‘There can be no other relationship,’ I avow. ‘There can’t be anything else after you. One moment of you would be enough for me to crawl around the world on my knees.’
‘Doesn’t saying pompous blah like that make you sick?’
I guard the dark at the door like an ancient sentinel, a standing stone. In the end my legs give way and I let myself slide to the floor. I sit on the doormat with my back against the wall. Gradually, at the other end of the corridor, a pale and then ever brighter rectangle is etched. I’m torn from my doze by the door opening and a shout of surprise above me. You step over my outstretched legs, then once again in the opposite direction, rustling with a plastic bag.
In the bakery I buy a cheese pasty and a cherry strudel. Oh, and I’ll have one with apple too, thanks. I eat them in the car, taking care that not one crumb ends up outside the paper bag. One of the topics on national radio’s news and current affairs programme is suicide. Today is World Suicide Day, or something like that. The announcer enlightens us with the remarkable fact that depression is one of the leading causes of suicide. Here in Croatia the statistics aren’t alarming, thank God. Even post-traumatic stress disorder hasn’t significantly spoiled them, contrary to appearances. Research has found that the Croats are not a suicidal nation, he emphasises triumphantly (a million homes heave a collective sigh of relief and fireworks are prepared for that evening). True, it happens here sporadically, but almost exclusively in the northern part of the country. The announcer mentions that the rate is a little higher along the Slovenian border. Slovenia is part of the civilised world. And in this respect we can see how much we lag behind it, although there’s a little influence from across the border. The paper Jutarnji list reported a year or two ago that an Australian doctor by the name of Nietzsche had patented so-called exit bags. Dr Philip Nietzsche chairs the association Exit, which distributes free plastic head covers with a personalised elastic neckband–but only to trained users who have acquired a diploma at a corresponding workshop. Zagorje and Međimurje counties in the north of Croatia are famous for their shrewd entrepreneurs. They’re already flocking in droves to Brisbane for agency contracts, aware that the system doesn’t have to be free of charge.
The light has gone on behind the drawn curtains in the basement flat. The door of the building is locked. The mobile device is on, but it rings in vain. I press a few doorbells simultaneously. Pest control, I say, could you please open? Downstairs I ring twice, three times, knock, and then lower myself to the doormat. Every now and again there’s the clack of a door somewhere further up. For something to do, I test myself to see how many of Cioran’s aphorisms I still know from memory. Surprisingly many. At the peaks of despair, the awareness of death’s immanence in life creates an atmosphere of constant dissatisfaction and restlessness that can never be appeased. Some are quite matter-of-fact: There are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Or this one: If I obeyed my primary instinct, I would spend my days penning harsh epistles and letters of farewell. Oh, if only! But people are so damn corruptible. With professional marketing, or PR as they say today, tertiary things can easily sweep the primary and secondary out of people’s heads. Hmm, that begins to bother me, so I start counting the number of clacks. I like the number 69, it evokes pleasant images; I’d like no one to pass now for as long as possible. But now a fine crackling sound begins in the lock near my ear, and a stethoscopic scraping punctuated with pauses goes on for a long time. And now the door abruptly opens, only a little but enough for me to put my foot in the gap.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ I reassure you because you tremble as I sit you in the armchair.
‘I’m not afraid. Just go. Leave me in peace.’
‘Unfortunately that’s not possible,’ I say, kneeling down. ‘If you want, I can simply die. I’m prepared to, if it’s for your good. There’s no other way to get rid of me. I’m not going to leave here without force. Whoever you call, they’ll have to deal with me. That won’t be hard–there are few weaker than me. After all, I won’t return their blows. But tomorrow I’ll be at your door again. If you call the police they’ll take me away, but no one can prevent me from coming back. There’s no law to prevent me from standing at your door. As a last resort, they could hold me in custody, but not for life. As soon as I get out, even if it be years later, I’ll be back. Day and night. You can change your address as much as you like, but I’ll find you each time.’
‘You mean I really have no choice?’
‘Heaven wants it to be like this,’ I say. ‘I’ll lift you in my arms and carry you through the whole city, all the way to my house. We won’t set foot in the outer world again.’
‘How can you be so selfish? That’s got nothing to do with love any more!’
You wriggle free, get up and storm off into the kitchen. You resolutely push away the arm which tries to embrace you. When the other comes to its aid, you can’t prevent them from carrying you away into the room and lying you down. The bed isn’t wide but is more than enough for us. We’re fused together–you turned towards the wall and me wrapped around you from behind. You don’t struggle any more and have stopped scratching and kicking; now you just cover your breasts. Needlessly. I seek no more than the softness of your neck, that sweet-smelling warmth I bury my face in.
‘I won’t do anything violent,’ I assure you.
‘This is violent enough! Let me go! LET ME GO!!!’
There you go again, although we’ve breathed as one again and so much tenderness has flowed between us. I’m forced to grip tighter.
‘Please don’t do that to me, don’t make me push your head into the pillow,’ I say. ‘You’ll only get hurt. Look, you’ve already got bruises on your knees and elbows. Can’t we stay at peace? Rationally, without strife, to share what we have now, if there’s nothing better in store? Only please don’t be curt with me. Don’t you start, and neither will I. We’ll lie here like this until nature has its way.’
You cry voicelessly. One after another, pearls emerge from the corner of your eye and spill. How callous I would be to coldly watch them fall; I kiss them, drink them, gather them down to the last trace with my tongue. You don’t resist. You do nothing to show you’re alive any more. Your arms lie listlessly by your sides. Added to the grabbing and friction of just a moment ago, that becomes too great a temptation. My abdomen is still flush against your back; my erection is so explosive that it rings in my head. Something far stronger than civilised scruples seethes in my blood. Your zipper gets caught, so I tear it apart. Your panties are black and find their way to your ankles almost by themselves. You bite my hand, probably to blood, but I feel no pain. Whatever happens, I won’t hit, I promise myself. The problem is more that I keep blacking out for seconds at a time. Your knees are squeezed together and your thigh muscles strain almost to bursting, but I just need to press with the weight of my body and your thighs yield and spread wide like an oyster opened with a knife. Almost regretting that the resistance is over so soon, I clasp your butt with one hand and pull you onto my member, as easily as a custom-made sheath. It’s smooth and tepid, and I hear the squelch of flesh on flesh. Your sobs are replaced by a sound like a death rattle, deep and protracted. I have visions of muddy puddles, silt and animal dung. Ejaculation happens but seems somewhere outside of me. All at once I’m founded on that sweat-soaked, bespattered, denuded body. I turn over onto my back, do up my flies and stuff my shirt into my pants in the hall.
‘I bet you didn’t think for a second that I’d be capable of something like that?’
‘What’s the film you’ve made your intimate myth from–Boxing Helena?’
‘But even there it turns out that everything’s fiction. Besides, I only love that film, along with lots of others, because the actress reminds me of you.’
‘Bullshit! What about me is similar to that woman?’
‘Your eyebrows. But totally contrary to the metaphor of amputati
ng limbs and shutting someone away in a box, I wish for you to grow, develop and blossom–as an artist, an individual and a woman, and I can aid you in that.’
‘If only you’d let me get up. My shoulder has gone numb.’
‘Then turn the other way.’
‘I have to go to the toilet.’
‘I’m going with you.’
‘I’m hungry.’
I get up to bring you a glass of water from the kitchen. A long, serrated knife by the breadbox catches my eye; it lies there like an evil forefinger–an invitation. I meditate over it for a moment, then I cut. From my left shoulder downwards, around five centimetres, but deep. I put my arm in the sink, taking care not to drip blood on the floor. I wait. Finally you peer in. I cut another five. Only one thing can stop this, I say. Without blinking, you turn, take your jacket from the coat-hanger, the keys out of the lock, and call over your shoulder from the doorway:
‘Just pull it shut behind you.’
At work the bloodstained tea towel shows through the sleeve of my shirt.
‘What happened?’ they ask.
‘A shaving accident.’
Through the window, from my chair, I can see a little piece of blue sky. One of those bright December days which wipe away all the decay of late autumn. The coffee in a paper cup warms my hand like a friend. I look forward to the working day ahead and apply myself with more élan than ever before. The bundle of paper on the table is a Croatian translation of the book Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating. An electrifying read. It grips me to such an extent that I stop worrying about typos and redundant commas. I devour page after page, crying out Unbelievable! What utter bastards! So many people aren’t aware of this at all! At the end of the ch20"indent">I don’t know what I found in you. Your ears, for example, are clumsy. The lobes are too thick, without refinement. Who can like you with ears like that? Besides, what am I to do with a pony of a woman? There are so many pint-sized ones around! I’ve already almost forgotten the smell of your skin. In a few months I won’t recognise you on the street. Any other woman will fill the gap immaculately, down to the last millimetre, as if we were talking about Lego blocks.
The Boss calls me in for a chat. Oh great, so this is it then. It was only a question of time, I didn’t even try to camouflage it any more. I must say, at least he had the human decency–that’s how it probably looked through his eyes–to wait until after the Christmas break. I try to put on a smile like his, and I even succeed. I’ve always had nothing but positive feelings for him. I’m sure we’ll embrace when we say goodbye; I’ll carry one of his cigars in my jacket pocket and light it years later, when nostalgia befalls me.
It’s to do with a capital project, he tells me, immediately getting down to business–our most important project in the year ahead. We’re to publish the collected works of an eminent theoretician of literature, a living legend of Croatian literary scholarship. This is a great honour for us, but also a responsibility to perform the task properly. To make sure things go swiftly, he’s decided to entrust it to me despite my lack of experience as an editor. He’s attentively followed my work over the last few months and established that I’m ripe for the task. The moment has come for me to be promoted, to move up a rung. And later, if I prove myself…who knows?! He feels I have what it takes for big things–and here he leans forward and winks–if I know what he means. But more about that later. Now I have to roll up my sleeves. He reclines into the back of his chair and carefully puts the tips of his fingers together; a vertical furrow appears on his forehead like the one on the portrait guarding his back. I’ll have to revise all the texts most prudently. With all due respect to the author, some of them perhaps need to be…brought up to date a little. In cooperation with the author, of course.
That’s why I’ve been chosen. Because of my sensitivity, or rather humility, which will certainly mellow him and get him on side for the small cosmetic alterations. My very first look at the material reveals the unusualness of the project. The earliest texts were written in fifty-five, and the literary theory in them is only a screen and a springboard for reckoning with Stalinism on the one hand and the decadence of Western materialism on the other. He becomes fiercer over the years.
Success sharpens the scathing pen of this well-read critic, and everywhere he scourges the class enemy, the ecclesiastical clique and the demons of nationalism; he recognises the unity of the emancipatory aspirations of the exploited and disempowered which runs as a thread through world literature, and in the history of regional literature he discovers proof of the age-old brotherhood of the Yugoslav peoples; and so on up until the nineties, when, in keeping with the times, he celebrates the resurrection of the Croatian pastoral novel, the opulence of Croatian baroque verse, and crowns his scholarly career with a study on the Ustashi politician and folk writer Mile Budak, whom he considers a precursor of postmodernism.
Since the old man is hardly mobile, we agree to pedicure his opus at his home, however many working days it takes me (the Boss is generous). But it immediately turns out that my endeavours to institute aesthetic changes have no chance whatsoever in the face of this litterateur’s tide of evocations. Whatever we touch on instantly casts us into a well of associations. Starting from his participation in the national liberation struggle, where biographical pedantry would indicate he was just twelve at the time, and despite the fact that he sometimes mixes up that war and the Croatian War of Independence of the early nineties. Therefore I resign from all technicalities and let him sail spontaneously through the book of his life, only occasionally interspersing minor questions like little lighthouses when he drifts off course. We spend pleasant hours together. He’s a nice, agreeable fellow, and evidently I arouse his paternal feelings. He’s also an inexhaustible, although lugubrious narrator. All his reminiscences, even those from early childhood, lead him back to the same topic. His muted voice and misty eyes clearly show that all other baggage, ideals, books and people pale to insignificance beside it: the woman of his life. His wife recently passed away after forty years together, without children. And here he is now, alone in that enormous, dark flat, in the quicksand of his own useless mind. Since his stories were rather elliptic, it took me a dozen or so sessions to establish that the main heroine was actually from an episode which took place in the nineteen thirties, before he married.
Overall, the weeks slip by pretty smoothly. With only one excess, at our webshop editor’s birthday party in the bar across the street. Domestic disco music is doof-doofing away but the vociferous female colleagues have warmed up with colourful cocktails and manage to outshrill it. A twenty-year-old couple sit at the table in the opposite corner. Leaning towards each another and smiling, they whisper alternately in each other’s ear and caress each other with glances indecipherable to the rest of the world. She takes his hand and rests it on her cheek. Tears begin to run down mine. I’m discovered several seconds later, giving me enough time to start frantically turning all my pockets inside out because I’ve lost my wallet with all my documents and the pay I’ve just picked up. The girls devote themselves to the search and produce it out of my coat pocket with noisy jubilation. But I’m not greatly compromised.
I still can’t get through with my mobile. I call from a telephone box, and finally:
‘Hullo?’
‘I know what we’re going through isn’t at all original,’ I say. ‘It’s happened to thousands or millions before us: two lovers sooner or later find themselves, how should I put it, out of step with each other; emotions tip a little one way, and the other feels they’re strangling him, and that can sometimes drive normal people apart; but we are so far on past that danger, how trivial and tiny it will look to us, how we’ll laugh at it when…,’ and now I notice that I’m alone on the line.
The lights behind the curtains of the basement windows go on, off, on, off… I gradually become friends with the caretaker of the building.
She’s distrustful at first, which is natural in her position, but she grants me her trust and even opens up her heart. She drops in almost every day after walking to Mount Sljeme and sits with me for a while. We talk about the weather, prices at the market, and things like that. Sometimes she brings me a piece of cake she’s baked, and I offer her dried figs, chips and bananas. She shows me photos of her grandchildren and tells me about each of them in great detail and with love. As well as bursting with vitality, she has only serene and complimentary words for her co-tenants, what life has given her, and the interior of my car.
I imagine ringing. For a moment you look daggers at me, not letting go of the door, and say:
‘I want children. Two children.’
I can’t think of anything more desirable or urgent. If we start straight away we can do much better than that: surround ourselves with cordons of our own miniature reproductions and in doing so insure ourselves against old age. I lift you in my arms and carry you out to the car. There we make the family nest. Beyond the coordinates of contemporary residential technology, true, and sometimes it’s crowded until the eldest of the brood are fully fledged and leave the nest. But we lack nothing because nothing material and nothing earthbound can harm us, let alone pollute our spirit. The ethereal refuge of love and pure spirituality we built in ourselves is resurrected to the letter in our progeny, and they in theirs, and so forth.
Oh, if it could only be…
At Easter, the caretaker brings me two coloured eggs, which we hang from the rear-view mirror, and a poppyseed cake. We eat it while listening to Mass on the radio.
I ring the doorbell.
‘The only way for me to accept this, the only thing keeping me alive, is the hope that this is only a dream which will dissipate sooner or later,’ I say. ‘I’ll see your face and realise with indescribable relief that it was all just my subconscious mind playing a cruel trick on me. Without certainty in that, I wouldn’t want to live an hour longer.’
A Handful of Sand Page 22