But that other truth ripens at the same time. The next day, and now almost every day, I stare with terrifying sobriety into Nothing. It’s there, sneering, both in inhuman distances and in tame, everyday objects–a spoon or the fin of a radiator is able to hypnotise me and cast me into my inner well. The couch is constant, kindly and full of understanding, but as the hours pass it numbs to me. I get up at night and sometimes spend half of it sitting on the balcony faced with the childish, theatrical, but unanswerable question of how to keep on living. That should be indescribably easy because of you and with you at my side, but I’m ever less able to get myself together. I just watch, day after day, as the seasons sail by on your face.
* * *
It was like observing a freshly painted picture and the way it changes before your eyes. Its contours distort into something deplorable, even taunting, and the colours fade away. You still recognise it, more or less, and can link it to your work and that part of you to which you’ve given material form. But not a single brush stroke has left the mark you intended, nor can anything be corrected. Every detail has got out of control and the work as a whole seems strangely arbitrary; and that hurts.
I seek in vain to understand what happened. No sooner had we risen to lofty heights and inhaled the zephyrous breezes, than I felt a solitude in my lungs. There wasn’t even time for anything to get spoiled. I don’t remember a single harsh word or either of us raising our voices. Or anything like a cloud on the horizon. But I watched as it deflated day after day, floated back down to earth and withered away.
Viewed from here, everything we had looks like a thimbleful of air. Whatever I saw–our ethereal unity and fusion–was perhaps an image painted on a non-existent canvas by the wish that it be true. And it was, for that isolated instant. But how much truth can there be in a scene which so thoroughly melts away?
Your enthusiasm lasted about as long as a child’s when given a new toy. It’s true that your Peter Pan syndrome fascinated and beguiled me. But it quickly became clear that there was a less inspiring, highly impractical side to your being stuck in boyhood. It was plain that you didn’t know what to do with me.
Consciously or not, you stripped everything from me. It came off in fine pieces of husk, but steadily, totally, down to the bone. And I don’t have unlimited patience. I tried hard to understand and to move things along and to wait for the problem to pass. But I never caught a glimpse of what consumed you so quickly, squeezed the life out of you, and then started working away at me with equal devotion.
I can’t imagine any ill intent. But you really do deserve someone who will respond to your declared feelings by sighing and biting their lips, who will swiftly depart when anything resembling perfection is born in you, who will join in your joy with a pained face, and who will assiduously nourish the insight into your inadequacy and your inability to counter whatever exasperates them.
Unfortunately I already had a patient like that at home. The two of them overlapped ever more unpleasantly, they added up and aided each other in irritating me. With the best will in the world and all the understanding I could muster, I just wasn’t able to overcome my expectation that the one I love would at least reach me his hand out of his prison.
I’ve never met another person so divorced from their feelings. The emotionally stunted are easy to sort out. With you, your feelings began to sparkle and for an instant showed wings and a palpable refinement I was immediately drawn to. And then they disappeared behind stockpiles of who knows what past evil, behind all sorts of junk which loves the limelight. And soon they almost needed pulling out of a well.
I don’t know what irritates me more than your romantic gesticulation and tokenism, the words you stick like stamps to your suddenly unique being and the emotional boons which come as by-product of our interaction, as if you and they were all from some Toyland post office. And so I found myself in the role of spokeswoman, animateur and B-girl forced to plead for a smattering of applause.
And, at the same time, all you didn’t say and all I waited for in vain to happen quickly left a bitter taste in my mouth, although the opportunity was there and begged us to take it. Strangely enough, I couldn’t but take it personally that you just watched, without a word, as each of us withered in the other and the silence between us mounted. And that you didn’t prevent it from gouging a wound in me and tearing it open again every day.
Even now I don’t think I should have protected myself from the way things were going, with you creaming off all that was pleasant–the aesthetics of it and the fun–and letting the rest go down the drain. Whatever I was so lucky as to filter out by non-verbal, telepathic means, I absorbed like a good little sponge. And over the phone I was like a soundboard for what your voice couldn’t or wouldn’t express. So we tele-pained together, and our suffering easily bridged the rift.
Which of the flourishes of your fading should I single out? Your shoulders bent beneath a burden of existential absurdities, antediluvian but addressed personally to you? Your misty eyes lost in the abyss which opened up in the middle of the floor? The ability to forget what I’d told you half an hour ago? To sit the whole evening in company just answering questions, in a mumble? Or the outright lies–though I called them by a different name so as to swallow them more easily, when you started avoiding me?
But my favourite was your slow, pained sotto voce in the receiver. All at once it ran dry like batteries going flat, and ones like that aren’t made any more, what bad luck. From then on your voice only brought words like the wind carries an echo from afar. You sobbed and choked, but whatever remained in your throat could no longer be spat out and there was no way of extracting it. OK, never mind, speak to you tomorrow.
You took my alarm signals pretty well: my protests and silent Masses, my attempts to give you a jolt, or at least a shake-up, and to stick comical moustaches and beards on phantoms. And then there were the pains which started to spring up in unusual parts of my body–elbow, jaw or rib–and sometimes last for days, making me go for an X-ray in the belief that something was broken. Not even my avowals that I couldn’t go on like this inspired you to anything more than awkwardly stare at the floor.
I searched myself for blame, trying to find things I should feel guilty for. Perhaps for not having big tits in my bra and lacking four to six centimetres on the vertical? Or for not sympathising profusely enough at your moans of self-pity? Or because you secretly craved for a blonde, a redhead or a platinum bimbo? Or because you actually need someone who’ll use you as a doormat and spit in your face to remind you how wretched you are? What a shame I have absolutely no talent for that.
All that was missing, now I’m sure, was your ability to keep me in focus. For as long as we touched, everything worked wonderfully as if there was no chance in the world of it ever stopping. Even when we were with other people we never stopped touching each other, holding on to each other and intertwining our bodies. Our physicality had a life of its own–insatiable, unquenchable, indestructible–but ever more out of step with everything else, and keeping it in view became ever harder.
* * *
It smelt of proper autumn that morning when the chilly air drifted from the dew-covered grasses and flowed through the rust-spotted, insect-gnawed crown of the walnut tree, which had now grown into the house so far that its branches brought every wind inside, flailing at the furniture and raining leaves on the floor. The Samobor hills on the horizon were still a chimera behind a wall of pea-soupish fog; a tremor of dawn remained in the air and, as usual for that time of year, the distant smell of the first days of school came wafting up. Walking on my tiptoes so as not to wake Mother, I carried out my luggage and locked the door. Only on the stairs did the true state of affairs come home to me with a jolt and a realisation of the relativity of death, or life; while Mother had been alive I’d hardly taken note of her, at least in the last few years, but now she appeared to me most assiduously.
I drove to pick you up. My stomach tightened a little at meet
ing your father. Answering his questions, be they inquisitional or polite, and even just hearing his paternal advice, words of encouragement and best wishes rather wearied me right at the outset. What was more, given the situation, entering the house had an uncomfortable sense of abduction about it, of taking the sun away from a person who’s deathly cold, or plucking out their vital organs. But it went smoothly without a hint of friction; his eyes were a touchingly faithful duplicate of yours but too extinguished to take any real note of me. As we shook hands goodbye, the premonition pained me that I was seeing him for the last time, because very soon he would die, or I would, or we were both dead and had simply not yet registered the fact.
In the car, there was a tangible thread strung between joy and anxiety. On the first leg of the journey, to Karlovac, my hand travelled in your lap, with you snuggling up to it with your face and breasts, but this blessing also contained a fear of drowning and an inkling of the coming flood. We were going on a seaside holiday after the summer because, despite my eight years at the firm, I hadn’t advanced to be one of those who could take their annual holiday when it suited them. But that didn’t bother me; on the contrary, the sea was now even more appealing, decontaminated of the package pleasures of mass tourism. But those three weeks of complete mutual devotion came around a tiny bit too late for us, at least that’s how I felt. As if all the years of waiting had eradicated my ability to take what I had lacked for so long. I’d lived for too long without love; in my thirty odd years I hadn’t really learnt what life is like when you truly love someone. My lovestruckness was created by a chemical reaction, incomprehensibly powerful, and for some time it held me in a state of shock like that caused by acute pain; but when the anaesthesia wore off and I simply needed to love, I didn’t know how to. That was a very dubious thought. Or rather, of all imaginable thoughts, it would be hard to find one more stupid, pathetic, and also more malignant; but I didn’t know how to hide from it.
Something else travelled with us too–a remnant of the evening before. The lady colleague who had worked in Marketing until she disappeared overnight, both from the firm and from my semblance of a life, had suddenly spoken from the receiver after several years in limbo; she was as nonchalant as someone continuing a sentence after they’d just had to get up because the kettle had boiled. She didn’t have anything noteworthy in the way of news, nor was she calling to find out what was new with me, but was inspired by the idea which had just shone forth that day and hurtled like a comet towards my fragile planet: that it would be great to revive our old affair. While I listened and detected her intention creeping up through all her waffle–the question if I had any plans that evening–I knew very well what I would answer: that my plans were to prepare for a trip with a person of my choosing and that every other female was an alternative; and when the moment came, I just said no. But several hours later, in a mental blip which my conscious mind found a way of bracketing out and rendering impenetrable to thoughts like What are you doing? and What’s the point?, I was standing at her door and ringing the bell. The same boy opened as before, now a whole head taller and only really recognisable due to the door situation. After looking hard for a moment he recognised me, was happy to see me and made a long face when I said I wouldn’t come in. He couldn’t tell me where his mother had gone, he only knew she’d be back late. Her decision to continue our romance was of no great duration, however long it had been in the making, and I accepted that with gratitude. Though not with relief, because I knew that if it had restarted I would have felt so immensely guilty. And I couldn’t think what conceivable good there was in it.
Leaving the car at the ferry terminal was also a mistake, albeit a lesser one, and things probably wouldn’t have ended any differently if we’d taken it to the island with us, but its lack helped turn the stay into a form of imprisonment. The internet hadn’t quite given us a clear image of the little town we chose specifically for its lack of inhabitants; we didn’t know, for instance, that the only shop there was closed in the off-season, and it was half an hour’s hike over the hill to the next one. Or that the cliffs which the only beach was nestled between were so sheer and jagged that it was impossible to walk on any further along the shore, let alone seek a secluded spot. Or that the off-season isn’t the same as after a neutron bomb–uncultivated folk compensate for their small numbers with extra decibels and a tight family ethos. In other words, we had little choice but to spend the evenings on the charming, shared terrace of the apartment building in collective merriment which not even the orchestra of crickets with its numerical superiority could drown out; we were flanked on the left by two fanatical Slovenian card-playing couples with great lyrical potential for genital expletives, and on the right by a Bosnian businessman and his family; Mr Big had a thing to two to say to his mobile phone even after midnight; his speech was linguistically less exacting since he was a passionate devotee of the immutable, all-purpose phrase he liked to spit out with every single sentence: Fucking hell!
Approaching in a vintage bus, which strained and chugged on the one, morning route of the day, we spotted the town from the crest of the island. It fairly took our breath away: far below, amidst a lunar rockscape already so sun-scorched that it quivered, as steep as a wall, we saw a handful of houses just pinned to it, as if it was only a matter of time before they succumbed to gravity. Right at the bottom they were promised a treacherous blue softness, seemingly introverted and immersed in smooth meditation. When we’d wound down into the town, that precarious little pocket of resistance to free-fall, everything looked skewed, like a crookedly hung picture gradually giving way and slipping; one careless step sent stones raining down the slope; buildings rose up and thrust out their balconies, almost shutting each other off like flytraps; stunted trees between them flung out their branches in a futile search for support, and the parked cars provoked seasickness; the whole set-up was crying out to be secured with heavy chains.
The beach was designed by Federico Fellini. It was actually a combination of a beach and a pocket-size fishing port, although no fishermen were to be seen, only two rowboats baked in seaweed and three worn-out fishing traps at the pier. Next to the pier, you could see a bicycle in its resting place at the bottom: a real antique with dynamo light and basket, although surmounting that steep slope on a bike was inconceivable; that being perhaps the reason why it lay where it did. Because of the dizzying incline, families came to the beach and stayed all day, well equipped with cooler boxes and aids for active recreation. If they forgot anything, their beach neighbours usually had it. People knew what the others were having for lunch and the clue they were stuck on in the crossword thanks to the amphitheatrical acoustics which the rock-sheathed walls lent the beach; nature had anticipated fast food, too, by hollowing out a hearth in the rock face: Eh, this one here’s burnt, bloody hell. The inland part of the beach was reigned over, in absolutist manner, by three or four pre-school children, to all appearances from the same family. Whenever one of them needed to do a poo, the job was done with collective support in the corner. The sea front, on the other hand, was constantly guarded by two rotund forty-year-olds enthusiastically playing keepy-uppy and highlighting their achievements in that endeavour with resilient cries of Great, mate! Plus there was a bodybuilder of competitive calibre, one of the sort you think only exists in comics, with arms dangling down to the ground and a Hitler hairdo, albeit without his equipment and now completely devoted to floating on an air mattress. The only thing missing in this menagerie was a circus midget who would settle down in the middle of the beach and calmly masturbate.
You could go out early in the morning or at dusk. But the early morning pleasures are best appreciated by those who had a reasonable night’s sleep, and as far as dusk went, after ten days or so the beach began to seem further away, edging beyond the border of reachability. By nightfall, the bulk of my mobility and potential for uprightness was exhausted and I would become part of the deckchair on the terrace. I must say it was quite all right
on the terrace, especially in the mornings when the card-players and the neanderthal with his mobile used to gather down at the beach, up until when the sun took over, beating down with all its might as it sailed across the sky. With a book in hand and my legs stretched out over the railing, I was in my element here; cascading rooves bowed to us from below, stone walls promised indestructibility and immunity to storms and earthquakes, there was as much greenery as you like to cool down under, oxygen blew in from the open sea, and the sky met the water in a distant blur of azure. And above all, you were constantly there for my eyes to behold, filling them with immeasurable delight.
Carefully peeling back the sheet, I would be stunned at my discovery: I find you curled in the shape of an S, a body I already know in every detail and still can’t conceive that it wants to belong to me–why me? Your face rippling with peals of laughter yet immediately calmed with a finger to your lips; the resolute line of your chin and the meditative shadow beneath your cheek, in profile, as you chew on your pencil over a sketch of the inlet; your dress the colour of sand, clinging to your sweet prominences, glades and hollows; tiny toes, touchingly child-size, which seem lost in the middle of the bed; calves freshly depilated, and I hear the rustle of silk as you feel them to check the result; armpits which, as you dry your hair after your shower, I want to bury my face in and remain there for the rest of the summer holiday, nay, for the rest of my working life and retirement.
A Handful of Sand Page 19