An indefinite number of days pass. At work I’m as amiable as ever before. Whoever approaches me speaks in a soft voice. Their eyes linger in mine for a second longer than necessary, but they refrain from comments. At home I rarely turn on the light. There are no more food items in the cupboards. Whatever I pick up has to be shaken free of balls of dust.
I sit on the floor for at least half an hour with the telephone on my lap, or maybe it’s three hours. Then I call her. It rings five times, I hear the click and then I quickly hang up. I topple onto the bed and go out like a light. At the office I have to constantly fight off the desire to shut down the computer and leave because I’ve picked up a virus or my ulcer has started playing up. I drive straight to Medveščak Street. Your father peers down from the balcony. No, you’re not at home, and he doesn’t know when you’ll be back. He leans against the railing of his observation point and watches me as I go. At home I put down my bag, wash my hands and open a tin of sweet corn. I strain it, eat one spoonful, and get up again. This time I park on the other side of the tram track, exactly opposite your courtyard door. Now and again a chestnut leaf falls onto the windscreen. You could have come back in the meantime, but then the window in the attic would light up sooner or later. I count the trams as they pass, and after forty-nine I reach for my mobile. The number you have called is temporarily unavailable, it tells me. The trams now become few and far between. I’m woken by the cold. The glass is milky with dew and my stomach heaves at the bitter nicotine stench. It’s too early for the office, so I drive to the bus station. In the bistro, I unnaturally prolong my coffee and croissants, and I manage to arrive after one of the secretaries. I don’t take a lunch break because I have to leave a bit earlier. The attic window is open, but it’s still a while until it will perhaps come alight. The person we’ve called has turned off their mobile device. I consider the possibility of climbing up onto the roof via the drainpipe. Even if I found the ability, it looks pretty decrepit. The night is already quite black but the window doesn’t light up. I take my mobile and order a pizza from the number I know by heart; Quattro Stagione with an extra portion of olives and a can of Zlatorog beer. Without removing his helmet, the delivery boy eyes me with amusement as if I was an exotic, ill-starred early version of the human product I’m proud to belong to. While eating, I listen to the evening news on the radio. After the weather forecast I turn it off and recline the seat a little. My back hurts; I fold my arms behind my head, making sure to keep the approaches to the house in view. The mobile device is turned off, like before. A drizzle sets in.
It takes me a few seconds to recognise you. Or rather, to think what to do with that information. I jump out of my car but have to let a tram pass before I can dash across the street. Only now do I perceive the male figure who has stopped at the door at the same time as you, although he’s almost twice as tall, or perhaps precisely for that reason–it’s hard to convince my eyes that he’s of the same species. That doesn’t prevent him from pressing his lips against yours, while coiling like a cobra. Enormous limbs crawl everywhere, doubtless seeking the softest spot for the bite. You hug that hulk, at least as far as you can put your arms around him, and press your face into his belly. You wait at the fence for him to turn round and send you another drop of venom with his fingers. In return, you lean your head towards your shoulder in that painfully familiar way. Then you disappear.
I imagine following him, keeping ten metres’ distance. That isn’t hard, although he wears the largest shoe size; he’s not in hurry. Rather, you’d say he’s maintained a healthy attitude to time. Is he one of a race of perverse giants who go around collecting Thumbelinas? Are there any more on his list for the evening? The rain doesn’t bother him. He’s probably a water-polo player and water is his element. He crosses Ban Jelacic Square diagonally, in just a few steps, and enters the Bulldog Pub. The acorn returns to the oak. I find him underground, in the catacombs adapted to the consumption of drink. I sit alone behind one of the partitions. He doesn’t see me, preoccupied with writing in his notebook. Devotedly, with evident elation and inspiration, he fills one page after another. He raises his head and immediately lowers it again, only looking up again when the waiter brings him his Cockta. What, a soft drink?! He brings me a vermouth, although I’ve never had one before. For a while I look at the virgin glass; I exhale all the air in my lungs and follow him to the toilet. I stand up on the toilet bowl and climb up onto the cistern, and there he is. Back in the bar, I wait for our eyes to meet. There isn’t much surprise in his, perhaps a touch of melancholy. He doesn’t try to protect himself and keeps both hands on the table even when a red bud blooms on his collarbone and is joined by one on his chest. And another on his forehead. His head just sinks against the back of the chair. I discard the gun like the core of an apple and leave with a step both resolute and calm.
The rain has intensified. Gusts of wind bend the branches. Chestnuts drum down on the roof, even whole burrs. An umbrella stops in front of the courtyard, goes inside, and only now do I realise who’s underneath it. I yell your name from the tram track. Despite that tremble, you only manage a glare. Your eyes are compact, armoured and cold.
‘Can we talk?’
‘About what?’
I can’t squeeze it all into one sentence and only just persuade you to listen to a few as we sit down in a nearby bar, although it doesn’t deserve that name: the low building concealed in a park behind residential blocks successfully conserves the communal aesthetics of communist Yugoslavia. Wood-panelled walls and ceilings, rustic carvings, chequered tablecloths and an overweight, moustached waiter in a white shirt open to reveal his hairy chest. The woman in the speakers miaows about her man having cheated on her, stolen from her and beaten her, but she loves him all the more. Encouraged by such kindliness, I launch into a confession of my guilt, in extenso.
‘You’re all mine, I’m deeply aware of that, and also of all I’ve done wrong, or failed to do. And all the pain I’ve caused you, and the terrible loss, for both of us. If anything has ever been clear to me, it’s how much guilt I bear.’
You tell me I sound more Catholic than Radio Maria, but I pretend not to hear.
‘Only one thing is worse than the damage inflicted: the possibility that it remain unredressed and knowing we have to live with it until the end of our days. Under it, to be precise: crushed and ground. How can we live with the memory of something so exalted and magnificent as our love, and its consequent absence? How can we stop staring into that cleft when it’s as big as life itself and can’t be diminished even by the sum total of everything else experienced? The rest of my time would be a flat, empty road without a goal if I had to spend it without you. The only way out of this sorrow would be sorrow for myself. I would inevitably see my lack of you everywhere and in everything, and I would view everyone by how much they differ from you. I would no longer find a shred of feeling for people because all that I’m capable of feeling belongs to you alone; I can’t exist without you. Please just let me live, for you, because I can’t live any other way. I’m saying this because I know your desire hasn’t disappeared, I know it in my bones, in my every neuron. Otherwise I wouldn’t approach you like this. I’d vanish from the face of the earth in shame, and also so as not to trouble you with my presence–if I wasn’t absolutely certain that we belong to each other, that we were made for each other…’
You say something about there being a similar bit in Woody Allen, but still I continue…
‘…to be there for each other. To give meaning to the other’s existence. So we can learn what the real meaning is. You’ll say that’s cheap or even vulgar, but it’s true: only now do I feel with all my body how much we’re connected, when you’re wrenched away from me.’
You tell me I’m being histrionic…
‘If only you knew how base even the most dramatic words are, how far from what’s inside me! How beautiful that is, although it hurts insanely! Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a masochist. But I wouldn�
��t give up a single bit of the pain if it meant being robbed of what I see before us, from now until our final day. This isn’t coming from my loss and longing; it’s all been inside me. It just couldn’t find a way out to show itself, to really come awake, to overpower what’s smothering me. Maybe it had to be like this–maybe I needed this to happen so I’d know what it means to fight.’
You claim not to have needed it at all, whether I did or not…
‘Please give me just a little longer, a scrap of space at your side, so I can show you a different part of me. Please don’t discard me without giving me one more chance, I beg you. I understand, at the moment you think your feelings for me can’t return. But what now burns inside me is a hundred times, a thousand times stronger than what you’ve seen so far. It far exceeds what any human being can feel. It’s not mine, it’s not personal any more, I’m only the medium it resonates in because I’ve picked up the frequency. I’ve opened myself and surrendered to love in its purest form, the love which has existed since the world was born, which created us and is all around us, but we’re unaware of it because it’s beyond belief until something happens; only now do I realise how blind I was.’
You say that’s a shame, get up, grab your bag and umbrella, and disappear.
A van drives past with the picture of a rotisserie and the name Balkan Grill on the side. I enter the number and let them recite everything they have on offer. Then I choose shish kebab. They haven’t got Zlatorog, so I accept a Stella Artois.
The morning is wet but the sun has risen and the sparrows are lively. I call the office and report that I’m stuck in bed with the dreaded lurgy. I imagine lurking outside your father’s house. Finally I see him returning home with a shopping bag on wheels. I step over the fence and hide behind the cypresses. Here he comes now, groaning with every step. He needs time to fit the key into the lock. While he pulls the bag in behind him, I grasp the door and then lock it from the inside. He trembles with rage but doesn’t dare to shout. We’ll talk upstairs, I say. He doesn’t offer me a drink or say a word. Seated at the kitchen table, he just follows my steps as I pace around in semicircles. I tear the wire out of the telephone. With three strides I’m up in the attic. Innumerable objects but an impression of orderliness, the sofa bed is folded up. He doesn’t move; a bottle of milk protrudes from his bag. The fridge is hardly inhabited: margarine, a piece of sausage, a mouldy beetroot in a jar, and something cooked but intended for animal food, judging by the smell. I find a glass in the cupboard and pour myself some water at the sink. I drink slowly behind his back. His skull is stately and bald at the top; one blow with a stick and it would burst like a watermelon. He protests but doesn’t resist excessively when I tie his hands behind the back of the chair with telephone wire. He endures it all bravely, with a minimum of yowling, and answers me only with scornful glances. In vain. He’s of the breed of parents who would really step in front of the bullet meant for their child.
Waiting out in the car again. I run out of cigarettes but don’t dare to be away even for as long as it takes to zip over to the kiosk at the corner and back. I manage to recruit a boy from the neighbourhood by promising a fat reward. The guest on Radio 101 is the manager of the crematorium. Radio Three is playing opera music. The search button only leads to advertising. They’re taking me down, my friend, says a very deep male voice, and as they usher me off to my end, will I bid you adieu? I quickly press it again. There, on the pavement, fifty metres away: I recognise you by your walk, although the details have yet to get past my short-sightedness. A light-coloured velour jacket, black pants and a bag over your shoulder, both actually grey compared to your hair. You unlock the courtyard door and then that of the house.
Times passes. Sweat from my brow drips into my eyes. I notice my middle finger is tapping hard and fast on the steering wheel. It doesn’t stop even when I cast it a reproachful glance. The door of the house opens. I bend my head down to the gear lever and wait. Now you’re at the tram stop for the city-bound trams, with your back to me. I still stay nestled in the seat until number fourteen comes. It moves off again and I drive along after it. Panic thinking is no good for coming up with instant strategies. Only when we reach Ribnjak Park do I realise I’m not going to be able to follow the tram further than Vlaška Street because of the one-way system. With squealing tyres I veer off into the street on the left to the honking of oncoming cars. There’s nowhere to leave the car and I have to double-park in the hope they’ll find their way out somehow. I run after the tram like it’s the last ferryboat to ever leave Hades but the gangway has been raised in front of my nose. When I reach the interchange, I grab onto a metal post to get my breath. You’re gone–no, there you are, at the top end of Draškoviceva Street. I lose sight of you for a moment as you head round the corner to the right. I give you a fifty-metre berth. We walk along, past Kvaternikov Square and a major intersection, and then you disappear into one of the buildings close by the road. I look at the names on the doorbell panel next to the Meblo furniture shop: yours isn’t there. The door is locked.
The car has been reparked for me, the autosnatchers confirm on the phone. I go back down to town, hop into a number eight tram and set off on the mission of redeeming the car. A ticket inspector comes. That’s almost comforting–some divine eye is still overseeing and organising things after all.
The name Meblo stays beneath my closed eyelids, a flickering orange, until its letters slowly fade. I repeat the game, who knows how many times. From 11.30pm till midnight Radio Three presents a French critic’s essay on the political economy of music.
You appear at the door at nine fifteen. I head across the street; you’ve already entered the bakery at the end of the building. As you leave, you see I’ve found you and flail back with your bag. Without any other comment, you let me follow you down the corridor and in through your door. After the dark of the basement, the windows are blinding. Not waiting for your permission, I flop into the armchair. You stay at the doorpost with your arms crossed. I feel very awkward in my raincoat with the jacket underneath but don’t feel it’s right to take anything off. The pincers of your gaze, the gallery of ghastly yet vaguely familiar faces on the canvases standing by the walls, the light in your eyes from through the barred windows, my raincoat–I feel like a police inspector brought in for questioning, caught in a web of his own lies. My time is ticking away, but nothing more than a mumble passes my lips. Instead of everything I’ve thought up, phrased and finely honed for days, I burst out crying, loudly and fitfully. I tremble from head to toe as I saturate my clothes, the armchair and the carpet with tears. Now some words do begin to come, breaking out in little spurts as I gurgle between sobs, and a whimper is suffixed to every utterance.
‘I’m sorry, it wasn’t supposed to turn out like this,’ I barely manage to pronounce, ‘I really didn’t mean it to be this way.’
‘There, there. Come on now,’ you say. You help me get up and tenderly see me out.
At work I intercept multiple police-like glances; there are conversations which abruptly break off as soon as I appear. My eyes send out threats to everyone, and it works. Just leave me alone.
I ring. You hold the door for a moment, and then open.
‘Tea?’
I’m perfectly composed, upright and confident as I twirl the teaspoon in the cup and place the squeezed-out teabag on the saucer. A subtle, highly aestheticised scene of Kieslowski quality, or perhaps even Greenaway. We both smile quietly; what grace, are we going to exchange bows like geishas next?
‘Promise me something –,’ I finally say, ‘just one thing, and then I’ll never darken your door again. Promise that you’ll get in touch if you ever desire me again. Purely hypothetically. It doesn’t cost you anything, it can’t hurt you, and I need it in order to stay alive. I need at least the possibility of that happening, whenever it may be, even if it means I wait in vain for decades. Without it, my life is completely worthless.
‘I promise.’
A clos
e-up of tea in a cup, a pregnant atmosphere and the mysteries of the murky liquid.
Outside I deeply inhale the fragrant air. I extend my hand to stroke a passing child’s cheek. I walk round the building, unlock the car and settle comfortably into the seat. I open a bag of pistachios and shell them with relish. The parking lot is small, embraced on all sides by buildings–very cosy. A joint extension of living rooms, where their sounds meet and flow together into a symphony, a unique and irrepressible ode to life: televisions, vacuum cleaners, birds in their cages, the clangour of crockery and kitchen utensils, laughter, burping, the scolding of children and domestic pets. This nascent botanical garden wedged in between cars is just like a vase on the table.
I ring. You hold the door for a moment, and then open.
‘I’m dead. There’s no one inside any more,’ I declare. ‘That wouldn’t be anything special–I mean, it’s like that with the vast majority of people, and they show no signs of it bothering them–if I hadn’t felt for an instant what it was like to be alive. I was dead before, too, but I can’t take it any more since I know what it means to be uplifted, freed of everything which rivets us to the ground. Isn’t that the essence of what we all long for, consciously or not? To break out of our imprisoned selves, the armour of our own egos, to crawl out from beneath the burdens which crush us? Let’s detach ourselves from earth-boundedness, the two of us, and, refreshed, rise up to stay in levitation forever!’
Carried away, I take liberties and lift you in my arms. You don’t weigh a gram.
‘Put me down. This instant!’
‘You see, I would carry you for as long as I have arms,’ I say. ‘Never would I let you fall. Not with what I know now. It hurts too much not to have you: it’s such a hard lesson and I can never forget it.’
‘The most I can do for you is to wish that you capitalise that wisdom in some other relationship.’
A Handful of Sand Page 21