support until I was ready to confidently set off on a long cycling marathon. Then again, someone could push me in out of sheer mercy, push me into the river, into happiness, into the flow. I would start trusting despite my trust originating in a white lie. I would start living, for I still get the feeling that I’m not in the flow, that I’m still on the riverbank, occasionally sticking my feet into the gravel washed up against the bank, occasionally washing myself in the ice-cold water, leaping into the water for a brief moment and immediately looking for a rock to grab hold of and climb back out again, only to once more watch the river flow past me, a silent observer. An external correspondent on my own life.
…
I am forever awaiting something. I try to remember that first push, that urge to breathe on my own, pushing my head towards the exit. I try to sense the force with which the crown of my head stubbornly falls towards the crevice of light and relentlessly widens and tears my mother’s bones. I try to remember the moment I raced with a ferocious horde of sperm towards the egg. I try to remember the triumphant moment when I realized I had made it. The only one out of the millions of other marathon runners. I would like to remember how the head of the sperm cell burrowed into the soft surface of the egg, pushed deeper into the yolk of creation, and shed its tail when it was no longer needed. I try to remember the creature inside the parental cell. Inside the cell that splits into transience and eternity. I try to remember with what bravado and self-confidence I did so. It was evident that I wanted to be born. Evident that I wanted to become, evident that I was a bearer of life. I had made it. I, who am incapable of running a mile without doing my back in, without my untrained lungs betraying me. I try to remember the sensation of that initial triumph, the sense of accomplishment, the tranquility of resting inside the egg of conception and the curiosity of growth that awaited me. Was I capable of love then?
…
Some people mention happiness as the moment they call belonging, within oneself, being present, this curious, evasive rapture that dissolves as soon as it occurs in the brain. That’s where it all supposedly happens, inside the brain, through chemistry and hormones. Some people like to repeat this too often, probably only as an excuse, using science to escape anything that might surprise and surpass them. Subvert their command. Perhaps science is just as much of a speculation as other divinations, its difference being that it uses equipment—how funny, equipment that was nevertheless created by the limited human mind. I cannot agree to anything definitively because I do not know. I’d like to, though. I’d like to fall into the flow of relief. To find my own home. To be, meaning to be both relieved and happy. To live within myself. Always. Without doubts, without control. On the sofa, the pullout sofa that can double as a heart, a pullout heart, a beer or Coke in hand, one that can be a wheat field of caresses with a cup of chestnut ice-cream, can be a children’s book, legs on the table, can be the horizon that never offers an identical repeat performance by the setting sun. Was this what the moment of my birth was like? Was I happy then? Was my first cry one of being deeply moved by the fact that I had condensed onto this planet? Who is to say? Mother says I sang. Not cried, but sang a kind of musical scale. A scale with a particular tonality, a particular syncopated rhythm. What was this tune like? A happy one in a major scale or a sad one in a minor?
…
Happiness does not exist in verb form. Perhaps this is because it contains no duration, it is only a blast, a friction. A suspicion, simple, never continuous. Like a momentary realization, a fleeting acquaintance that buds inside us and then instantly sinks into oblivion. Only encounters can withstand duration. And even that is limited. (Another realization.) With a sell-by-date on the box. From – until. From discharge to discharge. From the initial discharge of semen to the final discharge of the river into the sea. In between come the encounters. The sell-by-date is printed on the packaging. Best before, recommended time. Once past this date, it has to be discarded. So, arrive to encounter, then leave.
…
I keep dilly-dallying. This is still not a beginning. I am not yet capable of a beginning. I need to rewind the film a few more times. Is it really that difficult? Difficult to say that I am sitting on a chair, staring into the void? Trying to remember, to recall. People in the room wait respectfully. They are patient. Silent. They know how hard it is to stare at an empty chair. Is the chair I am sitting on really empty?
…
So I return to this befittingness of the thought that keeps pursuing me, return to its evasiveness. Perhaps, instead of its beginning, I could try to seize its end, then we could pretend that it is easy to catch the fish by hand. But it seems we are never well-enough equipped to pursue befittingness … I could only grab a loose end, a frayed thread, one of those at the end of the seam of the soft fabric of the nightdress I never took off as I waited to grow up. A nightdress patched up over and over again. Or maybe I wish to consider the whole, look upon it from afar, through a wide-angled lens, the way a tailor sees a gray factory-wound thread on a cardboard spool and knows exactly where to find both ends. The way only sailors know where the sea starts and where it ends. Maybe I’d like to write a story, a novel, a screenplay, in order to understand it, to untangle the ball of wool. I could become entangled myself along the way. Entrapped. Yes, a trap. Is this writing of mine not a trap? This wish for completeness? The wish to slacken the meanders, the unknown knots, in order to find out. Find out what? Step into the river that I am merely observing, shouting after it to wait for me. I would draw out the thread into a straight line from here to there. On it I could mark certain points, years perhaps, events in my life. All the embankments I have stopped at along the way. I could thread them as tiny pearls onto a necklace and hang it round my neck. I would know for sure, I should see, should realize, what it is that is ever present, what exists within me as some kind of eternal accomplishment. (Inside me everything would still agree: “This is a word, only a word, incapable of expressing any substance!”) But in this straightened-out timeline it should be obvious. As I say this, I am already nearing restlessness, at the same time cherishing a kind of burning, hollow desire for a final cut. As if I want in a single stroke to both understand the world and end it. To stop being so restless. To catch my life by one end of the thread that has all along been flirting with the other end. Wrap everything up and, in doing so, throw over my shoulder all that is redundant. Into the wastepaper basket. Like in basketball. A free throw. One zip. I’m in the lead. I’m winning. Losing in order to win. But I no longer want to compete. No more comparisons. No more trading. All I am is sad, sad and res
tless. And I no longer want this.
…
No, I don’t really want to simply wrap everything up. For all you know, I’m probably talking about death, but it has to do with the appropriateness of the word that poets like to stick on their covers to elicit in their readers an awed, perhaps morbid admiration, thinking that they, the writers, know what dying means. (As in any good film, here too you need to have a little death, a little sex, a little birth, and a little pain. Any good manual will tell you as much.) No, basically I wish to start anew. Talk about birth. Start from zero. From the beginning. Tie the thread between two dwellings, two homes, between the home of my childhood and the home of my adult womanhood, and then, with light ballerina steps, walk across the abyss. As a child, that’s how I imagined the beginning of life. I drew a boy and a girl on a sheet of paper. They were clumsy, little more than circles, one with a skirt and the other with straight lines for pants. I was young and these were the limits of my artistic abilities, simple, clean lines, joining the circles that were their tummies with a thin line. No genitals of course, just a thread linking their bodies, and along it, tiny figures, genderless and unidentifiable, marching from father to mother in an even row. From navel to navel. Father was very angry, waving the sheet of paper above my head as I lay in my bed, ranting and raving about who the hell had filled my mind with stupid rubbish like this. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong. What I was guilty of. All he did was shout and wave the sheet of paper around. Probably out of embarrassment. I don’t know, we never talked about it. I wanted to understand how I had begun. My brother smirked, I know it was he who told on me. Then it was all forgotten. No more talk about how I was born. How it all began. They bought me a few children’s sex education books with titles like Time for the Stork to Retire. There was one about a mommy going to the hospital and the diligent daughter cooking sausages and pudding for daddy. How I wished my mother would become ill and have to go to the hospital so I could stay alone with him and show him that I know how to cook dinner. But Mother was always healthy, active, seemingly invincible. She was only consigned to bed once, after a miscarriage, but she stayed at home. Thus I could only dream of evenings with pudding and Father. According to some quasi-literary sources of supposedly didactical nature, time with the father is only possible in the event of the mother becoming weak, frail, and absent. What a grim, heavy anchor for all generations that were fed such juvenile fiction: out of the way, Mother, remove yourself, surrender part of your domain of kindness and healthiness to the father! Mother, do not repress him with your saintliness! Yet to start anew, start from zero, is probably the same trap, the same face, just that is appears on the opposite side of the coin. A malady of the impatient and undernourished.
Best European Fiction 2017 Page 27