For some reason I provoked neither his allergy nor his rage, and who wouldn’t feel a sense of privilege and an inherent compliment in that. We discovered it by coincidence. He virtually had to force himself to go to bed with me as if he wanted to prove to himself that it wouldn’t work and there was no point trying. But all at once there was an almost audible twang as barrier after barrier burst asunder and he opened up to me inaccessible regions of himself. There was nothing particularly pleasant there, only a ragged, furrowed wasteland. And endless banks of bitter dregs. A bit like quickmud, which he skilfully accumulated. It acquainted me with the sickening inclination to immerse myself in others which lurked in me, just waiting for fertile soil. And he revealed the tick in himself–his hitherto underutilised talent for getting under my skin. When we found each other, our threads instantly intertwined. As if a substance had glued us together. He presented me his intolerance of the world and his sprees of drunkenness as if they were prize exhibits, and I demanded more of the same, although pretending to resist. In turn, that prompted him to pour out all his vitriol and to build up even more through self-abnegation, forming it out of thin air if required. Thanks to me, he even learnt to enjoy it. And worst of all: I embraced a sense of guilt for not being able to help him. I immersed myself in misery, took it to heart ever more, and pitied both him and myself. He didn’t need any help but rather a mirror so as to better marvel at his own misfortune.
Who knows how long that idyllic symbiosis would have lasted if they hadn’t mobilised him at the start of Operation Storm. They didn’t consider any other male student from the Academy sufficiently reliable, but he was indispensable to them, multiallergic and alcohol-sodden though he was. They couldn’t have done him a greater favour. Several hours after getting the call-up notice he was in a train for the front. Today he lives in New York, esteemed, rich, and married to a beautiful Chinese lady who owns a chain of galleries.
During the war years, artists who weren’t able to take refuge abroad had to either keep their head down or become involved in the defence of the Fatherland, if only through art. Some works of art even went like hot cakes: larger-than-life paintings involving Golgotha, the Croatian chequerboard coat of arms, red-hot shackles, and tanks. When things calmed down, four years later, I too began to earn a living from my work. Again, this was thanks to one of my lecturers from the Academy: he had entrepreneurial talent more than anything else. He hand-picked several of us for his master class, where we produced Mediterranean landscapes for days on end–manifold compositions with ready-made motifs of stone houses, boats and olive trees. The treetops were completely individual creations: we stamped them on the canvas with a little sponge dipped in green paint. He would just crown the pictures with his artistic pseudonym, and then they travelled in consignments by the hundred to his Adriatic homeland, ready for the tourist renaissance.
At the same time, my more intimate, less market-sensitive work began to make a mark. Without plan or conscious intention, each painting revolved around a female body which either contained something else inside, changed into that thing, or lived with it in bizarre duality. Take the woman turning into an elephant: her body, depicted from behind, is still graceful, and her arms are even melancholically elongated, but she’s already grown elephant ears. Or the one who’s half butterfly but at the same time is sinking into the ground, and her limbs have changed into roots. And a line of bodies whose skin is creasing or tensing up in places: whatever lives inside is preparing to burst out, and sometimes you can discern an eye or a claw of the creature. And countless clay figurines which are melding two beings into one body, as well as heads with a second face at the back. But the most frequent motif in the pictures is that of a young woman whose bones can be seen through her body. One such woman watches children playing in the sand and hovers over them on a swing without supports. Another daydreams up in a tree and gazes into the sky, across which a flight of skeletons are streaking like comets. A third reaches out her arm towards a bird fluttering above her, black with a fiery crest, as if she’s holding up some seeds to it in her hand, but one of her bony fingers is actually in the bird’s beak. Another woman sits on the brink of a chasm and stares into it sadly, with a ladder jutting out of her back as an awkward extension of her spine. Yet another is wearing a mantle like a wedding dress, but it could also be bees’ wings, and she’s holding two children with bare skulls in place of their heads. One woman is surrounded by little animals–lambs, squirrels and mice–with their skeletons showing too. Another woman is performing in a circus, which by the lighting could just as well be a brothel: she dismantles her skeleton piece by piece, and the audience is also made up of skeletons in different stages of disassemblement; some of them are holding their skull under their arm, others take off and put aside their lower legs like boots which have given them blisters. In one painting the skeleton people are queuing at a counter like a butcher’s table, except that the transactions are in the opposite direction: the thickset, ruddy proprietor, in smock with the sleeves rolled up but from the belt down himself a skeleton, weighs the pieces his customers give him–their ribs, pelvises or collarbones, while his assistant pays them at the cash register.
Although my paintings garnered some praise here and there, they were generally not taken seriously. People thought of them when they needed to emphasise a point or illustrate a lucid theory they’d developed, but they wouldn’t actually support my work. Let alone buy it. They’d come and look and devote them a second or two of great lyrical tenderness…and promise themselves they’d return when they plucked up the courage.
In the meantime, I needed the wherewithal to live on. So I turned my hand to art for those of middling courage. I painted the city’s sights, suitable for hanging over dining tables where veal escalope, Zagreb-style, was served. The hunger for art became almost insatiable after the war, but stomachs were still sensitive. They needed bland, pleasant scenes. The fast-growing market demanded that aesthetic excellence be supported by the patriotic vertical. The compositional axis of my collages of the capital were the steeples of Zagreb’s cathedral, and hussar generals on their steeds floated beside them as if full of helium. But my best-seller was the evergreen motif of the Stone Gate and its shrine, with an old woman kneeling at the threshold of her promised Home.
And then I put together that portfolio. It was based on an erotically provocative inspiration–a bold step into the backstage of the soul, to put it mildly. Put less mildly, the pictures were full of nudity and as challenging as they were outrageous: young female bodies offered all they had to give, fucked cripples, geriatrics, billy goats and demons, and wrapped themselves around crosses. In one picture, three little girls rode in elation on a penis the size of a Zeppelin.
Not that they sold. But they gained me a certain renown. They prompted the editor of Nacional weekly to do an interview with me, which came out as a centrefold with nude photos of me and the title I dream of sex with a cardinal or at least a bishop. I didn’t actually say that, but never mind.
Gallery owners and art agents now also discovered an interest in me. It would regularly come to light, straight after the preliminary negotiations, that their interest had little to do with my paintings. All of them wielded the cardinal’s sceptre and took offence if I didn’t get down on my knees in front of them.
It was still mainly those panoramas of the city which financed me. I sought love, even if I didn’t call it that, in everyone who promised anything of the kind, though over time I consented to less and less.
And then, in the spring of 2004, your editor offered for me to illustrate that Chinese cookbook and decorate the recipes with the animals of the zodiac. Who could refuse such a challenge? That promised a whole menagerie of illumination, an osmosis of the senses and mind.
* * *
I’d seen my share of times when one nasty thing brought on another–when it rains AND pours, with the Murphy factor on top of that–but 2004 exceeded its own worst ambitions.
It beg
an with the Vila Marija episode at the firm, when the Boss’s wife was caught on the graphic editor’s desk. More dramatic still, the discovery was made by the Boss’s daughter, whose reaction revealed that she’d established similar working relations with the editor. This made the atmosphere unbearable for a time, but then the famous smile returned to the Boss’s face. He was made of German stuff, after all.
Then there was the business with that writer. The Chief Editor had discovered him among the best-sellers in Finland, celebrated abroad as well–the voice of a new Finnish generation. The translation of his book of short stories was arranged, and he agreed to enhance the launch by attending in person.
But consternation prevailed among the editors when the translation arrived, because the stories were preoccupied with one single topic: the author’s depression. He wrote about it most frankly and in the first person rather than hiding behind ficticious names. Depression manifested itself in everything his eyes touched and was nourished by marital tragedy, the harsh climate, physical decline, the polar night and chronic insomnia. It had long run in the family: his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all suffered from depression. When he felt he wasn’t living up to their standards, he fuelled it with alcohol, as did almost all the other protagonists in the book, or they used drink as a way of coping with depression in general. And everything in his stories was credible and consistent, from the first page to the last, without a single ray of light, without any stylistic embellishments or a shred of interest in the rest of the world.
In the final story, however, depression was allegorically disguised as a wolf. In the hope of escaping the ill fortune brought by his various urban debacles, the narrator moved with his wife and two small children to live in the tundras of the north: to be with nature and raise sheep. The summer months were salutary, almost idyllic. But in the winter a wolf came down from the mountains and started to kill the sheep. It would enter their pen at night and carry them off one at a time. So the narrator wrapped himself up in furs, took the rifle, and spent two nights in the pen watching and waiting; the wolf didn’t come. On the third night, weariness overcame him. He woke up just before dawn. The sheep were all there. He went back to the house, and there a scene awaited him: his wife and children lay in pools of blood with their throats ripped out. Game, set, end of career.
No one mentioned the translation for a while. But the translator had to be paid, and the rights had already been bought, and an airline ticket had been sent to the author. So the book was published.
One of the secretaries was delegated as an escort to meet him at the airport and provide any help he needed. The next morning she came in, furious: in the taxi he’d asked her to buy him some cocaine, and then, seeing as no other entertainment was scheduled, he’d taken it for granted that she would spend the evening in his room.
So the task of accompanying the launch fell to me. It was scheduled for midday at the Finnish Cultural Centre, which was financing the event. This was to be the first in a series of mutually beneficial joint projects that year, intended to present Finnish culture to the Croatian public.
At eleven thirty I called him from the front desk. There was no reply. The receptionist hadn’t seen him go out. I went up to his room and knocked, without result. The door was slightly ajar. He was sitting on the bed in his underwear and with one sock on, staring at the carpet. I needed to make a major effort for him to focus on my presence, and it kept slipping away from him. I helped him into his clothes, which demanded quite some heroism, given his alcoholic breath. The bellboy helped me bundle him into a taxi.
I began to seriously doubt the prudence of the venture as soon as we set off. He swung at every bend and corner as if he was made of rubber, and once he tipped over onto my lap. Still, when we arrived at the Cultural Centre he partially revived and even made it up the stairs to the second floor without assistance. We were late; the cameras were waiting, the auditorium was full and the staff of the Centre were on tenterhooks. He zombied past them all, ignoring the ambassador who was left holding out his hand. Without taking off his coat, unshaven, with a crimson face and a tuft of hair which stuck up abruptly on the left as if it was reaching for the sun, he slumped into the seat he was directed to in the middle of table, flanked by the Boss and the Chief Editor on one side and the translator and ambassador on the other. The diplomat spoke first, or rather read, from many sheets of paper, showing himself to be a great friend of our country, in which he found similarities with his own as well as stimulating differences, almost boundless riches, etc. His face still revealed a certain unease and offendedness. But bliss played on the Boss’s face; his part was spoken quickly. The Chief Editor needed much longer, not due to the abundance of his words but because they came with great effort. The audience started to get involved, giving him prompts whenever he got stuck, and this turned into an interactive game which continued up until his closing, enthusiastic statement that it was a pleasure and a privilege to meet one of the undoubtedly greatest European writers.
When the author was asked to read, he didn’t move for a good ten seconds. Finally he reached for the book, started leafing through it and weighing every page as if it was a tremendously touchy decision, cleared his throat, and then time really stood still. He read in a terribly tired voice with enormous gaps between words, and every one of them caused him tangible pain. Silence and apprehension reigned in the auditorium, with no one knowing if he was going to collapse on the spot or vomit over the book and its promoters.
But he didn’t. He made it to the end of the story, the audience timidly clapped, an actor read out the Croatian translation, and there was general relief when no one felt the need to ask the author any questions. Likewise, when he responded to the invitation to join us for dinner with the single-word utterance: Hotel.
In the taxi, his head drooped and came to rest against the window. When we arrived I shook him: Mr Uusitalo? And again, harder. To no avail–he was dead.
A cardiac, the doctor said. After years of struggling with coronary insufficiency he chose to capitulate here. The embassy took care of the transport of the body, but first they had to sort things out with the police. And with the journalists, who the story greatly appealed to. They were all immediately put through to me, of course. They called from different countries. Three Finnish film crews descended on the office, and even the most obscure of Croatian papers had questions. They wanted something anecdotal to do with the event, a perversion from the author’s opus, public life or childhood. The weeklies vied in giving exhaustive descriptions of his final hours. The Boss took over negotiations and at one stage sold exclusive rights to my statement, with a photo reconstruction. But my story didn’t prove graphic enough; it came out in a weekly with flourishes penned by our most noteworthy writer under the title He Came Here to Die. This was later expanded into a novel, published by us, of course. In the bookshops, Uusitalo’s prose outsold even Beckham’s autobiography.
On the fifteenth of March, Mother had a stroke. It happened at night. For the first time I can remember, I didn’t find her up and about in the morning. She slept very little. In the winter months she would get up before dawn and sit in the kitchen for hours with a cup of coffee.
That winter was exceptionally long. The crust of snow didn’t melt and the birds were at the end of their strength. They attacked each other, shrieking and trying to grab the last scrap of wrinkled apple or morsel fished out of the rubbish. Goldfinches, hawfinches and species I’d never seen before came down from the forest, very close to the houses, and peered inside.
In the second week of March it finally started to warm up. Within just a few days everything came alive, emerged from the ground and budded. The sky went a mighty blue. Aeroplanes hummed optimistically overhead. And then I found Mother in bed, her face strangely contorted, her lips twisted and her eyes cheerless. She didn’t answer me. I tried to sit her up straight but her body remained limp.
It wasn’t actually that much of a surprise. Her he
alth had been going downhill rapidly for several months. She moved around with difficulty, ever more bent at the waist, holding on to the furniture and reaching out for it ever more slowly with her trembling hand. She stopped going out. Whatever existed beyond the house became uninteresting for her and deserved only contempt. She withdrew into herself and waited for the end.
She wasn’t even particularly alarmed by the government’s campaign against illegal houses. The threat of the bulldozers turning up became increasingly real; they could be seen every day, not just on television, reckoning with structures raised without the government’s blessing, while ministers stood beside the ruins congratulating each other on the rule of law. Our house fulfilled the conditions for being flattened, but we only spoke about that once, beating about the bush and reaching no conclusion. Mother was already elsewhere.
Confirmation in writing that we belonged to the priority targets, in other words notification of demolition without a date, arrived one week after her stroke. It had evidently been decided that our courtyard urgently needed turning into a national park, or Disneyland. Although still immobile, Mother began to speak a few syllables in the days that followed. Her speech gradually returned. It wasn’t quite comprehensible, and her face remained skewed, but soon she was able to get up again and take a step or two, at least as far as the toilet. Although the impending victor was within sight, she’d wrested one game from him.
I didn’t tell her, of course, that the municipal council had us in its sights. But the threat was actually less immediate than the paperwork suggested. Before the German adventure, Mother had started the registration procedure for the house. That had meant months of wrangling with surveyors and architects, as well as the ingratiation of court officials and land-registry staff, and when all the requisite documents had been obtained there was no money left over for greasing a cog in the machinery which was stuck. A top cadastral official made it perfectly clear to her that he could have the matter resolved instantly–or she could wait an indefinite number years. And she would have gone and somehow obtained the amount he demanded if the romance with Steinhammer hadn’t catapulted the house out of focus at that crucial juncture. The state she was in when she returned dispelled all thought of legalising our existence. I could have taken over the project, but I was already up to my eyeballs in work every day just to prevent the house from collapsing. Besides, part of me actually longed for that to happen–so I’d be rid of it forever.
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