A Handful of Sand

by Marinko Košcec

  I trembled with fear, and also shame, under the spotlights and the shower of eulogies. Being presented like some kind of circus attraction, being photographed for people’s private albums, touched and felt, and having a dictaphone thrust into my mouth was OK, that was part of it all. But my pictures–I felt as if I was now seeing them for the first time. The gallery walls bore the marks of the mourning which I had painted out on canvases day and night, for months, unaware of what I was doing. Now it screamed from the walls, showing me strung up in a hundred copies. I felt that everyone there in the hall must have noticed, that every last person saw me as I saw myself before them: not just naked but flayed alive.

  Yet the words praising my work gradually reached me and sank in, something about a ‘plunge into archetypical meanders’ and ‘the concatenated metamorphoses of points of departure’, about the paintings’ ‘psychogrammatic texture’ and the ‘intersecting of oneiric planes’, and it finally occurred to me how wrong I had been. There was nothing to be seen, either in me or the paintings. Now they belonged to the buyers, who could hang them wherever they liked. They were never mine anyway, but only passed through me. That brought relief; a huge burden left me, trickling away like sand through my fingers. At the same time, I rose up towards the ceiling and stayed there floating, invisible. I set off home, or towards what I had started to call home, in a stupor, even giggling a little. The bubbles of champagne converged to carry me down Vlaška and Maksimirska streets like on a cushion of air–even after I had noticed a commotion in front of the building, people wringing their hands and others running to the scene.

  My reflexes always set in too late. Anyone with the slightest instinct of self-preservation would have interpreted the commotion as a warning to turn around and go back without delay. But I kept walking, hypnotised, until I found myself eye-to-eye, literally, with what I had first taken to be a football under one of the parked cars. Only after staring for an eternity did I realise that it was the most important piece of the woman who had thrown herself off the roof to land in front of my window with more precision that her precursor. As my new friend, the caretaker of the building, explained to me in detail, the woman’s head had caught on a first-floor clothes line, rolled away and been hidden from the people who found the rest of her. Until I arrived, they’d been sure this was an unheard-of murder by decapitation.

  There was a curious watchfulness in that pair of eyes, something which long thereafter observed me timidly from the dark; now it’s with me to stay.

  When I finally turned and went back the way I had come, back along Maksimirska and Vlaška, it was quite involuntary. Only at the intersection of Medveščak Street did I realise where I was going and comprehend that I had to spend the night at Father’s. I ended up staying three days. He was attentive, cooked for me and brought the food to my room. I only left it to go to the bathroom and spent the rest of the time curled up on the bed. That at least enlivened him for a while. After such a long time, he noticed that I existed.

  On the third day, the landlady located me. She was full of comforting words but above all worried about how to find another tenant under these circumstances.

  ‘The caretaker has looked after everything,’ she assured me, ‘although she didn’t need to take responsibility. I paid her well.’

  ‘How do you mean take responsibility?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you know that you left your window open, so part of the unfortunate person, or rather what was inside…’

  At that point I hung up.

  It took me a lot of effort to imagine myself in that flat again. I could have asked someone to collect my things and store them somewhere for me; anywhere would do. But perhaps out of spite, or perhaps because it was hard to resist an opportunity to hurt myself, I returned. The woman who had taken on the unpleasant job had done her very best. She’d washed the curtains, polished the furniture and even ordered the cutlery in the drawers. But she was getting on in years, had a tremor, and the finger-thick lenses over her eyes prevented her from being particularly thorough. For days, I kept finding reminders of the event between the fins of the radiator, on my paintbrushes and even on the oil paintings I’d left to dry. I must admit, after the initial shock those stains and little relief-forming chunks fitted in very well on the canvases. The jumpers, who I’ll never know anything about (not that I want to) are sure to have had anything but that on their minds when they climbed up to the top of the building. But now they’ve become part of my art in a special way. That person deserves that their last traces be preserved, and at least they now hang in an ultra-swish dining room or the conference chamber of a big mobile-phone operator. In any case, their remains will serve to provide archetypes and oneiric points of departure for the art critics just as well as any stroke of my brush could.

  That event served to bring me together with the caretaker, who lived on the second floor. In practice, our rapport was formed around her almost daily visits, carrying mushrooms picked on the slopes of Mount Sljeme. They were just about her only food, a fact she tried to conceal along with the other signs of abject poverty. She got up at dawn and walked all the way there and back to keep fit, she said. Her mushroom-picking was actually risky given her short-sightedness because a toadstool or two is sure to have ended up in her bag along with the edible ones. I can’t stand mushrooms: I feel that living off decay is already common enough in the human kingdom. But the first time I accepted them in the name of friendship, and after that I communicated with that one person in the building. She saw that as her good deed, an opportunity to take care of someone. She’d let me make her coffee but would never have anything else, even when she sat for hours through to late lunchtime, telling me episodes from her life–stories sadder than sad. Although she did repeat them all several times, with considerable variation on each occasion. Her younger and only brother, for example, drowned as a child while trying to save a friend who couldn’t swim, but the second time it was a lamb he wanted to save, and the third time round he was killed by the Ustashi, the Croatian Fascists. That makes your ear a little immune after a while. I didn’t want to risk disposing of the mushrooms in our rubbish container, so I wandered the neighbourhood with bags of fungus. I hadn’t yet found her rummaging through the bins, but the prospects were all too likely.

  The title of caretaker helped her little in preventing a practical jokester from stealing the light bulbs on the ground floor as soon she replaced them. That, in conjunction with the front door’s eternally broken lock, turned my walk down the corridor to my basement flat in the evenings into fifteen seconds of panic. And it would do even less to prevent people in this part of Zagreb who wanted to commit suicide from thronging to our building, which was taller than the others, now that a pioneer had demonstrated how well it worked. In a flash of inspiration I stuck a note on the front door: To whom it may concern, the northern side is also good for suicide jumping. The next morning my friend just gave me a strange, mildly reproachful look. She was right, it was childish, so I took it down again.

  * * *

  For as long as I can remember I’ve been a magnet for weirdos, both for those who are kept at a safe distance with that label, as well as people who live among us peacefully and pose no danger until something in them erupts, for no apparent reason, and seem to need my proximity when it starts. It’s as if they recognise some kind of essential stimulus, like kindling needs a lighter; then afterwards they stop seeking me out and don’t approach me again for years, if at all.

  It began with Jelenko. I met him on my first day at school and immediately realised, with an instinct for danger like that innate to small animals, that it would be best to avoid him. He stared in front of himself, as pale as a ghost, almost transparent, obviously asking himself what he’d done to deserve such terrible punishment, as if he was carrying the world he’d been thrust into on his shoulders. Over time, this ceased to be dramatic and diminished to a melancholic resignation, but his air of absence never went away. He emanated it like a s
aint wears a halo–an absence so real that it was visible to the even slightly sensitive eye, as irrefutable as the body of a normal person.

  He did much better at school than all the others, but you could tell how little it mattered to him, and you could forget about the earthly application of whatever brilliance he had. Therefore he didn’t provoke any great envy or disappoint his parents’ ambitions: everyone sensed he was useless for any practical purposes and left him in peace.

  Jelenko’s lyrical dimension, the ethereality of his being, was where we differed; I’m rooted in the ground and only achieved good marks with great effort. But I am able to listen, and from time to time he had to speak his mind; early in secondary school he started dropping in and meditating about suicide. I would listen carefully, in trepidation, neither agreeing nor attempting to dissuade him, aware of how much his argumentation set him apart him from the kind of teenagerish ravings which make the enigma of death enticing, of how far he was from those who hang themselves because of a bad report card, breaking up with their girlfriend or being fat. Simply put, it was as if he’d been born not into this life but into an adjacent plane, which by some freak of nature turned out to be a dead end, and as such it was all the same to him if he was to cut his life short or wait for it to end by itself; he always had one leg in the other world.

  He could discuss death endlessly. These were actually dialogues with himself, because I had nothing to say on the topic. Death is something certain and eternal, everywhere and at all times; it’s damn hard to forget that but even today I don’t have anything to add. Maybe he came to me with his endless monologues because no one else took him seriously; but how can you dismiss someone when they show so much passion, when they only seem really alive when talking about death?

  One year after the summer holidays we had to write about an event we remembered fondly. Jelenko, in a solemn and moving voice, with a wealth of poetic detail, described the burial of his rabbit and the dignity and reverence with which his whole family consigned the body of this beloved being to the earth. While he read, and for some time afterwards, the classroom was oppressed by heavy silence, and the relief was almost palpable when the teacher stopped him from reading on, without a word of commentary.

  Still, the next day she suggested that he round off his composition with a story about the rabbit–about the feelings which had connected them and those which the loss of the rabbit aroused in him, with the aim of entering him in a national competition. Jelenko gave her an anxious look, but she persevered, thoroughly mistaking his reticence for modesty, until he shrugged his shoulders.

  In the extended version, the rabbit was an exceptionally sweet creature, hungry for love and capable of returning it. It hopped freely around the house, stood up on its hind legs and held out its little paws wanting to be picked up and scratched on the tummy; it even ate from a dish at the dining table. An albino with red eyes, it seemed to be aware of its own uniqueness and was only waiting for the day when it would start speaking. There was a special bond between Jelenko and the rabbit: it would always wait for him at the door and knew when he was coming; whenever Jelenko was sad, even if he was out of the house, it would curl up in its cage, no longer caring to be stroked or given any attention, and would fill the house with sadness. The composition made no attempt to explain why the boy decided to kill the rabbit, be it as an experiment or because he was deranged; it was simply presented as a fact. But the description of the act was exhaustive: when it proved too much to do it with a knife, he took a knitting needle and loosed it from his slingshot. He had to do this several times, but the rabbit didn’t budge or utter a sound. It waited patiently, as if with relief, for its destiny. The description of the funeral ceremony which followed now appeared in a different light and no longer had much prospect in the competition.

  After secondary school, Jelenko surprised everyone by deciding to become a priest. I personally think that, rather than ‘hearing the call’, he devised it as a way out–a ruse for avoiding both earth and heaven in a refuge halfway. In any case, he never got in touch with me after leaving for the seminary, and his family later moved away. I never saw him again.

  Goran, by way of contrast, was every parent’s dream: delightfully undemanding but not autistic enough for the psychiatrists. The kind of child you want to pat on the head, one to be seen and not heard. You could give him a lollipop and he wouldn’t ask for anything else for hours. Disinclined to tantrums even in puberty, there wasn’t a shred of rebelliousness in him.

  We didn’t have anything much to do with each other until we were sixteen. He called on me at home, shyly at first, with various pretexts, but soon he came every day and stayed for hours. What connected us was mainly that we didn’t have any friends; each of us in his own way enjoyed the reputation of a freak. But our conversations went into just about everything sixteen-year-olds can talk about, mostly books, especially those which were too complicated for us or where we only knew the title. And about sex: insights into the best ways to bring a girl to orgasm, the most intriguing places to do it, the most exciting positions, the comparative advantages of a virgin or a mature woman, and the secret inclinations of brunettes and blondes. Having exclusively theoretical knowledge of such matters was no hindrance to us. In other things, too, Goran liked to go into juicy details, smacking his lips like a connoisseur and pausing after spicy remarks to leave space for my admiration. I was well on the way to accepting him, if not as a replacement for my father, then at least as an elder brother–a kind of spiritual leader.

  And then, without any warning or any subsequent explanation, he broke into the Chinese embassy. At that time, I should emphasise, an ambassador wasn’t someone you could just bump into on any street corner like in our Croatian metropolis today; you had to go off to the then capital, Belgrade. It already exceeded the comprehensible that he got on the train one morning like he otherwise got on the tram to school, after one of the identical evenings we spent together, and I don’t remember us then or earlier having ever, even obliquely, mentioned Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mao Ze or feng shui, or travelling to the end of the night, or an acte gratuit. According to the version which leaked through despite his parents’ secrecy, he roamed the unfamiliar city until midnight, climbed the iron fence and silently crawled in through a window left slightly open, as if just for him. Today, the media would zero in on that act of pubescent stupidity and blow it up into an incident between the two countries, but back then one had to hide every eccentricity and white out the decadent blemishes on the moth-eaten garb of self-managed socialism. Besides, Goran hadn’t given rise to any suspicions of spying; apparently he didn’t touch a single document or try to open any of the drawers. He just sat on the floor and waited for the Chinese bureaucrats and then, without resistance, let himself be taken away by the police, who briefly and unsuccessfully questioned him before returning him to his parents.

  Time stood still for Goran after that. He was briefly institutionalised and then discharged for treatment at home, which proved unnecessary; he never ran away again or was a risk to anyone. He neither went back to school nor engaged with the world any more, although a few years later he started leaving the house again. Today you can still see him when he goes out on his walks, twice a day, sometimes in the middle of the night: he’s become the walking landmark of the neighbourhood. His walks are different to those where a person is accompanied by a dog, or takes a trip into the countryside, or has an issue to ruminate on. He’s become a phantom with empty eyes and mechanical movements, and he stopped returning greetings long ago. Sometimes children throw stones at him. When he gets hit, he stops for an instant and a spark of surprise flickers in his eyes, a kind of smile, but then they disappear around the corner in a flash. The years have left their mark on him in a ragged beard which clings to his cheeks, and grimaces which distort his face, but sometimes it seems you could catch a glimpse of something enigmatic inside, perhaps truly Taoistic.

  There were others similar to him, thank God, and I
may mention one or two later. Them recognising me as one of their own was largely thanks to my mother. According to generally accepted opinion, she was one of the loonies of the benign sort whom people like to run into in the street because they’re sure to come up with something interesting you can share with your family or flatmates and therefore allow all of you to feel better, more normal, and convinced that the Almighty has had mercy on you after all. You don’t let people like that into the house, of course, but they only turn up on your doorstep rarely anyway, for example with the diabolical insinuation that you’ve poisoned their cat, which they don’t dare to speak openly but just shoot at you with their crazy eyes. To shoo them away you just need to reply in a calm, ever so slightly raised voice: Lady, just move along now. You don’t hold it against them because you’re compassionate and will soon forget the incident; you’ll continue to greet them on the street and inquire after their health, although you know more than enough about them already.