Wild Woman

by Marina Sur Puhlovski

  We were silent, each wrapped up in our own thoughts, but I did pour myself a shot of brandy, knocked it back and poured another, even though I don’t drink in the morning.

  I had spent all winter helping him to study, because he would never have done it on his own, I mused, I had to funnel the information into his head, simplifying everything and making him learn it by heart, because he wasn’t getting it, especially not the theory of literature, he would rehash what he’d read, come up with literary nuggets and anecdotes, but what he needed was to understand the theory of literary style and so much more, he needed to make sense of it and explain it. It was an absolute nightmare. I learned a lot about him that I hadn’t known before, or hadn’t wanted to see, who knows. I used to think he was bright and funny, but now I realised that he simply memorised lines from films and books, along with all those maxims he had learned by heart from the collection in Frane’s red hardcover notebook. His son had bragged about it when we first met, as if it was his own notebook, as if he had been writing in it, not his father who had started it back in Dubrovnik, when he was young. He would insert these ripostes and maxims into the conversation as if they were his, always at the right time and in the right place, he was good at that, and he sounded witty, and I admired the wit and the way he talked, thinking it was original, not a copy. I also wrote his thesis, elaborating on my first-year essay “Music in the Work of Thomas Mann”, never in a million years could he have done it himself, I realised with increasing despair as time went by, why on earth hadn’t I seen it, I asked myself, but I knew the answer, there was a reason why people said love is blind, as if that was of any help to anybody

  What else is love except a kind of blindness, I reflected, you see what you want, what you like, what catches your fancy, what makes you grow, you see what you need but you don’t see what you don’t need. When you see what you don’t need you try not to see it, to attribute it to a random instance, to hide it from yourself, because you compare what you see with the ideal that they’ve drummed into your head and try to make it fit that ideal. Sometimes it more or less works, unless you completely fail, because basically you always fail, but even an approximation is something, at least it’s bearable. The world exists on the basis of approximation. But it’s awful when it turns out that what you get is not even close, that it’s the exact opposite, that you had imagined somebody else! And, of course, he helped you along, he tried to be what he thought you wanted him to be, not what he was, but he could pretend to be what you wanted until he captured you, until he took away your freedom, in life and, worst of all, within your inner self, because the hardest thing was to save yourself from yourself. By saving him I was saving myself from myself, I realised, from the debt of love, I supposed, a debt you couldn’t just discard as if it never existed, it doesn’t exist now but it did, it was your life and if it is worthless then so are you and your life; how do you live with that?

  That wasn’t something I could tell my mother because she wouldn’t have understood, she only knew about loyalty and self-sacrifice, nothing in between, about the part of the vow that says to have and to hold for worse, because for better will be easy, she would say, showing she acquiesced unreservedly.

  What shall we cook, she broke the silence, as we looked around the dining room, flooded with spring sunshine, take this, take that, what there is and what there isn’t, the dog at our heels. When I take her out, I’ll pop over to the shop, I said, we’ve got time, and we stepped out onto the balcony to admire the blossoming apricot tree in the courtyard, it looked unreal, like a painting.

  Before long it will lose its blossoms, my mother said, and I could already see a carpet of white and pink petals spreading out on the concrete, turning into red decay, and then into the dirty concrete of winter, rats scuttling across it with their young, their family closeness touching somehow, it made you think.

  We made a moussaka with minced beef and potatoes, topped with sour cream whisked with eggs, and for a salad we had pickled peppers, all of which we ate ourselves because he didn’t show up for lunch until the evening. He was all apologetic, saying that after his appointment at the radio he’d been invited to a meeting of bigwigs who decide on staff hiring, a dicey story because why would they invite a freelancer, I thought to myself. And afterwards they went out for a drink, he, Leon and one of the bigwigs, and it went on and on, as these things do, he said, a diabolical tinge to his laugh. He would probably be hired for the First Programme, news-gathering, he said, a miserable job, he wasn’t looking forward to it at all, but what could he do.

  It ain’t New York, I thought maliciously, he won’t be wearing a Rolex or driving a Lincoln Continental, he’ll just be a little reporter barely eking out a living, like all the others. But you’ll have a job, I said, and you’ll be able to pay the bills (which now I pay, needless to say), and he fell silent.

  You’ll be able to continue working for Leon when I get my job, he said, as if getting the job was his doing and not the result of my working working under his name for years – and people knew it.

  The next scene is from a family film depicting an idyllic picture: he’s sprawled out on the sofa in the hall, with a cigarette, an ashtray and a bottle of red wine, there’s the roar of the crowd at the stadium where some lunatics are playing football, with him occasionally yelling and swearing so loudly you can hear it all the way in the dining room, where my mother is playing Patience at one end of the table and I’m watching her from the other end, and we don’t know what we are or where we are or why we exist, or perhaps we don’t exist at all, perhaps we’re just dreaming.

  XXV.

  Winter is here, time to think about the heating, that woodpecker we put there keeps pecking away in my head, a perpetuum mobile, he never tires, I have to see to the wood, peck, peck, and to the coal, peck, peck, we’ll drop the coal down into the basement through the window, and then the wood, seventy cubic feet of beech, after it’s been sawed into logs, which later will have to be chopped. We don’t have central heating, we have the conventional square brown fireplaces, the kind that were installed after the war, except in the dining room, which has an iron-wrought gas stove and on winter mornings we gather around it while the other rooms are still freezing cold. I chop the wood and bring it and the coal from the cellar, the wood in my arms and the coal in a grey tin bucket, because he’s sick and has to be spared such things, like his father in his day. I feed the furnace with kindling and crumpled sheets of newspaper, there’s smoke, the fires catches, or doesn’t, I take away the ashes and clean under the fire-box, it’s such a bloody bore when winter comes.

  The flat looks grey and needs painting, peck, peck, and I have to tell him that he can go now, peck, peck, because he recently got a job. A permanent job, with a salary. By six in the morning he’s getting ready to go to work, because he has to read the news on air at seven. At six-thirty he’s in his suit and tie, his hair washed, beard trimmed, deodorant sprayed, the obligatory 4711 dabbed on the rest of his body, our gentleman journalist sneers at his job as twaddle, but not at the status it brings. The status is a magnet for catching all sorts of things, specifically women, and it’s not to be sneezed at, it’s not the status of New York but still, it’s not to be sneezed at, and he holds his head higher than before, even his step is livelier. The Pink Panther seems to be standing up straighter, I think spitefully when I see him getting ready for work, because I wake up at dawn. He doesn’t, but now he’s forced to, he’s practically blackmailed into it, the cage has finally found and captured him, there’s no escape, at least not for now, because I have no doubt that he’s thinking about it. Whenever he has the chance, he recounts a scene from an Italian neorealist film, which a group of young men in a red convertible with the top down are coming back in the early morning from partying and a bunch of workers are shuffling around in a factory, its chimney already churning out smoke... Lavoratore, shouts one of them in the convertible, standing up on the car seat, and showing them: fuck you, making a fist with
his right hand and hitting the crook of the arm with his left. Maybe he’ll think up a way to get out of the cage, I muse warily, and then I’ll be saddled with him again, the only way I can be sure is if he leaves, and even then, not entirely sure. I remember how he once left allegedly forever, just before summer, and then he decided to come back, just before winter, and he sat all day on the bottom step of the staircase, by our front door, kicking it with the droning rhythm of a machine, even when the neighbours passed by, until I finally opened the door and let him in.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say – you’re employed now so you can go back to your parents or rent a place of your own, do whatever you want but just leave because I don’t want to be with you anymore – I had opened my mouth and was starting with: listen, we have to talk about something, when he interrupted me, saying that the flat needed painting, as if reading my mind.

  Incredible that he should think about painting, I couldn’t believe it, and that he offered to do it himself, on his days off, I could have expected all sorts of things but not this, because he had never offered to do anything, he had never lifted a finger, he wanted everything served to him on a platter. That was when I discovered something about myself that I hadn’t known, I discovered that I could be bribed, because I didn’t say to him: thanks, but no thank you, we’re finished, no, I hesitated, I computed, I’d been planning to ask Adam or Filip to help me, but why not let him do it, since he was offering. As stage one, I let him take a sheet of newspaper and make a paper hat, which took some doing, and I laughed, and then, with that hat on his head, let him start moving the furniture into the middle of the room and roll up the carpets, creating the mess that I’m still sitting in, can’t get away from. Even when he reached the area with the insects, where it was murderous, I couldn’t move and create some order, as if I could hardly wait for the demise of order, that external order that concealed the disorder within, to hell with that, too, I decided in a fit of destructive energy, everything has to go to pot in order to be able to start over again, with both order and disorder, because we’re doomed to both, I guess.

  It was fun at the beginning, fun to turn order into disorder, I remember, constantly forced to serve the needs of order because there was nobody else but you to do it, so it was a nice change to turn against order, to attack and destroy it, there was a kind of surreal justice to it, as evidenced by wars and revolutions that immediately move against the order, as if it were the source of all conflicts; a strange story.

  So I bought paint rollers and paint, some white, and a bit of yellow to mix with the white and soften it, give it some warmth, and Filip helped by lending his car, his father’s Skoda, to transport it all, and he offered to help with the painting, but I said there was no need. You can help by writing my senior thesis for me, I said, because I had no energy even for my exams, let alone for my thesis, it’s you who urged me to prolong my studies so now’s your chance to make up for it, I joked but was serious, and he agreed right away. He would write about Nietzsche, he said, almost pleased, Nietzsche had been on his mind for a long time.

  And when we’d mixed the paint and laid the sheets of newspaper on the floor of the dining room where we were going to start painting, it’s true he did climb onto the ladder armed with the paper hat and the roller, which he dipped into the bucket of paint, made sure it wasn’t dripping and then rolled it over the wall a few times before suddenly slapping his forehead and shouting: “Oh!” I thought something had happened to him, terrified, I looked up at him, but, no, he was fine, he’d just remembered something, he bullshitted, climbing down from the ladder, I promised to do a report for the Second Programme, how could I have forgotten, he slapped himself on the forehead again, his paper hat finishing up on the table, and the roller in the bucket as he left to change and rushed off who knows where.

  I have to end it, I tell myself, it’s become unbearable, I have to be radical about it, like Alexander cutting the Gordian knot because he couldn’t untie it so he sliced it in half and then it unloosened all by itself. He did it for all times, for everyone who came after him, including for me, so that I would know it could be done, I say to myself.

  I put the leash on Tanga and we go for a walk to the park, Rokov perivoj, it used to be a cemetery but today it’s an oasis of peace and quiet above Ilica and the market, beyond the sound and the fury, as Faulkner would say, a quiet path under the trees, it makes you want to weep when you see it inviting you to something that’s not there, something that you can only look at and imagine, but never attain.

  But even just imagining means something, I console myself as I reach the little chapel of St. Roko, built by the people of Zagreb with their own hands after the plague, in honour of St. Roko, to protect them from disease: plebeians and nobility working side by side, stone by stone, because the plague made no distinction – so that all these centuries later I could sit in its shade and die of love at the age of barely seventeen, my first, platonic, unhappy love. You live what you imagine for that instant that you are imagining it, I console myself, having lost my life, and I let the dog off the leash and gazing at the early autumn greenery that has only just started to turn yellow and red and to decay, a moment with no continuation, but all the same a moment that existed, that fell into place with everything else that existed, the unreal attaching itself to the real which, once it passes, itself seems unreal, and passes in a heartbeat, as if it had never existed, but you know that it did, and so a vicious circle.

  After an hour of walking we went down into town, to the food stall at the market where I could see the smoke and smell the meat being grilled, and I bought a large portion of ćevapčići in pitta bread for the dog and me, then we rushed home, our mouths watering, so that we could eat it, one for me and one for you, and don’t forget the pitta bread, but I threw away the chopped onions along with the greasy paper. You have your water, I’ll have my wine, then you go to sleep and I’m going out, I tell the dog as I’m already at the door, heartsick, because I don’t like leaving her, I know she’ll brood. Dogs don’t seem to have a sense of time, to them everything is an eternity and I’ve vanished never to return.

  I’ve resolved to find him and kill him off in me, this time forever, I’m determined, he can’t just leave me in this mess and disappear, the radio programme my foot, lies, all lies and now we’re going to uncover them, I say to myself, mentally rubbing my hands as I rush down Ilica to Republic Square and the café Dubrovnik, which, of course, is where I find him. People told me that they would see him there, always by himself, loath to let anyone, Petra, Filip, join him, he just points to a chair, Filip told me because it had happened to him, makes a few witty remarks, laughs and then he’s on his feet, nodding, saying – sorry, pal, duty calls – and vanishes.

  Duty’s calling, I said to him once when he slept until noon after staying up all night who knows where, but he didn’t laugh, he just looked at me.

  I have nothing to hold on to so my thoughts are all over the place as I approach the café, all encased in glass, the customers as if in a display window, and there he is, he’s there, I spot him from the street, he’s sitting by himself with a glass of brandy like that time in Pula, when I had seen him perform his escape act for the first time, because what else can I call it, he’s as still as a mannequin, smoking, watching, as tense as an animal lurking in the bushes, waiting to pounce.

  You get it now? Somebody slaps me on the shoulder, making me jump and it’s Leon grinning, I’ve never seen him so drunk, certainly not in the middle of the day, and he’s in a suit, shirt and tie, red on white with dark blue, all spotless and ironed, but it’s not him wearing that suit, shirt and tie, it’s somebody else, it’s Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll, as Stevenson would say, who’d obviously encountered such a monster in a spotless, ironed suit, because it’s not a unique phenomenon, and his mouth is wide open so you can see his yellowing teeth, with the prominent canines between his moustache and chin, like a wolf’s, and this wolf is about to betray him. So I listen t
o what my one and only does when he’s sitting all tense at the café Dubrovnik, he wanks, I hear, he wanks, the wolf repeats in between sniggers, and at last I see what he’s gawking at, a woman at the next table in a mini, crossing and uncrossing her long tanned legs, as if wanting to excite him.

  Once, when I was a girl, somebody rang the bell and when I opened the door I saw a man – tall, dark hair, well-dressed, and I asked him politely who are you looking for, only to notice that his trousers were unzipped and that his member was hanging from his hand like a worm and he was massaging it, raping me with his eyes. I slammed the door in his face, it’s a good thing I didn’t break his nose in the process, I thought, trembling, listening to him run away down the steps.

  This time I didn’t. True, for a moment I felt sick, as if somebody had hit me, my throat tight, feeling miserable and humiliated, ashamed that everything had started like a fairy tale but had left me with one of life’s cruel lessons, as the only truth, from which there is no salvation, but a minute later I was laughing along with Leon, stepping back from his stench. He continued talking even as we moved away, because there was nothing more for me to see, and anyway I didn’t want him to observe me – that Rile is such a bastard, doing the dirty on me with the boss at the radio, when I’m the one who brought him there, he said. He was like that as a kid, he said, he’d break everything in the house, especially mirrors, they had to take a rope and tie it to the dressing table, he said, imagine, a rope, he snickered, and as soon as he grew stronger he’d beat up poor Frane if he wouldn’t give him money to go out or if he asked anything of him. And he forced them both to lie, he said, like that story about Italy, he’d never set foot there. And he cheated on you, he said, he’d bring all sorts of sluts to the flat when his parents were away (when he moved in with me and they got rid of him, they’d spend their summers in Slovenia), and if my place was free he’d bring them there, even some of your girlfriends, he said, like Petra and Dora, I bet you didn’t know that. Petra, Dora, I listened as if I’d known for a long time, though I hadn’t, except as a possibility, because he used to beat me as well, and lie to me and steal from me and I sensed that he was cheating on me, though I had no proof. But now we were going to put an end to all that, I was going to end it with him, and with me, especially with me, I thought to myself as I jumped onto the tram while Leon was still talking.