The morning they came to pick me up, he was particularly cheerful. He put on a brilliant parody of a broad Montenegrin drawl, full of all those lofty and pretentious ways of saying stupid things, which Montenegrins are masters of. He made two or three toasts, each more verbose and vacuous than the one before. Then Maria got up and ordered us to get going.
Radovan’s light blue Trabant was waiting for us in the parking slot. He apologized as he tried to unlock the door of the old wreck – his BMW was at the garage.
Even today you can still find discussions on The Web about which was the worst car of all time: the Yugo 45 or the Trabant. But whoever trashes the Trabant has obviously never been in one. Put it this way - if you like to compare a good car with a ship, a Trabant is a rubber dinghy in a force-ten gale. After all, a Trabant can be repaired the same way as people repair boats. The body of the car is made of plastic, and in seaside towns you could see specimens of Trabants among the sails and oars in the maintenance area of the marina, raised up on blocks in a row of yachts and smaller craft. There’s just one good thing about the Trabant, and it certainly came out that day in flooded Ulcinj; it doesn’t sink.
We set off on the watery voyage to Maria’s villa. Maria came from a family of weak fathers and masterly mothers – one where the men were married off. It was a mystery as to what had driven her great-grandmother to take her seven-year-old daughter by the hand and leave Trieste, where she had an enormous estate and social standing to match, and end up in Ulcinj, where people gossiped about and feared her. But once here, she bought a property on top of Pinješ Hill, where your gaze goes out across the Adriatic towards Otranto. She had a mansion built there, whose beauty could compare with any villetta by Lake Como, and which made everything ever built in Montenegro, including King Nicholas’s ostensibly luxurious palace, look like a dump.
That woman would go for afternoon walks by the sea clad in the finest dresses, striding the town and creating a public scandal because the women of Ulcinj rarely went out at that time, and only if accompanied by a man and covered from head to foot.
Maria’s grandmother enjoyed a home education: They engaged a governess from Rome, and her piano teacher – only the best would do – came all the way from Moscow.
The self-willed young woman ignored her mother’s advice that she stay single, without children. She married a Montenegrin officer from Cetinje, who fled from her when he was sober and beat her when drunk. He died in a Russian prostitute’s bed in a quayside brothel by choking on his own vomit while Maria’s mother was still in nappies.
Maria’s mother, Elletra, followed the family tradition of choosing a wimp for a husband. He did not die young like her father, and immediately after Maria was born Elletra banished him to the outhouse in the pine forest at the far end of the property. Happy there in his pigsty, he tippled and screwed around with the servants. When Elletra could no longer tolerate a bordello in her own backyard, she paid him out and he left for central Serbia to open a café. As Elletra expressly demanded, and in keeping with the contract they both signed, he never tried to contact Maria. Elletra later turned the outhouse into a larder with a collection of alcohol that the best of hotels would be proud of.
And it was to that store that Radovan now ran off, returning with a whole cardboard box of cognac. Elletra’s cook came waddling after him. He moved like a penguin because he was lugging two crates of Nikšić beer. Since he was short, the crates scuffed over the asphalt and screeched like Cobain’s teeth as he, already poised for suicide, played an MTV Unplugged concert on speedball that made him pogo up and down like a wild thing. If I ever come down with delirium tremens... Or rather, when I come down with delirium tremens, I won’t see white rabbits but a line of penguins with cook’s caps on their heads riding down the slopes of Mount Lovćen towards Kotor on empty beer crates and plopping into the sea one after another like ice cubes into whisky, I thought.
“This car is wonderful,” Radovan said. “Its only weakness is that the boot is so small.”
He zipped back to the larder and this time brought a box of Chardonnay, which he dropped onto Maria’s lap, as she had the honour of sitting in the front.
“Just a tick longer, have a smoke and then we’ll be off,” he said, vanishing into the garden. He came back with a children’s inflatable swimming pool, which he made the cook blow up. The fellow sweated from the exertion and I could imagine that he hardly restrained himself from butchering us and stashing the pieces in his freezer. Radovan then roped the swimming pool to the back of the Trabant and put another crate of beer and a few bottles of wine in it, taking care not to overload the vessel and cause it to sink.
As we were leaving, I thought I saw the silhouette of Maria’s mother up in the attic window.
A Trabant pulling along a children’s swimming pool loaded with alcohol didn’t grab the attention of the people of Ulcinj who, as happens with the poor in spirit who live in expectation of famine, cholera and family deaths, had lost all sense of humour and love of the bizarre – the only things of lasting worth among all that has gladdened, frightened or troubled us in our time on this earth.
Ulcinj was deserted and we passed through the town without any great hindrance. The real fun began when we came to the area behind the Velika Plaža beach. From there to Bojana River we had fifteen or so kilometres’ drive across the Štoj Plain. In Ulcinj, the water ruled like an autocrat, but in comparison with the reign of terror it unleashed in Štoj it was an enlightened dictatorship, perhaps a bit like the way Tito ruled Yugoslavia. In Štoj, the water was Pol Pot. Bojana River had burst its banks, and Lake Šas had also overflowed. A tide of shit rose from the septic tanks that the residents of Štoj had emptied their bowels into for decades. Dead cows and sheep floated around us. It was hard to avoid them because the water came half way up the windscreen. Our raft of alcohol bumped into bloated carcasses several times, but otherwise Radovan drove a perfect slalom.
“If you were in Noah’s situation, what sorts of alcohol would you take with you on the raft?” Maria asked us, holding a perfumed hanky over her nose.
We agreed that it wouldn’t be necessary to take a sample of every species of drink because not all of them deserved to exist. The world would be a better place without some drinks, and that is not the end of similarities between alcohol and humankind.
Maria would have liked to turn Noah’s raft into a floating wine cellar.
“Guys, for ideological reasons I wouldn’t save a single Californian wine,” she said. “Some of them are good, some are perhaps even excellent, but Californian wines are anti-wines. Where there is no tradition, there ought not to be any wine either. Do you also get the feeling that they’re instant wines concocted like Nescafe? The only thing more scandalous than Californian wines is Californian cognac – because cognac is a perfume among drinks, the essence of tradition.”
The rich are fundamentally conservative, and Maria was no exception. However decadent they are, however many transgressions their life is full of, however ardently they promote liberal values, or the manners of their class, and however much compassion they may have for people of colour, the disabled and the LGBT community, the rich want one thing above all: For everything to stay as it is – for them to stay rich, that is.
Goran enthusiastically accepted her thesis. He considered there should only be a place for a very few types of cognac in the new world.
When Radovan announced he would load the raft with good old-fashioned Rakia, and add the occasional crate of beer, it became clear that our apocalyptic fantasy was a confirmation of Béla Hamvas’s theory that there are wine-, vodka- and beer-drinking peoples.
As far as I’m concerned, there has only ever been one drink – Scotch whisky, single malt. There was no need for any other kinds of alcohol – neither in this world nor in any other. When I later succeeded in life, as they say, and finally had the money for single malt, I didn’t drink anything e
lse. A raft loaded with select oak barrels of single malt didn’t need to be seen as the seed of a better, future world – it already was the best of all possible worlds.
Entertained by imagining utopias – the path to which is always paved with corpses, or at least carcasses – we arrived at the Bojana River in good spirits. The water had not carried away Goran’s hut, although it had been a close call. The small wooden structure, sheathed in tarred and rusty corrugated iron, built to the highest standards of the slums of this world, had proved exceptionally sturdy. There are times when the glass towers fall and all of modernity founders with its information systems and social structures, when gravity overcomes everything that people’s pride has put in its way, and then only holes and hovels survive the universal destruction.
The Bojana River wasn’t always the cloaca it is today. Fishermen once used to net schools of grey mullet here, and at night they would sit together with local wine and home-grown tobacco telling tales of the good old days and big catches. But the little river had the misfortune of being discovered by rich Muscovites, who brought along their lovers – badly bungled crosses between the male ideal of female beauty and the female need to please the male eye. These Frankenstein-like brides came with their Luis Vuitton handbags and their shrieking Chihuahuas in tow. Later, prostitutes from Novi Pazar opened their all-inclusive spa centres. Then hordes of Montenegrin tycoons descended on the river like tribes of barbarians set on razing Rome to the ground, and this perfect landscape lay in their path, perfectly vulnerable. The moguls’ excess of money and lack of taste spawned architectural monsters by the waterside, and in a truly just society they would be publicly executed in the town square and their brains sent to advanced research centres for close examination in the hope that future experts would be able to prevent aesthetic crimes – the most terrible of all.
Radovan sped back to Ulcinj to kill one more wretch’s last trace of trust in humanity. The three of us, in a silence disturbed only by the clink of glasses, gazed into the river, which was carrying away the remains of a world lost in the flood. For hours we watched the millions of destructive raindrops compress into the stream of the river. At night, only a few lanterns upstream impaired the perfect darkness we gladly consigned ourselves to.
When Radovan came to collect us three days later, I asked Goran and Maria to wait for me in the car as I prepared to take my leave. I stood on the terrace and let the sorrow flood through my whole being, a sadness that numbed my limbs and then took away my thoughts. I floated in the weightlessness of that potent melancholy, sensing beyond any doubt that something majestic had ended, a grandeur I would remember till my dying day. I knew it was over and that I wouldn’t be able to talk about it because, however much detail and eloquence I described it with, the essence would slip away – it was essential to me alone and could not subsequently be interpreted and shared with another person, not even with the future me. I knew that no future intimate bond would be complete enough for that feeling to be shared, because however many words I used, no one would find what I was talking about more significant than some second-hand anecdote.
Our return to Ulcinj ended in catastrophe. Radovan insisted that we drop in for a drink in Štoj on the way. There another guy from the Krajina borderlands ran a pub called The Second Chance. As soon as we set foot in that hole it became clear to us that the name was not without significance – here you had a pretty good chance of picking up AIDS, or syphilis at the very least. Prostitutes roosted in artificial-leather booths lit by imitation candles; the girls were from Moldova, as it turned out. Radovan was a welcome guest here. You could even say a stakeholder. He and his fellow countryman went off for a conspiratorial conversation in ‘the office’, they told us. The three of us dragged ourselves to the bar. The waitress threw a few bottles of Nikšić beer at us – lukewarm the way bricklayers drink it.
By the time Radovan came back from his ‘meeting’ and buttoned up his flies, I was starting to slur my words. He insisted we have another drink, claiming he had reason to celebrate. One drink turned into five, or ten, it makes no difference. They carried me out of The Second Chance and heaved me into the Trabant.
They woke me when we arrived at a petrol station because our East German wreck finally gave up the ghost. We even tried to jump-start it for a hundred metres or so – in vain, of course. I stumbled several times and fell face down in the slough. Since I was wet and barely able to walk, Maria took me home. I don’t know many people who would haul a drunken pig three kilometres through a flooded town in the diluvial rain, fully aware that he would never thank her for it.
Somewhere on the way, I realized from what she told me later, I tried to kiss her. I wasn’t pushy, just wet and icky with vomit – my worst possible manifestation. It takes a special feeling for melodrama and tragedy for a man to declare the love he has been harbouring for years to his victim, the unlucky object of his love, at the worst possible moment.
She turned me down, though I don’t doubt she did it with a ladylike tenderness that would make anyone she turned down love her even more hopelessly. I then gave a romantic speech, whose details she spared me, but clearly it was in keeping with the genre, and thus unbearable. When cynics ‘open up their heart’, as the phrase goes, they ought to be shot on the spot like rabid dogs. It becomes clear at that moment that the best in the man – his razor-sharp humour, his cold, refined, analytical mind, and the dignified distance he maintains towards everything, including his own life – is actually just a mask. His confession and tears wash away that mask and you have an intellectual wretch before you who has pretended to be an aristocrat of the mind; instead of a rare being whose reason has overcome instinct, you have a rotten hulk kneeling in front of you for whom you feel nothing but disgust.
That’s what I told her later, too: “You should have killed me.”
“Would you be able to kill me?” she asked with a laugh.
“I’m afraid I don’t know any more,” I said, but it didn’t sound half as good as it would have one day earlier.
She was getting sick of pulling me along against the current, so she called the servants. She took me to a garden, where we sat under an orange tree and waited for the little kitchen hand to come in the pick-up. Then they threw me in, drove me home, took off my wet things and left me on the bed, unconscious.
I woke up in Sarajevo, a city I had never been to. I had a clear memory of the previous night. We had been drinking at the Piccadilly, a bar behind the cathedral. The father of one of the boys in the group, who owned the place, had the waiter bring us a bottle of whisky as soon as we arrived and got settled in the booths. By ten, we were all drunk – it doesn’t take much with teenagers. I wanted to clear my head and decided to go for a walk and get a trolleybus at the Skenderija sports centre. Snow was falling silently through the universe. Each plume of steam from my mouth revealed perfect snowflakes, and whoever saw them would have recognized the structure the world was created from by the principle of endless iteration. I walked past the Markale market hall, the Eternal Flame, and went down Tito Street to the Sarajka department store, where I turned left and stopped outside a bar. I remembered with the precision of the clearest, crispest photograph, although I had never been inside, that I once went in there with a friend the time he bought a matchbox full of hash from the barista before a school excursion to Venice; we smoked it in Cividale del Friuli, another city I had never been to. Recollecting the details of an excursion someone else was on, not me, I arrived at the banks of River Miljacka. It seethed and swirled, flowing as fast as that piddling river could, I recalled.
The trolleybus had broken down at the Olympic Village. I was still drunk and needed to keep walking in the cold air, so I decided not to wait for a bus. I set off for the suburb of Dobrinja, taking a route I had never gone before. The avenue was deserted and I headed down it, ploughing through snow that seemed immaculate. When I unlocked the door of the flat, I heard water flowing in the
bathroom. Then I trod on something. I lifted it up from the floor, and in the gleam of light from the upper, glazed section of the bathroom door I saw it was an empty jar of Zolpidem sleeping tablets.
I knew the layout of the flat intuitively and without turning on the light, I undressed, went into one of the bedrooms and crashed. I didn’t care whose bed it was. I remembered all this when I woke up. I jumped out of bed and went to have a shower because I was supposed to meet a young guy called Amar, whom I didn’t know, in the Bazaar that morning. I found a winter coat in the wardrobe and put on my sturdiest boots. I went outside, donned cap and gloves, and was heading for the tram turntable in a Sarajevo suburb when I saw a reflection in a drop of rain on a pine needle, and only then did I realize I was standing on the terrace of my house by the sea; it was night, the 4th May, and the water was draining away from Ulcinj; the sky had opened up, the lights of the town shimmered beneath the stars that had finally come out, and I didn’t know what was happening to me.
TIME
My gentle mother cannot return.
Paul Celan
1
These spatio-temporal lapses continued in the years that followed and became ever more frequent and prominent. To begin with, they occurred just after I had woken up: Lying in bed in my grandmother’s house in Ulcinj, I would open my eyes in Brussels, Paris or London and recall the circumstances that had led me there. I would return five minutes or half an hour later; it was totally unpredictable. Later the lapses became even more common, I’d say almost regular. They could happen at any time: While I was going for a walk, eating a meal or, worst of all, in the middle of a conversation. I would simply fall silent and be somewhere else. The person sitting next to me would call my name, but it didn’t work. Most of them simply got up and left. The well-intentioned and devoted ones would call an ambulance. After a few abortive calls, which ended with me coming round in front of the astonished medics and having to apologize, make them a coffee and beg them to be discreet (“My condition is certainly strange, and this is a small town – you know how it is when people find out about things”), the ambulance dispatchers learned to ignore the calls. “Just leave him,” they’d say to the good Samaritan. “Get on with your business and don’t worry about him. He wanders a bit, and then he comes back as if nothing had happened.”
Till Kingdom Come Page 2