THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

by Adam Thirlwell

  Mr. Ličina said nothing, his head hung low.

  Projević: What’s up? You aren’t satisfied with that?

  Mr. Ličina: But it was a male!

  Projević: A male, you say. I thought it was a bitch . . . Well then, I’ve gotten it mixed up. So somebody else’s bitch had puppies.

  In September Projević showed the poem to some important people in the Party. A number of them said: outstanding. The rest shrugged their shoulders: for no real reason.

  Projević (drinking his lozovača): Cheers, comrades.

  Everyone: Cheers!

  Projević: So, Comrade Ćićko, this means you don’t like it.

  Ćićko: But I didn’t say anything.

  This conversation was taking place in the office of the prison warden. It was a kind of inspection. Between colleagues.

  Projević: A traitor wrote this. An enemy of the people.

  Ćićko: The one Budišić arrested?

  Projević: Yes, that one.

  A pause ensued. Then they began talking about Budišić.

  Projević: I’ll show you all the variants. Seven, eight of them. Each one better than the last. I just think it’s a shame that Budišić didn’t keep that first one.

  Ćićko: It’s a pity.

  Projević: I’ll show them all to you.

  Ćićko: Sit down and stop acting like a child.

  Projević took a seat.

  They had another glass. And then another.

  Projević: How about I bring him to you? So you can see how he recites.

  Ćićko: Bring him.

  He was delivered to them.

  Mr. Ličina was squeezing his cap in his hand. They offered him a brandy. He thanked them.

  Projević: Go on, recite the final version. So Comrade Ćićko can hear you.

  Ćićko: Go on, go on. Don’t be stuck up . . . If you were able to write like that . . . See, I give you my word: if the poem is good—we’ll release you. But make it pretty . . .

  Projević: Like last time.

  Mr. Ličina started reciting his sonnet in the manner of the actors at the recent performance for prisoners. Or so his recitation seemed to him. He raised his arms to the heavens (the ceiling), laid his hand over his heart, and took a bow when he finished. He all but curtsied.

  Projević looked at Comrade Ćićko. Then he said:

  “You’re free.”

  And they released him.

  Mr. Ličina signed the certificate of release and the confirmation that he had retrieved his personal effects: his suit, watch, fountain pen, hat, shirt, underwear, vest, tie, raincoat, handkerchief, riding breeches, socks, shoes (low-heeled, yellow, size 37), ring of keys.

  The guard accompanied him to the prison gate.

  Mr. Ličina walked toward the city on foot. It was raining and the wind tore the foliage from the poplars. Leaves whirled up and around, like leaflets tossed from a plane.

  A bit before nine he reached his home. He called out his dog’s name: Lunja! Lunja!

  The dog didn’t respond.

  When Mr. Ličina opened the door to the apartment, the reek of stagnant air greeted him. He ran his finger through the dust on his desk. The top of it gaped bare; his typewriter had been confiscated.

  Then, without taking off his coat, he started up the water heater in the bathroom. While the water was warming up, he started to dust in the other room.

  He checked the water with his finger, and then he got undressed and stepped into the water that was warm, almost hot.

  He took a long bath, huffing and puffing, and almost broke out in song. (But people would have heard him. Auntie Mara had seen him going into the building.) Then he rubbed himself dry using a clean towel that he took off a stack of ironed linens in the cabinet.

  He held his shaving soap in his left hand, and with his right he spread the foam over his face, making very slow circles, reminiscent of a tango. Then he squirted a great deal of cologne into his palm and rubbed it in, first on his face and then on his chest, where an old man’s white hairs protruded. Lastly he puffed his cheeks up like a gargoyle and patted them with lotion-covered hands. His dry skin soaked up the moisturizer like the desiccated earth sucks in water.

  Then he slowly put on his clothes, all of them clean and fresh. (Though everything smelled slightly of mothballs and uncirculated air.) Underwear, undershirt, shirt. Fresh pants (he took only the suspenders from the old pair), a fresh waistcoat and suit jacket. Clean socks, knee-high. He wiped the dust from his shoes with an old handkerchief.

  Then he beheld his appearance once more in the mirror.

  He tossed the damp towel from the clothesline into the bathroom, unhooked one end of the line and then jerked the other free of the wall together with its nail. He spread some newspaper (Politika) over a chair; it had been in his bathroom since before his arrest. Then he tied the cord to the hook from which the light fixture hung, and placed the noose around his neck. And he shoved the chair away with his foot.

  THE DEBT

  After a few “terrifying days,” things unexpectedly calmed down in the morning. The doctor knew that this calm was only illusory and provisional; he knew that inside this sick human organism certain changes were taking place, changes whose nature was entirely unknown to science and that depended on God as much as on the complicated mechanisms of the organs and psyche. The sick man lay on his back, buoyed lightly by pillows; a monitor tracked the steady beating of his heart. His body was hooked up by tubes to complicated instruments that, for one, flashed how his organs were functioning onto a screen; in addition they ensured that he was artificially fed, and they eased the work of his exhausted veins, bowels, and respiratory system. In the peace of the bright white room only the quiet hum of this machine was audible, along with the occasional tinkling of glass pipes when the sick man moved his limbs even a little. For a while the patient looked up at the bottle suspended above his head, the bottle from which dripped the fluid transmitting life-giving sustenance, by means of a clear tube, into his body.

  His staring eyes had dimmed a bit, and he was cross-eyed too, in the manner of people who usually wear glasses but have taken them off.

  All was still, to look at him from a remove.

  Slowly the drops fell from the bottle; they welled up and then slid suddenly into the tube. And just as one drop was flowing down along the clear piece of tubing toward his body, the next drop had already begun to blossom. The sick man lay observing these drops. They served as a kind of rosary . . . The idea came to him, struck a part of his consciousness, that the hour of his death was drawing near. Behind him lay a life that was no better and no worse than other lives; he had loved, suffered, traveled, and written. Many people thought, and had said as much in articles, especially after his eightieth birthday, that his life had been filled with work and solitude. But no one knew the price of this work, in terms of renunciation, or how it was as forced as it was beneficial. He recalled, “as if through a foggy mist” (as a refined stylist he certainly never would have used this phrase), that he had been through some terrible crises in recent days, that he had resisted death with all his might, that he had avoided its clutches, that he had torn the tubes out of his veins and spit into death’s face, and that he had wept as he struggled with the phantom of death that was invisible but present; sometimes it stood by his bed and sometimes it was inside him, in his intestines, in his lungs, and in his feverish mind.

  And then, on that morning—he knew neither when nor how—the calm descended. He accepted the unacceptable: for him it was all over. His days, his hours were numbered. He made an attempt to take stock of how he had lived, seeing his life from the others’ points of view, and it made him chuckle to himself. He was going to die, therefore, having filled up his life with solitude, self-abnegation, and labor; for all human endeavors teach but this one thing: that the meaning of human activity on earth resides in law, moderation, order, and renunciation. And everything great and beautiful that is made, is made with blood or sweat, and in
silence. Who had said that? Had he read it somewhere or perhaps even written it himself? But the point was that, at this time, this thought seemed to him at the very least accurate, if not all too comforting.

  He thought how nice it would be to have at his side one of those noble and sage individuals whom he had come to know over the course of his life: Alaupović, or Mr. Ivo Vojnović . . . In his lifetime he had met only two or three people as wise as they. The rest were like the majority of the human race: narrow-minded and selfish, with no sense of beauty, lacking sympathy for others, ignorant. They were people guided only by instinct and ambition—for love and food, for fame and fleeting glory. And whenever they entered his life, they created disorder, like an army occupying a city.

  He looked at himself with others’ eyes and took stock of his life as the others, the strangers, saw it: he was leaving behind his collected works, in which his biography, his language, stood mingled with the history of his nation; this guaranteed him the thing people call immortality. Among his papers there were still a few texts that he kept, painstakingly sorted and selected, in bundles: poems, journals, notes. He had removed from these manuscripts everything that could have compromised him in the eyes of posterity, every trace of personal life, every private item, so that he would remain, in the eyes of future generations, even more of an abstraction, even more a writer, but less of a man of flesh of blood. There was, in this gesture of his, something both bitter and just: after all, he had spent all his days in the domain of fiction, in the world of Platonic ideals, and every side-trip he’d made into life turned into torment and misfortune, embarrassment and monotony. Every real-life decision outside the world of pure ideas, beyond the quiet and solitude, had brought him only injury; every action had missed the mark, every encounter with others had proved a setback, and every success was only a fresh misfortune. So he removed all names other than his own from those texts. He removed this entire ephemeral world that could only besmirch his name: because proving a fool to be a fool amounts to compromising oneself.

  Then the thought flashed abruptly through his mind, like an electric shock extending deep into his core, that he had not paid off his debts. Not the spiritual but the earthly ones. (As for the spiritual debts, not a single person has ever paid them back to anyone: not to God nor one’s own mother, neither to one’s language nor one’s homeland.) No, he wasn’t thinking of those debts; he’d be taking them along with him into that other world. (And if that world truly exists, if there really is a reason for it to exist, then it is precisely this: for a person to pay back his creditors.) He was simply thinking of the kind of debts that one can settle with money, even if only in a symbolic way, like a word of greeting, a handshake, now that he could no longer postpone this any further, now that the time had come to settle up with this world. Even the modest subvention—of two hundred crowns—that was provided to him by the Croatian “Progress” society and that reached him every month without fail (something that was a genuine miracle in these turbulent times and was a real credit to those Habsburg institutions, whatever else people thought of them) had to be parsed sensibly, distributed wisely: so that everybody benefited from it and no one was wronged.

  He watched as the drops bulged in the bottle fastened over his head, and he counted them, one by one, the way one counts the beads of a rosary, or gold coins.

  To Ivan Matkovšek, the Wachtmeister, who opened my eyes to landscapes, the way a soldier learns to read terrain from a map: two crowns.

  To Ajkuna Hreljić, the first person to take my hand and lead me across the bridge: two crowns.

  To Ana Matkovšek, who taught me the language of flowers and herbs: two crowns.

  To Draginja Trifković, the schoolteacher, who taught me my first letters of the alphabet: two crowns.

  To Idriz Azizović, nicknamed “the Arab,” who taught me how to listen to the human voice, which can be a musical instrument: two crowns.

  To Ljubomir Popović, who taught me kindness, because it isn’t enough simply to have a kind heart, and goodness has to be learned like the alphabet: two crowns.

  To Milan Gavrilović, who taught me friendship, because friendship also has to be learned like a foreign language: two crowns.

  To Ratko Bogdanović, who taught me that friendship is not sufficient, since even it can be selfish: two crowns.

  To Jovan Vasić, schoolteacher, who encouraged me when I needed bravery to take the path of literature: two crowns.

  To Tugomir Alaupović, who watched over my soul and my body as he did his very own: two crowns.

  To Mijo Poljak, professor, who enabled me to read German, which was most useful throughout my life and furnished me with intellectual diversion: two crowns.

  To Dimitrije Mitrinović, who revealed to me the existence of other worlds, better and happier, beyond these hapless provincial backwaters: two crowns.

  To Vladimir Gaćinović, who uncovered for me that region of the world and the soul that is like unto the dark side of the moon: two crowns.

  To Bogdan Žerajić, who poisoned me with doubt about the worth of words, leading me to regard them with distrust and weigh them out one by one, as if they were gold pieces: two crowns.

  To Fanika and Evgenija Gojmerac, who poisoned me with music and love; but music and love—they are like twin sisters holding hands . . . one of them playing a polonaise by Chopin and the other kindling the holy fire of love in me with her poems and letters . . . for in the beginning was love: four crowns.

  A drop had separated from the bottle, and another now started to well up in its place. That’s fitting, he thought. That one was about two people, so each deserves a bead of the rosary; each deserves a memory.

  To Milan Rešetar, Jozef Jireček, Vilhelm Jeruzalem, Oskar Evald, Jozef Klem, my professors, who taught me that knowledge is everything, while ignorance begets fanaticism and spiritual darkness: ten crowns.

  To Doctor Oskar Aleksander, laryngologist from Ilica Street, who operated on my throat after explaining to me in advance the point of the surgical procedure and who treated me like a human being, not a sheep: two crowns.

  To the waiter in the “Green Salon” in Krakow, who served me herbal tea the way I like it, and the way the state of my health requires, and who did so gladly and with a smile: two crowns.

  To Helena Iržikovski, who instructed me in the deciphering of the “divine hieroglyphics”—musical notes—so that I wouldn’t stand there, dumb as an ox, before this Gothic architecture in lyrical form: two crowns.

  To Jan Loc Nepomucen, who disclosed to me the fact that upon the magnificent tree of languages every bird sings in its own way, and that our preferences for certain languages are every bit as individual, arbitrary, and mysterious as our choices in love: two crowns.

  To Marjan Zdjehovski, who laid bare for me the deep roots of that Slavic linguistic tree from which branched off the languages of Pushkin, Słowacki, Murn, and my “Bosnian,” too: two crowns.

  To Maja Nižetić and Jerko Čulić, to whom I became indebted for gifts, words, and favors during my prison term: four crowns.

  To the unfortunate Vladimir Čerini, who gave me a thousand dinars when I needed it the most, and who gave it “anonymously,” so to speak, so that the recipient, who was in trouble, did not perceive it as charity or a humiliation: two crowns.

  To the unknown guard at the prison in Maribor, who pushed a scrap of paper and a tiny pencil under my door when writing meant survival for me: two crowns.

  To the judge from Split, Jerko Moskovito, who assisted me in regaining my freedom at my trial, and who thereby demonstrated the degree to which one’s personal attitude and courage in hard times are capable of changing that fate which cowards believe to be inevitable and pronounce to be fate or historical necessity: two crowns.

  To Fr. Alojzije Perčinlić, who revealed to me the strict, penurious, and industrious life of Franciscan monks; had I not become a “poet,” I would have become a priest: two crowns.

  To Stipica Lukić, a Franciscan n
ovice, who brought me bread, belief, and hope in the prison at Zenica: two crowns.

  To the honorable sisters Hermina and Eparhija, who showed me by their example how one can subordinate the body to spiritual concerns, something that I tried to apply to my own life, within the limits of my own modest powers: four crowns.

  To Count Ivo Vojnović, my benefactor and Maecenas, who saw in me that which I myself had hoped to possess: talent, that divinely bestowed blessing and curse: two crowns.

  To Mr. Dinko Lukšić from Sutivan, whose hospitality made my days more pleasant and improved my health so that I could complete my volume of poetry: two crowns.

  To the young investigating magistrate, a Viennese, who, on the occasion of my arrest in Split, allowed me to send for my personal effects, which had remained behind in my pension; he brought me Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and that book would end up having a decisive impact on my intellect: two crowns.

  To the sentry who allowed me to retrieve this book from the prison warehouse, where they kept the items they confiscated from us: two crowns.

  To Jaromir Studnjički, the bookseller and bibliophile from Sarajevo, who exposed me to the “cosmic light” of books: two crowns.

  To Gospava Dunđerović, who knew how to tell stories from the Ottoman times in the way the bards with their guslas once did—drawn out, lovely, precise: two crowns.

  To Luj Bakotić, who made it possible for me not to squander my time in Rome on office work and for me not to be weighed down by obligations, so that instead I was able to learn, observe, and write: two crowns.

  (“At the end, at the real final end, everything is good and everything is resolved harmoniously.” That’s Ivo Andrić. From Days of the Consuls.)

  To Vladislav Budisavljević, whose understanding made it possible for me to devote myself to writing and to the study of history: in my work, these two things are mingled and interlaced, so that one can’t tell where the one begins and the other ceases: two crowns.