by A. S. Patric
He kills the engine. There’s a light on in his house. He might have left it on. It could be Suzana. Sibelius is playing. Jovan likes the radio on, even when he’s not home. He turns it off only before sleep. So, there’s no doubt about the radio. Is she in the kitchen? He walks down the hallway, fingers tracing along the wall. The light is coming from the kitchen. No noise. No sound of movement. He stands in the hallway. There is the smell of food, that particularly astringent, sharply pleasant smell of Sarma. His stomach is filled with junk. That smell still has the power to reach into him and reveal an abyss of hunger.
When he lies down in bed, he’s waiting. He’s lying at the waterline of an ocean, the tide about to change. The waves will start rolling in and there will be white foaming hurt. Her nightdress is hanging on the cupboard doorhandle. The hairbrush from the bedside table, long black hair bound within the bristles, is gone. It was there this morning when he woke. Her glass of water is ready for her on the bedside table and the sleeping pills she needs every night. The bottle of sleeping pills is gone. Her slippers are on the floor. A couple of her notebooks have vanished from the lounge yet all of her reading books are where they were before she left a week ago. A body impression in the bed, head in the pillow. Jovan spreads out his arms and legs across the bed and closes his eyes as though it’s a large expanse of sun-warm sand. He feels nothing but relief falling away into sleep.
The first few nights in the Cotton Tree Holiday Park produced little change. Both of them felt so exhausted they slept far too long in the evenings and felt drowsy during the days. They walked along the water. Saw pelicans with immense throat pouches and found no way to comment. Ate mango every breakfast and went to a restaurant that served Thai food each evening. No dinner banter. Wordless meals. Afterwards they talked about the lovely weather, as though they were strangers with little in common. They wandered around like people that didn’t know the first thing about taking a holiday. It was almost out of boredom, not knowing what else to do, that they went to bed, removed their clothes and waited to see what would happen. Three years had passed since Sarajevo and the last time they’d been intimate.
Jovan showered afterwards. The feeling of euphoria hadn’t lasted long. The illusion that they would be well again and they might find happiness wasn’t something he could believe even at the height of the delusion—Suzana’s head on his chest, feeling her drift away in sleep so deep it wheezed in the back of her throat. The trust and safety of him there in that Cotton Tree holiday shack. At home with him again. She need not worry. She could drift away.
Showering and knowing as he washed off the sweat of the day and the stickiness in his pubic hair, that nevertheless, this was the end of the line, even if it was different to how they’d imagined driving up to Queensland. They would break up after the holiday. It was clear to them both. There was no point in suffering together when the suffering was worse because they were together. One last effort to break loose and see things clearly and then they could walk away clean. They’d done everything they could. There were some things people weren’t meant to recover from. There were losses you simply couldn’t let yourself overcome, out of basic decency.
The water roaring around him in the shower was loud enough to obliterate the sound of weeping so he let himself go. It got away from him and he lost himself to it until he was barely able to stand and minutes or hours had passed. Suzana came in from the bedroom. She entered the shower wearing her nightdress.
Naked and crying, Jovan pressed his forehead to the shower wall, away from her, and found the blunt edge of a tile and forced it to split the thin skin above his left eye. He would have searched for more blood to hide his shame, if Suzana hadn’t forced herself below his face and pushed him back, the watery blood spreading, getting into her eyes and mouth.
He thought he was a good man. He thought he was right. He didn’t want the devil to win, yet the devil always gets in and takes what he wants. Where was the safety he should have given Suzana? Where was the protection? The simple foresight of a caveman would have been enough. He should have taken them away from death. It should have been easy to run. He could have taken them to safety. He didn’t protect his daughter. He didn’t protect his son. And now what can Ana and Dejan mean? Did he let them go so they could be dragged down to hell as well?
Utterly useless. He’d proved that. The most basic task given to him by God, the simplest function in this world, the only thing that mattered to his heart, mind and soul, was the preservation of family. He should be washed down as well. If he wasn’t a coward he would have already found a way to slide down to the devil.
The water roared around them and he thought she would never speak to him again. That they would hold each other and she would simply walk away and that’d be the end of everything. She whispered words he couldn’t make out into his ear, long senseless fragments of words without pauses to separate their syllables, and continued to tell him this endless story filled with nothing he could understand until he picked her up and carried her back to that Cotton Tree bed.
Jovan has an early start the next morning. He gets the van going and then places a brick on the accelerator so the engine won’t stall while it warms up.
There is a bag of seed in the garage. He takes a cupful and walks to the back fence and drops some down in the flat dry grass for the birds. One of the planks of unpainted wood is coming loose. The nail has leaked rust in a brief streak. He pushes the plank back into position and uses his callused thumb to press the nail back into the wood.
The rosellas are already dropping around Jovan’s boots to get at the seed. Might not be much for them to eat around here. He’s not sure how they survive. Rosellas don’t seem the most resilient type of bird. Neither scavenger nor predator. They don’t peck straight at the seed as seagulls or pigeons. They don’t threaten each other. They take the time to pick a seed up in a foot and lift it to their beaks, eating at leisure.
He gets into his van and pumps the engine in the predawn darkness. He notices a scrunched up ball of paper on the floor. He leans over and picks it up. It’s the drawing by the girl he gave a lift to the other day. A picture of himself at the wheel of this car. Graffito emptied out the glove box when he placed his Bomb message, but mustn’t have noticed this bit of rubbish.
Jovan is more used to seeing the slice of time that a photograph offers, and usually all he sees in a photo is how much older he’s looking these days. With a portrait or a drawing, there’s a particular perspective, an aesthetic. He sees the artist’s impressions rather than some scientifically objective document. There’s the pain from his swollen jaw in what Leni noticed that day though that doesn’t seem significant to her. She’s sketched him looking out into the oncoming traffic. Cars shooting by in blurred lines past his face and shoulders. Vehicles by the borders of the paper are colliding but appear to have little more impact than that of rain on a windshield. The man in the sketch has a kind of patient resilience which he wishes he actually did possess. The man in Leni’s vision rides through crashes like a surfer breaking through foam to get out beyond the waves. Romance of the Crash, written below his image. He can almost imagine that place beyond the waves.
Jovan reverses the van down the driveway. It dies and he lets it coast out onto the street. The gauge tells him he’s out of fuel.
Jovan gets to the hospital late. Even so, it’s early enough in the day that he can get through a few essential duties quickly before anyone is inconvenienced. He rushes around from one thing to the other and then he pushes a cleaning cart toward the men’s and women’s by the main entrance. The most frequented toilets in the hospital. A very rudimentary clean today should be enough. A quick look to make sure they’re all flushed and nothing atrocious in the bowls and that there’s toilet paper for the day. Perhaps a quick wipe of the benches. There should be enough of the pink liquid soap in the dispensers.
The fluorescent lights flicker into life. On the floor are black lined stencil markings of dead bodies. Poli
ce drawings marking the outlines so that the place of the murder victim is displayed for future reference. Not one body on the floor—ten, twenty, maybe thirty, were overlapping each other. Different sized bodies, implying different ages and sexes. One of a baby, has words scrawled into its body. Obliteration. In another stencil of a pregnant woman, over the bump, the word Oblivion. Just those two words in the massacre of bodies that is depicted on the hospital floor.
Jovan steps outside and lets the bathroom door shut. On the other side of the door, perhaps the title of this work, Ethical Cleansing. He fumbles with his keys. Can’t make sense of the jangle. So many of them. He focuses his mind as well as he can and tries one key and then another. Manages to lock the door.
“Hello, Jovan. We should set a date for that portrait. Whad’ya reckon?” She stands there with an open smile on her face, natural blond hair around her head in a ragged corona, clear sky-blue eyes tired, an exhausted angel at the end of a long night shift.
He nods toward Leni’s ‘hello’, otherwise doesn’t move. She’s walking down the hall. He can’t remember who she is. He nods. The nurse that drew the sketch. The one he gave a lift to after the dentist. Who kissed him on the check to say thanks.
She says, “You look like someone’s punched you in the guts. You alright?”
“I am not sure where or how. Punching, for sure. I want to find a way down maybe. Stop with the fighting.”
“What’s going on? Can I help?”
“I’d crush you for help.”
“What?” She says, the smile on her face faltering. “Sorry?”
“You can not help me.”
“But what’s happened?” She waits for him to explain, which he does by hooking his thumb over his shoulder.
Jovan unlocks the door and Leni walks to the doorway with the door held open and peers inside. It takes her breath away. The amount of work alone that has gone into this. It must have taken hours. She takes a step inside. When she walks around the toilet it’s the slow steps of a patron visiting an art gallery. Even in the cubicles, there are the outlines of the bodies. In two figures there is a message:
Obliteration. Oblivion.
“That’s very cool,” She says when she comes back out into the hallway. “That’s fucking amazing.”
“That’s work. My whole morning. Cleaning for hours.”
“This is that guy, right? That’s doing all that shit around the hospital?” She shakes her head at Jovan, her eyes not blinking. “That dude’s hardcore, man, I’m serious.”
There were hospital employees, X-Ray, Tammie and others, and now Leni, that thought of Dr Graffito as an artist. They had became cultish about it. X-Ray had created a site on the Internet that displayed every message, and many people commented on each new ‘piece’.
“Hard core …” He says on an exhalation and locks the door. The first thing he will clean is the message on the inside of the door. A pun for Jovan? Ethical Cleansing. Jovan walks with gritted teeth to retrieve the cleaning equipment he uses for Graffito’s ‘work’. Oblivion was already out of his hands, Jovan would make sure, in this instance at least, of Obliteration.
Jovan buys a lemon, a loaf of bread and a prime cut of beef from the local supermarket. He also buys three pieces of grilled trevally from a nearby fish’n’chippery. He carries the food down to Frankston Pier. It’s a long boardwalk that takes him and Charlemagne a good distance across the ocean. The dog is used to dusty dry food from a bag; it doesn’t take long before he’s savouring the cut of beef. Jovan slices the lemon with his pocket knife and squeezes both halves across the grilled fish. A few slices of lemon come with the food but Jovan enjoys fish soaked in lemon juice. After they’ve both eaten, they listen to the water moving below them. It’s a warm autumn evening and people are walking the pier. The dog closes his eyes for a snooze. There’s restlessness in hunger and there’s a few moments after eating a good meal where even Jovan can sit and feel at ease.
Before going to the supermarket Jovan stopped in at the newsagency. He picked up a copy of Novosti, a Yugoslav newspaper he didn’t often buy. He read about Zoran Djindjich, who seemed to Jovan the only rational politician in what remained of the country, portrayed in the article as a traitor to his people. A trial for treason would soon be underway. Jovan thought going to trial would be a victory for Djindjich though it was possible he would simply be assassinated first. Miloshevich had initiated mafia assassinations of political opponents—Slavko Churuvija gunned down in front of his own home in Belgrade by two masked men, the most outrageous of these murders so far. The byline for the article read: Vladimir Mitrovich. Jovan put the newspaper down and walked out of the newsagency.
Jovan had been in Belgrade for a conference when he met Vladimir Mitrovich. He’d been expecting a refined, well-spoken man. That’d been the impression Suzana had given him of her great Belgrade professor. Perhaps that had been the way he was in his prime. He’d become bloated with bad food and alcohol, fingers, teeth and eyes stained tobacco yellow. A man without friends and family in a city he’d live in his whole life, and perhaps because of this, he pursued political and professional contacts with all the more vigour.
Jovan heard Mitrovich was staying in the same hotel, but before he could seek Mitrovich out, Jovan found himself buttonholed at the bar. A finger tapping him on the chest any time Jovan looked as if he might rise from his seat. Not as a threat, as punctuation for the story Mitrovich was telling about that bitch of a woman Jovan had married.
A slap across the old professor’s face made him lift both his arms as though he might fall backwards—they remained raised. When talking he hadn’t appeared so drunk. After the slap, with his eyes closed, dropping his hands onto his head and then into his lap with a series of small nods, he seemed almost paralytic.
“Oh yes, I understand. Hit me if I prove rude company again.” The speed with which he opened his eyes and began talking intelligently again surprised Jovan. The man lit a cigarette, despite having a half-finished cigarette in the ashtray. “I’d like to tell you a story. I’ll mind my tongue but don’t slap me again, comrade. Women slap and I’d prefer a punch. It’d be better for both of us.”
“If I punch you, comrade, a soft bag of shit like you is going to split at the seams. It’ll be messy, for both of us,” Jovan told him.
“I’ll be honest.” The cigarette made Mitrovich cough when he inhaled, he took a long drag in any case, exhaling the smoke with another two coughs. “I’d like to be honest. You won’t strike me over the truth. That’s all I want to do, speak to you.” He raised his hand for the barman’s attention. “You need the right person to tell a particular story. After all, words only live in communication. The rest of the time words are half-dead fish in a bowl of rank water. Maybe I’ll understand how I lost everything over the kind of weakness you yourself, I’m sure, have occasionally indulged. I’m not talking about a great evil. It’s a simple function yet it’s easy to get lost in something so simple, because you stop thinking. If it was more complicated you would give the situation proper contemplation.”
“I won’t listen to babble. You’d want to make sense right now.” Jovan told him, mocking Mitrovich’s ‘punctuation’ by tapping him on the chest with a knock, knock, knock, as though on a heavy door. It made Mitrovich cough again.
He patted Jovan on the hand, and then left his palm on the back of Jovan’s wrist, as if they were old friends. The barman arrived and Mitrovich didn’t order a round of drinks, he bought a bottle of rakia and began pouring glasses.
Jovan sits on Frankston pier with Charlemagne as he remembers that conversation with a shake of his head. Even drunk Mitrovich had come up with that line about words living only in communication—half-dead fish in a bowl of rank water the rest of the time. Jovan couldn’t help but agree that some subjects could only be understood when talking with a particular person. It was the moment he decided not to lay the rude bastard out on the floor, or at least to hear the story he wanted to tell before he did. Th
ere was no doubt in Jovan’s mind that’s how the conversation would end. A punch to the solar plexus to watch the old windbag gasp for a few minutes.
“A particular love. A particular hatred. A particular heart.” Vladimir Mitrovich said that after his first drink. He then began to speak about the day he came home to find Suzana sitting in his kitchen with his wife. Suzana had explained to Vesna that she was one of his students and that she would soon be leaving Belgrade and there was a last-minute detail to attend to. She had also brought cake as a gesture of thanks for her wonderful professor. Vesna insisted she come in, at least for a coffee. It was a cold day and it had just begun to snow and the girl was so thin, pretty and polite.
When Vladimir came home there they were, his wife and his mistress, eating a cherry torte Suzana had made herself. Drinking coffee and laughing, happily talking about all manner of things.
Suzana was “dressed for church”, is how the old man put it, in that hotel barroom. He didn’t know what to do when he came home to this nightmare scene. Since everything was going along so pleasantly he sat down and had some cake and coffee with the two women. Soon his son and daughter came home from high school and hit it off with Suzana as well. “She’d never been more charming,” said Mitrovich, drinking another shot of rakia and lighting a cigarette before his lips were dry.
Vesna even asked her to stay for dinner. Suzana sweetly explained that she couldn’t. She really had to run. She had an early start and the bus would take her an hour and an half to get home to her cramped student apartment, where there were four of them living in a place with room “for one person and a bad-tempered cat”. That was another expression Mitrovich remembered as he poured more drinks for Jovan and himself. Jovan wasn’t drinking. Vladimir Mitrovich didn’t notice.