Fortunately, her children’s birthdays have long since done away with all attempts to embellish our own in any particular way. The final such episode, before her wedding to Marko, ended in a bar in trendy Tkalciceva Street; it wasn’t our first that night. Already blotto, we went and sat with the last guests, some boys who were humming to a guitar together with the waiter. When it was time for last orders, the lights went out and cheek-to-cheekers were put on. I danced and was soon smooching around with the guitarist, whose inquisitive hands didn’t waste a second. Several dances later, equally bold, he switched to Ines. On the way home, to my consternation, she raved on drunkenly with detail after detail. It felt like she was nipping the bud of a unique romance. But I was in no state to remember things and the next day I had no idea what the guy looked like.
Later that day, I called Father and told him I was coming for lunch. Like so often before, lunchtime was spent listening to the news and current affairs on the radio. A funereal voice informed us in great detail about the premier’s latest meetings, price rises for petroleum derivatives and turmoil in the tradeunion leadership. Afterwards, with coffee in the living room, I summarised my recent achievements in a few sentences. He added his unshakeable Yes to each of them, which means whatever you want it to–usually that he’d heard it all before. The subsequent silence, punctuated by the tick-tocking up on the wall, inspired me for a masochistic moment to ask him how he was. He lifted a watery gaze, gave a deep sigh and pronounced his usual To be honest, I’m not all that well. The tick-tocking took over again. We each stirred in our coffee dregs until I said I had to go, and he sealed the matter with another Yes.
He saw me out to the courtyard door. After a few steps I looked back. His propped-up head hung over the fence. Words started to come but fortunately got stuck in my mouth. Instead of saying It’s my birthday today, you know, I just waved.
It had been a good six months since I’d seen Ines, and again I was taken aback when she opened the door. She’d put on even more weight. Her daughters flung themselves at me, embraced me and immediately withdrew with the booty, moderately satisfied. I found Marko in the kitchen making salad. That smooth, intelligent face, those soft eyes and hands which make you want to take him home on the spot. Damn his eyes, some people get more than they deserve.
It was amazing how much fitted into their kitchen, thanks to the ingenious layout. If just one thing was moved, something would have to be thrown out. The mosaic of cups and crockery hanging from nails on the wall was complemented by decorative ceramics and artistic photos of food. Herbs greened the windowsill. And a family of terracotta pots arranged pedantically from large to small had made its home above the kitchen cupboards together with a collection of style-conscious glass jars filled with dried fruit, pasta, pulses and packets of various organic, do-gooder junk.
Marko brought in Josip, the baby, holding him under its arms. The little thing waved its tiny legs and flapped its arms, uncertainty in its beady eyes, not sure whether to smile at me or start cooing like a bird. Without taking its eyes off me, it slowly reached its hand towards the finger I proffered; its amazingly long, already perfect fingers looked fake on the body which had only just outgrown the larval stage. One by one, they wrapped themselves softly around mine and stayed there, without lifting it mouthwards or exploring further, as if they’d found what they were seeking and now clung to it.
I felt something crack and shatter inside me. One part of me fled in panic, vanished in the dark and covered its ears. At the same time, a warmth spread through my other part and made everything flaccid; all my will melted and drained away through my finger imprisoned in that downy palm. Laid in a bassinet in the middle of the room, the little creature now gradually lost interest in me and was quiet apart from the occasional gargle. But it went on silently pulling me apart, dismantling me bit by bit.
They wanted me to tell them everything about the exhibition at the gallery, they said. They didn’t mention the invitation I’d sent. They were excited to hear about the prize one of my paintings won in Ireland, and about the invitation to the biennale in Korea. Marko put on a video they took last summer in Istria. Well-informed and enthusiastic, he talked about the towns they’d visited with an abundance of amazing details. Then he withdrew into the kitchen to finish the cake. Ines told me about her new antidepressant.
The daughters came back together from their rooms. After blowing out her eight candles, the eldest was sent off to get her violin; that’s right, I was sure her name was Dora. The violin was a recent therapeutic measure, her parents whispered, an attempt to counterbalance her sociopathy and loathing of school. We listened to the two scales she’d more or less mastered to date, and then clapped. She put the violin down on the floor and entrenched herself at the edge of the couch, her lips squeezed tightly shut and with dark circles around her eyes. Every now and then, her mother routinely pulled her fingers out of her mouth. Sweat stains spread under her arms. The younger daughter, Sara, took over the stage. An endless source of energy, she chattered and hummed incessantly and brought out doll after doll; she animated each of them with different voices and performed gymnastic pirouettes, until these were interrupted by her landing in the remains of the cake. Marko changed her in the blink of an eye. Now she brought out drawings and explained each one in great detail while fidgeting on my lap, playing with my hair and giving me little kisses on the cheek.
That sweet, bouncy little thing on my knee–so much loveliness in her, so much fresh, zestful life, hungry for love. That hurt. My whole body hurt.
All the more so because Sara’s face was reflected in a spiteful, derisive mirror on the other side of the table. Dora took after her father a bit, but the little one here was a spitting image of her mother. Or rather, Ines was a poor copy of her: spent, sucked dry and spat out.
As I looked from one face to the other, the living chasm between them brought forth memories. Year 11 Applied Art at a school for those who have no scholastic ambition and envision their future differently, or not at all. Ines and I found each other in our ‘touristic approach’ to classes. One meaningful look sufficed, and we’d skive off to get our kicks around town. In the evenings we’d often end up at the Mirogoj Cemetery, jump over the fence and loiter among the graves. When we came across a newly masoned tomb, she’d get into it and lie down to try it out. For Ines back then, that was really quite banal, a drop in the ocean of similar things. She loved experiments, especially if they ended in destruction. When Fight Club came out years later, there was every indication that the character of Tyler Durden was modelled on her.
She lived with her grandfather, although her parents were alive and kicking, and normal, or maybe exactly for that reason. As well-to-do intellectuals of liberal convictions, they let her do what she wanted, even when it was as clear as daylight that things had gone amiss. It was important for them that she realise that herself. They almost cheered when she told them she wanted to move to live with her grandfather. That way she would mature more quickly and learn responsibility for herself. Her grandfather was a wonderful old man and always happy to see me. He would bring us fruit or hot chocolate in Ines’s room and empty our ashtrays on the way, nodding reproachfully but without insistence. He didn’t recognise the stubs of joints among all the others. His working life had been devoted to producing souvenirs like gingerbread hearts, peasant moccasins and kitschy umbrellas. He endured his wife’s death bravely, although the flat was then turned into her reliquary. But he didn’t allow age to crush him: he was an avid hiker and was always reading something or doing crosswords. So the cogs don’t get rusty, he said. He borrowed books from us because he was interested to find out what young people read today. Ines would give him Ulysses, or Carver on her darkest days, or de Sade. He would sometimes join us to watch Wim Wenders’s films from the seventies, or Tarkovsky. His head would soon droop. Ines would prod him with her elbow at particularly interesting moments, like the sequence in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick where the prota
gonist picks up a girl, they make love in a hotel room, and he proceeds to strangle her.
Once she spiked his soup. It was something very special, the dealer had said with an enigmatic smile. It was called The Witch, and there was a drawing of a broomstick rider on the wafer. At first we were going to share it but got cold feet and gave up the idea. The trip spent several weeks between the pages of Madame Bovary until Ines turned up at school one day with a giggle on her lips. We dashed off after the first lesson. Her grandfather wasn’t at home. We rang at every neighbour’s and turned the area upside down. We called several hospitals as well as the police, and left our contact details. Finally, after dark, the doorbell rang. The police had brought him home, his hair wildly dishevelled, with only one shoe and not a trace of reason in his eyes; he’d been subdued while attempting to hijack a tram.
Unease reigned for days, but we all acted as if nothing had happened and gradually things returned to normal. Later Ines came up with another ingenious idea: she started sending him anonymous letters. She pretended to be a lady who had yearned for him since her youth, when they experienced a moment of tenderness together, as unique as it was calamitous, before life had separated them, and only now at the close of day, when all joy and tears were spent, did she come to the painful realisation that they’d been spent on the wrong people, that it had all been a surrogate, a lie to herself and to others, and she was obsessed with the endless promise of what the two of them could still enjoy together. She didn’t dare to contact him in any other way because he probably didn’t remember her. When Ines’s grandfather opened the first letter, he stood thunderstruck in the middle of the kitchen, blushing and on edge. He read it over and over again, unaware that the two of us were watching from behind the half-opened door and rocking with laughter; in the end, he tore up the letter and threw it in the bin. But when the next one came, he slipped it into his pocket as soon as he recognised the handwriting, went off to his room without a word and quietly closed the door. They kept coming, and now he mostly sat gazing away somewhere, frowning, his lips moving without a sound. Ines brought him one letter and said: Look, it’s for you. Can I open it? He snatched it from her like a pouncing tiger, and panic flashed in his eyes. With every letter the lady became bolder and freer. She no longer abstained from explicit fantasies. Finally she mustered the courage to propose him a rendezvous, in the coffee house on the main square. Grandfather went there all spruced up, with a tremble of anticipation and looking twenty years younger; he returned grey and wizened. There were no more letters because Ines decided she’d had enough of that sort of fun.
She went to bed or to the pictures with boys when she couldn’t think of anything better to do. Not that she collected them; she simply took whatever was on offer. Some were kept in circulation for a few weeks, others were ditched the very next day. The only thing you could be sure of, was that she would break off the relationship as soon as a guy started showing any signs of attachment, declared his love, or the like. If he got clingy and claimed there was something meaningful between them, something he couldn’t live without, she was happy to recommend him a psychiatrist or meditation techniques.
In the middle of her degree she started getting into drugs in a big way. I only saw her sporadically, enough to follow her decline as she lost teeth, took on a greyish complexion and developed that glassy look. She borrowed money from me when she wasn’t able to steal from her parents or her grandfather. Several times I thought she’d reached the bottom, but it always went a bit deeper. And that went on and on until, by a curious turn of events, she got hooked on some really hard stuff: she was torn from one of her deliriums by the realisation that she was in a church, alone, sitting in one of the empty pews. She was staring at the figure of Jesus depicted up on the dome, and tears ran down her face. She fled the church in disgust at herself or in fear. But a few days later she decided to devote herself to Jesus. And to do that she needed my help.
You’re out of your mind, I said when she dropped in and demanded that I accompany her to a spiritual renewal seminar. It was actually meant as a sarcastic practical joke at her own expense, with me in the role of the audience. But at the same time, aware that she was just a step away from the point of no return, she didn’t completely reject the possibility that this might be a straw for her to grasp; my hand would give her a push, or stop her, when she went into withdrawal. How could I not agree to help?
Cunningly, she didn’t tell me until the last minute that the whole shebang lasted three days and we had to spend day and night in a kind of quarantine. That Friday morning, the bus took us to a Franciscan monastery out of town. A hundred or so souls were already milling here, in ardent anticipation of Renewal. It all began quite unpretentiously: we just had to write our name in the list of participants and pin a name badge to our clothes. Then they let us go into a hall painted with multiple Jesuses, of both the crucified and the hovering variety, as well as the odd Mary and St Francis with his animals. They’d all been painted by a naive hand, actually in keeping with the concept of humility. The pictures were ablaze with bright colours, which filled the hall with optimism. An athletically built young man in an Adidas tracksuit entered, took a guitar and spoke a number into the microphone. That was the page of the songbook Servant of the Infant Jesus which was waiting for us on our chairs, but almost none of the others opened it. They all knew the songs off by heart and sang gutturally, in the exalted joy which overwhelmed us. We sang to the Shepherd and Teacher about his gifts and love, and also about meekness, purity and liberation. Every now and again we had to kneel and fold our hands, or stand up and sway like grain in the wind. And all this was harmonious and perfectly orchestrated although without a conductor, despite the diversity of the multitude. The majority were high-school girls with glowing, angelic faces, but I also saw colourfully painted ones and others with many piercings. And a lot of gold, and the words Made of Stone on one enviably taut T-shirt. And a handful of ladies with rosaries, who heartened each other, hugged and held hands. There were three or four broken-looking men with bloodshot eyes as well as several maimed, dwarfish and disfigured folk on crutches or in wheelchairs. Plus a boy who didn’t open his mouth for the whole three days; he just stuck to the wall, trembling like a jelly and puffing intermittently, while his eyes flashed wildly. The priests went up to him countless times to ask if he was all right and if he really wanted to stay, as if it was touch-and-go whether he would collapse in a twitching heap or commit an obscenity or massacre.
I was just waiting for them to expose us, for all eyes to suddenly turn towards us and the whole thing to end in debacle and scandal. Because apart from us moving our lips very unconvincingly, Ines had put off getting clean until after her conversion. Every little while she went off to the toilet, and she sneered between verses and hissed brazen comments in my ear.
The songs, prayers, Masses and lectures went on and on. And the more Ines got on my nerves with her scantly concealed subversion, the more stubbornly I concentrated on the message, finding hardly anything to protest about. It was about renouncing Evil and its servants (I needed no persuasion), having courage for the truth, because it would free us (who wouldn’t wish for that), and letting the certainty of Divine Love clothe and lead us (that really would be wonderful). I learnt that the world was our enemy because it forced temptation upon us as well as rules contrary to God’s law, and once again I could only agree; as well as with Jesus’ advice that we be in the world but not part of the world. Oh, I’d already got to know the world, and I hated all the works of Darkness almost as much as the priest who enumerated them did: addictions such as alcohol, drugs and gambling; the craving for money and all material evils; violence in the family and society; pornography, although he seemed to equate it one-to-one with the internet; prostitution, sodomy, swearing, envy, lies, and TV programmes which enslaved us to sex and the all-encompassing, insatiable urge for Pleasure. All these things kept the nation in a condition of perpetual adolescence and turned adolescents into
morons.
That’s not exactly how he phrased it, but I clearly read his thoughts and felt greater and greater closeness between us.
The rostrum was periodically taken over by fresh converts who testified to the perils of the wrong choice and the felicity of the right, based on their own experience. A particularly long talk was given by a fellow who introduced himself as having an MA in Sociology. Middle-aged, with mouselike eyes and a goatee he liked to stroke, he described his calvary, emphasising in particular the imperceptible ease of declining from a fine, upstanding young student to a follower of Satan. Every step seemed innocuous because the forces of darkness always disguise themselves as something attractive. Sex, marijuana, occultism, the internet, crime: he descended the whole ladder. And at the bottom, in his case, was yoga. Yes, it had to be clearly said: it was a sect, one of a growing number. They easily found victims, unfortunately, even among sincere Catholics, because this world smothered us in information and caused stress. We were ever more tired, ever more in search of a way out. So we clutched at the so-called relaxation techniques which they used to lure us, concealing their true goal: the destruction of our soul. He only realised this when they gave him the mantra Hong-so to repeat while meditating, which in translation meant I am God. This meant renouncing not only God, in whom we believed, who made us in his likeness and watched over us from above, but ultimately ourselves too. Because alleged meditation emptied people of their thoughts and feelings, of everything human, so they could unite with some abstract energy. In other words: give their soul to Satan.
He said all this much more intricately, with a host of dramatic effects. But the outcome for him had been intriguingly reminiscent of Ines’s experience in the church with the picture of Jesus: he’d fallen to his knees and the tears had come all by themselves.
A Handful of Sand Page 9