A Handful of Sand

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A Handful of Sand Page 16

by Marinko Košcec


  At the municipal council, the day after I’d received notification, they sent me to the staff member responsible. This wasn’t the gentleman who could resolve the matter instantly but a lady who painstakingly gnawed down an apple almost with disgust, while listening to me, and chewed on for a moment when I’d finished; then she made a brief phone call, got up and walked away, calling out over her shoulder that cases from that year weren’t in her office but in Archives. In order for the staff there to look for it, they needed a form with a duty stamp and registration number. I didn’t have the number; in the registry, the information I gave was insufficient to find it. At the archives they accepted the form nevertheless, only to return it to me an hour later and declare that they’d never received such a file.

  ‘How could it have gone astray?’ I asked. Braced against her desk, the woman searched me with her gaze over the rim of her glasses, smacked her lips in disinterest and shook her head.

  I went back to the lady with the apple; she was now eating yoghurt, rhythmically scooping it with a teaspoon.

  ‘Look, is it my problem if it’s not in Archives?’ she huffed. ‘What do you want of me now? Where else am I supposed to look? Here, see for yourself!’

  She put aside her yoghurt, opened the cupboard behind her which was crammed full of files, and immediately slammed it shut again.

  ‘Nothing older than ninety-seven! That’s when I was transferred here, and these here are all my cases!’

  ‘What about your predecessor?’

  ‘He doesn’t work at the council any more!’ she snorted.

  ‘But where are his cases then?’

  ‘In Archives, of course! How long are you going to keep harassing me with this business? Would you be so kind as to let me get on with my mountain of work?’

  Mother was a vegetable at this stage. We had no copies of the building plans and whatever other documents had got held up. The land register showed an open space where our house stood, a vacant block, and it was looking ever more likely that that would be its status in future, too. Our existence increasingly resembled the transparent paper stored in the archives. Little squares were drawn on it in places; human habitation sometimes merited that. Some folk left at least that much trace–small squares on the ground plan–but there was nothing of us to be seen.

  Suddenly I felt trapped in that office. The rest of my life had foundered like the frigate Medusa, and this was her raft. Taking a chair, I slowly pulled it up to the table, straddled it and laid my chin on the backrest.

  ‘I’m sorry, madam, but neither you nor I are leaving this place unless you find me the documents,’ I pronounced calmly, wondering at my own eloquence.

  Unless was a crucial flash of genius. Until you find me the documents wouldn’t have made the same impression and would have led us towards some nebulous postponement, but unless revealed the sharp edge of an abyss. I should mention that it was becoming increasingly popular at that time to resolve matters in courts and local councils by resorting to weapons. Although I was sitting quite calmly, without any idea what scenarios could flow from my little ultimatum, I saw in her eyes that I had an explosive belt strapped beneath my T-shirt ready to detonate if she said another wrong word.

  Not letting me out of her sight, she ordered me to wait and escaped through the door on the opposite side of the office. In the ensuing silence, interrupted only by the flushing of a toilet somewhere nearby, I speculated what exactly was going to happen to me: would she call Security or perhaps even send in riot-control police with German shepherds? How long would she be away for? Long enough for me to start thinking that she’d simply leave me there to die of hunger. But finally she appeared and thumped a bundle of papers down on the table; I couldn’t tell if she was furious because she’d found what she was looking for or because I was still there. She leafed through the documents, eyeing them one by one, and then went back through the pile again.

  ‘Will you tell me what’s missing?’ I asked timidly.

  ‘Everything’s here –,’ she said, holding the pile out to me, ‘but it’s all old.’

  Rejuvenating the paperwork took several weeks and cost an amazing amount of money. But now, with the registration number, I could stand tall in front of the bulldozer drivers.

  Things at home began returning to normal: to the state of permanent inundation and the painstaking struggle to at least keep our heads above water. Although it was impossible to stop the leaks, it looked as if we’d at least evaded the torrent for the time being. But on the twelfth of April, when I returned from work, I found Mother lying on the floor. That blow was the hardest.

  The coroner came and did his job, followed by the woman from the neighbourhood who helped in cases like this out of pure humanity, refusing any remuneration, but with a strange gleam in her eyes. They say she’d been doing it ever since her only son died in a traffic accident. When she left, the house was enveloped in silence. A thick, pulsating silence gushed from the walls, filling the whole space and burning my throat. I went to bed around midnight; Mother lay directly below, down on the ground floor. Needles stabbed from the depths of the night. At around four, the birds began to call with their inexhaustible joy at the breaking of a new day.

  In the morning they drove her away, wrapped in a sheet. I rang work. After quite some hesitation I also called my mother’s brother. I really didn’t want to, but I sort of felt it had to be done. I’d only seen him once, when my grandmother died and I was about twenty. My grandfather had died long before and Mother didn’t remember him. Her brother had a daughter roughly my age in Zagreb but I don’t think he’d seen her since he moved to Slovenia, where he had two or three more children. One of them answered the phone and put down the receiver without a word when I attempted to introduce myself. The conversation with my uncle was very brief, but I stayed sitting by the phone for a long time afterwards, trying to recall what his Oh! at the news reminded me of. I finally remembered that the pensioners I used to watch playing chess in the park near my school when I was a boy used to react like that to an unexpected move by their opponent.

  No other member of his families came to the funeral. When it was over he asked if I needed any help. A rather unusual question, when everything is added up; I saw on his face for an instant that he was aware of that. We shook hands and he left.

  I’d had to make a decision for or against Mass. If only her last few years counted, it wouldn’t have been an issue; but accounts are kept for one’s life as a whole. There were only a handful of us at church, mostly old ladies from the neighbourhood who go to every funeral and never miss Mass. The priest spoke briefly about the good deeds of ‘our sister Mira’, her gentle soul and also her occasional weaknesses. Mira hadn’t been perfect, but even when she sinned it was without the slightest ill intention; she did her job on earth and all her failings were forgiven, just as she forgave others. He was young and had just taken over the parish, so he’d definitely never met Mother; but the statistics underlined the absolute appropriateness of his words. Then he waffled on, wishing that our sacrifice and his be pleasing to our Heavenly Father–it’s nice to know that He too follows the pleasure principle. In the end we wished each other peace, I paid and we all went home.

  Mother and I had never talked much, or about anything important. Everything else wore down to the bone over the years, too, albeit painlessly. But now an ominous, icy silence blew through the house. After work, the effort to dissipate its deafening onslaught consumed all my strength. The TV was on all the time, in neutral. All the lights were on, but darkness rose from the floor and lapped around the furniture and fittings, clinging to them and weighing them down. Torn free of gravity, they were like a leaden weight in my hands. A teapot or watering can could bowl me over onto the couch, and sometimes it would be a whole hour before I came to.

  Returning home from the office was like a journey to the isle of the dead. The house awaited me, gruesomely shrouded in darkness, gaping between its neighbours like an extracted tooth.
The door closed behind me, tombstonish.

  On 8th May, notification came from the municipal office that I could pick up the building permit. Victory! But at that moment the concept of building couldn’t have contained an ounce more sarcasm.

  Everything in me came to a standstill. A thick wall of glass sundered me from the world. From inside, I observed my own movements as foreign, in slow motion. Every morning I had to remind myself all over again why I was alive, how I differed from the boards I lay on, what a toothbrush was for. In the outside world a contest of colour, mobility and haste was culminating: Croatian idols and local government bodies were being chosen on television as the wheels of Euro-Atlantic integration gathered pace. Invoices and advertising leaflets with even more favourable offers of detergents and smoked pancetta diligently arrived in the letter box. But they were only cellulose illusions, flotsam from a sunken world. In the house, everything was running out: to use up the last little sliver of chocolate or the leftover packet of soup was like to forever abrogate their existence. The things around me vanished one by one or became hollow from the inside, leaving just an empty shell. When I met people on the street it felt like I was seeing them for the last time, and whatever we said felt like a farewell. Every set of traffic lights involved the possibility of me just stopping and sitting there like a mummy until the emergency team arrived. At best, I lived two or three hours a day–that’s how much life, for want of a better word, I managed to scrape together.

  The plant kingdom, on the contrary, was experiencing its renaissance at that time. Grasses burst from every crack and fissure to rise up skywards. The ivy wove brows above the windows, while climbing roses crossed their thorny halberds over the little path to the house. The courtyard at the back was choked in bindweed and nettles. The only way up to the back, lost in an impenetrable thicket of blackberry bushes, acacias, ferns and creeping mutants, would have been with napalm. Yes, even I became a grim reaper on occasion: a bearer of ill tidings for butterflies and hummingmoths, a feller of tall poppies. But a scythe wasn’t enough, our yard called for a lawnmower like those that were heard elsewhere in the neighbourhood and grated on my nerves from early morning till after dark; without it there was no hope of prevailing against the green pestilence. But now I kept putting it off until the next day. That didn’t make the problem any smaller: I dreamed of nettles with stems thicker than my arm sawing the walls with their serrated leaves, and a nest of green mambas beneath my bed. But I was still unable to overcome my loathing of gardening and any other conceivable intervention.

  And ants! They’re part and parcel of human habitation, especially in the summer months. In most dwellings people treat them as intruders and pest-control them out of existence. I no longer had the strength to combat them in any way, I just hid food from them, but they found and plundered every hiding place. Ultimately I gave up and got used to shaking them out of the bread in the morning and eliminating them from individual mouthfuls with indifferent flicks. Soon it no longer bothered me that they loitered on the table waiting for crumbs while I ate. Who knows how long I sat beside my plate to gaze at one of them with an empathic tear in my eye–a reliable sign of sinking into imbecility; watching the ant struggling to tug away, or at least shift, a cornflake far bigger that itself.

  A teller at the bank began to look at me with concern. Her name badge was attached to her shirt; I said she had a lovely name and that it made her face even more beautiful. And I really meant it. She smiled at me, I smiled back, took the money and left. Outside, too, everything seemed lovely, the people, trees and cars–beautiful, alive and incomprehensibly far from me.

  Day still followed day. The weekends were endlessly long, but at work I performed whatever was required of me as reliably as a robot. The more senseless the better: such tasks were just right for maintaining a bare minimum of existence in me.

  And then that launch came along.

  It was early June, when people do the last shopping before the summer: just the right time to put out some inspiration for culinary adventures. But that didn’t help us to bring together more than the author’s family and the odd unexpected guest at the Peking Restaurant. The buffet was waiting as the Chief Editor stammered out a few words in praise of Chinese culture, and an eminent Croatian gourmet shared his meditations on the flourishing of Oriental cuisine in our homes. Before we were admitted to the tasting, our heads turned when the author of the illustrations was pointed out. It was then that I saw you.

  You were standing next to one of the originals effectively hung on the walls, with your arms folded, supporting your chin in the palm of your hand, and with a cigarette between your fingers. All at once I was standing on a narrow sliver of ground, everything else fell into an indefinite, mute whiteness, except for that figure, seemingly just a few steps away, which stepped forth from a gracious heavenly hand and switched off the world around her.

  I stood there dazzled, without a whisp of air in my lungs and not knowing where to find it. Nor was there any room now for seeking it; she’d found me. From the depths, from who knows what inspiration, a light began to flow and made my body shiver. It was unrealistic to feel anything at that instant, but the vigilance of my senses doubtlessly overwhelmed me and was already washing me away with a roar, not giving my breakwaters the slightest chance.

  Those eyes. As cold as a winter night, like wells of dense darkness, but at the same time trembling with ardour. I’d never desired anything so strongly nor dreamed that I could desire anything so much, as if I was at the very source of that shine and somehow part of it.

  When the first blindness abated, I began to make you out piece by piece. Eyebrows. They arched like butterflies in flight, and when resting they were curved question marks which at the same time conveyed a reproachful comment, drew sharp borders, and wondered at the futile efforts to involve you in the event and count you as theirs. But totally human eyebrows, all the same; they didn’t herald anything divine, any call of the other-worldly. But how can brows or any part of the body embody so much soul, so much completeness of being? The face beneath them was drawn with a broad hand, as generous as it was intricate, with love for every detail, without a trace of cosmetics, and covered with shadows, tiny tensions and ripples. Jet black hair which no attempt had been made to shape; once cropped, it had been left to grow into a bushy blackness so dark and dense that it cast metallic flashes. What delicate joints: every bending and folding of your limbs testified to how painstakingly they’d composed you, how much love and labour had been invested in their articulation, and afterwards the creation was covered with gossamer, in places painfully taut. Your physique was reminiscent of Thumbelina, but standing stationary you created a flame and a wilderness around you as stark as if a Bengal tiger had suddenly prowled into the building, and that made everything else seem artificial, plastic and burlesque. Yes, a tiger. There was so much suppleness in you, so much density of movement, so much hidden peril. A feverish lurking paired with coolness, a seething hunger channelled into indifference, and a scorn for lower creatures, which still managed to harass you. I watched your gaze wind across the surface of things to avoid the traps set for it; now and again it would dart like a striking snake and claim a yard of space to probe and archive. I was frightened by the idea that nothing in me could retain it and that it would look through me, too, as if I was made of glass.

  Bizarrely, you looked inaccessible, as if there were no ways via which I could reduce the distance between us; but at the same time your figure was more than just an image on my retina, it impressed itself into my body like a stamp, directly, branding me with its deep and total presence. Propelling its entire aura into an excess of matter, giving it dimensions of deafening, pulsating meaning and more sense than the building’s structure could bear, more than the architects of this world anticipated. Everything was at once dislocated and contourless, everything swayed in amazement, palpating this new, weightless freedom.

  Not only did I do the unimaginable in fording that int
erstellar vacuum, but I didn’t doubt for an instant what I should say to you. I felt I couldn’t go wrong. If ever I was to have the grace of saying something right, just as required and at the perfect moment–if such luck exists in the world–I knew it would take shape and issue from my mouth. Perhaps in a language I don’t understand. Perhaps in the form of a flower.

  It didn’t surprise me at all that you looked at me without surprise, expressionless, only turning your head when I came up to you. I didn’t say a word. I stopped, one step away, close enough to touch you but without doing it; if I were to discover that you’re made of pure desire, let this take at least another few moments. A smile darted across your face–I would get to know your smile so well, like the opening of a door to a land of pure bliss–but it was elusive, hardly longer than a wink, and at least tenfold lined with shadow.

  * * *

  So many had approached me with their ready-made charm phrases, each more original than the other. I’d got to know so well the words that didn’t even pretend to be more than a request to enter the realm of the pleasure principle. And when they’d accomplished their mission, the whole sphere of verbality was scuppered and there emerged the terrifying banality of what had been hushed up. Agreeable words, indispensible for caressing each other submissively and fearfully, lest they be answered with a slap in the face.

 

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