A Handful of Sand

by Marinko Košcec

  I never stopped missing Mother, but at the risk of sounding harsh, I also missed her when she was alive; a mother with human blood in her veins, whom you wish to confide in. Sometimes I feel the need to go to her grave, light a candle and sit for ten minutes. Not that I feel more of her presence there, but it’s soothing.

  I never let my sorrow break the surface–because of Father more than myself. I felt that he hung from me like a thread. Today I know that was mistaken because he’s essentially been dead all this time. The fact that he can still take a few steps, and groan, doesn’t mean anything. I sought in vain for something to at least reanimate him a little. No antidepressants or psychotherapy, no pensioners’ excursions or stays at rheumatic clinics, not even his favourite pastries mother used to make or my quasi successes in life could evoke even a semblance of liveliness in him. At the same time, however dead he was, he cried out from the depths of his unconscious to share his suffering with me and for me to be part of it. It didn’t overly concern him that his need was also a hand dragging me into the grave. But I couldn’t muster enough self-respect to decide that it wasn’t my problem any more. And so, on the threshold of my own life, I became a mother to my much-lamented father.

  Yet I couldn’t replace Mother or do anything for him. We’d lived alongside each other for so many years, separated by a vast sea of silence. I had pangs of conscience, but I gradually gave up trying to contrive words. All of them were destined to fall into a deep well. He didn’t even try and pretend that what I said meant anything to him, to wipe that nothing-matters-any-more look off his face for at least a second. We both knew very well how much harder it would be for him if I wasn’t around. So ever more often, when I left the study to check how he was doing, I would just stand at the door. He’d raise his eyes and we’d look at each other in a silence no words could unlock.

  * * *

  Although she accepted the blame, Mother didn’t consider the deadening of the woman in her, her sexual being, to be one of the forms of penitence. I don’t mean to say she was putting out or showing the world she was eligible; on the contrary, she cultivated an arrogant air of self-reliance and a neurotic gruffness in communication. But when the widower Gabriel came along and started to circle in on her, she didn’t need much convincing. Uncle Gabrek, as I had to call him, worked at an insurance company as a specialist in motor-car collisions and traffic-accident premiums. But the only thing which really interested him was fishing; he lived for the occasion–and that was almost every non-working day–to cram his deluxe fishing paraphernalia into the car and to drive off to a body of water, which if you were lucky was just twenty or thirty kilometres away. His expeditions were far from fruitless; he came back with bucketfuls, sometimes even with prize specimens. He liked to take me along as well, and I was too submissive to show what I really thought; he showed peculiar persistence in teaching me the secrets of the trade, the subtleties of choosing the right bait and position, the habits and psychology of different species of fish, etc. Mother prepared them in all imaginable ways, and he didn’t fail to admire her skill, most often with the words You can’t taste the silt in it at all, can you? If I was accompanied through to adulthood by incense and cigarette smoke, those two years with Gabrek owe their uniqueness to the reek of swamp water and fish entrails.

  I was twelve when we moved in with him, after he’d called by at our house for months with his broad smile, smart suit, waistcoat, tiepin and slicked-back hair. He would tousle mine as a sign of affection, produce a bag of toffees from his pocket, and once even tried to take me on his lap. I never liked toffees, but Cat did. Cat, in fact, turned out to be a bone of contention when Mother was set to be married because she didn’t fit into Gabrek’s vision of a happy family; but just then the problem disappeared.

  The period before their marriage was perhaps the only time when I felt something like happiness. I’d discovered books and knew their power to whirlpool me away into fictitious worlds. During the summer holidays I went to the library twice a day: in the morning for my daytime dose and again for my evening hit which would keep me in feverish vigilance and oblivion long into the night. I spent the rest of the time on my bike, which became Don Quixote’s Rocinante, the Orient Express, or a Mississippi steamboat. That little blue, wobble-wheeled bike had been salvaged from the scrap heap after some boy in the neighbourhood had outgrown it, and now I pushed it up the steepest streets of our quarter for the matchless feeling of zooming downhill, pedalling to increase my speed and perhaps break my own record, trying to hold on for just a second longer with my eyes closed.

  I cruised streets full of ghosts and bleak castles for hours as a lone rider and avenger. Gabrek’s visits ushered in a Copernican revolution; Mother’s obsession with my behaviour disappeared and she was understanding of my absences from home. One place I liked to ride was in the enclosed grounds of the psychiatric hospital which our part of the city is known for. I was able to zip in past the guard, no questions asked, and then cheerfully trundle along under the green of the grand old chestnut trees. Or talk with the patients who were out walking in striped pyjamas, sauntering about with their arms folded behind their backs or waving them in the air in lively debate with inner voices. Many of them were happy to chat, and they came up to me whenever I stopped for a break and daydreamed on a bench or by the goldfish pond. It was here that I heard some very interesting life histories.

  One day I even plucked up the courage to approach Zoran and see what he was drawing. Day after day, I found him sitting on the same bench, preoccupied with the paper on his lap as if nothing else existed. He was so tall that I thought he must have been some kind of giant, albeit a little bent from always having to lean down; his grey hair, cut in a somehow feminine way, grew thickly above an almost boyish face; and he had enormous hands, elegant and well-manicured, with long nails on both little fingers. He was a good-natured giant, because he was always smiling and showing his handsome teeth, but with such feeling and ephemeral emotion that I would take a piece of it home every time and shut myself away in my room without a word. I remember clearly the smell of flowers that came from him. The patients at the hospital generally needed to be kept at an arm’s length because hygiene at the hospital probably wasn’t high on the scale of priorities. But Zoran radiated a vernal freshness, sweet and polliniferous.

  I remember his drawings even more clearly. Each in its own way showed living labyrinths: scenes of teeming action, dense and compact, full of interlaced movements, collisions, rifts and transformations. They were covered from edge to edge in intricate patterns, calligraphic tendrils and arabesques which intersected and merged, plunging into one another, vanishing into depths and forming bizarre figures here and there with unbelievable, enchanting colour combinations. There wasn’t a single empty spot. It was impossible to recognise anything from the earthly world from up close. But when I moved back a little, without realising what they were about, I felt a childlike sense of bliss–at the absolute tranquillity they emanated. Even today I wouldn’t be able to judge the artistic worth of those drawings, but one thing is for sure: neither before nor since have I seen anything more beautiful.

  He’d once been a promising young nuclear physicist, he willingly told me, a university dux with offers of a career abroad, but he kept putting it off for the sake of a girl; he burned with love and waited impatiently for her to decide. Until one day she gave him a simple, dry No. And no question he could ask explained where it had all disappeared to so abruptly: all the warmth, the fusion of their souls, the moments of inconceivable tenderness… How could it be that he was suddenly deprived of all that mattered to him? Forget about physics–all he wanted was her and to devote his whole being to her happiness. For days he called and beseeched her, promising any sacrifice and even threatening to kill himself, but that only strengthened her resolve and added to her annoyance.

  I’ve reconstructed the way he described things, but I remember the end of the story word by word. She agreed to another date, under he
r conditions, at the local football grounds. She met him in the middle of the pitch and said: There, exactly where you’re standing, I’ve fucked half the junior team. I had such earth-shaking orgasms that I thought my brain would explode, if you have even the slightest idea what I’m talking about. Have you got the point now? Is it enough for you to leave me in peace?

  It was. He turned and went; he didn’t know where to, or how much time passed after that. The next thing he remembered was the hospital. He had only positive things to say about it: everyone was friendly, the food was fine, his parents often visited him, and they brought him all the paper and drawing supplies he wanted. It was only here that he felt the need to draw, and he didn’t stop, from morning till lights-out. But when we returned a year after moving to Gabrek’s, there was no trace of Zoran and I never heard of him again.

  I wouldn’t know what to single out from that year. I didn’t make friends with anyone at the new school. There was nothing of interest at home; Mother temporarily overcame her hysterics, and overall she suddenly seemed to have got it all together. She got along fantastically with Gabrek, or at least that’s how it looked; I don’t remember a single quarrel, or one of them even raising their voice. An exceptional peace reigned in the flat, all the more seeing as Gabrek didn’t allow television or radio. I didn’t miss any programmes in particular, but his ban condensed the silence into something morbid. He only consumed the external world as printed on paper and spent most of his time reading the newspaper in the armchair. Apart from the rustling of the pages, you could hear him clucking with his tongue, like a clock emphasising significant seconds to the rhythm of its own inspiration; originally the clucks must have been substitute for a toothbrush, but over time they grew into a means of expression with a broad range of applications, from approval and surprise to disgust at what he had just read. He was mild-mannered, almost always in a good mood and happy to help Mother, but as soon as she left him in peace he would grab a newspaper and be consumed by it, and all that was to be heard were his clucking noises. The day Mother told me–without explanation–that we were packing our things, he only raised his gaze when the boxes had piled up in the hall.

  But there was something of a homme fatal about him because the next year Mother announced we were moving back to Gabrek’s and shrugged her shoulders at all my questions. The first move had been in the summer time. Now it was midterm and winter, which caused certain complications and understandably provoked comments from classmates and the neighbours, who were even gladder when we returned, in exactly the same way as before, after less than a month. The good thing was that Gabrek never showed up again.

  In the meantime, the house had gone to the dogs. We found it in a sorry state: the walls were green from moisture and a lasting chill had sunk in; it was full of holes, dead flies, mouse droppings and unimaginable smells as if to show us how much it had appreciated our care of it (or perhaps the totality of our existence as seen from inside). Mother actually cared very much for cleanliness and order; once, late at night, I found her in the bathroom trying to scrub something out from between the tiles with a toothbrush and grinding her teeth so fiercely that I returned to bed in fear. From early childhood I carried a feeling of guilt around with me because of my alleged slovenliness, which in my mother’s eyes was a harbinger of delinquency, a path to certain ruin and failure. In fact, the fear of irritating her actually made me develop a pedantry bordering on the pathological, an intolerance of what people like to call creative disorder, everything unfinished and abandoned which was up in the air, including stray embryonic ideas; in other words, I had a precocious obsession with order worthy of a born bookkeeper. After that second outing, however, things stayed in their boxes for a long time, perhaps in anticipation of another journey in the opposite direction, or more likely because of the utter futility of any efforts to keep them in their right place.

  The house weighed heavily on our minds. Mother heroically resisted its collapse, first by herself and later with my help, but this didn’t bring about any lasting solution. The house, like our livelihood, rested on fragile foundations. Everything else; the cracks, the leaks and the never-mentioned but credible concern that the roof could come down on our heads in both a physical and a figurative sense, were the inevitable consequence. He, whose name wasn’t to be mentioned (and his heavenly forefather, when we’re talking about the collective structure of things) built it quickly, without a building permit, convinced of his inborn talent for architecture; plus the workers had syphoned off some of the material for more profitable purposes, my mother claimed. For lack of documentation, the house couldn’t be entered in the land registry and so formally didn’t exist, which in practical terms prevented it from being connected to municipal services. An electricity cable was installed thanks to the kindness of a neighbour, but his generosity didn’t stretch to a water pipe. Mother liked to repeat his words, No man alive is going to go digging up my courtyard. Needless to say, his ‘courtyard’ consisted of piles of rubble overgrown with weeds and nettles.

  For years I watched her from the windows, still too small to take on the chore of going to the water pump several times a day; in those days it used to be down by the crucifix, so that in the neighbourhood we called that spot ‘at the cross’. Pumping water was strenuous, even for men, but for Mother it was a welcome opportunity to exchange a few words with the bleeder on the cross. Then she tramped back up the street carrying the full buckets, with a defiant fag between her lips.

  In the mood of piety prevalent in the nineties, after the war, the municipal council had the inspiration of changing the name of our street to The Way of the Cross. But the insight prevailed that the name was too grand for a cul-de-sac which turned into a muddy creek, especially when heavy rain made the septic tanks overflow. But they did see fit to discontinue the free water from the pump. Fortunately, Mother was able to solve the problem beforehand; just how, she didn’t want to say; but one day workmen turned up, dug a duct out to the street, knocked massive great holes in the walls, and the water flowed. It took much longer to patch up all those holes, and for years they let in the draught and the dust. Then Mother got hold of a loan and a ‘Normalisation Project’ popped up on our agenda, which meant doing away with all the gaps and blemishes in the house. Unfortunately, things got bogged down before the end. It would have been quite contrary to Mother’s nature to have at least consulted someone when setting the priorities; one result was that the reinforcement of the load-bearing walls lost out to an extension of the upper storey. We also got a lovely new façade, it’s just a shame that it started to crack so quickly and peel off. Our ground-floor ceiling was so unpleasantly low that you could touch it with your arm outstretched, though nothing could be done about that; it had already been dark inside because the windows were so small, and you needed to turn on the light during the day as well; but the result of the extension was polar night. The money from the loan ran out much faster than expected, of course. When making the major alterations, the tradesmen ingeniously found other small things that absolutely needed doing, so there was no money left for the new staircase up to the first floor.

  ‘That’s all right, I can wait, I’ve got a heart,’ the contractor consoled us. And then proposed: ‘Look, it’s fine if you just pay me for the material…’

  So, that same day, the workmen demolished the old staircase which led nowhere. But they didn’t come the next day and no one answered the phone at the number given in the telephone directory.

  As a temporary solution, we placed a ladder against the wall of the house. As with most temporary solutions, this one proved to be long-lasting. But Mother soon stopped using it after she lost her balance, fell and broke her arm. Not only did she no longer climb up to the upper storey, but from that day it ceased to exist for her.

  When I started Year 12, she summoned the courage for the desperate step of joining a ‘lonely hearts agency’. After several dubious offers, she hit a bull’s eye: a retired German industrialist of Jew
ish origin by the name of Jakob Steinhammer. They began corresponding, facilitated by the agency, because Mother didn’t speak German. The first letter was accompanied by a photograph of a greying gentleman with a neatly-trimmed moustache and metal-rimmed glasses on a slightly crooked nose. When he visited us, three letters later, we realised the photo hadn’t been quite up to date and that Mr Steinhammer had made the acquaintance of Mr Alzheimer. But the wheels were turning and scenes of salvation spun before Mother’s eyes.

  Reduced mainly to smiles and gestures of mutual enthusiasm, the rapprochement didn’t go smoothly. But soon a one-way ticket arrived nevertheless, and Mother didn’t vacillate; the offer of marriage involved me joining the newly-weds as soon as I finished high school. Mr and Mrs Steinhammer settled down in a country house in green and peaceful southwestern Germany. Mother wrote to me almost every day and soon showed great skill at inserting mangled German expressions into her sentences, which most foreigners take years to master. She enthusiastically described all the wonders of the house with its underfloor heating, gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, wallpaper with life-size woodland animals, or the breakfasts they had at the nearby lake. Never mind the spelling; she evidently had enormous potential for assimilation. I must admit, I too started to feel I was becoming German.

  All the more because all my clothes soon had German labels. Not one of the garments and pieces of apparel which arrived in the parcels, from shoes to sunglasses, would have been my choice in a shop, but I told myself it was a different country and a different taste, and I had to get used to it. Mother didn’t choose them either, but rather Uncle Jakob, who was better informed about fashion in Germany, and even more importantly about the difference between quality merchandise and junk. Mother illuminated each individual item with an assurance of the quality of the material, its water-resistant qualities or the enormous saving made due to the excellent value for money.