Impossible Stories

by Zoran Zivkovic

  “Of course I won’t find you dead, Katarina,” I said, in a voice I hoped was the epitome of conviction and self-confidence. “You will be alive and well when I come to visit you tomorrow. How could it be otherwise? We will continue our conversation then. It is extremely interesting.”

  She did not reply to this. A shadow of sorrow and compassion seemed to pass over her face, like a teacher who finally realizes that all her efforts have been in vain, that her pupil is too dull-witted to understand the simple things she has explained to him.

  I took the file and got up from the floor. I gave two sharp knocks on the doorframe and the attendant’s face appeared in the peep-hole almost the same moment. Evidently he had been standing in front of the door. I nodded my head. When the heavy door opened, I turned towards the girl.

  “Good-bye Katarina,” I said cheerfully.

  “Farewell, Doctor,” she replied, no less cheerfully. Two friends who were parting after a pleasant chat, smiling warmly at one another.

  I didn’t find her dead the next day. She hadn’t meant it literally. When I arrived at the sanatorium her body had already been taken away. The initial doubts about the cause of death had been solved as well. When her breakfast had been taken in at eight o’clock they’d found her curled up on the floor in the position in which she always slept. With her back to the door. One look at her face was enough for them to realize that she was no longer alive—Katarina’s pretty face was completely deformed, grotesquely bloated and distended. Whatever had caused this ugly death mask was no longer in isolation cell number seven, so it was not clear what had actually happened until the forensics report arrived.

  Katarina was allergic to wasp venom. Sometime early in the morning, between six and half past seven, an insect, which could only have flown in through the opening up by the ceiling, had stung her on the left cheek. She died some twenty minutes later. Certainly before seven. There was only one problem. The girl must have been wakened by the sting. Why hadn’t she called for help, since she was perfectly aware of the risk she ran? She’d had enough time, but had done nothing.

  I was the one they expected to answer this question. I did so in my first and last report on Katarina. The reason she hadn’t reacted was most likely because the sting enabled the execution of her previously failed attempt. It was a very unusual suicide that had taken advantage of an unbelievable tangle of circumstances. Indeed, what are the chances that a wasp will find its way through such a small opening right into a room with an individual who is allergic to its sting? Completely infinitesimal, one would say. But it happened just the same. Perhaps such holes should be closed up for this reason. In any case they are almost useless. And you never know when and how such an inconceivable incident might occur again.

  I said nothing about the motives that had led the girl to raise her hand against herself on two occasions. What could I have said, anyway? I’d had only one chance to talk with her, and that was certainly not enough to come to any reliable conclusion. Perhaps my colleague Sonja would be able to shed more light on the case, since she’d spent more time with Katarina. When I had finished my report, I got in my car and headed towards her house. I wanted to tell her the tragic news in person. And give her the message that had been sent the day before.

  26. Geese in the Mist

  The ski lift stopped about one third of the way up the slope. That was the last straw. If I’d been alone on the two-seater I would have cursed out loud. Instead I swore to myself, which wasn’t the same. Only a coarse profanity would have let me vent my feelings. Some days nothing goes right. When that happens the best thing is to stay in bed, but we never know what awaits us, of course, so we dash headlong into the future like geese in the mist.

  First there hadn’t been any hot water in the bathroom. Irate, I’d called hotel reception only to learn that something was wrong with the boilers. I was kindly advised not to worry. The repairmen were at work and there should be hot water early in the afternoon. This information comforted me as my teeth chattered under the icy shower. As if this wasn’t enough, the plastic shower cap slipped off my head for a moment, partially wetting my hair, so I had to wash it, although I hate doing it in cold water.

  Then came the incident in the dining room. I shared the table with a family of three that had apparently never learned civilized behavior. During every meal the father would return from the buf­fet table with a great deal more food than he could possibly eat. He always left more than half of it on his plate. And was proud of the fact. Plus, he chomped on his food with his mouth half-open. In addition, he always had a newspaper spread out in front of him.

  The mother was excessively talkative and inquisitive. She didn’t hesitate to adopt an intimate, chummy manner towards me even though I maintained a persistently reserved, formal demeanor and was several years older. She inundated me with questions, one of which was repeated every time we met. She was determined to find out why I had gone skiing alone, even though I’d made it perfectly clear more than once that I did not intend to disclose that information to her. The fact that I wasn’t with anyone aroused her suspicions.

  The son, somewhere around five or five and a half, was a rest­less soul. He fidgeted in his chair, made a mess of the table, dropped his silverware on the floor, talked too loudly. His father paid not the slightest attention to this and his mother would mildly reproach him only when he had really gone too far. As soon as he started to play with the large tube of catsup, I had a feeling something unpleasant would happen. As I hesitated, wondering whether to ask the boy’s mother to take the tube away from him, he pointed it at me and squeezed.

  I don’t think I was his intentional target, but nonetheless a thick stream suddenly gushed across the table and hit me in the middle of my chest. A large red spot blossomed on my white sweater, as though I’d been wounded. I jumped off my chair, not knowing what to do in the initial confusion. The little boy started to giggle and his mother finally did what she should have done be­fore it was too late. Taking the tube and putting it on the table, she said to her son, in a not-so-angry voice, that in future he should be careful of the direction in which he pointed the catsup.

  The father’s reaction pushed me over the edge. As though doing something perfectly natural and expected, he got up, put down his newspaper, took a linen napkin, and without a word be­gan wiping it over my breasts, removing the catsup! I looked at him in disbelief for several moments, as the desire to slap him rose sharply inside me. Nonetheless I held back, mumbled something angrily and left the dining room, feeling a large number of inquisi­tive eyes on me.

  As I tried to wash the spot out of my sweater as best I could with cold water, the weather changed. This happens very quickly in the mountains. When I entered the bathroom, the window had been filled with completely blue sky. Less than ten minutes later, the sky had turned into a gray rectangle with no depth. This was all I needed. Of the five days I had been there, two had been spent in the hotel because bad weather had put skiing out of the question. I needed to head for the slopes as soon as possible if I didn’t want this day to be ruined too.

  As I hastily tightened my bootstraps in the ski room, I tore the nail on my right index finger. I bit my lower lip, as I always do when overcome by anger. If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a torn nail, but I would have wasted a good fifteen minutes if I’d taken off my boots, gone back to the room where I had some nail scissors, and then come back down to put my boots on again. I put on my mittens, hoping they would at least lessen the damage, but knew that the torn nail would keep bothering me until I took care of it. Everything was conspiring against me.

  On emerging from the ski room, I found myself in a cloud. I could only see a few meters in front of me. From time to time the ghostly figures of other skiers materialized out of the dense wall of gray. I slowly made my way towards the foot of the ski lift, afraid that it might not be working. When the cloud cover is complete or a storm is blowing, they shut down the lifts. Fortunately there was n
o wind, and if I had any luck at all only the area around the hotel would be veiled in mist, while the slopes at a higher altitude remained bathed in sunlight. At least, that’s what I hoped.

  I let out a noisy sigh of relief when I saw the moving line of skiers waiting to get onto the ski lift. Finally something good was happening in a day filled with nothing but bad luck! My satisfac­tion, however, did not last long. It was lessened by the person who sat next to me on the two-seater. The man had been behind me in the line and I hadn’t had any reason to turn around, so I didn’t see him until he appeared next to me on the lift. He didn’t do anything to annoy me; his appearance alone was enough.

  I have always been irritated by non-skiers who take skiers’ places on the lifts instead of hiking through the mountains, which would be much healthier and more beneficial for them. In addi­tion, the man was by no means suited to this place. Even if one disregarded his age—he must have been in his sixties—he had dressed in clothes more suitable for an evening on the town than trekking about the mountains in this weather: hat, bow tie, white scarf, long fur-trimmed coat, thin leather gloves, umbrella, fancy shoes. He would have a great time when he got out at the top. I smiled with a certain suggestion of malice and, as much as the cramped two-seater allowed, turned my back on him.

  We had already come out of the cloud when the ski lift shud­dered to a halt. I knew the reason immediately: the power had failed yet again. This had happened every day since my arrival. The hotel reception had a ready explanation for this inconvenience, too. The worn-out grid was being renovated. Starting next season there would be no power outages. I felt like gnashing my teeth. Next season! A lot of good that would do me here and now. Here I was, hanging helplessly a good fifty metres up in the air, in the company of a man who was probably the last person I wanted next to me, without the slightest idea of how long it would take for the power to come back on.

  As though reading my thoughts, the man suddenly addressed me: “Don’t worry. The lift will start working in seven and a half minutes.”

  I have never been one to talk to strangers, particularly when I don’t find them likeable and am in an awful mood, as I was at that moment. My first thought was not to reply, but then I would appear immature and impolite. I would have been happier if he hadn’t said a word, if we had spent that time in silence as we hung there, caught between heaven and earth, but now I had no choice. Social considerations, however, did not require me to be exces­sively polite.

  “Really, seven and a half? You must be clairvoyant!” I made no effort whatsoever to hide the mockery in my voice. I turned my head briefly towards him, with an ironic smile, then turned away from him again.

  “I’m not,” was his simple reply.

  The conversation might have ended there. If I had not said another word, no one could have reproached me for being rude. But the rage that had been gathering inside me all morning wouldn’t let me stop.

  “Then how do you know exactly what’s going to happen?” This time I turned my head towards him for a bit longer and was thus able to get a better look at his face. He looked exactly like my idea of a retired civil servant: plump cheeks, thick well-groomed mustache that didn’t go over his lip line, small watery eyes. His aftershave lotion had a pungent, piercing odor. I don’t know where I got the impression, but I was convinced that he was either a wid­ower or unmarried.

  “It’s not hard, if you know the cause. Then it’s easy to predict the effect.”

  “So you know what caused the power failure, even though you were sitting here on the ski lift when it happened? Congratulations!” My voice was still sarcastic.

  “It’s my job, ma’am, to know,” replied the man simply, as though this explained everything. My derision clearly had not gotten through to him. “The ski lift was stopped by the failure of a tiny part in the power sub-station. It’s smaller than a match­box. Such a tiny cause, and such a huge effect.” He indicated the long line of seats in front of us filled with irate, impatient skiers.

  “Isn’t that utterly interesting!” I knew I had gone too far, but his equanimity was driving me mad.

  “Yes,” he replied, taking my words literally. “The future is most often shaped by small things, very rarely by incidents of large proportions. Take, for example, the fact that we had no hot water in the hotel this morning.”

  “You’re staying at the hotel too? I haven’t seen you.”

  “That’s because I’m inconspicuous. People don’t usually take any notice of me, which is useful.” He stopped briefly, hesitating. It seemed as though he’d been about to add something to his last sentence, but then decided to leave it unsaid. “The hot water heater broke down because of simple carelessness on the part of the man who maintains it. He let sleep get the upper hand and didn’t do what he should have. And just see how many people had to take cold showers this morning as a result.”

  I was suddenly filled with unease. It seemed as though I could see the frosted glass on the shower door in my suite gradu­ally turning transparent, making me visible to inquisitive eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, for the first time in a normal voice, “very un­pleasant. In addition my shower cap slipped off by accident and my hair got wet.” I instinctively touched the ends of my hair under my woolen hat. It was unnecessary, of course, because I had dried my hair with the hair drier before going out.

  “Accident, yes,” repeated the stranger. “A vague concept used as a good excuse for ignorance. There are no accidents, ma’am, only our lack of information.”

  I was angered by the superior tone in his voice. I have always felt an aversion towards men who show off their alleged intelligence.

  “But how could I know in advance that my shower cap would slip off? You can’t predict something like that!”

  He looked at me several moments without speaking. “Perhaps,” he said at last. “But even you could have foreseen what happened to you in the dining room.”

  The anger that had just subsided flared up inside me once more. Not so much for the condescending “even you,” although that was part of it. I felt myself exposed to unwanted looks again, naked. “You know about that too?” I asked. He certainly must have heard the snarl behind my words.

  “Of course, I was there. I eat breakfast too.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “I told you I’m inconspicuous. My seat is in the corner, be­hind your back. In any case, the incident was such that no one could have missed it.”

  “It all happened so fast,” I said, as though defending myself. “I didn’t have time to get out of the way. But it wasn’t the boy’s fault. His parents are to blame, of course.”

  “You are partially, too. It must have been clear to you from the start that something bad might happen to you in such company. You should have asked them to move you to another table. Particularly since there was no special reason for them to put you there in the first place. The waiter did it indiscriminately, just as he did with the other guests. He could have given you another seat in the same way. Had he done that, your sweater wouldn’t have a spot of catsup on it now.”

  “But how can the waiter be blamed? He certainly could not have guessed what would happen.”

  “I didn’t say he was to blame, just that his arbitrary deci­sion was the cause that led to adverse effects. Fortunately, they are harmless in this instance.”

  I shot him a piercing glance. “Have you ever tried to remove a catsup stain from wool?”

  “No, I haven’t. I don’t suppose it is easy. What I wanted to say is that even the permanent loss of a sweater would be nothing dramatic. It is simply an unpleasant matter, basically nothing more serious than, let’s say, tearing your fingernail.”

  I stared at him suspiciously, inadvertently wrapping my right index finger in the other fingers in my mitten. I didn’t have a chance to say anything, however, because the ski lift started to move at that very instant. The seats stretching before us towards the mountain­top rose up briefly and t
hen rushed forward like a team suddenly whipped by a coachman. The man pushed up his left coat sleeve a bit, looked at his watch and nodded in satisfaction. “Exactly seven and a half minutes, just like I told you.”

  He might have expected me to show a bit of admiration, but I didn’t. I was haunted by completely different thoughts. “You say accidents don’t exist?” I asked in a low voice.

  “That’s right, they don’t,” he agreed, also speaking more softly than before.

  “So that means that you’re not here by accident either. Who are you, anyway? What do you want from me?”

  He didn’t answer right away. We covered half the distance between two ski lift towers in tense silence, staring each other in the eye. I tightly grasped the handles of the ski poles in my lap, slightly raising the pointed ends towards the other side of the seat. We were almost at the halfway station in the middle of the slope.

  All I had to do was raise the safety bar and quickly slide off my seat. I doubted he could have prevented me from doing it.

  “Rest assured,” he said at last. “You are in no danger from me. I don’t want anything from you. I am only an observer.”

  “Observer?” I repeated questioningly, not knowing what else to say.

  “Yes. I am here to see what you do. Nothing else.”

  “What do you mean, what I do? Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to ski down the mountain. What else could I do?”