Etched in my mind is a scene from a recent movie where a dead man lies on the floor in the fetal position in the half-dark of a room. By the corpse glows the little screen of his cell phone, the only living thing in the dark, a glowing heart. The dead man’s hand on the floor is reaching for the device, a straw at which he’s grasping, the life source. I can’t say exactly why it is that this scene moves me so deeply. Even if it wasn’t designed to serve as a parody, that’s what it is. At night in the half-dark at my B&B, curled up in the fetal position, lit by the bluish light of my cell-phone screen, I flicked through the headlines like a madwoman . . . “Again stirs the beast”! Some thirty miles from Hekla, the stirring beast is Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that spewed ash a few years ago over all of Europe. With the news item there was a video clip: thick smoke billows from the volcano, looking like vast mounds of sheep’s wool. The clouds changed color, from sooty to dark-gray to light-gray and white. Nothing was visible but the terrifying, threatening wool. At first I thought the video had been made in black and white to satisfy a filmmaker’s yen for “artistic effect.” Apparently during such eruptions, where a volcano spews billows of smoke and nothing else, the surrounding area does become black and white, perhaps as it was at the moment of its origin.
Mesmerized by the scene, I played the video over and over. We live in a time of the theatricalization of everything; acting is no longer about somebody acting as somebody or something else, but about each of us being forced to act ourselves. Everything is “art”; even the photogenic volcano was acting itself to perfection. The world is inundated by “art projects,” such as a heap of anonymous naked bodies in front of an artist’s camera acting a heap of anonymous naked bodies, such as textile-industry workers who’ve been laid off acting textile-industry workers who’ve been laid off on a theater stage, such as executioners brandishing their swords, declaring, as they do so, why they’ll be decapitating their victims . . . We are all forced to take part in “recreational, creative, therapeutic workshops,” as the lingo of the modern “creative industry” would have it. Politicians act the politician, Donald Trump acts Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton acts Hillary Clinton. And refugees find themselves roped into “recreational, creative, therapeutic workshops,” and there, through the ministrations of artists, they are transformed from living people into symbols and metaphors, into a “typical refugee narrative”; into migration literature, into miglit—a term that has already taken hold in the faddish slang of literary scholarship; into sculptures of human figures on which, where the head should be, there’s a barbed-wire-wrapped suitcase, symbolizing, of course, unwelcoming borders. Even the cell phone is no longer a communications device, but an essential piece of refugee luggage, and sneakers are part of “migrant chic,” symbolizing the migration of sixty million people according to the official count. This vast number registered briefly on the global gauge of human emotion and then at the behest of life that moves on (always at the behest of life that moves on) it faded from view. Everything is acting, the happiest moments of our lives are stage-set like performances. The births of our children are performances in which more and more guests take part; they are the favorite themes of video recordings where the baby’s first whimpers are annotated with “creative” subtitles. Maybe this, too, is part of my momentary (momentary?) falling-out with my “profession.” Is it that I’m not acting the role of writer well enough? Maybe I should over-play my role so the audience can play its role as it should. Why do I so doggedly insist on authenticity at a time when fakers are the only ones who are taken seriously? Am I not, after all, involved here in an “acting” task, “presenting” my new book?
Curled in the fetal position in the dark, I played the video with the raging Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano as dense smoke streamed out of the crater. I played it again and again until I sank into an equally dense sleep . . .
5.
Too often I’m unable to decipher the reasons for her reactions. This is because I’m not with her all the time, and when we do get together I’m supposed to be Santa Claus, while she is the “good little girl.” Never, for instance, will I be able to discover why she behaved so wildly when she and her father visited me briefly in Amsterdam. Was she nine? I took them to the Van Gogh museum, she gamboled about the museum like a restless puppy that keeps bringing a ball to its master’s feet and waits for him to throw it. I couldn’t grasp why she so avidly sought to draw attention to herself at the museum, as if Van Gogh were her rival. At one moment I nabbed her, steered her over to a painting, held her little head with my hands and pointed her face at the painting.
“Now, look!” I said.
In the painting was a pair of shoes, one of Van Gogh’s paintings from that series. She quieted down, listened to my praise of the painting, and then I saw she’d dropped her eyes, she’d been staring down the whole time, she refused to look up. We went on to the next one and tried again. Now her father joined us, and he, too, made admiring comments, but she insisted on shutting her eyes tight. Why she so fiercely defied the ritual of a museum visit I don’t know. Painting was one of her favorite activities, and “art class” her favorite subject in school.
Once my bad back kicked in so painfully that I couldn’t move at all. She came solemnly to my bedside and pushed a drawing under my nose.
“What’s that?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, instead she asked . . .
“Are you better?”
“No.”
She ran back to her room and soon returned, her drawing showing a few changes.
“How about now?”
She’d drawn a rainbow on the paper with thick layers of pastels and I finally realized what it was that I was supposed to say . . .
“Now I feel much better. Thank you, mouse.”
How she’d come up with the idea that drawings have curative qualities, I don’t know. There’s a story by a Croatian writer about a little girl who believed that running under a rainbow would turn her into a boy, but she couldn’t have heard that story yet in school, she was too young for that.
She still enjoys making pictures. Her greatest pleasure used to come from the physical, tactile side of painting. She loved big sets of wooden pencils and pastels, water colors and tempera, then the plasteline, brushes, pencil sharpeners, and erasers I brought her. Especially the erasers. Why erasers? This will remain a mystery. She complained that her erasers were always disappearing. This gave us the opportunity to devise a household sprite, the Eraser Gobbler, that snatched her erasers at night. When she was littler her favorite game was “rain.” “It’s raining!” I’d shout and then we’d both reach for pencils and drum the pencil tips on the paper . . . “Rain! Rain! Rain.” She loved dipping her fingers in paint and leaving fingerlines on paper or printing with stamps in different shapes that we’d carve from potatoes. Like a little enchantress who steers the winds, she was fond of flinging around the room little square drawings she called Storm, Blizzard, Cloud Burst, and Chaos in the City. Once she painted a sheet of paper in many colors and then tore it all to tiny pieces, piled the pieces in a tin box, sprinkled them with water, and shut the lid. This was her experiment, who knows how she imagined the outcome. When she was in particularly high spirits she’d draw heart after heart in electric pink colors, then cut them out and strew them along behind her, trailing little heaps of hearts in her wake.
I cheered her on, till once she told me . . .
“You like what I make only because you love me.”
It was true but not entirely: I really thought her fierce little paper escapades showed an artistic gift. I have kept one, about 4” x 4” (the size she liked best), where on a cut-out sheet she arranged a somewhat smaller paper napkin with a design in such a way that she contrasted the structures of the papers and white hues. Then she sewed the two sheets of paper together, a little angled, on the diagonal, with thick black thread and big stitches.
“Kazimir Malevich couldn’t have done better!” I said.
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br /> “Who’s Kazimir Malevich?” she said, intrigued by the unusual first and last name. But as soon as I’d reach for a book or the internet to show her who Malevich was, she’d already lose her interest, or pretend she had.
Was she wilfully resisting growing up? After all what was so attractive in the grown-up world that she’d be so eager to hurry in that direction? Until now she could only learn that old people like her grandmother get old and die; that grown-ups like her mother can be young and still die; that grown-ups work, but they can, against their will, lose their job, as her father did; yes, all in all, the adult world is not safe, nor is it particularly fun.
I’ve never met a child who plays with greater zest than she. One needs a partner to play, but she wasn’t choosy: the “other” could even be the battery-operated hamster she received for her birthday and with which she could play for hours without boredom. She drank in her games, they intoxicated her, she guzzled them to the last drop, to the point of physical exhaustion. Once, despite her father’s explicit instructions, I let her play with other girls in the courtyard. She’d been outside for quite a while, and then there was a downpour, the voices of the children in the yard stilled, and finally there she was, drenched to the skin, shivering. She demanded an umbrella so she could go on playing under it. I refused and asked her to change her clothes. She raced for the door, I was quicker. I locked it and took the key.
She flew into a rage. Her shrieks tore at the surface of my skin, a pain, either imaginary or real, such as I’d never known before. There is only one sound that may have shocked me as deeply, the voicing of a female fox, a vixen, which I heard once on an amateur video clip. I’d be happy never to hear it again.
“I hate you! You can’t keep me from playing outside! You’re not my mother! My father’s the only one who can make me come in . . .” she was choking with fury.
I reminded her I had let her go out despite her father’s instructions to keep her in. And he’d clearly forbidden her to go out because she had homework due the next day.
She did not give up. She snatched my cell phone, threatening to call him and say I wasn’t letting her go out, and then, incensed—she was stymied by not being able to figure out how to find the number—she flung the cell phone onto the floor in a rage and went on with her insufferable shrill screeching . . .
“I hate school! I won’t go! I hate it! I’ll never go to school again! I-i-i-haaaate iiiiiit,” she shrieked as she shivered.
“You’ll crack the windowpanes with all this screeching! The other children will go to school and grow up. You’ll have nobody left to play with,” I said.
“Then I’ll go to Germany and play with anybody I like!” she screamed.
I don’t know where she’d picked up the notion that children in Germany can play with anybody they like.
“Kids in Germany go to school and grow up, too.”
“Then I’ll drink from a magic bottle and shrink down so small that I’ll always be able to play with the little kids,” she clutched at the comforting thought. (Aha, here we are, this she must have picked up from Alice in Wonderland, I thought.)
The comforting thought did give her comfort. As did the warm shower I coaxed her into, and the towel I wrapped her in, her, the angry, soaking-wet little bird against whom the laws of humankind had conspired.
6.
Publishers and other organizers of literary events are on the lookout for ways to squeeze a little money, often out of the embassies of the countries where their authors come from, and in the process they draw the author into uncomfortable situations. They scrounge as best they can to cover the costs of the translation or promotion of the book, the publishing costs or the author’s honorarium. Although these are negligible sums, the embassies and the publishers have no money. Publishers explain this by saying that the books of the writers for whom they’re seeking support don’t sell. The embassies reply that this is not their concern, and, of course, they’re right. The economy-class authors are willing victims one way or another, and they usually have no idea of the little deals struck behind their backs.
This time I happened to learn of the “deal” for the Croatian embassy in Rome to cover the expenses of my short tour through Italy. I didn’t object: the ambassador was an old friend. He did his job, apparently, with competence and without patriotic delirium or the promotion of any personal business, literary, or sundry interests of his, the sort of things that usually accompany the diplomatic representatives of small, recently established statelets.
After the literary event my friend, his wife, and I spent a pleasant, warm evening filling in the gaps of some twenty years since the time when each of us had gone our separate way and the decade or so since we’d last seen each other. It was one of those “life writes novels” conversations. If our stories had been written up as a novel it would be such pulp fiction that we’d have had to pay the “pulp tax,” I said. We reminisced about the Yugoslav “pulp tax,” the mildest form of censorship, a tax on sleaze and sensationalism but also a helpful filter, which, in the general circulation of cultural goods, contributed somewhat to preventing the incursion of that ugly, stinking pond scum that, during the collapse of Yugoslavia, surfaced with such a vengeance. Ever since, the last twenty years or so, life has been mired in scum, in every sense of the word, sludge, slime, bilge, and murk. We’ve been swamped by pond scum, astonished at its tenacity. Some stopped holding their breath, meanwhile, and sank, some of us made it out onto the other shore, but most have stayed right where they were. Of these, a few have cultivated an almost inhuman capacity for survival while others have stayed on the surface by treading water quietly and unobtrusively, and a third group has come to rule the swamp, ravaging every other life form but the scum. I cannot expunge from my memory that moment when the scum surfaced, following a powerful underwater upheaval, and for a full quarter-century now I’ve been coming ashore and surveying the stench of the fetid swamp, exactly as if I were being paid for the job.
The Croatian consul had sent a driver (a homeland war veteran, no doubt) to meet me in Milan, the second stop on my brief Italian tour. At the bookstore where the public event was scheduled, a fellow countrywoman of mine who lived in Milan and was married to an Italian was waiting for me impatiently. I’d met her somewhere before but couldn’t retrieve her name. With her was a young woman wearing a slightly pained expression, a member of the Croatian consular staff (no doubt the daughter of a homeland war veteran who’d earned her degree in Croatian Studies, funded by a scholarship for the children of homeland war veterans). The two of them perched in the front row like nuns. I now know by heart the body language and the seating strategies of my compatriots from halls at similar literary events. My countrymen generally keep their hands stuffed in their jacket pockets and seem loath to take them out, as if at any moment they might draw a gun. The Italian critic who was there to moderate the event hadn’t yet opened his mouth when my countrywoman spoke up to warn me that I should know how many Croats in Italy disagreed with my thinking. I asked if we might leave the topic of differences in “thinking” for later, when the time came for questions from the audience. When the moderator asked the audience for questions, my countrywoman asked again whether I knew what Croats in Italy thought of me. She was now positioning herself as spokesperson for all the Croats in Italy, though what she was really angling for was the chance to hold forth about the little country to which the world owed such a debt of gratitude for the invention of the necktie, about Croats’ feats of heroism during the homeland war, about the little, charming, exquisite, Catholic, European, patriotic land that had thrown off the fetters of totalitarianism, communism, Yugoslavism, Titoism, the Serbs, and Balkan turpitude, to return at long last to its authentic Croatian self. I asked if we might set aside questions about the Croats for the moment, as most of the people in the audience were there to discuss my book—just out in its Italian translation—rather than the Croats. I was bluffing, of course, I couldn’t know what the people in
the audience were there for. She quieted down, at least briefly, but as soon as I opened my mouth to respond to a question from the audience, she began chatting in stage whispers with the young staff member from the consulate.
My compatriots are often of a particular type; they trudge off to literary events of this kind, whine, gripe, froth at the mouth, but they are not capable of voicing a position of their own or defending it. They arrive, self-important, scowling, indignant, but quickly deflate and retreat, it’s clear they’ve come wanting something, but literary events are not their ideal milieu, they’re daunted by the public exposure. This is why they feel best in a pack of like-thinkers or in front of a computer screen on their Facebook page. Here they beat their chest, “share,” “like,” “hate,” snarl, stick out their tongues, wait for their stagnant circulatory system to jolt into action, send blood to the brain, come alive, buzz, jut their proboscis, gape, bare their dog teeth . . .
This time (which I’d learn only two months hence) the internet assault was led by an Italian who professed to Croatian roots that had pushed him over the edge. He posted his “pics” on Facebook of the pages of my books (in Italian) which he’d slashed with scissors, he threatened to sue me, that I’d be banned from setting foot on Croatian soil and all its islands, that he’d skin me alive. The furious Italian, however, was charmed by Croatian women, those who use as their “Face” icon a woman’s eye reflecting a Croatian flag, or something resembling it, with the national red-and-white checkerboard emblem superimposed. As a sign of support for the crazy Italian, an anonymous staff member from the Milan consulate joined in, trailing heaps of little yellow smiley faces convulsed with laughter.
All in all, I was left with no satisfaction. Had the hunt been an inteligent exchange and my hunters literature lovers there would, perhaps, have been something for me to take away from it all. They were, however, utterly ignorant. They weren’t even capable of reciting a verse by one of the Croatian national bards. They were out for blood, plain and simple. And saddest of all, there was nothing free-thinking to their hunt. Only in the pack would they join in and doltishly follow the scent they knew so well . . .
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