Death in the Museum of Modern Art

by Alma Lazarevska

‘The writer Dario, Dario the writer.’

  ‘The writer? No, I don’t. Why do you need it?’

  ‘No reason.’

  4.

  This morning I put only three matches in the tin. All three stink of old ash. There’s still room in the tin. When I toss it from one hand to the other, I hear cheerful sounds, the sounds of tiny souls sliding and bumping into each other. They are enjoying their loss of weight. Yesterday, when he saw me playing with the tin, the boy said:

  ‘You’re a child now. You’ve got a rattle. A really ugly one!’

  Now I have to find a second tin. Until I find a better one, I’ll use the box that once held long, thick matches with yellow phosphorous tips. It says ‘Budapest’ on it. I was there once, but I don’t remember the building in the picture. It isn’t ugly. But it wouldn’t be worth going back there to see it.

  This box won’t last long. It’s already worn at the edges. For the moment, there’s a little ball of paraffin wax resting in it.

  While we sit beside the candle, he makes three or four of them in the course of an evening. He collects the dripping wax with his fingers. The hot touch can’t be enough to burn him, but it’s quite enough to make the chilly room feel cosier. Some of the wax slides onto the saucer. He forms a little ball from what remains between his fingers, with the tips of his thumb and forefinger. When it’s half-formed, he puts it on his palm and rolls it with the forefinger of his other hand. Taking my arm, he holds it by the wrist and drops the little ball into the palm of my hand, it’s quite cold now and smooth. There’s no trace even of the short-lived warmth it picked up from his palm.

  He touches the little ball in my hand with his forefinger again. Now I feel the touch of his fingertip as well as the slight tickle of the little wax ball. In the morning I collect the little balls from the table and place them in a glass jar with the words Kompot švetsky on the label. There’s a picture of two blue plums under the first word. When I have collected a lot of little balls, I melt them into a narrow candle.

  But this morning I also placed one wax ball in the box with Budapest written on it. That’s when it happened!

  Nothing particular preceded it. It had been an ordinary day. He came home late. Not looking particularly tired. That silent membrane already covered the room. At around midnight he took a cigarette out of the half-empty packet, then put it to his lips, but before he had separated one lip from the other, he made the face people make when their nose is itching and their hands are full. He moved his lower jaw upwards and his lips moved towards the tip of his nose. His upper lip, comically pinched, touched his nose. Nothing special.

  I don’t remember a single film scene where an actor did that before killing someone.

  He reached for the candle with his right hand. He raised it, on its saucer, to which it was secured by a broad wax base. The saucer has a picture of a rococo lady in three colours on it. Grey, violet, gold. The lady is sitting on a swing and a long arc separates her from the young gallant who has, presumably, just pushed her away and is now waiting for her to come back. The wax base of the candle covered part of the picture. Part of the lady’s face was hidden. You could see her wig, with its comic curls. And the lady’s legs. They are painted violet and grey. Her feet are separated from one another and have little narrow shoes strutting on them. The little golden shoes of a rococo lady. When the picture is completely revealed and daylight reaches into the room everything looks somehow different. Deprived of colour and action.

  The candle in his hand was raised to the tip of the cigarette. A trickle of wax ran down the thin stalk out of the hollow round the wick. It covered the lady’s left leg. For a time the leg could be made out under the little transparent pool of paraffin, until it cooled, solidified and became an opaque blot. Musing on the lady’s leg, I forgot the sailor standing on the deck of a ship sailing from one continent to another. He was pressing tobacco into a pipe with his broad thumb. He had turned his back to the wind. Did he strike a match? He raised it to his pipe. And fell. As though struck down. As when one player’s pawn knocks out his opponent’s and it is no longer in his way.

  5.

  He is smoking. He was away for three days and two nights. In the besieged city men have duties that keep them out of the house a lot. Should I tell him that the night before he left he killed a sailor? I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him tomorrow:

  ‘Put out your hands. Palms up.’

  I’ll put the tin on his left hand, and the box that once held long matches on his right hand. I’ll step away and say:

  ‘Those are the souls you’ve saved and one you didn’t.’

  Will he feel their different weight?

  My God, in these giant amoebas, in their silent membranes, words and games acquire a weight that should be forgotten with the morning.

  ‘Give me a cigarette!’

  ‘Since when have you smoked?’

  ‘Since this evening ….’

  He taps the packet lightly and a cigarette slides out of it. I take it with the fingers of my right hand, with my left I lift up the saucer with the candle. A trickle of wax runs down the thin candle and in an instant the rococo lady’s other leg disappears as well. Just the tip of one little shoe peers out, no bigger than the sharp end of a needle.

  The lady is completely smothered by the wax base. Besides, her smiling gallant who is waiting for her to come back to him in an arc on the swing … There, he’s vanished. Their coquettish game has been stilled by the hard pool of wax.

  Now we are tranquil. For a moment at least. I inhale the cigarette smoke inexpertly and cough. There are no more sailors whose lives and souls depend on our tiny actions and decisions, weariness and forgetfulness. There are no more ladies and gallants whose game is in our hands. Just the two of us, alone, waiting for sleep. Today more people died in the besieged city. Perhaps their names and pictures in the obituaries will one day feed some future story. Like wax which you shape into a little ball and when it cools, drop onto someone’s open hand.

  I shan’t throw away those two boxes. I shan’t empty them. I’ll leave them somewhere, in one of the dark corners that gnaw at the square shape of the room. When this is all once again brilliantly lit up one day, shall I find them?

  Shall I ask:

  ‘Who left this here?’

  Shall I be able to say:

  ‘I did!’

  DEATH IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

  ‘How would you like to die?’

  ‘What do you mean … how?’

  ‘That’s what’s written here.’

  ‘Die?’

  He had put the Times Atlas of World History under the paper on which he was noting my answers. We use it when we write at night. The boy likes leafing through it when the shells fall.

  He waited for me to reply, looking at my hand resting in my lap. It reminded him, he had said the day before, of a tiny baby. Its nappy changed, dressed, and peaceful. On the little table between us lay a photograph of me. Taken in front of the ruins of the old hospital. The reporters who come to the besieged city like taking pictures of ruins. The hand I write with was still unharmed then but I had thrust it deep into my pocket. I had drawn in my neck and hunched my shoulders, as though I was cold or uncomfortable. It seemed that I was stepping out of the photograph. Or should one say: stepping down?

  ‘So, how would you like to die?’

  He was hurrying me with someone else’s questions, like a waiter or a shop assistant serving an indecisive customer. All that was missing was ‘madam’. The questions had reached me a fortnight earlier. I put of answering them, day after day. In the meantime, there was this problem with my hand. (That’s why he had to write my answers for me. He had given his own in ten days earlier).

  Another ninety-eight inhabitants of the besieged city had received questionnaires like this. Before they came to the question How would you like to die? they were asked what happiness is, what they feared, where they would like to live...

  This reminded me of t
he little confession notebooks in which young girls and boys used to write, the aim being to encourage those questioned to confess who they were in love with. But here, they were not asking who you were in love with, but – how you would like ... wish ... to die.

  The answers, illustrated with our photographs, would be published in a luxurious magazine with shiny covers. Part of the edition would be kept in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  What did they want of us? Something like those doctors who spill two or three drops of ink onto a sheet of paper and ask their patients:

  ‘What does this blot remind you of? What do you see in it?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  What do you mean … nothing?’

  ‘I don’t see anything!’

  ‘They’re not asking you what you see or don’t see, but how you would like … or wish, to die. Here, translate it yourself the way you want!’

  He knew how awkward I felt with shop assistants and now he was deliberately imitating the way they spoke in order to hurry me up. In my wardrobe there was a pair of shoes I had never worn, except when I was trying them on in the shop, four years ago. As I stood in front of the mirror, I glimpsed the expression of the assistant who was promoting me into a person on whose decision the fate of children in an orphanage depended. She had large glasses, worn high, at the very top of her nose. Their lenses did not look as though they were correcting anything, but like two windowpanes, recently washed. Twins peered bad-temperedly out from behind them.

  Well, madam, have we decided? I have other customers waiting!’

  ‘At Kristina Verček’s!’

  ‘Kristina who?’

  Men did not read the column that had been appearing for years in the local paper, every Tuesday. Kristina Verček, a qualified cosmetician, part-time lecturer at the College of Cosmetics, was the favourite reading matter of my women colleagues at the editorial office. I used to read Pearls of my Cosmetics infrequently and without interest, until I noticed the same sentence in three consecutive texts.

  ‘It is a well-known fact that we all want to live for a long time, no one wants to grow old.’

  The copy editor had once changed the verb ‘to grow old’ into ‘to get older’, but I was eagerly awaiting the fourth text for quite different reasons.

  This time the expected sentence came between the address My dear readers and the advice that One spoonful of oat fakes, previously ground in a coffee-grinder ... Whether the linguistic adjustment had been made in that one key sentence or not, I did not notice. I don’t remember having noticed. What I was expecting, and what I received, was an invitation!

  On Friday I had done everything I could to ensure that the editorial board would put me down to work on Monday, as that was the day the porter brought the pink envelope with Kristina Verček ‘s text in it. In fact, I did not have to try hard at all as my colleague was delighted to accept the swap. She intended to use it to prolong her weekend from which she said, licking her lips as she thanked me, she would bring me something sweeeeet .... sweeeet! Delectable!

  On Monday I sat in the empty office and responded to the invitation intended only for me. I crossed out the word ‘grow old’ with correcting fluid. The open pink envelope lay on the desk smelling of the pungent tinctures that I had liked looking at as a child, touching the glass bottles in which they were kept; there in the artificial light of the laboratory, a room without a single window, where my father had taken me after repeated and persistent pleas. How his severity and the cold expression of his face were transformed in there! A magician’s working mask. But, my father did not make cosmetic tinctures; he oversaw the mixtures and colours in the production of porcelain. But still I did not let myself be distracted by the smell of the pink envelope. The correcting fluid was already dry and over the blot under which the word ‘grow old’ lay I wrote in black ballpoint the word ‘die’. I did not feel like a copy-editor making linguistic adjustments but neither was I like a thief with a curious area of interest. In a half-whisper, I repeated the word ‘die’ the way my father, bending over his tinctures, used to whisper formulae kept in books with a strange, pungent smell.

  The only response to my voice was the steady hum of the press from the depths, behind concrete partitions and walls. This time it was not mixed with the murmur of voices from neighbouring rooms. It continued in my ears even when the office joker came in through the abruptly opened door, with all the force of his bulky body and asked in a booming voice:

  ‘Are you writing something ... delectable? Something sweeeet?’

  The next day, the telephone in the editorial office rang at 8.30 am. At that time the only people there were those who were trying to avoid some domestic ‘troublet’ (the bulky joker’s word) or those who, like me on this occasion, were expecting an important call.

  On the line, of course, was the voice of the qualified cosmetician, part-time lecturer at the College of Cosmetics and the valued contributor to a local paper with a tradition of nurturing cosmetic subjects – all this was contained in the voice of Kristina Verček. I immediately apologised in the name of the editorial board and explained that the mistake must have crept in at the printer’s. But she spoke as though calling for a quite different reason. In her soprano voice she dictated what type of skin I had; warned me, in a mature female alto, about bags under the eyes, and finally, in an indisputable baritone, she ended:

  ‘So, I’m expecting you tomorrow, then. At exactly six p.m. You’ve remembered the address? Take care, I’m on the fourth floor and the light on the stairs doesn’t work.’

  My ‘yes’ did not manage to overtake the metal ‘click’ in the receiver.

  I reached the door, where a little fluorescent plate gleamed with the words ‘Qual. cosmetician, K. Verček’ on it, up a long, dark staircase, twice hesitating and ready to give up, not to respond to the invitation. The person who opened the door had a pronounced, dark moustache.

  It was not long ago that she had given her readers as many as three pieces of advice on how to rid a fuzzy female face of hair. But the whiskers of the part-time lecturer at the College of Cosmetics did not strike me as in the category of a cobbler’s worn shoes. Those fine whiskers reminded me of some female characters (my friend the writer who says that he does not see but hears faces, maintains that characters do not exist). I was thinking of the characters of a writer whose name I could not remember. They often had whiskers and wore them proudly, sometimes even twisting them into festive little plaits.

  But this was a scene from my life (perhaps life, including my own, did not exist either?) and it was hard to apply literary effects to it.

  But, there we were, I was standing in front of a person, undoubtedly a woman, who had a very pronounced moustache. She wore it proudly, both when she appeared in the doorway, where whoever saw her from the stairs was blinded by the strong light from inside, and in the room, an improvised cosmetic salon, where in full light the eye took in the smallest detail.

  She proudly offered me her brochure Pearls of my Cosmetics. Without waiting for the smile under her proud moustache to be coldly extinguished, as happens with disillusioned magicians, I immediately started fumbling in my handbag and my purse. But Kristina Verček suddenly closed her smile, like a weightless fan. For time passed inexorably in this salon where women came who wanted to live for a long time and not to grow old ... die?

  ‘We’ll talk about the book later. First a complete treatment!’

  ‘Are you afraid of death?’

  ‘No!’

  He tapped his pencil on the half-written piece of paper and the Atlas of World History under it. Was he consoling or hurrying me?

  But, I was not afraid. Nevertheless, I would have liked to tell him about that terrible feeling I have of being late ... the feeling that I have been overtaken and am losing my sense of being present. Neither here, nor there. With swinging legs. As on that far-of day, when I was waiting for my mother. Up a dark stairway, we had reached a door with a brass plate. Presumably
with the word ‘Dentist’ engraved on it. A tall man in a white coat opened the door and with a broad sweep of his hand pointed my mother in a direction where she vanished after just two or three steps. He followed her and, unlike that heavy one, the second door closed soundlessly. I was left in the waiting-room, pressed between two doors. I sat down on a plastic chair and spent some time trying in vain to stop sliding on its smooth surface. I finally managed it by leaning the full weight of my body against it. I leafed through the magazine with pictures in it that my mother had bought on the way here. It was full of photographs of girls with thick hair, brushed away from their faces. I closed it and began to touch my own hair and then suddenly bent the top part of my body towards my knees. Under my knees I could make out the rest of my legs. They were swaying because they did not reach the yellow vinyl tiles. On my feet were my narrow shoes with blue satin bows. Suddenly the only thing in the world was their simple, persistent movement. The left-hand bow, then the right, left, then right ... a double pendulum.

  Towards the chair, away from the chair, towards the chair, away from the chair.

  Then there was a penetrating woman’s scream.

  I didn’t want to run away. Nor did I feel pity. Not even that selfish feeling that separates the lucky from the unlucky, the healthy from the sick, the living from the dead. This is not happening to me, we think as we return from a funeral. We wipe our muddy shoes on the grass, draw our neck down between our shoulders, clench our hands into fists and push them deep into our pockets.

  None of all that! I just felt the horror of a being that had not yet mastered a difficult and definitive task. If I were to say: like a child staring at a complicated exercise when everyone else has written the answer in their books and left the classroom ... it would be insufficient and feeble. Inadequate for the horror of a little girl with swinging legs.

  ‘So, children, who’ll be the first to have the injection? Let me see.’

  The smiling young woman with a white cap pinned onto her stiff hair-do which glistened with a gold sheen, looked over our heads.