We won’t hold him to his word, my mother said after he left, and we went to her ground-floor room, which was smaller than I’d imagined and had a narrow bed that was barely big enough for her, making me wonder where I was going to sleep. By the evening a folding bed had arrived, which when opened filled the entire room, and was anything but comfortable, I realised when I lay down on it in my mother’s nightgown, who would even think of bringing pyjamas when you were running away, but I was dead tired after the events of the day and its decisions, so I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
The birds woke me up in the morning; there are birds on the apricot tree in my courtyard as well, but just sparrows and blackbirds calling out to each other and whistling, and doves and pigeons cooing on the rooftops, however here it was something else singing in the early morning, something that went straight to the heart and that I had never heard before, and I instantly recognised the bird that sings in books, a nightingale, I thought, it must be a nightingale, like the emperor’s, in the fairy tale. I immediately left my bed and stepped out of the room – my mother, like the other residents of the rooms lining the eerily white corridor, was still asleep – but I stepped out like a sleepwalker, in my nightgown, barefoot, at that magical moment in the morning that belongs to the surrounding forest, when life wakes up and you are filled with this sense of awakening, as at the dawn of humankind, when the first human realised that he was alive, because he hadn’t known it before, it came to him suddenly. And it’s no different today, the wonder of life remains hidden from us during the day, and turns into fear at night, and it is only like this in the early morning that we understand it, when we are alone and when it’s spring and when the forest within us breathes, or the sea within us breathes, when we imbue each other.
But the nightingale fell silent when I stepped outside and the moment passed; I tried to hold on to it, searched for it with my eyes and my nose, but I had disturbed it the second I understood it, and was back in my life, which was longer a wonder, just pain or pleasure, as the case might be and depending on how you saw it, never pure and simple.
For three days I dragged my pain through the pleasure, because everybody wanted to show me the lakes and the waterfalls and all the other magical wonders of nature. A magical wonder is when something doesn’t look real but is, I realised as they took me around – like the way Plitvice’s waters forged their own paths through the rocks and bushes, through the grey and green, through the air and earth, creating a work of art out of nature, making it look like child’s play, untaught, becoming a work of art in itself, based on some primeval memory. It was as if we became a work of art ourselves, rather than creating one, a higher form of existence that we did not sufficiently appreciate, because it eluded us, I thought, walking with my feet in the moss and ferns and my head in the air. Everybody wanted to show me something, take me somewhere, because my mother was popular with both those above and those below, which meant that Srećko never got his turn, then again he didn’t insist on it either.
The phone call to my mother came on my third day, around noon, when I had come to her office to take her to lunch; my husband asked if I was there maybe, he was worried because I had disappeared, I hadn’t been around for days, he complained. She’s not here, I would have told you already if she were, but don’t worry, my mother waffled, having been instructed not to tell him anything – the poor man is ill, you shouldn’t do that to him, she objected, but she didn’t tell him I was with her, she just stammered and was vague and when she put down the receiver I snapped: he read right through you! You shouldn’t have tried to comfort him, you should have sounded worried, I said again; my disappearing had become pointless.
As had my staying in my mother’s room, on the folding bed, it was unbearably cramped, and it wasn’t just the bed, I realised, plus there were no books for me to read, at least before going to sleep. The mornings would fly by, unlike the afternoons, which my mother would sleep through while I, having nothing else to do or see, would, in despair, read the romance stories lying around the female staff’s honeycomb-like rooms; it was as if everything had suddenly become smaller – it had all looked so immense when I arrived, I thought to myself, biting my nails in boredom.
I left six days after I arrived, with no solution, with a knot in my stomach that remained lodged there like an axe in a log, watching the rain pelt the dirty windows of the bus, leaving a quivering trickle, and then little rivulets of water streaming into the window’s grooves, an entire universe inhabited by who knows what, where even a second is like a thousand years, I thought to myself. But for me, it was simply rain and I worried that it wouldn’t stop by the time we reached Zagreb, because I didn’t want to get wet and catch a cold, even though it was warm, because then I’d have to take five days’ sick leave. And I thought about that ruthless clash of worlds, and how it was the key to Alice... a ruthlessness we laughed at when actually we should be sitting down and weeping, a ruthlessness that was the deepest truth not of dreams but of reality, driving us all mad...
By the time we reached Zagreb the rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through the steaming city, lending it a touch of enchantment, of light?, of smell?, making me want to hover there and postpone my return and the conversation that was doomed before it started. I was helped by the non-appearance of the number two tram, and, one last time I looked south, at the endless tram track that ran alongside the hedge, bringing the number five tram, which meant I’d have to transfer, shove my way onto two trams lugging my travel bag, no I wasn’t going to do that.
Instead, I lit a cigarette, inhaled, then exhaled and the smoke assumed the shape of a cloud, which expanded like a huge mushroom; hey, what’s this, I thought when my travel bag suddenly lifted off the ground and floated around my legs; sit on me, I heard a voice say, like in a fairy tale, and I immediately obeyed, never happier. Then we soared up into the sky, me and my travel bag, up into the blue, amidst the woolly clouds left after the rain, and from there I watched the city turn into squares of different colours and sizes, into a patchwork that said everything is possible, that nothing is lost and nothing ruined, things just rearrange themselves.
XXII.
Sitting in the living room, dressed to go out, is my darling, my love, my everything in life, my forever; when he was in the hospital in Rijeka, I would write him letters with stickers of Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, I’m Tinkerbell, you’re Peter Pan, and with pictures of a little heart, and I’d also put Lady and the Tramp and Snow White with one of the dwarfs, Sleepy, for a good night’s sleep, and a lipstick kiss, and a photo of me when I was three, dimpled, smiling like a sunny day, and a pressed violet that I’d picked when I visited Petra, and a lock of blond hair tied with white thread, and a cutout of my eyes from a photo that I pinned to a scrap of paper, and my thumbprint, like for an I.D., all so silly, so impossible to imagine today. And all this embellished with words of love, adoration and devotion, although I did mention some terrible doubts, though they seemingly vanished when he fell ill, when health was all that mattered, everything else was unimportant. But now, doubts are all we have left, I thought, looking at him, still standing at the door, like a wall separating us, an invisible but impenetrable wall, stopping us from reaching each other.
Although I still see the same blue in his eyes, that forget-me-not blue, the same straight nose, the same pink lips, the same facial bones under the stretch of thin, fair skin that blushes so easily, the same high brow inviting baldness, the same always neat beard, the same dark straight hair, everything the same yet nothing the same... Because if it were, I would go over to him and kiss him on the mouth, on the nose, on the forehead, on the cheeks, everywhere, I would run my fingers through his hair and we would laugh, but I do not go over to him, I stand at the door, petting the dog who’s trying to jump on me. And he doesn’t walk over to me either, he sits there, watching me from a great distance, as if he had left his body in the dining room and gone off somewhere, it’s not him looking at me it�
�s a bloodless, lifeless shell, stiff and pale.
And then I see the mouth of this corpse suddenly start to quiver and the face adopt an expression that says “so, that’s it, then”, as the blood returns. And, look, he’s already nodding his head in recrimination, nodding not to me but at me, at this alien being that has done something bad to him, that tormented him for five days, but that he torments as well, so he has no right to say anything, to attack it. He can only exude silent resentment and plan his retaliation, because one retaliation calls for another, regardless of who started it, maybe it wasn’t your fault before you took revenge, but afterwards it is.
The flat looks neglected, on the table the milky white glass ashtray, big as a plate, is overflowing with cigarette butts, the tablecloth is full of breadcrumbs from the stale white bread in the blue porcelain dish nested in the basket, and, apart from the cup in his hand, there are two dirty cups with the dry dregs of coffee, because we drink aromatic Turkish coffee, we drink a litre a day, the coffee-pot was a wedding present from Adam. A piece of greasy paper holds the remains of the salami, there’s a plate with the leftover rind of the cheese, a pair of big scissors and a pair of nail scissors, along with a knife, a few sheets of typewritten paper next to some folders; a quick look at the kitchen reveals a sink with dirty dishes that he stacked but didn’t wash, and I realise that he didn’t do any cooking, he bought everything ready-made, a breakdown of the system, and then I catch sight of the dog’s paws, festering with puss.
What’s that? I scream, what have you done to the dog! I’m already on my knees, hugging her, examining the wounds between its toes, green, festering, wet, putrid, awful, he says he doesn’t know, that they simply appeared, overnight, the day after I disappeared. I say he could have looked for me at my mother’s, where else would I go, what do you think, assuming you think at all, I yell, that’s how mad I am. He says he did call, your mother said you weren’t there, he says, you know she did, he says, you were probably standing right next to her, listening, he snipes, he wants to put the blame on me, as usual. You didn’t phone until yesterday, I say, and you didn’t mention the dog, you didn’t say a word about it being sick, you didn’t even take it to the vet, you just watched her waste away, I say, shaking with fury; poor little thing, I say, trying to soothe the dog whose sorrowful eyes blame me, its eyes are the same even when it’s happy, it’s that kind of breed; it’s so sad it’s enough to break your heart.
He doesn’t answer, he just scowls, shakes his crossed leg, and lights another cigarette, his mouth twisting in disgust as he exhales; the look on his face, which initially wavered between self-pity and accusation, is now utterly cold, there is ice in his eyes, like on a window in winter. He’s not looking at us anymore, he’s looking straight in front of him, and up somehow, shaking his crossed leg, nodding like a plastic mechanical toy, and says that he has to go to hand in his article at the radio; aha, so he wrote it when I wasn’t there, I think to myself, he can do it without me. After that he’ll go to his parents, he says, and he may stay there, he says; go right ahead, I say, just go, I have to see to the dog, you don’t have to come back.
Fine, he nods, gets up, opens the folder and puts in his papers, moves his cigarettes and lighter to the breast pocket of his light blue poplin shirt, because we wear only the best, and is already opening the dining-room door when he stops and turns around, as if to say something, but he doesn’t. I watch all this from the corner of my eye, still kneeling on the floor, hugging the dog, which is disintegrating along with this marriage, I realise, a marriage that never even started, never came to life, it was just a hopeless mess, and it still is, it still is, even though he’s gone, because he’ll be back, because I still can’t let go of him, just as he can’t let go of me.
Once again he’s left me on my own, without a word, without us talking about it, I think to myself after he left, banging the door behind him so loudly that it made me jump; as pointless as it was, I wanted us to talk, because words always give hope, anything is better than this nothing he’s given me, like the way he left the dog to die, watching it fall to pieces, not lifting a finger to help it. That was probably to punish me, I realise, because he knows that I adore the dog; what a monster, what a piece of shit, where was all this hiding that I didn’t see it, I keep struggling with all these questions, it’s like trying to break free of the ropes that bind you; because I’m not free, I’m a prisoner of this relationship, have been from the very beginning, I guess, a prisoner of sickness, my mother saw it but I didn’t, because I was already involved, because I was already infected by it. And I fell ill, just like my dog, my sunshine, my sweetie-pie, my poor little thing, I think to myself, putting the leash on her and taking her straight to the vet, who’s on the other side of town, where I’ve just come from, I take her on foot because trams don’t allow dogs.
Your dog has a serious skin disease, says the vet after examining her, he’s an older man with a big nose, in a clean white coat, a pen tucked in his breast pocket, and on the right side of his face a purple birthmark the size of a child’s fist; he gives her an injection and rubs a dark blue liquid on the purulent sores between the toes of her front paws, saying it’s probably genetic and hard to cure. When you first got her, you may have noticed a little white pimple on her paw, he says, it contained staphylococci that multiplied. You should never buy a puppy like that.
I remember the little pimple, I say, but I didn’t know it was a symptom of disease, I just thought it was a kind of mole, harmless. That’s what lots of people think, he says, but the person who sold her to you knew what he was selling. And she’s pedigreed, I say, as if that’s a guarantee against fraud, and anyway, fraud or not, surely he wouldn’t kill a puppy because of a pimple, I say aloud, but he simply shrugs and walks over to his desk to write out a prescription for some pills and a liquid, while I take the terrified dog off of the examination table and hold her in my arms. Once upon a time, when she was a puppy, she happily ran into the vet’s office for her first injection, but after that I would have to drag her in, she’d brace her paws against the pavement, like a donkey, and wouldn’t budge.
It’s a serious illness, hard on both the owner and the dog, the vet continues, leaning over his desk, not looking at me, and it requires daily therapy, rubbing down her paws and giving her the pills, the best thing would be to have her put to sleep, he says, trying his luck, but on the wrong person, because I immediately explode. Only if we’re put to sleep together, I say, attaching her red leash to her matching red collar, because red looks good on gold fur, don’t you worry, my darling, I whisper into her long ear, mama will make it better. Your choice, he says, handing me the prescription and when I see the birthmark on his face twitch as if it were alive, I decide never to come back, we’ll find another vet.
The next day, the bastard unlocks the door – he didn’t ring the bell, I think to myself when he appears in the dining room, where I’m rubbing down the dog’s paw with the dark blue liquid, wiping away any overspill with a cloth. He stands there holding the travel bag he’s taken from his parents’ place and says he’s come for his things. You know where they are, I say without getting up, holding the dog down while she fights me, listening to him move from room to room, thinking that I have to get the key back from him before he leaves, I don’t want him bursting into the flat or my life whenever he feels like it. Who knows who might be in the flat, will be my argument when I ask for the key back, my way of provoking him, making him understand his place so that he doesn’t get any ideas. But I don’t have to remind him about the key because before I can say anything he leaves it on the dining-room table when he’s finished packing, and walks out of the flat with a “See you”.
“Goodbye”, I correct him, and let him leave without saying another word. Then I walk into the room to see what he’s taken, just his summer things, I note, summer trousers, tops, sneakers, sandals, underwear and the Biser typewriter I bought him, I work on my mother’s Olympia, which is twice the size and which h
e also put into his bag, as if wanting to hide it.
And now we’re alone, just the two of us, the dog and I, and we roam around the flat; I’ve never been alone here before and it feels a bit strange. My father’s brother and his family, all four of them, once lived with us, for ten whole years the house was full of people, of arguments, of cooking and the smell of browned flour, and then it was just the three of us, my mother, my father and me, with the arguments and the browned flour, and then again three of us, this time my mother, my husband and me, with arguments and stew but no browned flour, because it isn’t healthy, my husband would say, parroting his father Frane, a Dalmatian, so instead of browned flour it was sautéed onions and fried lardons, and then it was just the two of us, him and me, with the arguments but no stew, because I didn’t make it, that was my mother’s cooking, and anyway he didn’t like it, especially not leek stew, yuck, he’d say, but now it’s just me in the flat, I don’t count the dog, without the arguments and without the cooking. The only cooking I do is for the dog, innards, tongue, hearts, in a pressure cooker so it can’t boil over, and I don’t have to wash the stove and sink. Thinking of my health, I go to the market and bring back fruit, and vegetables to make a salad, and I buy a few tins of tuna and some mayonnaise, it’s enough to fill you up, but if I notice a hole in my stomach I just pop over next door for some ćevapčići in pitta bread, and eat it in its paper wrapping so that I don’t have to dirty a plate.
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