by A. S. Patric
“Have you even fucking read the damn book Silvana?” Brakochevich asked.
She blinked. The lie. It didn’t matter what she said, she realised, so she didn’t bother with the excuses. “I’ve always liked you Professor. It would really be my pleasure, you know. It wouldn’t be an effort making you happy.” She got up, moving around his desk, and let her body find its new rhythm, showing him all the things it might do for him. That it could bring him such joys. Bliss would last longer in the next few minutes than it had ever done before. It would resonate long after she left his office. Unbuttoning her shirt and lifting her skirt, already within her groove when the silence came through a ringing slap. For an instant, she was totally awake. Nothing had changed. It was just Silvana—alone in the world. Her professor standing before her, his huge hand returning to his side. No indication that he had struck her. He might have waved away a fly from his face. Sitting down at his desk. Arranging paper. Picking up his green ink grading pen. Silvana knew that he’d been careful. Only the fingers had connected. Not the full weight of his massive hand. She wouldn’t have been left standing otherwise. Thankful for his restraint.
“Read the book. Get me that assignment by the weekend. I don’t want to hear, or see, anything else from you. Now get the fuck out of here you silly little girl.”
Silvana reaches her car and opens all the doors to let the heat out. Her daughter says she wants butterscotch ice cream, the same as you get at the movies. Six years later and she can still feel that Sarajevo slap.
“What are you doing here Joe? I thought you were at the dentist this morning?” Mr Sewell, Jovan’s supervisor, stands at the staff entrance, dropping his smoke, crushing it with an old black shoe. The sole looks paper thin.
“This was a plan. They check today. Scrape my tooth clean … teeth. So nothing, until Friday. Arvo Friday,” Jovan says.
Mr Sewell nods and lights another cigarette. He smokes, watching the cars in the car park circle, slotting into a space as soon as it opens up. A grimace every time he draws in his tobacco. Smoking as part of some grim duty.
“It’s a fucking nightmare out there.” Robert Sewell raises a chin at the cars, all in some kind of commerce with illness or death. Depositing their wounded and maimed, picking up their leg- or arm-plastered kin, the all-too-glad-to-be-escaping visitors. A woman in her nineties, trying to exit her spot without turning her head; her handbrake on.
“Maybe you should have gone to the beach,” Sewell tells Jovan. “Why do I find that hard to imagine? You ever go to the beach with your wife, Joe?”
“We should go more times,” Jovan says, not sure what Mr Sewell is thinking, standing in his worn-out black shoes. What he sees out there, and why it makes him draw on his cigarette with that ugliness around his mouth.
“Me too. I don’t have a wife though. It’s good to have one when you’re contemplating a jaunt. That’s a word you might not be familiar with. It means to get out there on the spur of the moment. For the hell of it, you know. Have a picnic by the Yarra or the Melbourne Botanical Gardens. My parents used to get into that. They never did the traditional Christmas or birthday bullshit. A BBQ by the river was always a brilliant idea. Not only on the 25th of December. You and your wife should check out The Botanical, Joe,” he says blowing smoke at the cars. “Me and Gillian moved all the way out here and never got out anywhere when we were married. We forgot lots of great places and things we used to do, like the jaunt. Used to seem too far away every time we considered it but it’s really not a long drive to The Botanical Gardens.”
“OK. I’ll get address from you.” He takes off his sunglasses and moves towards the door.
“But that fucken van of yours, mate. You can’t take a woman anywhere in that. A woman doesn’t want to feel as if she’s a part of the equipment.” Jovan lets out the first breath of a chuckle—knows from previous experience that his supervisor is quick to begin talking from his loneliness. “You can borrow my car, mate. I’m not saying it’s a luxury vehicle but it’s got air con and a great stereo system. I listen to most of my music on the road.”
“Thank you. Maybe we have some time soon.” Jovan makes a move for the door.
“No new graffiti.”
Jovan stops, his card held above the swipe-scanner that will unlock the door for him.
“Maybe he’ll stop now. After Hallam,” Mr Sewell says.
Jovan turns around. Waves off the proffered cigarette. It was as if Mr Sewell didn’t believe him when he told him he used to smoke—that he no longer did. Every time they saw each other the pack of smokes came out and he would urge Jovan to take one as though there needed to be a reason for the two of them to be standing together, having a conversation.
“Not a generosity to welcome a friend to poison,” he says in Serbian. In English, “No thank you very much.”
“Life could go back to the way it was.”
“Maybe, yes,” Jovan says.
“You don’t think that’s likely?”
“This going in one direction. Worse. And more worse.”
Sewell remembers to blow the smoke away from Jovan as they stand at the staff entrance. He’s about to raise the cigarette again when he says, “Look at that old woman, struggling to get out of that spot for the last ten minutes. Her windows up on a day like this. I hope she’s got air con. What do you reckon? Is it nice and cool in that piece of shit Mitsubishi Colt?”
They watch the old woman, shrunken white head on stiff shoulders, swivelling in confusion. Two hands that have seized the steering wheel, unable to let go. Not being able to negotiate the tight spaces and narrow angles that will allow her to get out. Jovan swipes his card to release the lock.
“I’ve already given you the day off, mate. It’d take you five minutes to walk down to the beach. Why don’t you go down and have a swim?”
“Maybe you should go water, Boss.”
“Me? What would I fucken do in the water?” He smiles.
“And I hate smoking on the hot sand. You can’t get any satisfaction from a ciggie at the beach.”
“I go work now.” Jovan smiles at him with his hand to his jaw. “I have this pain. Not so easy to relax in sun.”
“OK mate. I want you to go straight up to maternity. Nurses up there complaining as usual. Can’t ever be clean enough for them.”
“Life go back to way it was,” Jovan says with a smile. Sewell blows more smoke at the carousel of cars out in the car park. The old woman has released herself from her purgatory. Jovan swipes his card again and enters the hospital. He hears Sewell behind him say, “Who knows what the fuck that looked like anyway?”
Jovan descends the stairwell and out a door that will lead him past the laundry rooms and then on into the change rooms. He stops by a sign above the largest of the immense industrial washing machines. Made to look like a regular sign that might have been up on the wall for decades, except it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. For one thing it’s in German, Arbeit macht frei. Dr Graffito’s work. Perhaps it was new yet Jovan is certain it isn’t. It hadn’t grabbed anyone’s attention. It is a failure for Graffito. Maybe his first piece. Surreptitiously placed on a wall. No one noticing it for months. Derivative. Uninspired. Before he started getting creative. Before the mania really took hold.
A middle-aged Hungarian lady in her white cleaning uniform unbends from a washing trolley and gives him a malevolent look. He points up at the sign, to indicate he wasn’t watching her bend over. She doesn’t look. She walks away mumbling something in her language.
Another woman in the white cleaning uniform, a dinky-di Aussie, with that broad type of English he can barely understand, is returning from a break, and stops beside him. She’s gazing over to where he’s pointing.
“How long has that been there?” she asks. He shrugs. “What’s it mean?” Her voice rises from the gut. Always comes with a heavy swing to it, as if she’s using her fists as much as her lips.
“Work is … work make you free,” he says.
&n
bsp; “Huh! That’s bullshit if eva I heard it,” she says, “And why’s it in Croatian?”
“You mean Serbian?” he asks.
“Same difference.” She looks at him as though he’d climbed down a ladder after having hung the sign. “Why’s it up there?”
“It is German.” He takes a step away from her, “And I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. Of course you don’t know. But you’ll stand here looking at it like it’s the Mona Lisa.” That last, MownahLeesuh, comes out as nothing Jovan can identify.
“This is Dr Graffito. You know, the graffiti we have been having.”
“What, he’s a Kraut, is he?” she asks as she walks back to her work station. “Huh! Should’a known it’d be a foreigner.” She turns on her iron, and starts bringing out the white coats of doctors she’ll be ironing for the next few hours.
* * *
Suzana is still in the house when he wakes. Jovan stumbles out, eyes refusing to operate properly. She’s got the coffee on. A pile of French toast. Cinnamon on the table. Broke-open eggs in a bowl, ready to be poured into the pan. The smell of coffee squeezing his stomach tight and then releasing, opening a vast space of hunger.
“Not working today?” Jovan mumbles through a thick mouth, slumping at the table; hands scratching through his hair and then rubbing at his face.
“Is that disappointment in your voice?” She puts down her book. An Ivo Andrich collection of short stories in English he bought her on her first birthday in Australia. To practise her English with something familiar. Turned out an annoying hurdle for something too well known. Unused until now.
“That’s fatigue. And my eyes—not being able to open them—that’s age. The stumbling around for half an hour before the coffee kicks in, that’s death.”
“Hey. That’s not funny. Not fucking funny.” She rises, waving her hand at him to dispel fate-tempting words. She switches the gas flame on and strikes a match. Waits a second for the pan to melt some butter.
“No, I save the funny for the dilemma of the toilet on this kind of morning, an erection and a full bladder.”
“And now disgusting. The scratching of your arse, that’s just gross.” She uses the English word, gross, like a cliché teenager from an American film. She pours a dash of milk into the bowl of eggs. Swishes them around a few times, (Jovan’s preference).
“I might want to do that, scratch my arse, yet I resist that temptation in your presence, because that’s love.”
“Love in refrain. Sing me a silent song darling,” she says. Presses her mouth closed afterwards. And he doesn’t speak because it strikes him as unusual, these days, that she’d even speak of love in jest. Fear struggles up out of his intestines and freezes his lungs into a gasp that she doesn’t see, and he’s able to swallow it with some French toast. Maybe because this is the first time they’ve talked this way in years. As though nothing had happened and they were allowed to be themselves again. The familiar silence goes on now.
They eat. She reads her book and Jovan looks out the window. They’re surrounded by trees. Down Reservoir Road, the street they lived on, was Jubilee Park. In their elms and the park’s pines and gums, vermillion birds were leaping around from branch to branch. Brilliantly coloured ones they call Rosellas. Australian birds, he thinks. About the most beautiful birds when they’re seen altogether. A neighbour, Mister Karistianos, breeds them. Cages and sells them sometimes. He prefers to sit on his front porch these days throwing them seeds as he listens to classical music on the radio. It seems a shame that the music comes through a small speaker, from a cheap stereo the size of a hardback book, that he’s owned for a decade or two. Orchestras had produced the music in concert halls.
“I had this dream last night,” Suzana says, bringing over the plate. He’s putting the piece of French toast he’s taken from her plate into his mouth.
“What are you doing? There’s plenty of toast in front of you. Why you taking it from my plate?”
“I don’t know. I thought you were finished.”
“In the first place, that’s revolting. And in the second, damn strange behaviour. Why would you do that?”
“There was something appealing about your bite marks in the bread. I don’t know. Move on. Tell me about the dream.” She sits there looking at him, shakes her head.
“I was back in Belgrade. Walking along Kalimegdan. I used to do that in my angsty student days. Anyway, it starts snowing, and I’m bothered by that because I’ll be wet by the time I get to my car. I’m dressed for summer. A dress I got for my birthday; from you. The one I had to wait six months to wear because you bought a summer dress in winter.” She gives him a look with the pause, “Then it really starts to snow, and I’m trying to make my way through half a metre of it blanketing the ground. It gets worse, and I’m panicking because I know I’m going to get covered. Suffocated. And I do. The snow falls in blankets. The suffocation is slow. When I woke, I was desperate for another breath. Snapped my eyes open, and saw nothing but white. Woke up from that and for a second still felt an oblivion of white airlessness.”
“Good dream,” Jovan comments around his last mouthful of wolfed-down eggs. He picks up his coffee cup.
“Good? It was terrible.”
“Yet interesting. I never remember my dreams because they’re too boring. I had a good one about moving to a new planet called Crumbs.”
“What happened in that one?”
“That’s all I remember. Planet Crumbs.”
Looking at the clock on the kitchen wall, she stands up. “Eleven o’clock start for me today, in Chelsea. Jelka is picking me up. And then I’m in Black Rock again until dinner. You’ve got ham or pastrami for lunch today. I baked some bread yesterday as well.”
“Alright,” Jovan says, drinking his coffee and shaking some cinnamon onto his toast. Cinnamon was never something they used for French toast back in Yugoslavia. It’s an idea she has picked up in the Black Rock house.
Suzana stands in the doorway, watching him as he moves with sleep-clumsy movements. She looks out the window, at the garish birds that drive her crazy with their ceaseless squawking and twittering.
“I want to have another child,” she says.
He looks over at her, his face immobilised. He turns his body towards her, a slight swivel in the wooden kitchen chair. “Is this something you want to discuss?”
“You want another child, don’t you?” she asks with a very small question mark. It’s a statement really.
“Yes.” He swallows the piece of bread in his mouth. “I do.”
“So do I. What’s to discuss?”
“Alright,” Jovan says.
“And I want you to clean up the yard today, OK? I’m walking through a minefield every morning. Not to mention the impression it creates of our house. I mean, we live here, right?” She leaves the kitchen, saying, “Someone should put that monster dog on a chain.”
“I started to clean the lawn the other day but then the Australian came over. He wouldn’t stop talking and I suppose I got distracted.”
“You can finish it today.”
“No problem,” he says in English and doesn’t move from the kitchen table for a long time.
CHAPTER
FOUR
The street lights buzz and seem to be smouldering in the wet air. Glowing like fireflies left in a jar too long. A mist of rain falls as if there’s all the time in the world to come to a final rest on the ground. Summer warmth exhales through concrete. Thick black blanket clouds have brought the evening early to these Melbourne suburbs. The branches in the trees sprinkle heavier drops of water as they sway above. The damp wind blows strands of Suzana’s long hair across her face, making her seem like the young woman she had been only a few years ago.
She slots her key into the door of Jovan’s Ford panel van. She hears Mr Coultas calling out to her. He’s jogging up the long driveway and to the street. To the ugly vehicle that neighbours have complained about in over-the-fence convers
ations. Rust stains along its bottom like unwashed underwear on display. About the roar of the stuttering engine, a crass brute belches at their pristine Beamers and Mercs. She has heard snatches of conversations on the phone and between Coultas and his wife. They have both agreed, the panel van is a problem. Suzana has been waiting for them to mention it to her for the last two weeks.
Glen Coultas has followed Suzana out into the night even though it is drizzling. He’s out of breath. Isn’t it pathetic when a man can’t run up his driveway without having to gasp for air?
“Missus Brakochevich,” in that carefully over-pronounced way of his. “Hang on a tick.”
“Yes Mister Coultas.” A hard edge to her voice. Knowing it should be a soft tone of voice when speaking to an employer. Unable to help herself. “I need to go home now.” She pulls the key out of the lock and opens the door. She continues to face him over her shoulder.
“Well … we forgot to pay you, is all,” Coultas explains.
What does he want looking at her that way? Desperation in his hands, flapping uselessly at his side. Why doesn’t he fold them or put them away in his pockets? One hand is now palm up before her as if he’s presenting some kind of fortune in its lines.
She opens her mouth for a moment and then speaks. “Okay. We should arrange payment every week if you want me to come here so regularly.” It’s only on that final word that her accent stumbles. It’s such a sing-song word, and she might have put one too many la’s into it. “Paying me every day is stupid. Also not easy for you.” It feels as though she’s getting paid pocket money.