“Look how tiny I am, sir. I am but a grain of sand on your shores, never to travel farther. I am the sudden raindrop that fell into your quiet lake. I am the dust in your eye, sir. I am collectible. Do you know any other pigeons from my war-torn country?”
Another voice, booming, official, belonging to a moustachioed man in a top hat who had just appeared before the camera:
“PLEASE FILL IN THE NAME OF YOUR COUNTRY OF ORIGIN ON THE DOTTED LINE. USE CAPITAL LETTERS AND WRITE IN BLACK INK.”
Sara looked underneath the desk to see where the sound was coming from, and realized that the sides of the desk were actually two large speakers.
The pigeon continued:
“I am the embarrassing sound that your intestines make during the monologue in a theatre. Bear with me, and I shall pass. Pretend that my feathers have no colour, that my brain is flat, that my beak utters no sound. I will stand in front of your cathedral, with my lesser god at my wing, waiting for your mercy. Your border is a rainbow, and I’m starting again, anew, alive. Tears and mucus have the same salinity.”
The pigeon flew several yards away and landed on a bench by the water. Mechanical sounds started filling the space, giant machines at work, marching bands, boots hitting asphalt—all mixed together—and the pigeon’s voice suddenly became a hiss, full of scorn, whipping from the speakers:
“I am the giant penis on your morning horizon. The sun rises behind my glans. There will be thousands like me. I am that horde that will topple your temple. My voice is before your Jericho.” Boom, boom, boom, boom. The sound stopped. Blank screen.
Sara stared at the monitor for a while. Is that what Johnny was doing here—making soundtracks for silent movies?
She stood up, her hands shaking, probably from too much espresso, and looked around. She was here with a task. The task was to find something that might unlock Johnny’s memories. But what? She went to the group of cards that she was reading earlier and started taking them down one by one. There was nothing else she thought was significant.
She had the key, but it unlocked a new door.
Tomo spent much of his time around Johnny, far more than what was expected of him. He brought him fruit, old music magazines, some rock recordings from Yugoslavia on his old Walkman. She should have been grateful, she knew that, but she wasn’t. The problem was that he was not the type one could comfortably argue with. Tomo never raised his voice, and at every sign of conflict, or even nervousness, he quickly withdrew. Yelling at him would have been like shooing a sad puppy.
Except that he wasn’t helpless. On Thursday, Sara brought some fast food with her, burgers and fries she wanted to share with Johnny. Tomo saw her in the corridor, recognized the paper bag, caught up with her and told her that high-fat food aggravates the symptoms of brain injury. Before she could even answer he held his hand out, took the bag, and threw it into a trash bin in the hall.
On Sunday, she rearranged things in Johnny’s room. She thought it would be nice to make some changes, no matter how limited, and moved the chairs around, repositioned the vase and pushed his nightstand a little forward. On Monday, everything was back in its original place.
On Thursday, Sara brought with her two posters she had bought in a small bookstore down the street from where she was staying. They were good reproductions of some peaceful Flemish landscapes. Johnny liked them and she taped them to the wall. On Friday, the posters were gone.
The idiot was not even supposed to work on Fridays. Everything until now had been emendable, snippets of bad dialogue that could be fixed with a little tact, but this was too much. Sara marched down the corridor and knocked on the frame of the open door. There were two women in the staff room with Tomo. He wasn’t in his uniform.
“May I speak to you for a second?” she said.
“Sure.” He followed her out into the corridor.
Halfway to room 1013 Sara stopped. “Did you remove my posters?” she asked. Her voice was low and harsh.
He shrugged. “Yes. They are on my desk, I’ll bring them right away.”
“Why do you have to change everything I do? And don’t tell me it’s hospital policy.”
He looked straight into her eyes. “Technically, it is,” he said. “But that’s not why I did it.”
“So why, may I ask?”
“For the same reason I moved the furniture back, Sara. He needs things to remain predictable, boring if you wish. He needs coordinates. You think that changes might do him good. They won’t. If he’s going to be successful in his search for the past, he needs to not think about his present.”
“But a landscape can’t hurt—”
“I agree. And I don’t agree. But seeing that you are angry with me, let me tell you something: we are working on the same thing, you and I. As much as you want to bring back his memories, I do too. Well, maybe not as much.” He smiled faintly. “But in any case, we are on the same side.”
She looked carefully into his eyes. “What is your interest in this?”
“Interest?” He seemed to measure the word, to taste it: bitter. “I don’t have any interest.”
“Why, then?”
He looked at the floor for a few moments, then raised his head. “I fell in love with my wife while dancing with her to one of Johnny’s songs. We played it at our wedding. We had all his records when we moved in together. She had the ones I didn’t.”
He paused. Sara waited.
“She was killed. A grenade hit our building. I was in the basement, getting some food. And it was fired from our side. An accident, they said. The fire destroyed everything. If he doesn’t remember his songs, I’ll … I’ll teach him, note by note.”
LAVA. March 8, 1999
The beginning of March brought longer days, and a sense of optimism, fluttering on the sunrays that entered the hospital, crisscrossing the corridors and rooms and poking the pale skin of the patients. Sara thought there was the smell of spring in the air, but she wasn’t sure. Not here—this air was foreign.
The cards from the apartment did not help at all. “Probably because they are the product of his abstract thinking, not of his experience,” the doctor said. Her mother (“You should have known that you were the most significant thing in that apartment, dear”) started sending her magazines from Belgrade, and Sara read them to Johnny whenever she could, hoping that some names or places or even words would trigger another memory in his brain. And it worked, to some degree. Sometimes he would ask her to repeat a sentence. A few times he recognized the locations and then recovered some of the lost pieces related to the particular sites.
“It’s International Women’s Day,” she said, entering his room that Monday morning. “I brought you flowers.”
He smiled. “You look happy today.”
“I am,” she said, putting the bouquet on his nightstand. She kissed him on the cheek—for some time now she did this whenever she arrived; he didn’t object, and it gave her a sense of normalcy. She noticed that he had shaved and smelled of … “What is it?”
“What?”
“That perfume.”
“Oh, it’s an aftershave—Tomo gave it to me.”
“Can I see the bottle?”
“It’s in the drawer. Why?”
She took a black bottle out and smiled. “He must have discovered that detail somewhere.”
“What detail?”
“That’s what you used to wear back in Belgrade. That man will marry you in the end.”
Johnny laughed. “I asked him the same when he gave it to me. He said that my legs weren’t to his taste.”
She went to the sink to fill a vase with water, checking herself in the small mirror above the sink. She looked good today. Not the same person as she was in Toronto, but this one was okay. Back at his bedside, she unwrapped the flowers.
“I was thinking, Johnny—you know, it’s difficult to retrieve the memories of our hometown. And it has nothing to do with your particular state. Belgrade is so different from what we reme
mber. It’s not even about us never being able to stand in the same river twice. Belgrade is not even a river anymore. It’s flowing, all right, but more like lava, burning everyone in its way.”
“What’s lava?”
She looked at him and saw his smile. “Don’t frighten me, mister.”
“Sorry.” He kept smiling. “What took you there?”
She stopped for a second. Where? Toronto? Or Boris?
“In your thinking. Why did you think of Belgrade?”
“Oh. I read this article about gangsters dying one after another,” she said, arranging the flowers in the vase. “There was a documentary, See You in the Obituary, where they interviewed some gangsters about their life and work, and three of the interviewees were killed during the filming. The article says that the assassinations have continued. The theory is that these guys were used by the regime for some hush-hush activities, and now the secret service is getting rid of them. Do you remember a guy they called the Candyman?”
She glanced at Johnny, and saw his face darken.
“What about him?”
“Well, he was the night itself. Before the war, he always operated abroad, keeping his hands clean in Yugoslavia, at least on the surface. The story was that he was a contract killer for the secret service. Then, when the war started, suddenly he had his small army. They operated in Croatia and Bosnia for a couple of years, then he disbanded the unit and they lived happily ever after. The official stand was that the state didn’t have anything to do with his army—he was a private citizen and free to do as he wished. If he wanted to help his countrymen under attack, that was up to him. If he wanted to buy tanks with his own money, who could prevent him?”
She sat next to Johnny, looking straight into his eyes.
“And?”
“And he was killed a week ago. On the street. By several attackers, in two black Audis, in broad daylight. His bodyguards were killed, too.”
Johnny covered his eyes with the palm of his hand, then moved it slowly up his forehead and all the way to the back of his head.
“Does something ring a bell, Johnny? You remember the war?”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
She leaned over and hugged him. He hid his face in her hair.
“It will come, Johnny.”
“I know it will.”
“Are you afraid of your memories?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I have an idea. If I get you a notebook, maybe you can write down what you remember from the period closest to the empty zone. Go to the very edge, Johnny. I’ve read an interview with some writer where he said that writing in his notebook made him concentrate better and retrieve some memories he thought were lost. He thought it was something related to the economics of handwriting. Too many moves involved just to erase it and start over. Will you do it, Johnny? Will you try? But you have to write up to the edge, because maybe then you will see what fills the void.”
He seemed confused.
“What?”
“What will I write about?”
“Anything. Make it like a diary.”
He leaned back a little, still letting her hold him.
“Sara?”
“Yes?”
“Do I still hurt you?”
“No, Johnny. You never did. I hurt myself.”
• FIVE •
PURE WHITE LIGHT
CHANGE. April 15, 1999
At first, after Sara left, Boris found solace in his work. He stayed late, fixing every hairline of his designs, changing colours even when he was certain they were already right, pretending to be the perfectionist he never was. He left his office only when he felt that he would be able to eat something then fall asleep on the sofa in front of the TV when he got home. One night, crossing the street, a cab almost ran him over. When he heard the screeching of brakes, he lifted his head and realized that the light was red and that he was in the middle of the street, his brain on automatic pilot, his senses dead.
He also knew that the feelings deposited quickly in him, layer upon layer, were starting to choke him. He had read enough about psychoanalysis to realize the danger.
So he changed his tactics. He started taking long walks in the evening, usually ending up at the lake, where he would have a whisky by the water, in Spinnakers, and then take the subway home. If exhausting himself at work meant filling his brain with such an overload that he did not even have the time to think, this was the other extreme. Emptiness crept into him, shrouding everything in both his inner and his outer worlds and threatening to render his entire being invisible. Gazing at the lights from the islands across the harbour one evening while sipping his whisky, he saw his reflection in the window. His shoulders were slumped, his hair in disarray, his left hand propping his forehead.
Was he looking for oblivion? He could never forget Sara or Johnny. It wasn’t an affair, it wasn’t someone else’s life. It wasn’t the stuff of books or movies. It was in his veins, tattooed on his skin. There was no line under it all, and there couldn’t be without all three of them meeting again and talking it through—or fighting it through.
He glanced at his reflection again. That man looked like he needed a change. There was no storm swirling around him. A storm leaves hope—shaken, beaten—but still hope. This was dead water. This was some place with no current, no wind, with dead fish floating around him, naked trees on the shore, no sound at all. He needed a change. Deep, thorough, unconditional change. He had thought his life had changed enough when he emigrated.
But when, exactly, did he lose control? At what point did he switch to automatic pilot? He had been in command back in Belgrade. And when he had decided to leave. He was still driving when they came to Toronto, when he found a job, when they bought their first car. Or was he? Was their coming to Toronto the last conscious step he took, and everything else just an automated process, something that this big-hearted country offered like a mother to all its hopeless, confounded, clumsy new children?
Change.
Then change it would be.
He spent the last few days of February and the first week of March sorting through the closets. He carefully separated everything into three heaps: one for the garbage, one for Sara, and one to be stored. In his old notebooks he found many sketches for projects, ideas he never had the time to follow through. He unearthed old letters, pictures, boarding passes from their flight to Toronto, a photo of the two of them—and some others—standing with a Mountie in his screaming red uniform immediately after they got their Canadian citizenship. Shopping lists, napkins with doodles on them, two old notebooks that contained his early diaries (abandoned at fifteen, when his father found them). Sara’s early pictures with Johnny, both looking beautiful, her photos (now seriously fading; she should scan them) from her primary and high schools, rows of girls and boys in blue uniforms, letters of hers that he did not want to read, love letters to her from some boys before Johnny, and a small pressed branch of pine. He held that branch, surprised. There were two tiny cones on it, and by them he recognized the branch: it was the one he gave Sara that fateful night on the mountain, when all was clear and maiden and white. He started crying. He went to bed in the early-morning hours and slept the next day—it was Saturday—until one. When he woke he felt rested.
——
In March, serious speakers spoke in serious voices about bombing Serbia. At first, Boris thought it was just a form of political pressure, as did his mother, as did all her friends. But the General, his mother said, was sombre about it. His contacts had said this bombing was going to happen.
He still felt the need for Sara, but, surprisingly, he discovered that it had shifted into a craving for their talks, not for her body, her touch. Recognizing that he again needed the shelter of his mother tongue, Boris started seeing his Serbian friends a lot. They had all entered the zone of high anxiety, some hoping that the coming war would mean Milosevic’s demise, some beside themselves with anger at the whole Western world. They
were not able to discuss anything: the heat of the situation had switched off the analytical parts of their brains. The language was there, but there was no communication. There were people around him but he was not among them.
Then, on March 24, in the early afternoon, he was sitting at his computer designing a web site for some company when a colleague who was married to a Serbian woman entered his corner office, his face grave. “It’s started,” he said.
Boris remembered later that he had asked, “What’s started?”
Days at work. Most of the people around him were full of understanding. His boss gave him small tasks, leaving him a lot of time to follow the news on the Internet. Some faces were hostile, some jerks with their tiny, steely smiles asking how he was, pretending not to know. Only a few, though.
He spent evenings in front of the American consulate, demonstrating with a few hundred, sometimes thousands, of other desperate, quiet people. In the early days, Boris was reserved, standing on the side, smoking, listening, a small target on his lapel. One evening, a vehicle belonging to CTV News drove by and someone in the front seat opened the window and gave them the finger. They drove slowly, as if they were brave, as if they were righteous. There were hundreds of police across the street, armed, on horses, with dogs. Boris finally felt rage. He bought a Serbian flag the next day—and increased the number of pills he was taking.
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