by A. S. Patric
It’s got to be soon now, he’s thinking as he walks down the stairs. He passes people sitting and waiting to see his dentist or the GPs that work in this centre. An old man with a walking frame, who brings along a small tank of oxygen the way some bring a bottle of drinking water. The two sixty-year-olds in matching tracksuits, assuring the five women of the reception that they are careful to look after themselves with diet and exercise. The child that drapes himself over a chair, moaning about how bored he is, coughing his head off in minute-long fits.
Jovan stumbles outside into the bright light, thinking soon, because a child will keep both of them near one of these purgatorial medical rooms for two or three years. Even if a new child turns out to be not as sickly as Jovan’s other children had been, it will be difficult getting around. He wants to drive, and that would be crazy with a baby, yet without a car to explore that wondrous Queensland landscape, he can’t see the point of going. Neither he or Suzana are the kind of people who can loaf on a beach for hours on end every day. So it would have to be soon if they want to get up to the Sunshine Coast again. Suzana had been all for it. In the last week or two she’s been saying she wasn’t so sure anymore. The Coultas family needs her. Jelka is having a crisis as well. Then there’s all the scribbling in her black books. It’s the writing that makes Jovan desperate to find a way to free them for a trip up north.
By the time he gets to his white panel van, his head is swimming. He reaches into his pocket to fish out the keys. Pulling them out, he fumbles the keys to the ground. He leans over and feels he might tumble onto the bitumen of the car park after them. Rust along the bottom edge of this van, that he has sanded back once already, puttied and painted over. Yet there it is again, beginning to bubble beneath the paint and eat at the edges. The metal was old. You couldn’t patch it a million times. Eventually it gets to a point where there’s nothing left to work with.
A young woman is talking to him before he realises someone has approached and is catching up while she’s halfway through already; he opens his thick mouth and attempts a smile through lips that feel made of rubber. “Yes, hospital. I work in there.”
“I thought, since I needed to get down there as well, maybe you could give me a lift? Public transport from here to there is a bitch. It’d be a tram and a train, a ten-minute walk or a bus, and it sucks when you have to go from point A to point B, just so you can get to point C, and then finally to where you need to get to. You know what I mean? Point fucking K or something.”
Jovan wishes he could tell her in one facial expression that the long explanation isn’t necessary, and all she needs to do is tell him they work in the same hospital, and they would already be on the road by now. His nodding doesn’t stop any of it, and eventually he’s able to mumble, “No Problem. We go. Get in. Point K. Direct.”
She gets into the cabin of the van, though first she’s got to be told it’s alright to shove the paper and Melways, the jumper and cap and smelly boots to the floor. To push his lunch box aside while Jovan returns to the dentist for the sunglasses he’s only now realised he left up there. His own sunglasses, the ones he swapped for the dentistry sunglasses when he lay back on the seat.
So it’s past the old man with his little bottle of O2 again and the child that was now pulling on his mother’s arm to go now, can we go now please!!! Back to the annoying Janusz who is the dental receptionist upstairs and his Polish-style ultra-camp flouncing and fluffing over every detail of his cubbyhole of an office and its eternally running, locked-on soaps, five-inch television.
“Oh yes I have the sunglasses for you. But you left them here on purpose. You must be desperate to come back already. To see Janusz again. Don’t forget, that I will see you again on the fourth of July. Maybe we should celebrate with fireworks. I will call you, to remind you,” Janusz says through his flavourful Polish accent.
Jovan blinks through all this, thickly says, in his blockish English, “What?”
“You know, American day. When the Americans celebrate themselves. You won’t forget again at least.” It baffles Jovan what he means by forget again. As it was, for this appointment Janusz had called him three times during the week to shift it around by half-hour slots, and there was certainly no possibility of forgetting when Janusz called once more this morning.
When Jovan gets back to the car, the girl is scribbling in her book. Maybe technically she’s a woman and old enough to be a nurse. She’s the kind of petite woman who stopped growing at about age fourteen and will continue to look like a teenager for the next ten or twenty years. Jovan will go on feeling as though he’s clocking in as an octogenarian. Dentures not too far away now. Having a child certainly isn’t going to be a remedy for that.
She’s talking again as he starts the loud Ford which makes birds in a nearby tree leap for open skies. Has to gun the thing so that it doesn’t stall. Gives her a retarded-looking smile by way of saying, sorry, I have to do it, and seriously, this car isn’t a hot rod in anyone’s imagination. The anaesthetic is making the right half of his head feel like the aftermath of a stroke.
He’s not listening to what she’s saying while he navigates the heavy crate through the busy traffic. She goes on talking and he’s prompted to correctly say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘why’, and ‘I understand’, which is enough to keep her going happily. Talking and drawing in her sketchbook. Jovan drives raggedly today, getting beeped at twice, almost crashing into an ice cream van because of his bad brakes, which makes the nurse laugh so hard she has to wipe tears from her eyes.
Buoyed by her good will, Jovan tells the nurse that the van is an old love that will continue to need to be seduced even when she’s ninety. That doesn’t make her laugh again. She smiles and nods at Jovan because now she’s the distracted one. By the time they get to the hospital she has drawn a portrait of Jovan in pencil. The nurse asks for his name and writes it above the image. Romance of the Crash, she adds below his face.
“My name’s Leni by the way. Thanks for the lift,” she chirps. Leni gives him a playful peck on the cheek and leaves the sketch on the seat beside him. Jovan doesn’t know what to do with it. He folds it and pushes it into the overfull glovebox. He crushes the image to make it fit. There’s a lot of stuff in there he knows he’ll never need. Inside that compartment is also sunscreen Suzana used on those beaches up north. He can feel the kiss through the fading numbness of the anaesthetic.
“Don’t know why, but I never think of you as a refugee. But you are, aren’tcha mate?”
Jovan is pulling up his overalls in the hospital’s change room, his jaw still sore on both sides. Bill’s a janitor that works in the hospital with Jovan. He says he is Greek because he’s the son of immigrants, yet besides the stockiness, hairiness and olive skin, there’s nothing about him that Jovan sees as actually Greek. He’s Australian, whatever the accent.
“When you think refugee, you think black, brown or Asian. Skinny and small, because there’s never been a lot of food. But look at you. Raised by basketballers. Smiling like a fucking wood duck. Usually. Not today though, hey? You’ve got your refugee face on this morning.” Bill throws a can of coke he’s been drinking at a bin. He misses. They both watch it roll away.
“So where’s the wood-duck smile today? What happened?” Bill asks.
“I go to dentist this morning,” Jovan answers.
“You’ll be walking around with that stupid fucken smile soon enough, hey? Maybe later on today I’ll see you walking along the halls with that little smile that tells everyone everything is OK. ‘No problems.’ I don’t know what you’ve got to fucken smile about. I hate this shit. Had to fucken clean up an old man’s vomit in the lobby this morning. But maybe that’s why you go on smiling. Being a refugee, you seen all kinds of shit, hey? What’s an old man’s vomit when you’ve seen old men gunned down? Happy to be in the land of the fucken free!”
Jovan finds it difficult to think when Bill’s in this mood. Bill likes to rant every few days and all Jovan can do is
let him go on for a few minutes. The fading anaesthetic and the general discomfort he feels makes it that much harder for Jovan to deal with Bill today.
“You want go back to Greece?” Jovan says. “You say this sometimes. Freedom there, even if your parents run from their islands, give everything away to make it to over here. Doesn’t make sense to me. Things get worse in Greece. Not better, since your parents leave there.” Jovan sits on a bench and puts his feet into his boots. Pulls the laces up and begins to tie them with hands that feel clumsy.
“Fuck yeah. They know how to live over there, man. We waste all our time working here. They know what Life is over there. You know what I’m saying? We have to plan to fit it in. Save up for years, and then go over for a few weeks. Call it a holiday. Fucking hell, man, what do we call the rest of this fucking life here?”
“It is easy to make picture cards of places.” He regrets even saying this much. Smiles at Bill closed mouthed—a ‘wood duck’. There’s no point talking to Bill. Jovan usually walks out on him, mid-rant. Jovan doesn’t know where he gets this idea of life. A holiday that never ends is the daydream of a spoilt child.
“You mean postcards.” Bill kicks his locker shut. From the way he’s behaving, Bill might have been on this same job for thirty years. His father, Tom, had done just that, and retired recently. Bill hasn’t been a cleaner for a year yet.
Bill says, “No Bosnia postcards, that’s for sure. Fucking Muslims, fucking up their own shit, and then they come around fucking up everyone else’s. Acting as though not eating pork is gonna mean shit to God or the Devil.”
Bill leaves the change room thinking he’s offered Jovan a pat on the back, as though to share a hate is to share a love. Tossing Molotov words with his eyes closed. The type of thing you lob around a football ground during a rival match. A flare and nothing more. Not something that could set the air alight—a kind of napalm that would keep burning for generations.
Jovan feels the fluttering, and then he’s within the feathers and claws of the black crow. He makes it to a toilet cubicle and is able to close a door. All he can do is place his head in his hands and breathe while the crow crashes his brain with adrenalin and fear. Promise himself that it will pass. Sit and wait. Close his eyes and press his palms into his face. He knows it will pass. Curl his shoulders over and bring up his thighs until he’s above the balls of his feet and on the edge of the toilet cover.
Someone enters the cubicle beside Jovan’s for a long piss. Music erupting from his ears in long stuttering beats and jack-hammering trills. Jovan can hear it clearly though the speakers are plugged directly into the man’s head. Drilling his brain with this ceaseless roar of sound. Words are barely made out in the noiseless grappling of thoughts in Jovan’s brain. The graffiti on the walls of the cubicle around him is as black as disease and threatens him with the noxious penetration of the shit-stained fingers that wrote it, reaching through his skull, even with eyes closed and hands over ears.
Graffiti that talks about sucking someone’s dick, or fucking some woman in the arse that works in the hospital, or drawing out images of sloppy cunts and dripping cocks. Everywhere this same kind of toilet graffiti and its puerile assault on decency, as though it’s written with one omnipresent hand everywhere in the world, scribbling these insults to thought for the last two thousand years.
Maybe it is only fifteen minutes. In the cubicle, his elbows pressed hard into his knees, he allows himself a moan that is soft—brings it back within himself as soon as he can. He’s afraid of it, and what it might become. He knows it’s a spark, and if it’s given fuel, it will rage and burn everything he has, from memories to bones … and then it begins to release him. He breathes and raises his head to breathe again.
Must have been the dentist, his drills and needles. Must have been Bill and his Molotov muttering. Must have been everything finding a moment to burn again. Silently and imperceptibly.
He washes his face and wishes there was a way he could wash any of it clean. The Crow has settled, sitting on its perch in the cage of his chest. There’s no way for it to ever get out again now that it’s in. Jovan’s last breath will be to cough up one final black feather. He looks at himself and sees none of this. He looks calm. In the mirror, he looks fine.
He dries his face with a powder-blue hand towel he keeps in his locker. Bill’s boots aren’t placed on top of his locker, they’re abandoned on the floor. Someone else’s problem. Jovan picks them up and does it for him. He’d rather throw the boots into the trash yet he places them together, heel to heel, on top of Bill’s locker.
Old men gunned down, as Bill said. And women and children as well. Regular clean-shaven men, fathers and sons of those other victims, destroyed by Jovan and his kind. Is this what Bill thinks? Jovan wasn’t only a refugee, he was responsible for the war. Because he is a Serb he is responsible for a decade of mutilation and death. There’s no conversation. Nothing can change a mind made in ignorance, but Jovan wishes he could speak anyway. To explain that there had been lots of ordinary people with ordinary religion, who started killing each other, for reasons less and less clear as more and more people died. He doesn’t want to think of what the Serbs did to the Muslims, and can’t think about what the Muslims did to Serbs. To his friends and family. To him. To Suzana.
Bill doesn’t know a lot about hate, and not a lot more about love. He thinks he hates a boss or a politician or someone at his local pub but he hasn’t seen hate turn into fire, free-floating and exploding throughout a city, and then materialising again into a blistered red monster more real than any creature children imagine in night-time terrors. Moving from city to city, and village to village, blazing across a whole country, uncontrollable and annihilating. Breathing fire around Jovan, and murdering before his eyes, raping and maiming all with a dying grin never quite dead.
Calling that explosion of murder War makes it seem familiar. Elementary as much as elemental. When it rises from the ground, reeking of sulphur, war is hard to disguise as anything other than the Devil himself. Turning mailmen, barbers, greengrocers, electricians and taxi drivers into dismembering demons. Burning up entire generations of men as if their souls were made of hay. The Devil was never a comic book character, with a red face and small horns protruding from his skull—he is a force as real as gravity, raging through the minds of men with the fires of Hell.
It does not restore faith in God for Jovan. If he puts his hands together, and he does that most nights, it is to bring the cool and quiet closer to his face. To enfold himself in silence, and find some kind of peace in it. He prays because prayer itself is as close as he can come to containing the Devil. Pressing him, if only for the space of a few breaths, between the palms of his hands.
Jovan takes his face out of the clean hand towel, which still smells fresh from the lavender detergent Suzana uses, and puts it back into his locker. A lavender smell she used in Bosnia as well.
He feels it all recede again, back into the postcard images of places he’s been to. Places people pass through. Everything he’s felt, reduced to the few lines dashed off for disinterested people never likely to go to those places themselves. Enough for them to contemplate a few images and a few words and dream themselves visions that had nothing to do with those actual places. Because a postcard from hell is a joke. Hell isn’t real. The Devil is as frightening as the graffiti, or cartoon, of a man with a pitchfork, painted on toilet doors, or on children’s television. No, this thing we’ve been talking about for thousands of years, this farcical fire imp, doesn’t really exist. There’s nothing to fear from him, because the choices men make are all their own, even when they decide as a nation to burn everything down to the ground.
It’s better to think of places like Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum. To hang on to postcards from those places. Let the words entice the mind back to the azure waters and sun-gold beaches of Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum.
He clicks each metal button of his overalls closed.
He opens his locker again. Takes the hand towel and breathes in its lavender one more time before returning it and locking the narrow metal door.
Jovan ignores the messages on his pager that direct him to the hospital’s dentistry suite. In less than an hour, Tammie has found him in the kitchen, mopping the floors. She plays at wandering through casually, looking for something to nibble on. A slice of fruit from a tray on a bench brought back in after lunch and covered by Gladwrap. She peels back the plastic and lifts a long piece of pineapple and places it in her mouth. Pretends she doesn’t see or feel Jovan looking at her. When she does look over, she turns on her one-hundred-watt smile. For everything Jovan can say about Tammie, he’ll give her the sincerity of that grin. He can’t help but return the smile.
She does love this, even if this is a sideshow to her life. This is dessert after the meat and potatoes. It only requires a bit of moral flossing after each meal, and that gets easier every time she allows herself to indulge. This sneaking around with a janitor, a brutish foreigner who can barely speak the language yet who fucks as if fucking is vital, as though it comes up from the bones, as much about marrow as semen, and not the distracted love-making of a lawyer husband who is never off the clock. Never really present. Simply turns over his body to necessary duties. The half-swallowed moan at the end of it as much a sigh of resignation as of satisfaction. Not that she actually sees Jovan. He’s more a part of the now of her imagination than he is a man with his own history and his own future.
Jovan kills the smile on his face with his palm across his mouth as though he was crushing a cockroach that had snuck out from behind his ear. He doesn’t know if he can help himself. Tammie’s smile is an offering, a reminder of a sweet place; a deep, rich, black oblivion. Already a taste in his mouth as she begins to move towards him again, pausing at the edge of the wet floor he’s mopping. Then proceeds as though daintily stepping, naked, into a cool, wooded lake.