by A. S. Patric
At their university there had been students who continued attending classes even as their courses became absurdities. Jovan still had a handful of pupils coming to read and discuss the merits of Mesha Selimovich’s masterpiece Death and the Dervish, drawing contrasts with Ivo Andrich’s monumental, Bridge on the Drina, with Milosh Tsernianski’s, Migrations, or Danilo Kish’s, Garden, Ashes, irrespective of which author was a Jew or Muslim, Orthodox or Catholic. He still gave these desperate, delusional students assignments; which they completed. He graded them and made his comments, and returned them to his students. Until none of them came at all, and his books became truly useless. He couldn’t read them himself anymore. And still he didn’t leave. Their flat in Sarajevo was taken and they began living in the university. Jovan walked around the university in a daze that wouldn’t lift for a second. A head full of bees is how he described it to Suzana. He couldn’t understand what bees were at times. The world was full of insects erupting from people’s mouths. She didn’t say anything, but even with Suzana’s mouth closed, he could hear humming.
They had already sent Ana and Dejan to Jovan’s parents, who lived in a village outside Banja Luka, where the war was not an immediate threat. Jovan and Suzana understood the danger well enough to protect their children—not well enough to protect themselves. Losing their home had not convinced them that they had lost their city and were soon to lose their country as well. They flattered themselves, thinking they were fighting for what remained of their culture, before it went up in flames in the general conflagration of their society. They were unable to let go of their lives; had not accepted a more basic existence, beyond what they had lived for, in their devotion and belief; beyond even children and a future. Pure existence. Bodies in the world, breathing and blinking because bodies kept breathing and blinking beyond reason.
There’s the smell of sweat burning on a radiator, that sickening smell similar to arm hair burned above a gas flame on the stove top during a rushed dinner preparation. The radiators in the university were industrial strength, screwed onto the walls. When they were fired up they stayed on most of the harsh Bosnian winters. During brutal blizzards students didn’t leave their university. They crawled under tables into sleeping bags. In the morning woke to whatever classes were scheduled by teachers who were also sleeping there. The radiators kept running, for weeks and months, the oil within them staying molten the whole time.
When they were turned on for Jovan it was late autumn, and still warm during the days, and cool in the evenings, not quite requiring gloves or scarves. They asked Jovan to remove all his clothes before they turned them on. Used bicycle chains to bind him to the cool surface of a radiator. Turned it on to full, and sat at a desk to play a card game called Tablichi. A game children play. These men weren’t far removed from such playful years.
It was pain Jovan could smell. Is that the smell of pork frying? one of the young men asked. Is it Saint George’s day? another asked. The Serbs must be celebrating a slava somewhere near, because another one is sure he can smell pig on a spit. The jokes about pork went on. Funny because it was practically the only thing that differentiated them from the man they had bound to the radiator, though they’d eaten pork themselves often enough. They went on playing Tablichi.
Jovan was not an extraordinary man. The pain was terrible. He tried to be quiet. His wife was hiding in the ceiling and if he cried out he knew it would be worse for her. Oddly, the words that kept running through Jovan’s mind were ones that would never make sense again. This is necessary. This is necessary. This is necessary. Jovan didn’t know what sense it made even then. He went on saying those senseless words.
Bored with the game, one of the young men stood up, and walked to Jovan with an American gun he held sideways as he’s seen gangster rappers do in video clips. “I think I’m going to give you an F, Mister Teacher. That’s fair isn’t it? You remember giving me an F don’t you. I got punished for that F, Mister Teacher, you know that? I got a caning with a branch from a birch tree. And I wasn’t a child anymore either. But there’s respect and my father’s a peasant and they don’t understand F. I don’t know what it meant to him. It must have been like something coming down from on high. An F, he kept telling me. Crying as he was beating me with that birch branch. Like I’d told him I was a faggot, and brought eternal shame to the family name. I let him beat me. I was too big to be beaten like that, but I let him anyway. My peasant dad. I felt ashamed of him, as much as he felt ashamed of me, so I let him beat me one last time. For old times’ sake. An F, he kept telling me. An F. An F. How could you! And do you see how little it matters now, Mister Teacher. But my F is going to matter. You will remember it. Tell Porky Pig down there in Hell that I gave you an F. Tell his brother, Jesus Christ as well.” And who knows if young Zlatan would have pulled the trigger on his gangster gun? It was enough to make Jovan close his eyes. Enough to whimper in the last moment before feeling the bullet.
Suzana didn’t let that happen. She pushed aside the white square of a ceiling segment aside. Announced herself to the four young men below. Who asked her to come down. Who did not need to discuss what would happen next. Who did not need to think about what would happen next.
Do not visualise the details. Do not try to imagine what husband and wife may, or may not, have thought or felt. As those images on television broadcasts could not fully penetrate the minds of Suzana and Jovan, or anyone watching anywhere else at the time, so no one will ever know anything of this experience. Which wasn’t unique to this husband and wife in anything other than the particulars. It can only excite brief feelings, in the way something might from a film, one of Jovan’s books, or the poetry that he used to put to paper and publish in various literary journals around Yugoslavia.
Outside, on the university grounds, Jovan would find the four bodies of these young men a few hours afterwards while Suzana slept under sedation. Shot down by Serb militia. Not because they were rapists. Because they were armed Muslims. And Jovan did not feel relief. Did not feel the hatred for them consummated in this violence. Maybe it was because they looked young. Young enough to still be his students. Young enough to be anything they wanted to be. No longer young. They had no age now. Hate would have been easier. Jovan searched for hate, and wanted to find it. Easier than the obliteration he actually felt.
The demolishment he still feels, even here in Melbourne, Australia. A different world altogether in which what happened in Bosnia was some kind of horror show where monsters killed other monsters. A place with no heroes, and therefore of little interest to anyone he talked to, except as far as they looked at him and wondered whether he was possibly another one of those Balkan monsters. Jovan smiles at people in the hospital, blokes like Bill, and assures them all he’s not to be feared. He’s just a cleaner in this world. No problems. There are no problems here that can’t be cleaned away.
He walks down the hallway, away from the change room and the noise of Bill kicking in metal lockers. Jovan moves down the busy hospital halls, patients making their way along to rooms for examinations or rest, with doctors and their purposeful faces and others, similar to himself, heads full of directions, moving here and there, looking to keep it all running. Everything going on as it should in this fully functioning moral economy. The hum of a healthy hive, audible through every wall, at least to Jovan’s ears.
That hum had been harder to hear ever since Doctor Graffito had emerged, his mind breaking out across the walls, a rare, exotic disease that was yet deeply familiar as well. As common as a cold. The cough and the frustration. As basic as hate. The venom from a wound, sucked up, spat out. Had Jovan been fooling himself about his own hatred? Enough of that poison and a man becomes toxic, the walking wounded, more dead than alive.
Outside radiology, he stops for a drink from the new water cooler. The white plastic cups are small, child-sized, so Jovan refills his cup and drinks again. The water is slow and he thinks of Graffito’s Origin of the Species oil. Leni walks along the
hallway and pats his elbow lightly as she passes, absentmindedly says, ‘Hey, Jovan,’ pronouncing it correctly. Returns after a few steps because a thought has occurred to her—for a brief chat with him at the water cooler. It’s one of those social phenomena, people talking at the water cooler, but he hasn’t seen it often and he’s never been part of that kind of conversation. It’s a small thing, yet it lets the toilet graffiti slip away from his mind as nothing more than the spat-out madness of Dr Graffito.
Jovan walks through the hospital feeling as though these people belong to him. As if the halls and rooms were in a home he owns. A feeling he used to have in the university. He knows them all in brief moments. He wants them to find their ways with as little confusion and pain as possible. The grid pattern of the plastic floors along the way pleases him; the three tones of a comforting grey. So clean you can’t see a scuffmark or bit of rubbish all the way out to the car park.
When he puts his key into the lock of the panel van, he thinks, Maroochydore and Mooloolaba, Noosa and Coolum, and wishes he could find a way to free them both for another drive up to the Sunshine Coast. They bought a pile of postcards while they were up there and sent them to no one. Jovan collected them at different service stations along the way.
There was a place called Cotton Tree. They spent a month there. Every day so bright it dazzled the brain all the way into evening. A gold-flecked heat, that blasted without blistering—the water freshening the air whenever it began to feel heavy. A place where he felt for the first time that they might actually survive Sarajevo.
Cotton Tree doesn’t rhyme with the rest of his Sunshine Coast names but it’s the centre of a useless compass he carries around with him in Melbourne. Jovan drops into his car seat and feels the shock travel up his spine and jangle up into his teeth.
He drives out into the homeward-bound evening traffic and doesn’t mind the push and pull of the metal river around him, the long stops, crawling along for sections of the road home. It gives him time to think about Leni. The conversation about her art. Asking him to be her subject.
He laughs out loud now, because back at the water cooler, he had thought she meant she wanted him to stand in a room for her—naked. Just him and the pretty girl. Had she noticed him blush? Had he actually blushed? His face wouldn’t have flushed, yet she was watching closely. There were almost invisible signs. The pupils dilating. A blush response in his eyes? Jovan brakes for a cyclist pushing out into the lane because of a parked car up ahead. She must expect that reaction when she asks someone to pose for her. Wouldn’t most people stumble on the idea of their own nudity? Not a brief nakedness, as it was most of the time, or part way. Fully nude, an hour or two, for the careful scrutiny of canvas. All of the people she’s asked, laughing with the same kind of embarrassed shift of warmer blood in their faces. He passes the cyclist and admires the fixed attention he gives the road ahead. The way the cyclist leans forward, poised and very still but for the perfect rhythm of his legs pumping up and down. “Almost killed you,” Jovan murmurs. Shakes his head in the rear-view.
X-Ray walked past the water cooler, stopped to see what the laughter was about. Impossible to explain and Leni laughed harder when Jovan attempted to describe the misunderstanding—what she asked him and what he had assumed. X-Ray walked away as if he was angry at both of them. Especially Jovan. He couldn’t help laughing at X-Ray’s confusion as well.
Jovan had looked back at Leni, enjoying her laughter. Might he have been persuaded to pose nude? He knew that, had he wanted to reveal himself, he wouldn’t be able to. Nothing showed in the mirror. Suzana said there were a few marks across his back. The sharp radiator fins had put a vague pattern into his skin—even those industrial strength Bosnian radiators couldn’t melt flesh. They weren’t quite as hot as an electronic iron. Was that why a demented mind needed to explode across hospital walls in graffiti? Spell out every vague wound pattern inflicted on a man’s mind.
He could wear his overalls, she said. In fact, the overalls were good. Wear the overalls, she told him, though he hadn’t agreed to be her subject. The clothes were a part of the world they both lived in yet she would be looking to draw him out of it. There would eventually be a kind of nakedness anyway, she said.
When he parks the van in his driveway the lights are on in every room of the house. The curtains are pulled aside. He doesn’t see Suzana walking from one room to another as he has in the past. Or he might see her sitting at the dining room table over her books, her spine as rigid and straight as her writing arm is relaxed and serpentine. Not at the table either tonight, though her books are there.
Isn’t this a kind of nudity as well? They were never this careless before. Maybe there were children to protect and privacy was part of that function. Now their furniture is always second or third hand anyway and there’s nothing to steal or protect. The open blinds and lights would confirm it for anyone walking past the house.
It reminded Jovan of an ant farm they built in a science class when he was young. Prayers for Cracks in the Glass—the title of a poem he wrote back in those school days, where he used those ants and their compressed, exposed world, as an elaborate metaphor for his own petty high-school frustrations.
He pulls the latch and kicks open his car door. Walks towards home. There’s a small slab of concrete in front of the house that serves as a step to his front door. He looks up and there are no clouds tonight. There are few stars—random dots of light which have managed to struggle through the city’s light pollution. He finds a scrap of poetry as he walks toward his illuminated house.
No stars in the sky
Frankston forgets
every evening
every dream
My genesis
graffiti scrubbed
clean every dream
every evening
Jovan doesn’t open the front door. Charlemagne, on a chain, barks from Silvers’ yard. Rosellas squabble on the power lines along the street. Cicadas roar from the eucalyptus tree in his yard. A neighbour’s ute coasts home along Reservoir Road—a few houses down the street. Silence beyond the door. Jovan’s keys are in his pocket but he can’t move his arms. He turns away and faces the street. He stands there, breathing and blinking. Pure existence. That phrase drifts through his mind, connected to nothing.
Jovan remembers the sketch Leni made of him when he drove her to work in the morning. The Romance of the Crash. Suzana might find the drawing. The portrait would hurt her. Wouldn’t it be clear a woman had drawn it? Might he seem a philanderer? Jovan walks back to his van and opens the passenger-side door. He leans in for the glove box. Pops it open. The compartment is empty other than for a small parcel. On the front of it are the printed words:
This is a Bomb
Jovan picks it up and knows he’s meant to open the package. Graffito wants him to feel a jolt of fear that his car has been broken into. Anger that there has been a theft. The doctor is directing the janitor to read another message within the small box, carefully prepared for him.
Jovan walks the parcel to the green wheelie bin. Changes his mind. He doesn’t want to be tempted later on by a curiosity that will be sure to grow. Given enough time it will be irresistible to know what Graffito had to say in a personal message to Jovan.
This is not a game Jovan can win since it can only be played on a madman’s terms. No doubt what’s in it. Harm. Pain for Jovan. An invitation to torment. He shakes the package as he walks toward the street and feels a weight within. So it wasn’t words today. The toilet door was enough, thinks Jovan, as he bends down. He drops ‘the bomb’ into a storm water drain that will sweep it away to Port Phillip Bay.
He walks back up to the front door of the brightly lit house and notices the dim, flashing lights of his television. The set is turned away from him. He can’t see what’s being televised. It’s illuminating his wife. She’s sitting on the carpet before it, as he’d seen his children do when watching a show. They were captivated in the same way at times. Tears running
from an immobile expression of fascination on her face. Mesmerised—a woman who almost never watches television. Suzana doesn’t look like she’s crying. Jovan can see her wet face as television light plays across it. She’s childlike, arms wrapped around her legs, watching. Doesn’t notice Jovan through the front window, three metres away, until he knocks on their front door. And then she flinches as though slapped.
CHAPTER
SIX
Suzana hears the distinct roar of the panel van before it comes into the drive. Listens for the sound of his car door thumping shut before she stands up. Runs her fingers through her hair. Stops halfway as if halted by knots. Suzana sits down again on the three concrete steps of the backyard door, watches the rosellas line up on the unpainted back fence. Nails in the wood have leaked rust in streaks. The rosellas remind her of the colourful metal outlines in a shooting gallery at a fair. She has often wished she had a rifle to test her skill because while the rosellas are colourful they are also noisy in a way that makes her feel as though she might go mad again. He’s walking through the house, turning off all the lights as he goes.
Their television sits on the grass in the middle of the yard. It might have fallen over, forwards or backwards, when it was thrown down. Facing her, ready to be switched on by a remote control. Jovan mustn’t have felt a need to demolish the damned thing. Removing it from the lounge was enough. Yet the fall would surely have destroyed at least one or two essential mechanisms within the box. Had it rained overnight? The day since had been overcast but Suzana hadn’t noticed rain. Even a minor sprinkle would have got into the television. Maybe that fucking idiot Silvers watered the grass and the television combined. From where she was sitting the box wasn’t cracked and the screen pristine, its grey static heart ready to pulse back into life.