by A. S. Patric
She has a neighbour who is dying of bowel cancer. She owns a Chihuahua. The neighbour has been dying for months now. They are going to scatter her ashes in a park where she walked her pet dog every day. This little rat-dog that Jelka loathes. Does Suzana know that Chihuahuas are the only creature in the world that can cry, outside of human beings. Not dog moans. Actual tears. Because this little rat-dog has been crying for its dying owner. Jelka starts laughing and crying at the same time as she says that a little rat-dog has more feeling in its little trembling body than the man she married. Because what it comes down to is this: if she was to die tomorrow she can only imagine how meagre a cluster of mourners will come, and how few, maybe one or two, might shed real tears of grief for her. For her, not their own mortality. For her, not because they lost someone once. And Ante will be sitting in the front row, listening to the priest. And afterwards, he will climb those stairs, and lean over the green felt of his tables, and hit those shiny red balls into those worn, brown leather pockets.
Would Suzana cry? Jelka doesn’t ask, but maybe that was the point of calling her over today. Feeling lost and unloved. That colossal sense of disregard from the world at large. Both of them perhaps like those fireflies left in a jar too long. The rain starts to fall in earnest, and as it does, the two women huddle closer, beneath the bit of roof overhanging the three concrete steps at the doorway of Ante and Jelka’s home.
Suzana stops at a service station for petrol. After paying she takes out her notebook and scribbles a thought into it. And keeps scribbling for a few minutes until she reminds herself that she has to get home, and before that to the supermarket. So she turns on the van and gets it to move without a stutter.
She recently bought a Moleskine. She hasn’t seen one since her Belgrade student days. She’s been opening it and writing in it. The notebook begins with a quote by Milosh Tsernianski, which she knows from memory and has translated into English.
In the eyes of these bedecked and bedizened Imperial officers, the Serbian nation, privileged as it was by the Empress, was a target for mockery—but otherwise a blank, an obscure thing, in whose existence they did not feel the need to believe.
She’s read his book six times. A novel called Migrations that doesn’t feel like a novel. The characters don’t feel like characters. It isn’t history or myth, and yet it’s all those things. That quote had been all she wrote for weeks. There is a lot more scribbled in the notebook now. Pages and pages have been filled in the last week. Ideas flowing from that inkwell she had first discovered in Belgrade—the one the Demon had helped her find.
There’s a local newspaper sitting on the passenger seat. Jovan takes it with him to work. He’s already read it and has left it open on an article with a picture of a sad little train station called Hallam.
Suzana has been reading newspapers every day now, as well as novels and non-fiction books, with an idea of improving her written English. She watches English films with English subtitles whenever she can, for the spelling. Suzana’s spoken English has always been good. Even before everyone started learning it in high school. Her father loved languages and thought he knew a lot more English than he actually did. He tuned a powerful Soviet radio he owned to one of twenty different languages nightly and translated what he could. An American military base in Naples played blues music and jazz and they spent hours listening to Yankee DJs tell stories about obscure American lives and loves. Suzana’s English still carries some of those American accents and music.
She enjoys speaking English though she continues to feel the bewilderment a native of a phonetic language experiences every time she encounters the chaos of English spelling. Four, but forty, not fourty. Nine, but not nife, it is knife. Where does the K come from? Why is it there? The W in Sword. Where is it in the word Sort? Why doesn’t a person swort out the mail if they’ve just used a sword to kill the mail man? Why is there two Ls in Hallam and Rs in barracouta?
She wants to take a knife and sword to those that uphold this medieval language as supreme in the world today, then lets the notion go, and spells her words as best she can. The truth is that she’s falling deeper in love with the English language. Her native Serbian is tied into everything she was and everything she had already thought and done. In English she notices things, as when Glen Coultas asked her to hang on a tick—she knows it refers to the ticking of a clock. Yet in English, she sees the words. The parasite that lives on blood, and hanging onto that insect with its full pouch is holding onto a moment with thumb and forefinger, in a pincer grip. Hold onto a tick. You can’t get it back but perhaps you can smear it black and red between the pages of a book.
When she goes out to her houses, she cleans quickly and then sits in a lounge chair and reads for half an hour, noting down eye-catching expressions or strange spellings in her Moleskine. At the Coultas house she sometimes has as much as three hours of reading time in an eight hour shift. They aren’t the kind of family that want their light bulbs polished. They’re happy when she deigns to cook them all dinner, instead of letting them order take-away again, and each of them thanks her when she cooks for them, very politely. For Suzana this kind of appreciation seems a weakness, yet she knows she’s not right in this.
If Rae is napping, she is glad that when she wakes, Suzana will be there, reading her book quietly. That when she rouses from deep groggy disorientation, she can ask for a glass of water and there is no need for conversation. Suzana simply goes and gets the glass of water. Has a very steady hand as she helps Rae drink. If Rae needs the television turned on, it is turned on. If she needs the washing done, it is done, and her urine soaked sheets aren’t a problem. Suzana doesn’t seem to notice. There isn’t an issue in anything they ask her to do. And they find some kind of strength in simply seeing her move around, doing the things they need to have done for them. They’re not the kind of family that needs a nurse or maid. They have found that they need Suzana.
She walks into the supermarket. She could go to every shelf blindfolded she’s traced the same route so many times. Suzana brings the local newspaper with her to read if she gets stuck in a line. There’s an article about a woman who has recently leapt from a Hallam platform to her death. The article is by a journalist who has tried to talk to Jovan once or twice about graffiti at the hospital. She remembers the journalist because of the name, which looks backwards. Apparently he is indeed Wilson Lawrence. The article isn’t reporting the suicide itself, but the fact that suicide isn’t being reported. It happens every week. People throw themselves in front of trains. Six or seven people go off the West Gate Bridge weekly. It becomes notable if a father throws his daughter off the West Gate Bridge. There are alarming figures in youth suicide. Australia has one of the highest rates in the world yet you couldn’t talk about it in an article without raising the figures—writing about suicide encourages suicide. Trivial as they might seem to the general reader, they can’t be tallied up like road accidents, because they represent a deeper social illness of disconnection. Our own ambivalence being …
The checkout boy calls ‘next’ a second time as she’s reading. Someone behind says ‘next’. From calm to berserk in less than five seconds in this supermarket line. An African boy with the name badge Capon on his chest. He doesn’t say hello or goodbye. She wants to ask him if he knows that Capon is also a word in English meaning a castrated chicken.
Suzana pushes her cart out to the van. Opens its back doors and puts her bags in. Takes the cart back to the supermarket. Gets into the cabin of the van and thinks about a commercial she’s seen on television about people wasting power by leaving electrical appliances on. Black balloons rise from the appliances, squeezing out of an air conditioner left on or an electric kettle on standby. It’s a effective way of illustrating waste because the commercial ends with people’s homes being filled with jostling black plastic, and afterwards, there’s a sky full of those nasty balloons.
The quiet suicides of Lawrence’s article might also have black balloons. Peopl
e who have thought about killing themselves, with black balloons hovering above their heads, the string reaching down, tied around their necks. Eventually it gets to a point where the string is tight enough, and breathing too difficult, and there is enough black balloons to carry a person off. It isn’t an effort, as ‘suicide attempt’ implies. It’s just breathing out a final breath and letting the balloons lift away.
She drives into Frankston and down Reservoir Road. Parks in her driveway, wishing they could organise a fence to go around their rental property. The giant dog from next door is nothing but a monstrous pest. He’s in her yard again, ready to leap on Suzana as soon as she opens her door.
It seems the entire neighbourhood has gathered on her lawn tonight. The excitable bald man, who uses his arms too much when he speaks. Silvers and his wife Jane. And a beautiful woman, asking for directions, and getting them from the bald man, looking at Jovan as though he’s the one giving them to her.
Suzana whispers to Jovan when she doesn’t need to whisper. Maybe to move that much closer to him and to have him bend his face down to her. Words for the cup of his ear. Telling him that he has an interesting collection of people here and she’s going inside to make dinner, so he shouldn’t be long.
By the time she is through her front door the woman is already gone. Call her a figment of the imagination. All that long black hair, the blue eyes amidst it all—a shock of contrast. The Chanel perfume the only thing clear, and all else a blur of unnecessary, unwanted details.
Suzana walks to the kitchen. She’s going to make Jovan one of his favourite meals even if it’s going to be late. An hour and a half from now would mean dinner at about nine in the evening. She’s already made a bean soup called Pasulje. Which would have to do if he was hungry sooner. For Lovachke Schnitzels she takes out the veal she just bought and beats it with a tenderising hammer. She cooks it slightly on both sides, throwing it into flour afterwards. She cooks up red onion, diced tomatoes, and pours in a good amount of white wine and a cup of water. Puts the flour-caked schnitzels back into the bubbling liquid and leaves it to cook an hour. The meat will absorb the wine and flavours of Vegeta and pepper.
It’s a peasant’s dinner she had never dreamed of making before she met Jovan. She’d learned the recipe from his Bosnian mother, one of her many rustic recipes. They argued a lot when they talked, especially if the conversation was in the kitchen, but she learned a great deal about Banja Luka and that region from the old woman. Even though she was dead, Suzana felt a combatative impulse at the thought of Darinka, a matriarch who dominated everyone in her world effortlessly despite cooking like a slave for most of her life. The total concoction of smell and memory are almost able to obliterate the scent of Chanel perfume.
There is a part of Suzana that always stands aside, aghast at this kind of domestic performance. She learned no culinary skills from her own mother and never bothered with real cooking all the way through high school and university. In the first years of marriage, if they ate at home at all, it was Jovan who cooked. So she’d never made proper meals before she had children, and for Ana and Dejan she learned a whole array of recipes. She’d stopped afterwards.
Over the last year she’d become sick of the round of five meals Jovan is content to cook over and again ad infinitum, and finds the time in the kitchen to be a good place to gather thoughts for her notebook. Doesn’t she look right now, to all intents and purposes, a drab housewife pottering around meekly in the kitchen for the man of the house? That woman outside, with her glossy black hair and silver SAAB and those vivid blue eyes, must see only this diminished life Suzana is living.
Suzana sits down at her small kitchen table and writes in her Moleskine, surrounded by the aromas of the cooking meal. Previously it has all been notes and snippets of things that could be bundled together into a history. Today she has an image of a man riding the long road from Istanbul to Belgrade, during the height of the Ottoman empire.
They warned children not to fall asleep near the poppy bush. The name of the flower in his native tongue sounded like a pagan god of the underworld. In that language of his mother and father, though no longer his. ‘Mahk’ they told their children while they still had them in their possession. They told them that if they fell asleep near this flower they would never wake up again.
When he heard this story he was so young that he listened with mystified awe, because what he understood wasn’t—‘be careful here or you will die’—he understood it as, there’s a place you can fall asleep and dream, never wake up, and never stop dreaming. He could close his eyes and imagine a rising ribbon of smoke, twirling up into the air, and through the dark clouds in the storming sky, and out to the stars themselves, rising on a stream of smoke on the still whisper of dreams.
He must have heard the story when he was five. He hadn’t thought about it for maybe the whole of the forty years since then. Yet here he was riding through the hostile land of the Bulgars and Vlachs because of it. Already he had slaughtered two brigands that should have known better than to try to hold up a soldier, clearly carrying the weapons of a Janissary.
He would usually ride by a tavern without question. He didn’t do that tonight.
The sun had dropped out of the sky, leaving him a few seconds of twilight. It wouldn’t be a problem to continue down the road a half hour, or hour, find another place to stable his horse and a warm meal and bed for himself. The right kind of house for a man such as himself. Or he could find a spot in a field anywhere around here. It was the voices he heard coming out of the door that drew him in. His mother tongue spoken this way, at ease, boisterously, tumbling out with friendship.
All of their voices faded away when he walked in, and petered out when he sat at a table. He was going to order a drink, something alcoholic, yet when he saw the frightened face of the Serbian proprietor, he decided to ask for a meal, and water, in the language she expected from him. Turkish from the Turk.
It’s a little after nine when she’s finished. Jovan is still outside talking. She calls out from the front door, to tell him dinner is ready. He brings David Dickens in with him—a schoolboy with a friend. Laughing like children when she offers David a coffee before he goes home and Jovan answers ‘no’ for him. Saying something about his friend the Wood Spider that doesn’t make sense to her.
They continue, Jovan guiding the conversation with a word here or there. Letting the failed psychologist/aspiring author unspool his mind—now talking about how long it’s been that human beings have used walls to communicate with each other, that it was indeed far longer, by centuries in fact, before paper came along, whether it was cave paintings, hieroglyphics, or billboards. And that the phrase ‘the end is nigh,’ is an acknowledgment of a certain culture and historical stream of public outburst …
They go on and on about the graffiti and she feels the embarrassment she’s felt often about Jovan’s English. She is beginning to think that with him it’s some strange point of pride. That he doesn’t want to rid himself of the heavy accent that makes sales assistants or doctors or the landlord talk to him as if he’s a cretin. That he knows how to form perfectly constructed grammatical sentences and feels more comfortable at a distance to English—a language to dabble in, and play with, only. Everything that he has been serious about, all his work, left behind with his native tongue.
Suzana thinks of nights when a group of students would migrate to their apartment after their classes at the university, charged with the ideas of Jovan’s lectures, and he would sit in the fray being fought around him, guiding and prodding them all along, enjoying more than anything circulating and sharing the enthusiasm for ideas.
It also reminds her of something Ivo Andrich wrote. “Not only every word, but every sound used to be accompanied for me by a whole procession of emotional and intellectual associations. Now that no longer happens. Sounds are isolated, and words weak, so that you have to repeat them: and that does not help at all. And this would be bearable if I were not tormented by
the idea, clear and exact in itself, that all these associations still exist and live around me, only I do not feel or hear them. And that all this beauty, inaudible to me, is heard by others, gathered and carried home like armfuls of flowers.”
When Jovan opened that page for her and asked her to share the beauty of those sentences, back in Sarajevo, she’d thought that Andrich had written them because he was getting old, and the beauty was a sentimental one she wanted to store in her soul—now she knew better, and wished she’d never seen those words; that Jovan hadn’t shown them to her.
Jovan had pulled out a chair for David and they had all started eating without an invitation to dinner being offered or accepted. Halfway through the meal, David takes a breather from their conversation to address the silent Suzana.
He says, “So Jovan tells me you enjoy reading.”
“It’s Yo-Vahn. Not Joe-Van,” Suzana says.