I found Ahmed in his office; a small room hidden in the corner of the library. I had met him while I was working as a journalist, but even that superficial acquaintance was enough for him to greet me warmly. He offered me a worn chair. On the table between us lay a small set of magnetic chess. I could see that the figures on the board were in the middle of a game, but I didn’t understand the positions, or who was winning the duel. I have never learnt how to play chess, and knew only which way the figures moved. Yet people often ask me to play, probably from a need to prove themselves. Ahmed’s office was neat and modest. He poured some really good herbal brandy, which smelt like an intoxicating island – full of ikebana. Into his own glass he poured first water, then only a few drops of the brandy.
‘I can’t drink because of my liver. At least I can taste a little bit like this,’ he explained.
It was pleasant, and I felt a sleepiness come over me. And then I saw the picture.
It was hanging on the wall above Ahmed’s head. It was old; the oil colours had long ago lost their sheen. A thin horse was painted on the canvas, in the way Đorđe Andrejević Kun used to paint. This horse didn’t have a typhus sufferer on his back, he was standing alone in the darkness, his dull eyes could only just be seen in the gloom. My mouth became completely dry when I understood: it was a blind horse from the mines, a pitiful animal which thinks the world is a dark tunnel.
Ahmed was looking at me so I had to compose myself quickly. He looked like Aleksa. Maybe friends, like husbands and wives or dogs and their masters, begin to look like one another when they are together for a long time. With the thumb of one hand he was caressing the top of a tiny chess queen, and with the other he slowly circled the edge of the glass.
I told him Mirna had returned to town and was asking about her father.
He sighed so deeply that the air in the room was disturbed.
‘So, now it’s perfectly clear, Aleksa is not with them,’ he whispered sadly.
I just nodded my head.
‘I knew it, he would have contacted me. I’d like to see Mirna, where is she?’
I wanted to answer him, but I realised only then that I did not know where Mirna was. She had always come to me.
‘She’s here, in town,’ I whispered.
After that, we fell silent. I sobered up from the effects of the brandy and wondered what to do next. Then I said, just by the way, ‘She gave me Aleksa’s diary. ‘
Ahmed’s finger lifted from the queen’s head. I added, ‘I know you were looking for Perkman.’
He got up from the chair. He was a head taller than I.
‘Do you know what Perkman is?’ he asked me.
‘Yes, I know,’ I answered as steadily as I could; trying to withstand his gaze even though I felt an itch between my eyebrows.
‘But you never saw him?’ He was serious, I remember, even dramatic.
‘No I haven’t, but I will see him.’ I was serious too.
It was as though this answer calmed him. He sat down, lowered his head and stared at the chess board. When he looked at me again, he had a smile on his face that I can only describe now as ‘Pre-Perkman’. He got up from the chair and went over to the metal filing cabinet. Theatrically, he pronounced:
‘I believe in the existence of worlds which are more exalted than ours and in the existence of beings that inhabit these worlds. I believe we can, depending on the level of our spiritual harmony, communicate with higher beings.’
Only after these words, which, without knowing their origin, I interpreted then as an oath,18 did he unlock the cupboard and begin to take out some white folders. He stacked at least fifty of them carefully on the table.
Over this paper wall, with obvious pride, he told me that in the folders were listed all the demons, ghosts, spirits, vampires, werewolves, witches, fairies and similar beings that had appeared in Bosnia-Herzegovina over the past fifty years. Amongst them was noted the case of the ‘House of Ghosts’, the ruins above the train station in Doboj, where Ahmed had spent the night while the rest of the human race was celebrating entering the 21st century. In the files were descriptions of all the fights of the unearthly strongmen on the white wall at Nemila, the appearance of giants at Gradačac and Listica, the Roman spirit Puhala at Tuzla (if I remember correctly), the apparition of sleepers from the tomb at Vranduk, the conversion of godless Lutherans from Žepa. Here too were his own stories of vampire hunters from Krajina, with whom he had stayed during the winter of 1968. In another file, he dealt with the legend of Jure Grando, the vampire from Kriga, whose case he researched during a summer holiday in Istria. He spoke quickly; there was more, but I can’t remember everything. For the first time in my life, I was listening to a truly fascinating story and I didn’t have a Dictaphone.
‘I’ve been collecting these stories all my life,’ he said calmly, then widened his eyes and roared, ‘but never, not even once have I ever seen anything! What makes you think you are better than I am?’
I kept quiet; I felt guilty, as though I had told a terrible lie. But then I added, ‘Who are Jedžudž and Medžudž? ‘
Ahmed sat in the chair and thought quickly. I saw him bite his lip. All at once he got up, grabbed his coat and went towards the door:
‘We’ll talk somewhere else.’
The old man was shuffling along in front of me, and I followed him, staggering on the icy footpath, crumpled and drowsy. There was no-one on the street, the town hummed around us like a machine in wait mode. Finally, we went into a small cafe; a place I had never noticed before even though I had been going down that street for years. It was attractive, covered with thick carpet, with an old wooden bar, heavy plush curtains, upholstered chairs, photographs in oval frames (they were portraits, but I didn’t notice whose), racks for newspapers. A thin waiter in a red waistcoat with black lapels danced over to us with a napkin draped over his arm and an eyebrow raised. He served us the same brandy we had been drinking in the library. I felt that this was a place I could relax in. It seemed to me that all at once time had slowed down, without my understanding how and why.
‘Do you know who the Pegasus brothers are?’ he asked me as soon as the waiter had glided away to the bar.
Of course I knew. The whole town knew about them.
* * *
The story of the Pegasus brothers
In a little settlement near the steel factory lived Adem and Badema Pegasus. Adem was a large, sullen lathe operator who seldom smiled. He spoke even more rarely, so it was hard to say much more about him. His wife Badema was absolutely beautiful, constructed in perfect proportions and with the most harmonious arrangement of facial features. Nobody ever found out from whence Adem had brought her, but when she went out into the yard for the first time, the news of her sensational beauty flowed with previously unheard-of speed through all the little houses. On the dusty track in front of the Pegasus home, there was a march-past of all the families in the settlement in order to look her up and down from head to toe and store the picture in their memories, to beautify their sad days. She was the point where the erotic fantasies of the inhabitants of the settlement intersected, more beautiful than any of the television hostesses, more alluring than the Lotto girls and more radiant than the beauties on chocolate boxes. In between the bathtubs full of holes, orange water-heaters, poison weeds, old car tyres, tinned cabbage, plastic dwarfs and similar objects from the settlement’s set design; she walked with a touching elegance and pride. When she threw back her heavy, black hair, and the sun found all possible colours in it, you could have wept and smiled at the same time from such beauty. The unpremeditated, promise-filled sound of her laughter or the completely unintentional curving of her body provoked explosive wet dreams in young men, and husbands gnashed their teeth. All the older women very quickly grew to hate her and hissed with gossip as she passed by, and little girls followed her in groups and mimicked her movements. Badema did not notice this attention or, more likely, she pretended not to see it. She seldom went out; the
neighbours mostly saw her washing the black dust off the flowers in her yard, or waiting at the window for her husband to return from the factory. And she was always alone…
Still, Adem was jealous; he was afraid of losing his beauty and was always sniffing out the tracks of possible intruders. He would come home at different times from his job, open the front door with a bang, and still in his shoes and coat, he would search the room. He was also seen spying on the house from the bushes and crawling under the window. They say he laughed for the first time in his life when he heard that Badema was pregnant, and for a whole three days he toasted the silhouettes of the factory when he learnt that there were twins lying in her stomach. He called them Albin and Aldin, he adored them, he would almost run through the settlement when he returned home from work, and once he even hung the nappies himself on the line in the yard. They were a beautiful family, the adornment of the whole settlement.
The tragedy began with the first white locks on the children’s heads. Until then, all the Pegases had been black-haired, so their father immediately concluded the children could not on any account be his. His neighbours tried to calm him down, told him that often happened, and that their hair would darken as soon as they started to walk.
‘If the children’s hair does not go black then.’ said Adem to Badema, ‘you will turn blue.’
In anticipation of their first steps, the father calmed his nerves with grape brandy. As the boys grew, his anxiety grew too, and with it a greater and greater need for alcohol. One evening, the brothers held one another’s hands, unsteadily got up from the floor and slowly went over to their father, who was watching television. While they were swaying on the balls of their little feet, the white curls danced on their heads. Adem pushed them backwards onto the floor; they fell with a scream, like rubber toys. That evening he beat Badema for the first time… After that, he beat her every day, without exception. To lessen his anger, Badema cropped the boys’ hair to their scalps, but the father easily discerned the white fluff and then beat her even more. When at sunset the settlement became quiet and families sat down to eat their evening meal, her cries announced the coming of the night; and they stopped around midnight, when Adem had no strength left. No-one from the settlement even tried to help the poor woman. The men thought it would be a dangerous precedent to entangle themselves in marital affairs not their own, and the women thought there was some justice in it, because her beauty had been unfair towards them. After a short time, the neighbours had become quite used to Badema’s cries, just as they accepted the daily earth shattering blows of the heavy metallurgy from the factory.
The boys grew, as white as the clothes in advertisements for washing powder. They were always alone; Badema spent the days recovering from her beatings, and the other children avoided them, according to the orders of their mothers. The twins roamed between the houses like little ghosts and thought up games of their own. They learnt anatomy by taking out the innards of live frogs, researched aerodynamics by pulling out the wings of sparrows, examined the threshold of pain while they set light to cats they had tied up, and threw stones at dogs… They liked to watch how life went out of the eyes of animals and compete to see who would be first to notice the coming of death.
Animals ran away from them, and they in turn avoided people. The neighbours too pretended not to see them, until things began to disappear in the settlement – bicycles, clothes, pies from windowsills, hard fruit from the trees, slippers from in front of doors, tools forgotten in the grass… The settlement did not think about it for too long, for everyone concluded that the brothers Pegasus were the culprits, and decided to solve the problem inside the local co-operative. At that meeting (which had never had a greater attendance), following a debate on the dynamics of rubbish collection, under the item of ‘current matters’ they discussed ways to ‘bring the boys to their senses’.
It was dusk when the local people prepared an ambush. They waited for the twins in a dark, blind alley, surrounded them and hit them with lathes, sticks, army belts, rolling-pins – whatever they could find in their houses. The boys’ cries mixed with Badema’s, who twenty metres or so further on was enduring Adem’s blows. The beating stopped when the boys lost consciousness, but there was still strength in the punishment group; they were all strong grown men, metalworkers, they could have kept beating them until morning; but it was no longer interesting, the lesson was finished. They parted cheerfully, chatting, walking off with their weapons across their shoulders, like peasants returning from reaping. Behind them, in the black dust, in the shallow dark of nightfall, two small bodies remained lying.
The boys somehow got themselves home and no-one saw them for nearly a year. No-one knows how they recovered from the beating. But everyone remembers the morning when they came out again into the light of day. Quite unmoving, they stood in the doorway, in the square of shade coming out from the house. Some say they stood like that for ten minutes, others swear it was half an hour, and there are those who stubbornly repeat that the Pegasus brothers stood there for a whole hour. That is not even important, what is important is that at the same time, surely completely pre-arranged, they took one step forward, left the darkness and stood in the sunlight. The light reflected from their heads. They had completely red hair! But, the colour of their hair was no longer of great consequence; black or white did not matter in this case. Adem had been given a long sentence for the murder of his wife, and Badema lay under a wooden grave-marker in the cemetery on the hill above the factory. The boys squinted in the sun for a few minutes, and when they strode out into the street, everyone in the settlement closed their windows and doors. While they walked slowly, everything with a heart became quiet and still. Only the transistor radios could be heard playing the usual folk songs from the windows. That morning the worst criminals in the town’s history were born.
Albin is burly, constructed like a concrete dam, with enormous fists and a fat neck. Aldin grew out into a flat thin man with narrow shoulders and thin hands. They both have wide faces on which there is room for another pair of eyes. Their own eyes are small; Albin’s are shiny and restless; whereas sharks have eyes similar to Aldin’s – empty and cold over which a transparent eyelid slips like a shark’s as soon as he opens his small, sharp-toothed mouth.
Perhaps Albin is not the strongest man in town, but everyone knows he never forgets. Anyone who fights with him knows he had better make an end of him immediately, because Albin will certainly come back to finish what he started. They say that in his whole life Aldin never loved anything or anyone. He puts up only with Albin, and even that is only from habit. It is said they love to torture people and that they now behave towards people as they previously did towards animals. That they have brought their science of death to perfection so that they can keep victims for days on the brink between two worlds and then at the last moment bring them back. Into this world. Or push them forward. Whatever they please…
Stories like this have enabled the Pegasus brothers to keep the whole town under control without any trouble at all. All the town’s shopkeepers and traders bring them a percentage of their earnings and would rather shut their business than try to lessen their contribution. The police turn a blind eye to their reign of terror, because the Pegases control the underground world too. They always keep to the same level of criminal activity, they do not allow any increase which would worry the authorities and force the police into action. Nothing can happen without their knowledge. Every criminal, down to the least important pickpocket, has to get permission from them to work, and give them a portion of the plunder. They have both the criminals and the police in their hands, justice and injustice. They alone determine the centre between light and dark. They create dusk.
* * *
‘Aleksa was seen several times in the company of the Pegases,’ said Ahmed softly, coughing, and then adding even more softly, ‘you know yourself that they used to get people out of town during the war, people who had the money to pay for it. I t
hink Aleksa must have approached them too.’
I just couldn’t imagine Aleksa talking with the Pegases. They did not belong to the same world.
‘You have to know that, after he met Perkman, Aleksa was not the same man. He believed he had to see the spirit again and listen to his message. He thought that that was an extremely important task, truly a mission. And because of that he assumed, I am sure, that nothing could happen to him until he carried out this task. He nearly got me believing it too… Nothing could change his mind, no matter how much we talked about it.’
Ahmed did not say, but I knew, that he was afraid the curse of the rabbi might be fulfilled, because he added, ‘It wasn’t so terrible that he was an atheist, it’s terrible that until that encounter he didn’t believe in spirits either. The spirits don’t forgive unbelievers; I’m surprised he succeeded in surviving the first encounter.’
He explained to me that Aleksa had approached his investigation as though he were puzzling out a treasure map. That he didn’t take anything especially seriously.
‘That’s the reason he accepted the Pegases so easily. He was not interested in who they were, as long as he could get to his goal through their help. They promised that they would make possible the two most important meetings for him – with Perkman and with Andela and Mirna. He even started to believe that they were the twins from the prediction.’
‘So, he went off with the Pegases?’
The old man nodded his head.
‘Does that mean…?’
He hit the table with his open hand, not letting me finish the sentence. He knew what my response would be. People were saying that the Pegases had caused the biggest number of missing people during the war. Really missing. Nobody, ever, even if he had been brave enough, had been able to accuse them of murder, because not one body was ever found. The waiter came up to the table with a new glass of brandy. One swallow helped me to look at the problem a bit more realistically. The war had ended long ago, there was a country now; miserable and unsteady, but still it existed…
Seven Terrors Page 8