A Handful of Sand

by Marinko Košcec

  He must have been exceptionally resilient and resourceful. Step by step, he ascended the camp-inmates’ hierarchy. After a series of jobs outside in the rain and snow, with coal, cement and iron pipes, he advanced to a section of the barracks known as Canada after the fur coats which were sometimes found among the surplus possessions temporarily stored there. The punishment for theft was death by hanging, but the odd bauble, gold hairpin or tooth still made its way out of Canada in secret inner pockets to be exchanged for food or tobacco. He didn’t smoke before the concentration camp; he came out a hardened addict. If things had gone on for much longer, he probably would have set up an import-export firm with branches beyond the wire.

  Riveted to his bunk with typhus and meningitis, he was among the few who didn’t wander off into the unknown before the Russians arrived, and the only one in his block who was still slightly alive. He wasn’t able to tell them his name or where he was from, so they took him along for a time as they advanced westward. As soon as he was able to walk again, they left him by the roadside. He roamed hungry from village to village, begging for food and sometimes stealing. Until one day he called on the widow of a German soldier and was able to stay on as a farm labourer, later as her husband.

  You could make a living in the country in those days. Grandfather even went back to his trading alchemy, turning flour and lard into gold in the nearest city. In many respects, life began anew for him. Everything from before the concentration camp remained in darkness. He would quite definitely have started a new family and a new chain of family businesses if his wife hadn’t hung herself two years after their marriage. What for? They’d found more than comfort and hope in one another; their happiness had been almost tangible; besides, that wasn’t a time for suicide but rather for picking up the pieces of broken lives. But it’s a mistake to always expect people to act logically.

  That event gave Grandfather his memory back. Straight after the funeral, he packed all he could into two suitcases and travelled to Zagreb. He searched in vain for his father, mother and sister, or at least some trace of them. But he was able to find his son, with the help of the moustachioed fellow, who in the meantime had earned more little stars and consequently a more fitting house–a donation from well-to-do Jews. Now, as a sign of gratitude, our street was named after the Jewish Communist Moše Pijade. Moreover, thanks again to Comrade Mustachio, Grandfather managed to get permission to move into the vacated house. The building in Kačićeva Street wasn’t available, however, because the fire brigade had set up station there. He was allowed to use two attic rooms of the house; the rest was shared by two families who had fled from the Kozara hills in Bosnia.

  Although written in this time of cohabitation, the notebook didn’t say a word more about conditions there. But Father filled in the gaps for me. The main problem, among many, was the bathroom, and in particular the toilet. There were a large number of residents already, and to make matters worse they arranged an informal roster to keep the toilet constantly engaged. This was just one part of their pact against my father and grandfather, whom they openly despised for being tainted with capitalism and urban decadence. They tormented them with loud songs from their home region and heavy smells from the kitchen. This olfactory and acoustic barrage was discharged up the stairs by opening their doors wide, and every now and again a stink bomb was thrown in through the attic window. They egged on their children to imitate Grandfather’s gait, which was contorted from his time in the concentration camp, or to fart loudly, which made them all laugh hilariously. Particularly because Grandfather was easy prey. They knew he would make a little scene as soon as they provoked him: he would roll his eyes, gnash his teeth like an animal and flail his fists in the air, though he wasn’t at all dangerous. Any little thing could irritate him. Then he would pace up and down in the attic for a long time, unable to restrain himself, shouting profanities and biting his arm in frustration.

  A part-invalid with a very shady past, the German, as he was dubbed, was unable to find a job. But the gold from his suitcase helped him launch back into business, and into gambling and boozing as well. This bore strange fruit. He would acquire a rare, expensive piece of equipment with the intention of reselling it, which usually didn’t work. He sought long and hard for someone to buy a pre-war British radio, for example, only to exchange it for three telephones. These, in turn, went to pay off a gambling debt. The culmination was the machine for producing ice-cream cones, which he’d bought off a bankrupt pastry-cook for a very favourable price. Of course, he didn’t know how to assemble the thing, let alone get it going. It outlived him, still dismantled, up in the attic.

  Luck did smile at him from time to time, though. He would immediately invest any gains in opulent meals and unlimited quantities of wine. This regularly resulted in cycles of drunkenness, lamenting, lifeless staring at the ceiling, and promises that it wouldn’t happen again. No one knows why–whether perhaps it was the return of repressed horrors from the concentration camp, but he came up with the idea of spending some of his earnings on hunting gear. The only photograph I have of him, the only one he left for posterity, shows him in that uniform with a green velvet hat, brilliantly polished knee-high boots, a bulging cartridge belt and a rifle over his shoulder. He’d actually never been hunting before buying the stuff, nor did he for several years afterwards. He showed off in the gear in vain, dreaming of a mountain of feathered and furry delicacies. One day he finally joined a hunting party and went out for some kill. When he took aim at a flock of wild pigeons, the cartridge exploded in the barrel and blew his face off.

  Thanks to his connections, Father managed to have one family evicted and then the other. Finally he bought the house from the government. But now it was too big for the two of us alone, and too rich in ghosts.

  * * *

  Sorrow began to accumulate in me at a very early stage. I didn’t call it that straight away, and even later I only used that word as a blanket term for things whose exact reason and origin I couldn’t discern. When there was pressure from the outside I found the strength to resist; but in periods of peace, when the latest breaches had been stopped, I was plunged into an unjustified mood of dejection and listlessness, which revealed the extent of my weakness.

  Money, together with the absence of my father, was the central theme in our house for as long as I can remember. Both issues lay at the root of every conversation although we were at pains not to mention them; perhaps for that reason they guided our every step like a hidden magnetic pole. Mother would never borrow money even when there was someone she could have borrowed from. She was a staunch proponent of belt-tightening and making-do. We repaired cracked glass with adhesive tape and pretended that the loss of the picture on the TV screen didn’t bother us. The TV was reduced to a radio, but so what? Mother did the laundry by hand for months until we’d saved up enough for the repair man to come. I learnt to deal with the plumbing and electric wiring without any instruction, which I definitely should have been proud of. Yet I came to hate that house with which we lived in symbiosis. We were vitally addicted to it, and it mirrored our inner states and limitations, never hesitating to show its disdain for all our efforts to retard its ageing. As restless as it was thankless, it added fresh cracks to the collection on the walls, rescrawled its mouldy graffiti in corners only just repainted, left rust on metal, and heralded each spring with clogged drains, peeling woodwork and a leaking roof. Selfish and ungrateful like a pre-pubescent child, it demanded constant attention to restrain even just the outward signs of decay and made us pay dearly for any neglect. And outside there was always something crying out to be pruned, cut, dug, heaped up or incinerated, and at the very least there was sweeping. Together with the everyday martyrdom of dishes and laundry, shopping and garbage, that cycle of Tantalian torment, neatly tailored to human size, demanded to be borne until it had consumed every last ounce of joie de vivre.

  As more and more tasks fell into my responsibility, my desire for revenge also grew: to leave t
he house to the mercy of the elements, weeds and pests. I rejoiced at the thought of camping amid the ruins. And the more sickly Mother became and the less she was able to look after things herself, the harder she took their imperfection. Her illness, combined with life’s tragic twists and turns, seemed to mellow her and she lost her imperious ways; I tried all the more to gratify her and anticipate her remarks, aware of how much it pained her to be losing control of things. In her bedridden last months I also read a mournful rebuke in her eyes for things she couldn’t see from her bed, like the matted cobwebs up on the first floor and all that happened in my life outside the house.

  Not that I grew up in great poverty. True, of all the literature I devoured I was most inspired by descriptions of fantastic feasts and the names of exotic dishes I could only imagine, but I had almost everything the other kids my age had. The only difference was that I didn’t have them at the same time, and that delay often hurt, but I learnt to live with it. My clothes, although seldom new, were always neat, and every year there was just enough to spare for me to go on summer holiday. Mother didn’t consider renouncing hers to be a sacrifice at all; she’d seen more than enough of the world.

  My first proper sexual experience was at the seaside during my studies. There had been inconclusive attempts prior to that, more because it was something others had long boasted about, than due to any true desire on my part. Nor is it really correct to call them attempts because the initiative came exclusively from the other side; but the girls whose curiosity I evidently aroused gave up on me one after another as soon as they saw beneath the surface. Later, too, I never got anywhere near flirting, although I was strongly attracted to women. One could say painfully attracted: I craved for their feminine curves, their softness and warmth; but I never made any moves.

  I’d known her since childhood, in a remote sort of way. We lived close to each other, but our two years’ age difference was an unbridgeable void for the hope that welled up in me each time we passed: that she might find something at least vaguely interesting in me. She would wander past, not looking at anything in the visible world, and wearing the clumsiness of a big, force-landed bird. She always walked along the outer edge of the street, stumbling into walls and stopping from time to time as if at a source of danger which only she could discern or perhaps was intended for her alone. I only found myself next to her on a few rare occasions; and discovered she had a soft voice and seldom spoke. From time to time, she let out strange sighs without any reason at all; and if she smiled it was with visible effort. Only with a lot of goodwill could you find anything beautiful about her face, or even anything resembling individuality; still, that face often came to me when I was feeling lonely because of the closeness I felt between us. But this became rarer and rarer until I forgot her entirely.

  Nevertheless, that summer holiday in a town by the sea, she not only recognised me but was glad to see me. It was at an improvised disco in the cellar of a family house, the only recreational facility of any kind to spite the wartime slump in tourism in that hole of a place, wisely omitted from all tourist brochures. The largest part of the improvised dance floor was occupied by a puddle of unknown origin; two or three guys were hanging around there and trying to shake it down to painfully deafening music–the DJ must have been a bricklayer’s assistant; and from the depths of the place, so dark that I could hardly see, someone waved to me enthusiastically with a broad smile.

  She wasn’t only glad to see me, but after a brief and futile attempt at conversation she took me by the hand–hers was surprisingly cold and clammy–and walked me down to the nearest beach. There I realised, without verbal procrastination, that her breath was heavy with alcohol and that the joy in her eyes had little to do with me. But the clarity of her intentions and the nimbleness of her hands weren’t impaired; with just a few movements there on the sand as romantic as emery paper, beneath the utterly disinterested stars, she freed me of the burden of virginity.

  I wasn’t her first, that’s for sure, but I was probably the last. Two weeks later her obituary notice went up on lampposts in our neighbourhood; she’d swallowed everything she could find in the medicine chest. My inquiries comforted me to an extent: it hadn’t had anything to do with me but had probably been the culmination of a process which had been brewing in her since childhood. Those who were better informed spoke about a recently lost love, but they tended towards the assessment that it could only have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Still, it had been my first time, and when reflecting on that it was hard to completely avoid egocentrism and not to think of the unpleasant connotations.

  There was only one more time during my study years, but it was to take on the trappings of permanence and develop into what they call a relationship. I had enough other chances, but my chronic lack of talent for seductive small-talk, plus my tendency to stay glued to the wall between lectures, ensured that I was soon put into the same category as the faculty inventory along with the eggheads, four-eyes and pimple-faced nerds: those who are only ever spoken to for some practical reason. Borrowing my lecture notes was really worthwhile because I noted down everything like a model clerk. That doesn’t mean they were processed into something spectacular in my head; I mean, I would have loved to have shrewd and heretical things to say about books and other issues, but it became increasingly obvious that my mental potential was reserved for information collection and friendly genuflection. I learnt to live with this, too, which was all the easier because no one seemed to be bothered by it.

  Mother had frowned on Phonetics. She was somewhat more positive about German despite her own German episode: knowing the language could still be of real benefit. But when she saw she couldn’t change my choice she embraced it as her own, as the only correct decision, and went all the way back to my childhood for arguments to convince us both that I was predestined to study German and Phonetics. At exam time, she would exempt me from all household chores, go about on tiptoes and make me coffee for late-night study sessions. All her concern was driven by her strong and equally mistaken premonition that I was going to lose my motivation and drop out before the end of my degree. That would confirm and seal our common fate–inevitable however much we struggled–because the omniscient hand wouldn’t release us from the enigmatic guilt which had been dogging our family for generations. The symbolic value of a degree was far greater than its practical significance; it became my mother’s horizon and her life’s project, crucial in tilting the balance in the grand equation of sense and senselessness. If, after my degree, I fell into vice or dropped out of everything and became an absolute zero, that would have been less of a tragedy; the main thing was to get that degree.

  I was among the first of my generation to do so and immediately enrolled in postgraduate studies. On the wings of a degree done purely to satisfy the external world, I chose Literature–I had the courage to reach out for what my heart desired. But once I’d attended all the lectures I had no aspiration to sit the exams. Day after day I opened my notes, stared at them, and then closed them and returned them to the shelf, where they gradually petrified. Although Mother had supported my scholarly ambitions, she didn’t protest when I gave them up; after all, she’d already got ‘her’ degree.

  My first relationship tapped me on the shoulder at one of those lectures. It was being held by a professor famous for his knitted woollen bag and the very long hairs sticking out of his nose. I don’t remember the title of the particular course–it might have been “Living Milestones in Theory”–because that living relic of our Critical School, which is mentioned in every good textbook, lectured by simply reading out one of his numerous articles. His writings were broad in scope and inscrutably interrelated. He would take the photocopies out of his bag, lay them neatly on the table and read from them in a monotonous voice, calm and solemn. He eliminated page after page in this way, without lifting his eyes towards the audience, who blithely chattered or read newspapers.

  I had noticed her before. She came to
lectures with another girl, and the two were inseparable. The other girl would undoubtedly have been judged the more attractive by anyone who approached them with any intentions. Since I didn’t have any intentions, I probably wouldn’t have made the acquaintance of either if the pretty girlfriend hadn’t been sick that time, and I certainly wouldn’t have received a note over my shoulder about the lecture being sooo exciting. This was just an invitation to move on to other topics, which we did, and another twenty or so notes were passed to and fro, but it came to nothing more than smiles. Then we each went our separate ways, and that’s definitely how it would have stayed, had we not come to the next lecture and found out that the professor had passed away.

  Without this unexpected boon we definitely wouldn’t have gone for coffee. The following coffee, two days later, inaugurated our relationship de jure. Nothing more or less happened at that second coffee: we chatted like people who strike up an acquaintanceship while waiting for their trains at the station or sitting in the waiting room at the dentist’s, in a casual mode unburdened by any thought of joint projects. Our second coffee, however, wasn’t coincidental but premeditated, with a follow-up in the form of a third, and that eliminated all doubt: we were in a relationship.

  She was pretty knowledgeable about legal matters and put great store by them. It ran in her genes, no doubt–inherited from her lawyer father. She’d actually wanted to study Law, and then at the last moment, who knows why, she veered off into Literature. I’m sure she would have made an excellent judge or expert in insolvency law; but, as things turned out, they took her on as an assistant after her Master’s, and to this day she pedantically performs her duties at one of the country’s Literature departments.