And what about us? We remained. Although for a few months after the city was surrounded we packed our two large suitcases. Not in order to leave the city but so as to take those few essential things down to the cellar, in case the fat went up in flames. In the besieged city, houses often burn floor by floor, usually from the roof down. Phosphorous bullets arrive from the other side of the ring. Perhaps those who fire them want to see an enormous blaze? Just as some people like to watch a sunset? Sometimes whole families disappear in that blaze along with their more or less trivial mementos. Perhaps even the occasional Greetings from the Adriatic.
A sunset does not damage even the fish swimming under the point where the sun falls into the sea. There, beyond the ring that is holding the besieged city in its grip, stands a man with eyes in the colour of which vile frogs could spawn. He gazes at the distant blaze, cools the barrel of his gun that has just fired the phosphorous bullet, and says to the man next to him (he does not have eyes, he has two snakes peering out of narrow slits):
‘Well, enough firing for today?’
We took our suitcases down from the wardrobe in the bedroom. His suitcase and mine. Mine is older. I bought it in London after losing my old bag at a station. I don’t know exactly in what part of the city I bought it, but I remember that at one point I was standing with it at Piccadilly Circus and looking into the face of a young man who said:
‘You have beautiful hair! Are you going to Ireland?’
He had freckles and the English words he spoke were light, metallic. As there is no distinction between the formal and informal ‘you’ in English, I wasn’t sure whether he was being insolent or not. I didn’t take what he said about my hair as flattery. All the girls passing by me at that time had straight, greasy hair. Mine was a freshly washed mane.
Whether it would have been worth going to Ireland just for that, I don’t know. But I sometimes regret that I have never been in that island-country.
The four letters on the metal plate on my suitcase disappeared long ago. My hair is still a freshly washed mane, even though it is hard to find water in the besieged city. While I was picking up notions about life from books, the image of sorrow imprinted itself in my consciousness like the image of cutting a woman’s long hair. Sorrow came, but my hair was still long. Nevertheless, you retain some notions like charming little pictures in a young girl’s pressed flower collection. The besieged city is an island and that is not an appropriate place for a pressed flower collection. Now Ireland is an ever more distant part of a whole continent that ships cannot reach. Perhaps another girl is standing at Piccadilly Circus with a new suitcase and a mane of hair. Someone approaches her and asks in a voice that forms words like light metal coins:
‘You have beautiful hair. Are you going to the Besieged City?’
Since then the three little wheels have come of my suitcase. The boy pulls it along by its strap, shouting:
‘Come on, little horse! Come on, you old nag!’
In my suitcase I keep things that no longer have a purpose in everyday life. The boy’s outgrown clothes, old toys ... trifles with which I find it hard to part. When I travel (when I used to travel!) I empty the suitcase, look at the heap of things that falls out of it and reproach myself:
‘Shouldn’t these old things be in the cellar?’
His suitcase is more up-to-date, better preserved. He travels (used to travel!) more often, so it has to be ready all the time. We don’t put old things in it. He’s the only one who can open and close it. The boy and I like watching. He stands over the suitcase and looks past it. He spreads his hands, and with his middle fingers presses little plastic catches on either side of the suitcase. The catches click, then with a little key that he keeps in a small sheath, he undoes the locks on the top. First one, then the other. The key turns a quarter circle. It clicks twice. He spreads his hands again and uses his thumbs to pull two little plastic tabs beside the locks. The suitcase becomes a large, open seashell. However often I watched him do it, I never succeeded in reproducing the same movements. Once, when he had to travel a long way away, to the north, I wanted to put something secretly into the suitcase which he would find when he reached his empty hotel room. Something to remind him of the boy and me. I didn’t succeed. On the other hand, my failure simply saved me from what was, essentially, a sentimental gesture.
A fortnight later, a postcard arrived with a picture of a Finnish landscape and the message:
‘Distance is amazing. I miss you both.’
The suitcases that were meant to travel to the cellar (in addition to journeys to the north, south, east and west, there is also a journey to the cellar), retained our old habits. Mine was still full of the things it contained throughout the year. Only the little book The Seville Fan was added. Our serious, important books stayed on the shelves. Many books about death. But not Death by Vladimir Jankelevich which, in order to accustom you to the fact of death, still required a perfect knowledge of the French language.
We packed essential clothes in his suitcase, our degree certificates, photograph albums and documents. We put both suitcases in the hall and waited for days. In case fire came from the other side of the ring.
Soon the suitcases, standing there in the hall, began to be in our way. And we soon needed one essential little item, then another, then a third out of his. And to extract them we had to repeat the complex operation of opening and closing the leather seashell. We decided to empty it, to put everything back in its old place, and both suitcases (mine still full of old things) on top of the wardrobe in the bedroom. The good side of this undertaking was that The Seville Fan was at last beyond the reach of the boy’s hands. He had begun by now to read books avidly by himself. He could easily have discovered the deception over the end of the story of the boy Pablo, It seemed to me, that if the book only came into the boy’s hands, Pablo would leap out of it, papery and cut out like a silhouette. He would look at our boy and say:
‘Your mother’s an inveterate liar. I am incurably dead!’
Although you live in a besieged city in which dozens of people may die in one day from the blow of a single ball of fire, you still find it difficult to start to accustom your boy to the fact of death. Which reading matter can you use for that? Although, when you compare the two planes, it becomes senseless. Our boy knows that a friend of his was killed a few months ago. A fragment of the red-hot metal that is let loose when the ball of fire bursts went through the very centre of his brain. The child’s brain spilled onto the asphalt, before it had become familiar with the fact of death. And here we are, still protecting our boy from the fact that the hero of a book had died.
There are, however, facts that suggest a certain progress. Notably, I succeeded in opening his suitcase. I wanted to empty it, without waiting for him to come home. He used to stay out for a long time and I didn’t want to burden him with trivialities that I could sort out myself in the meantime. It was only when I had opened the case that I remembered:
‘But I don’t know how to open it!’
But, it was too late. The seashell was already open. The jam-packed shell out of whose secret compartment (where he puts his documents and socks when he travels) fell a large envelope containing twelve postcards inscribed Greetings from the Adriatic.
If I am not mistaken (and I can’t be mistaken), the Boy with Postcards, later the Boy with Ice-Cream, was offering thirteen for ten. Thirteen cards for ten dinars. He had gone back that evening for ice-cream in order to buy the postcards.
But where was the thirteenth card? The thirteenth Greetings from the Adriatic? So, he must have sent that postcard from Dubrovnik to someone, without my knowing. Karenina and Vronsky! The other way round this time! This did not promise a happy end.
In the besieged city everything is unusual but everything is at the same time ordinary. While people are dying nonsensically, I am caught up in a frivolous intrigue. The kind made for cheap novels. It’s up to me to control it, this unexpected intrigue. I’ll show him th
e postcards and ask drily:
‘There were thirteen, if I’m not mistaken?’
That was what happened. But his reaction was unexpected. He did not even betray surprise: how come the postcards which had been hidden in the suitcase for two years were now suddenly in my hands?
‘Yes, there were thirteen.’
‘So where’s the thirteenth?’
‘I sent it.’
‘Who to?’
‘My parents. It means a lot to them in the summer. And they don’t mind if the postcard has a sunset on it. They didn’t study comparative literature.’
Our suitcases rest on top of the wardrobe. No one goes on summer holidays from the besieged city and no brightly coloured postcards reach it. Tracks still remain in the asphalt. Not only when the sun is baking. When it’s piercingly cold as well, and red-hot balls fall, sent from the dark mountain by the man with frog-spawn instead of eyes, and a strange imprint is left in the asphalt. People call them roses. The besieged city is a horrifying rose-garden whose roses, after they bloom, frequently contain pools of blood. Once the boy and I came upon just such a fresh rose. He asked me quite calmly:
‘Mummy, was there this much blood when Pablo was killed?’
‘Which Pablo?’
‘Pablo ... Juanita’s. The one from The Seville Fan.’
That was exactly what he asked. There are some sentences that I remember for months, for years. Like those spoken in the office where the dead, unreachable, branch was knocking against the window pane. Like the offer at Onofrio’s Fountain. Like the sentences I heard at Piccadilly Circus that had made me want to go to Ireland. Like the sentences that were full of sighs and smelled of lavender and heather. Like the realisation that distance was amazing. Like the terrible question:
‘Would you remind me? With whom do I have the honour?’
It is time that I took them all, those fragments scattered over the years and different places, and arranged them all in a story. The reason came in a dream. Last night I dreamed about my younger aunt. It was cold, I kept trying to get close to her, but she kept pushing me away and when I started crying, at last she looked at me (she had quite different eyes from in real life and she did not smell of lavender and heather) and she said reproachfully:
‘Could the little fair-haired girl find something to do? Auntie is translating Death by Vladimir Jankelevich.’
She sighed sadly and then glanced at her wristwatch (she never wore a wristwatch, but always a round watch on a chain round her neck!) and went on staring at the empty table in front of her.
I awoke with the feeling that I was suffocating and this time I did not murmur L’Eventail de Seville. I opened the window and breathed rapidly.
Sometime around midday I looked for my old notebooks and papers and among them that list of titles containing the word ‘death’. The red line with which I marked the books which were not translated into our language had faded under Death by Vladimir Jankelevich.
There was just a little red line under Jan and a red dot under h.
If it were possible to summon a dream, I would have summoned the one I dreamed last night. Let it come again. Then I would turn on a telephone answering machine in my voice and say to my aunt:
‘Would you remind me? With which title, with which subject do I have the honour?’
I am hurrying to finish telling the story. It has to have a happy end. Otilija T. deserves that.
If only I knew what a happy end was! Did I know once and have forgotten? Like Anna Karenina whom Tolstoy finally allowed not to jump under a train. And now she is standing on the platform ... standing, standing, standing ... and what next?
It is a sunny afternoon and I shall conjure up, as in a spiritualist séance, the little picture of Mother and Child with Pink Balloon. Two red-haired heads, a pink balloon, hand in hand... but then what? Then what!
THE SECRET OF KASPAR HAUSER
That side came for this one, after all.
The two sides had parted as long ago as the day when the little dwarf, with eyes which seemed composed of narrow concentric circles, had been standing by the window at the end of the empty room. He tapped his hand with his ruler, looking nowhere in particular, and said:
‘The bedroom goes on the north side!’
He had been sent by the architects’ office recommended to us for the alterations to the apartment. I don’t remember whether he said anything other than that sentence. I don’t even know whether he introduced himself when we met. It sometimes seems to me that I just found him that day standing by the window. It is hard to be sure of directions in an unfamiliar space, especially when it is full of the traces of another, a stranger’s life. It seems more important to satisfy your urge to remove the wallpaper with its torn strips and irregular bubbles. The traces of a stranger’s touch were imprinted in the cracked, yellowing varnish on the doors. On the window panes, like the tiny stars of some long since extinguished galaxy, there were the left-over specks of fies from a long-ago summer. Around the bath plug were strands of someone else’s hair. In the washbasin there was a sodden fag end with traces of violet lipstick on it. It looked like a TB patient’s spittle. The worm-eaten parquet creaked as though under someone else’s feet. In the bathroom, beside the lavatory, there was a crumpled newspaper with an old date on it and a large yellow stain all over the headline ‘Caribbean volcano erupts’.
But, before I put on rubber gloves and picked up the strands of hair, the cigarette end and the old newspaper, I learned that the bedroom had to be on the north side. Was that an established rule that architects respected? Although this one reminded me more of an old clown standing on the stage of an empty auditorium smacking his hand in a vain effort to summon applause. He never reappeared. He vanished after carefully recording something in a tiny notebook and peering into every corner of the apartment. I was just beginning to think that he was looking for something in the wormholes, when he made a little bow and moved towards the front door. I nearly responded by clapping. He scuttled down the stairs in a manner unsuited even to an old clown, let alone an architect who had been recommended by a reputable firm.
I had not even had a chance to offer him the coffee I had brought in a thermos flask. I drank it myself. Three plastic cups full of unsweetened coffee. The glass jar of sugar had tipped over. I drank small mouthfuls of the hot liquid, staring at the little heap of sugar crystals scattered over the floor of the room that had from that moment become the bedroom. The room that faced north. For the first time in our new apartment, I felt weary.
We telephoned the office again and again a hurried woman’s voice asked curtly for our address, and dictated the date and hour when we could expect an architect.
This time he was tall, with opaque, grey eyes, bent at the waist as though from a permanent stomach ache. He did not mention the north, or any other side of the world. He talked about surfaces, cubic space, insulation, a partition wall, laminated parquet, floor joists. These words acted like an antiseptic in that space filled with anonymous wormholes. He sighed loudly, as though wearied by what he was saying or surprised by the effect of his words. His breath lifted a thin lock of hair from his perspiring brow.
After that, many workmen passed through the apartment and finally our things moved in and a tablecloth appeared for the first time on our table. It turned out that the bedroom was indeed the one in which the dwarf with the concentric circles instead of eyes had tapped his ruler on his hand. I wanted to mention this at breakfast, but I was afraid that while I talked old wormholes might start to appear under the fresh white layers of paint.
As well as facing north, the windows of our bedroom also look onto a hospital. We are separated from it by the width of a road, two narrow pavements and the hospital park enclosed by a low green fence. The park used to have tidily mown grass, rose bushes which flowered every month and rare, exotic trees whose sumptuous flowers were replaced in midsummer by fruits of even more sumptuous appearance. They are inedible, perhaps even poisonous. T
hey sometimes attract the longing gaze of the quiet child. They say that some diseases float, like exotic fruit, in jars of formalin in secret hospital larders.
In the mornings, I used to gaze at the hospital trees. I brushed my hair by the bedroom window. I swept it backwards with one movement and it fell over my shoulders. The trees shifted benignly away again.
We are separated from the other side of the street by its tranquillity. The only people who used to pass by lived in the neighbourhood. Occasionally someone who did not know his way around the city ended up here. Such a person would keep stopping and looking around. On Sundays, at noon, silent visitors gathered in front of the hospital gate with offerings for the patients. When the gate opened and the visitors disappeared through it, I realised that I had been witness to a disappearance. And I was just as helpless as those who disappeared. Yet they did return, in small groups or individually. Some of them turned and waved in the direction of the hospital windows. A shadow passed behind the lowered blinds.
Occasionally ambulances sped along the street. Their sirens rent the silence. Then the piercing sound subsided and silence closed in again like water over the drowned.
Death in the Museum of Modern Art Page 3