‘You moved in?’
‘Moved in! I work here, you know that, you smart alec … moved in! Hee hee.’ He chuckled as he descended.
I followed and the sound of my footsteps close behind made him swing around in alarm. ‘I, I’m busy, this is my space …’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a red handkerchief. As he wiped his brow I noticed it was bordered with a frill. I couldn’t help but think that it must have been one of Nancy’s.
‘It’s OK, Henry,’ I said, shooting him a wink. I opened up my hand and held it flat before him. ‘Where is she?’ I asked.
He relaxed a little and let out a chuckle that sounded like a stifled hiccup. ‘Utopia,’ he chuckled, gasping, ‘upstairs.’
‘So what have you got downstairs?’
His eyes set like crystal. ‘My laboratory.’
‘Have a look?’
He dropped the folded handkerchief into the palm of my hand and gave me a nod.
Downstairs was one revamped white cube with three freezers lined up against one wall, and on the far side of the steps, three maps: metropolitan Melbourne, metropolitan Sydney, and one of his five holding lots of rabbits, all in the vicinity of Fawkner cemetery. On the table below were boxes and boxes of pins, a telephone and an answering machine.
‘Got everything wholesale,’ he assured me, allowing a little conspiratorial nod. As he ran his hand through the ragged cut of his grey hair, I caught sight of his new wristwatch.
‘Great,’ but it was the map that I was attracted to. Most of his blue-headed pins were concentrated around Essendon, with customers all the way north to Greenvale, west to Ardeer and east to Ivanhoe. His Sydney map presented far fewer clients.
‘God, Henry – I’m impressed.’
‘You wait, boy,’ he asserted, fisting his pockets.
I walked into my bedroom and Nancy was seated at my desk. Casper was back in his cage. She was looking at the bird books, the photos I had accumulated.
‘We’ve just taken him out for a minute, I hope you don’t mind.’
‘No – hello, Casper!’
‘Hello, Casper,’ he immediately screeched. Nancy and I laughed out loud. I tapped one of the cage rungs and he bopped up and down in acknowledgement.
I looked inside the big cage.
‘Don’t worry, no birdseed – we won’t spoil your nice covers,’ Nancy said, giving the record albums another scan.
‘They’re protected.’ I tapped lightly on the glass.
‘You’ve made good use of the cabinet. Kim Carnes,’ Nancy read, before turning back to the photo album.
‘Back in your old home,’ I offered. Casper pushed his beak through the bars and I gave him a little stroke.
‘Do we have one of these?’ Nancy asked, pointing to a photo.
I shook my head. After airing his wings briefly, Casper flew to his highest perch.
‘Beautiful bird – turquoise – blue belly, bright yellow and chestnut crown. What amazing colours!’
‘A favourite,’ I conceded, stepping beside her.
‘I see – you have given it a name. Jas– ?’
‘Jasna. Family Zahirovic.’
‘What an unusual-sounding name.’
‘Bosnian, I think.’
She turned the page. The backs of her hands were worn thin along the bony ridges, spotted, crinkly, old lady’s hands. She had developed red-veined craters around both eyes. Her face had swollen. Henry called her Old Owl Eyes. She sat at my desk, thin, perfumed and powdered. She looked dramatic and comfortable. She sat barefoot in a long, flowing nylon dress, slit from ankle to thigh, along with a pair of leggings.
She turned another page. ‘Yes. I see her sister … “an immature and therefore mostly green”.’
‘Esmira.’
‘Lovely. “All species have a black stripe over the eye.”’ She turned the page. ‘Oh! Just like a woman in purdah!’
‘Ah!’ That’s a thought; I’d not made the connection myself.
‘I wonder if the Muslim names are just a coincidence,’ she mused, making yet another connection.
‘Muslim names?’ I asked.
‘Are they Muslin names?’ She looked at me briefly. ‘And a black crowned finch. Oh! And Igor perched on a stone.’ She eyed the photo of the crimson finch intently.
‘Do you like it?’
‘And this beautiful bird?’ she asked, her finger millimetres away from the glossy print.
I leaned over her shoulder. ‘Oh, a shrike.’
‘Looks like you took it in the desert.’
‘The Tree of Life – Bahrain.’
‘Yes.’ She followed my finger.
‘I took many photos of birds there. The tree was a real magnet.’
‘I can see why.’
I observed the knotty, twenty-five-metre diameter of the huge acacia. I pointed out an Arab crouched in his dishdasha at the foot of the hillock.
‘Don’t know how it survives,’ I said, tapping one of the lower and longer branches.
‘An underground spring?’ she suggested knowingly.
I was nudging infinity between the illusory expanses of two mirrors when the phone rang. I put the hand mirror down and the hallway failed. The reflection I faced looked hesitant and a little annoyed. I held Henry’s handkerchief to my nose and detected a fragrant scent: mischief. I burrowed my face into the fine weave and dashed down the wooden staircase, eager to catch the call.
A woman responded. It had to be a mistake.
‘Is that Silvio?’ I felt the fishhook dangle between us and I knew that a single yes would amount to a fatal bite.
‘He’s not here at the moment,’ I replied.
‘Oh.’
‘Could I ask what it’s about?’
She gave some details. ‘We’d like to set up an appointment. Could you ask him to call us back?’ The voice was hushed and full of cautionary concern.
‘Will do.’
I flicked through the pages of my burgeoning journal – full of newspaper cuttings and notes relating to Zlatko’s stories. It was possible to be tested in the tenth week and be in possession of a reading that was 95 per cent accurate …
The start and end dates were indisputable and highlighted in bold. The window period ended on the 30th, my birthday. The coincidence, if it was a coincidence, was unsettling.
For this reason I set the parameters for a double date, therefore creating a parallel narrative. I fiddled with time in the hope of altering the outcome. But narratives have their own way of working out. There was so much you could do. You planned, you thought, you planned some more, but the ending was something you inherited, something you waited for.
Coffee. The number of tiny mirror fragments that made up Stalactites’s spinning disco ball was probably less than the number of fragmented conversations Zlatko and I held in that restaurant. One tile for each conversation, measured out in the duration of a coffee. At night, whenever the door was open, the ball would spin in the slightest breeze. It seemed to tempt the faintest degree of light, refracted and reflected on the brick walls, spinning around us. My coffees with Zlatko were often the highlight of my day. Despite the fact that it was located on Lonsdale Street with floor-to-ceiling sheets of plate glass, the cafe felt a world apart.
‘What was that book you recommended?’
‘Bihać.’
‘Next to the Croatian border?’
‘That’s it,’ he intoned with an appreciative smile.
He pulled out the book from his rucksack. On the cover was a shield. The shield was decorated with traditional fleurs-de-lis, six yellow fleurs-de-lis arranged on a blue field and divided by a white band. It was not the first time I had seen the flag of Bosnia Herzegovina. I had seen the heraldic shield on the news footage. For some reason I found the image both memorable and striking. ‘Is this linked to your story?’
The light from the next cubicle splintered the darkness. I leaned towards the spyhole, keen to see what my neighbour was up to. He flicked through a
couple of stations and settled for erotica. The volume of his TV increased, and to my surprise so did the volume of mine; the green vertical notches appearing in rapid succession, as if the TV was possessed. Stupidly, I looked at my bare hands before fumbling for the control board. I turned it right down and resumed my place at the wall. He reduced the volume of his TV and flicked through more stations, before settling on another porn channel; the notches appeared again in rapid succession. He sat back …
A lifeguard stumbled upon two lovers at the seaside and soon the scene escalated to incorporate him. Flexible and accommodating, the two lovers made the right moves. The TV went blank, then fuzzy, before other footage reclaimed the screen. I observed it with interest, but to my surprise it was not pornography. A tanker fired a direct hit at a post office. The noise that reverberated from the chipboard cubicle was explosive and though I was inclined to recoil, I stood privy to an event that has aired mistakenly. Yes, news breaking through the sparks of a Kalashnikov’s rat-a-tat as a tanker silently stormed a low-angle view. It was an extreme close-up of the wheels and links grinding defiantly over an uneven dirt track through the maelstrom of shelling and sniper fire. Soldiers in drab camouflage, front-line ditch combatants forced to retreat, for now ‘running away to fight another day’, though still managing to exchange fire. The footage was a montage of several military fronts, displayed in jagged succession, and judging by the colours of the uniforms, the berets, the sewn-on insignias, several armies. It was evident that two different units on two fronts were advancing on the mad scramble of an army still making bold claims on the town designated by the captions as Bihać.
The amateurish and at times plain wobbly footage revealed an anonymous reporter scaling the spiral steps of an impressive bell tower. Staring through the eye of the camera, I stormed a stairwell in disrepair. There was no-one but me and my complicit neighbour, who seemed equally impressed. Some of the thin concrete treads were shattered. We rose to the highest tier, the end of a staircase, to be greeted by a blond soldier sporting an unabashed, bucktoothed smile. He tied a flag to one of the colonnades just below a semicircular arch. Despite the worn uniform, the soldier’s dishevelled air, the flag was new. It seemed we had claimed the city as our own; a close-up revealed the flag wide as a full-blown kite, depicting the familiar shield. From below, I imagined the Romanesque tower, a powerful image encapsulating the regiment’s capture. Success! While standing on solid ground, I suffered the vertigo of an inexperienced cameraman who swooped wildly over the balustrade, losing vision, until the camera steadied its focus on a ragged group of soldiers on the ground below, roaring triumphantly.
I didn’t know how many hours I’d slept. I was exhausted but still I couldn’t get through an entire night without waking up. I was too tired to turn around and squint through the darkness just to look at the clock. I thought I would lie facing the wall and see if I could drift back to sleep. The net curtain swam through the air above, as if to protect the bed from mosquitoes and other insects. Zlatko had left the window open and the room was cold. He was fast asleep, his head turned towards the wardrobe. Lying facedown, I could hear my breathing, laboured and partly restricted by my body weight. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t get back to sleep with the window open. I turned towards the bedside table. The miniature portable clock Zlatko had brought all the way from Bosnia was illuminated. It was just after three, too early to call it a night. I got up and closed the window, then walked to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. In the mirror, the one with one hundred and one gold-leaf petals, I could see the glass I was holding, but the rest stood in shattered relief. I hopped back into bed and carefully pulled the covers over me. Zlatko maintained a steady breathing, barely audible.
I saw myself standing before the row of shelves at the back of the shop where Zlatko worked. At eye level, The Commissioner’s Report: The Bureau of Missing Persons, sealed in double shrink wrap. There was a seven-digit number, the last two digits separated by a dash, the year.
I stood before a shelf of books, laid bare, though sealed. The titles were familiar, though the pages were unread. Videos were interspersed among the books: full colour, Dolby sound, all of the same genre. They were also sealed under a film of plastic. The titles were plain. Ordinary as an index to a storehouse catalogue, though I knew exactly what some referred to.
I walked into the bathroom and through the smoky light an image surfaced: Igor, asleep on his perch in a small wire cage. Light filtered thinly from the stairwell through the rectangular mottled glass, high above the sink. I turned the faucet for another glass of water. I steadied myself, holding onto the taps as the water ran. Zlatko startled me as his head came to rest on my shoulder. His face rose and settled on the mirror’s surface, just beside mine.
‘Did I wake you?’
‘No … well, maybe – I noticed that the bed was empty.’
He turned off the tap. I looked at our sallow features. ‘Come to bed,’ he whispered, and taking my hand in his, he led me away.
Within minutes, that worn reflection surfaced, initially, but after a confused sequence it was Jasna that emerged, hollow-eyed and restless. Her revving engine ripped through the ink-stilled trees. The riot would have made some hesitate, but she hitched up her skirt, determined to head to Hana’s. It was barely midnight, so the timing would be perfect, but the motor backfired and within seconds stalled.
‘Shit!’
She checked the birdcage and found it had come loose and, for some bizarre reason, wondered if this had anything to do with making the engine backfire. She reattached it to the back seat, but after securing the elasticised rope, feared for its security. When the latch was released again, the hook struck like an angry snake. She doubled over with pain and waved her hand before sucking on the web of skin between thumb and forefinger. She positioned the fine silver handle into one of the crevices of the worn handlebar grip and secured it, folding her fingers into the rubbery grooves. The cage was no bigger than a lantern, easy to manage. It swung like a pendulum from its filigree ring, easy to keep an eye on.
Her thoughts looped over an inflamed pulse during her two failed attempts to kickstart the engine. Each time the motor failed to turn, she clutched the crystal rosary beads under her blood-soaked dress where the chiffon had pleated against her sister’s body. (Months ago, on one of her walks she’d found the beads hanging on a branch; after staring at them for over half a minute, staring at the way the light infiltrated every purple bead, she’d decided to pocket them.) She gave the lever another kick and this time the motor turned. Ignition. Her parents lay on their double bed riddled with knife wounds. Her bloodied sister lay face up on the single sheet smeared with boot marks.
On a dirt road that would take her past the town of Cazin and its three-minaret mosque and towards the River Una, Jasna accelerated through the colourless foliage. Her headlight cut an ill-fated path that she could only lean towards as she hunched over the handlebars in an attempt to save herself from stray forest twigs.
She had been unable to sleep, so she’d tied the canvas wallet around her waist, pulled a heavy shawl over her nightdress and in her slippers she’d ventured into the forest. Agitated, she’d jotted her thoughts on scraps of paper that she’d tucked with half a finger of pencil into her left hand before letting the whole heap fall in a trail, a welcome release. That was about an hour and a half ago. She’d continued to walk in a hyper-inebriated daze, tired and active, aroused. As the wind lifted, the branches moaned in a parched glissando, an accompaniment of dead leaves. During that walk the butchers would have arrived, finding the house still, closed, but her bed empty. It was Esmira’s soiled black glove impaled on a branch that made her run.
A dull weight settled behind her right eye. She leaned towards the handlebars, the pain and fear churning in her stomach. Regardless of the rough road, the heavy foliage, the wind that whipped through the branches around her, something about the directness of the route made it feel like she was skating out o
nto a thin sheet of ice. She could feel a cold sweat bead across her forehead. Several times, she wiped her palms across her woollen shawl, but as soon as she released a hand, the scooter pulled like a recalcitrant horse.
Traumatised, the bird fluttered in its cage.
The hall’s smoky cavern was predictably raucous. It was the weekend. Jasna stood on the landing, framed by an arch. From where she stood she could see the chairs arranged like pews and, at the far end, a stage. Jasna tried to pull her hair back but it tangled in the necklace. The forbidden purple beads glittered in the speckle of electrified candlelight. The movement in her stomach felt like a bag of apples that had wriggled and shifted. She was hungry. She had discovered, recently, an affinity for zucchini soup, the type her neighbour’s grandma resorted to during one of the many shortages.
A woman shouted, drawing those nearby into silence: ‘It’s her.’ They were congregated at the foot of the stage, squawking like a flock of seagulls. As the voices dropped, there was a scandalised murmur, ‘So quick!’ She placed the birdcage on the step, threw off her shawl and sat down. She hitched her nightdress towards her knees. After taking off her black boots and socks, she secured the cage’s handle before walking down the centre aisle.
The woman who had called the rabble to attention decided to extricate herself. She walked all the way to the back of the hall. She had a ruddy complexion that made her freckles look sallow. Her hair was dyed black. Jasna walked to the vacated stage; the woman, who tailed her like an early morning shadow, jostled members to attention. Igor intoned a handful of introductory notes, barely audible above the music. Jasna clasped the handle and the tiny cage swung against the folds of her nightdress. The woman pursued her like an ill-wishing doppelganger before slipping into one of the seats. Jasna ascended the steps in her bare feet.
Antidote to a Curse Page 12