by Daša Drndic
Today death was in my pocket,
hiding in the shadow behind me,
then it slipped into my hair,
today death was within me.
I remember this as well:
My sea is mine alone.
Small, hidden in my pocket,
it speaks,
fidgets
and murmurs.
On paper
it makes a picture in the shadow.
My small sea
lives
and sings
saltily scented
within me.
Leo collected his poems under the title Grain, a Collection of Poems, and there wasn’t a single word about grain. Pockets were the key thing for him.
There weren’t any cell phones then, or perhaps there were but I wasn’t aware of them. There, in the nursery, I scampered about with the children singing nursery rhymes:
three-four, open the door,
five-six, pick up sticks,
seven-eight, open the gate,
and so on. Then Vera Dumančić said, And you’ll spend the summer with them as well, camping with them on the beach here in Ičići, and I said, One-two, fuck you, and went off to Rovinj with Leo.
I haven’t been skiing in all the time I’ve lived in Croatia. Over there, I used to go with Leo every winter, since he was tiny. I dragged him up the mountains, carried him with all his gear and my own, he would fall over, get up and fall over, and just before we left, when he was nine, we both skied down, smiling. We went to ski centers in Serbia (Kopaonik), in Slovenia (Vogel) and Montenegro (Durmitor), in Bulgaria (Pamporovo) and once in Italy (Dolomites). Now that outdated equipment, Leo’s and mine, is rotting in the cellar, unusable, while Leo goes skiing in Switzerland. We missed the snow. Wrapped up, we took the train to Delnice, climbed up a hill and threw snowballs at each other, trying to convince each other that this was the real thing. But it wasn’t. We were conning ourselves with a surrogate, a poor, distorted imitation of our previous life.
Maybe, maybe if I had found a more permanent partner, with whom I would have quarreled, a third person for card games, or at least someone else for a game of chess, maybe that whole perspective on my life would have broadened or shrunk, it doesn’t matter which, it might have acquired softer outlines, maybe there would have been some of those dull pinkish tones (because that’s what’s really at stake, in this story the town is just the stage set), maybe. But I’ll never know.
A few days ago, at a bus stop, one kid was shouting to another, I’ve got a pistol and I got riled again. Shove that pistol up your ass, I told him and his mother went ballistic, You watch your tongue, she hissed.
All this, that brief summer encounter with the gentlefolk from so-called high Zagreb society, coincided with the publication of that book of Bora’s about quiet days in Rovinj. And, straight after reading the book (in the name of unquiet days in Rovinj), I wondered why the fashionable salonnier and excellent writer Ćosić had for years invited those gentlefolk from the hill to his atrium to sit around his four-meter-long black table while he served them three-course meals of this and that, often picturesquely, colorfully and imaginatively prepared with a lot of effort, when Ćosić, that excellent, one could say both Proustian and Bernhardian, even Krležian writer liked stuffed peppers and burgers more than anything. To be fair, in his book, Bora Ćosić does explain that recklessness, when (his) quiet Rovinj days arrived, entirely different from those of Miller and Perlès in Clichy, but that doesn’t seem enough to me. Let’s just say that Zagreb rabble from the top of Rovinj hill never sat down at our, Ada’s and my, summer table. Nor did those Zagreb socialites ever set foot in our house (as long as we had one) let alone in that neglected garden, where, after damp and mold and shoddy works, the thin concrete slabs came up, by now pockmarked and blackened, and dandelions and clumps of weeds grew out of the cracks.
Salons have existed for centuries, everywhere in the world, some are remembered, some not, some were well known and meaningful, and some became a caricature. So many interesting people (along with a few dull ones, even if highly placed on the social-political-artistic ladder) passed through the Rovinj atrium, and through the Berlin apartments, and earlier also through the relatively constrained Belgrade space of the contemporary salonnier (and excellent writer) Bora Ćosić that it seems to me that our writer simply did not need this artificial ornament, so like the remarkably lifelike, handmade flowers with which the Comtesse de Beaulaincourt decorated the table for her guests.
In truth, after the meal, our contemporary salonnier would move into his Thonet chair and languidly swing his leg from the side, and full of concentration (and critically, à la Marcel), maybe with an inner mocking smile, he would follow the way the conversation round the table became diluted, sinking into profanity, now that the guests were sated and had entered the phase of general regurgitation and digestion. Madame de Caillavet would sit in her bergère, but Madame de Caillavet was not a writer, nor was our writer a preciosa. And our writer did not remotely display any autocratic tendencies, such as those of Madame (Lydia) Aubernon de Nerville, who in the course of dinner would ring her little silver bell to indicate that the conversation had taken an undesirable turn. Bora’s guests were famous, yes, and some of them even close, one could say friends.
One should nevertheless be careful with the adoration of the famous; all fame is relative, and need not be close either. Among the famous there can sometimes build up a thick layer of emptiness, which the famous crush reciprocally. An acquaintance always greets me with So, who was there? whenever I come back from somewhere where he, that acquaintance, was not. What do you mean, who was there? I say, always with a hint of irritation. What famous people, what famous people were there? insists that former friend, himself fairly well known to the public, and I don’t know whether he is thinking of the ordinary people, well known to us, the generally, publicly well-known, or the generally, publicly well-known people he himself knows personally. So I say no one, no one was there. There are famous people who know each other, and they spend time together because they are famous, not because they like each other or miss each other. Those famous people who imagine that they are close to one another do not know much, if anything, about the childhood or youth of the people they know, about their legitimate or illegitimate children, about their aborted children, about who gave them gonorrhea, or who gave the little Ceylonese elephant on their bookshelf, Elephants must always face the door, said Laura (Laura who?), what kind of pajamas they wear, which plates they use when they’re alone, how they smell when they wake up, whether they have breakfast dolled up or déshabillé. The famous, what’s more, can be scum, useless, so it’s better not to know those well-known people.
And now, just in case one critic should appear and start to randomly dish out platitudes, worn-out assertions that a writer should create rounded, living, complex and convincing characters, about the plausibility of the narrative, about the firm or shaky composition of a text, about classifying writing in a genre, so that this critical eye should not be annoyed, I ought to say what I replied on that summer day to the lady who explained to me how and about what I ought to write. But, I won’t.
So I found her in a wretched state, buried. She was twenty kilos heavier than when we had last seen each other, a year ago, two, ten, yesterday. She has some teeth missing. From beneath her upper lip jut four canines, she looks like a nursing baby. Her belly shakes when she walks, her hips sway. It’s summer. She is wearing sagging woolen knee-high socks with violet stripes, she adores violet. Her eyes are violet too, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, in fact she looks like a fat Elizabeth Taylor just before she died, although Ada has better legs. If she was a man, she would resemble Marlon Brando in his old age, she adores Marlon Brando, He’s my type, she used to say, Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Lovely Ada, as they called her there. When she was young and later.
I go out into the garden. Where’s the loquat? I say. It died, Ada says, like me, she says. It burst, its stem blossomed, I listened to it at night, sobbing, it whined like a sick kitten, then one morning it just folded up.
It was a beautiful tree, regal. Adorned with golden fruit, little orange balls filled with juice, fragrant, shiny little apricots. Its branches as wide as an embrace, its leaves velvety like kisses. A powerful tree, a generous tree.
I’ve made pašticada with gnocchi, Ada says, because I like it, because I like pašticada with gnocchi. We eat outside, in that garden without sun. We don’t know what to say, how to say it. A fat, swollen silence settles at our table, drilling into us. We are close.
Ada is a biologist. In the family we called her Bubi. Ada sometimes pranced into my life, and after Elvira’s death, she was like a little mother to Leo. There, in Belgrade, when life was nevertheless somehow orderly, long ago, twenty or so years ago. That is not the point now. Ada too has been shunted into retirement, here, she too is alone, her partner is no longer here either. So many vanished people. Ada’s Gioia finishes her degree, then leaves. I’m not about to stay incarcerated here, she says, and flutters out of the country, out of all the new little countries in the region. Now she shifts her sketchpads and drawings, her paints and easel from one little room to another, from Amsterdam to Paris, from Paris to Vienna, from Vienna to Prague, from Prague to Budapest. Ada has not been to Belgrade for twenty-two years. Gioia comes back to Croatia mostly in summer. You have to let them go.
As soon as she moves into retirement, Ada moves out of life.
In Belgrade, Ada works for the Galenika company, Dr. Ada Ban researches the influence of estrogen on spatial learning and the neuron morphology of the hippocampus in rats. Within her and around her is order, laboratory precision, cleanliness. She walks briskly, she thinks briskly. Electric arrows whizz from her, and laughter. Now she is puffed out, opaque and unilluminated.
When she moves to Croatia, some time after me and Leo, there is no place for her in Croatian laboratories, because she is too old at forty-nine. She teaches biology in a secondary school in the next little town. She lives in the Rovinj basement, through which underground waters can be heard murmuring and dampening the walls. She is poor. She is fat. She used not to be. She has gray growths. She has four pairs of spectacles, worn-out shoes and felted sweaters.
Where’s that vacuum prosthesis? I ask her. It rubs and sometimes it falls off, says Ada, it’ll be okay, she says, and laughs. That’s the laughter I know well. There was a time, in our kitchens over there, when Ada and I used to talk well into the night, over fine cheeses and noble wine. We were looking for a way out of the trap.
That was that. A life, lives, can be compressed into a few short paragraphs.
The two of us spent a week in Ada’s hole in the hill. And I became anxious.
Ada has no company, whereas she used to have lots of acquaintances, close friends. She no longer reads, I’ve given my books to the library, she says, they’re consumed by mold here.
Where are your paintings, the oils and etchings? I say.
I sold them, says Ada.
At midday, Ada goes down to the square, has a coffee and leafs through the newspaper. Then she comes back. She doesn’t go to the cinema, she doesn’t go to exhibitions although invitations still reach her regularly. As soon as she wakes up, she turns on the TV, watches programs about the sea. In the summer she no longer goes to the beach, It’s too hot, it’s sweltering, she says, and the south wind does me in. She sleeps a lot, although she maintains that she hardly sleeps at all. When I go to pee at dawn, I almost always find her sitting at the table, sucking bitter chocolate and staring straight ahead. She swings one leg and smokes. Then she goes back to bed and lazes around until eleven. She never used to sleep till eleven, she used to sleep for six hours and get up singing.
I’m hibernating, Ada says, and laughs again.
And so we chat, and then Ada gets upset over some nonsense and starts shouting.
Why are you shouting? I say to her.
I’m not shouting, she says and starts whispering, she becomes small. Toward evening I suggest, Let’s go to the sea, let’s go and walk beside the sea.
I can’t, Ada says, I’ve got things to do.
She has nothing to do. Then, suddenly, Ada seems to wake up, torrents gush from her, she talks and talks, repeats herself, sentences whirl around her as though she is stirring porridge or thick dough.
You’re talking a lot, I say.
I know, says Ada, I go through phases.
Apart from Leo, who is far away, Ada is now closest to me.
Come to my place, I say, we’ll fix that keratosis.
Keratosis isn’t malignant, says Ada.
We’ll fix your teeth, I say.
I can fix them here, says Ada.
You could talk to someone, I say.
Maybe, says Ada, but psychiatrists want you first to tell your life story, and I don’t feel like doing that, it takes a long time. And psychiatrists are expensive. Let’s play chess.
At home, when we were all still alive, when we were a family, we had several chess sets, wooden, carved in the folk style, small, traveling, folding sets, with little holes to push the pieces into (ours were red and black), we had one set with hollow pieces made of cheap plastic and one with huge heavy pieces made of white and black ebony, which, of course, disappeared (all the others disappeared as well), because someone sold it. Recently, on one of my pointless journeys (perhaps to Paris, perhaps to Munich, or perhaps in a dream) in the window of a jeweler I caught sight of a chess set with crystal pieces, made by hand by Strass Swarovski, all transparent, enchanting, through which rays of sun were reflected, so the kings and queens, knights and pawns, bishops and castles seemed to be flying toward the sky and there lining up for some ceremonial parade, which would degenerate in universal extermination, in general carnage. I stood like that, in front of that glittering and luxurious army, like a hungry child at a counter full of candy, playing an imaginary, invented duel with Death. The set cost more than a thousand euros.
So, we play chess. For a long time. In the basement in Rovinj’s Bregovita/del Monte street, Ada and I play chess, we play our lives away. With little lifeless wooden pieces.
It’s dangerous to play too much chess. Chess players say nothing and calculate, they plan annihilation, attacks and defenses on their fields, visible and invisible, sometimes bloody stories develop, terrible slaughter and underhanded trickery. Too much chess drives some people mad. That’s okay, says Nabokov, there’s nothing abnormal about the fact that chess players are abnormal. It’s completely normal.
Even before he used a razor to slit the throat of his 83-year-old roommate, people used to say of that American international master Raymond Weinstein that he possessed the instinct of a merciless murderer. When he turned twenty-three, in 1964, they shut him up in the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York. He’s still there, if he hasn’t died.
Lionel Kieseritzky died without a coin in his pocket, in Paris in 1853, in the Hôpital de la Charité, insane, in his forty-seventh year. Kieseritzky was one of the greatest chess players in the world. He was born in Tartu, in what is now Estonia, where long ago Ada once attended a scientific conference. When she came back, she said: They read papers, I studied the Kieseritzky variant of the king’s gambit and the way Anderssen defeated him at that Deathless Contest. Do you know said Ada to the people in the house over lunch, do you know that Kieseritzky used to play chess in Paris for money, five francs an
hour, as Oskar did in Berlin, he was a mathematician as well. There was silence at the table, because the mathematician Oskar, Ada’s former boyfriend, had also come to an unusual end. First he beat Ada up, giving her black rings around her eyes, then he immigrated to Germany where he married a nun, having first dragged her out of her convent, of course, a certain Esmeralda who sang in church choirs and even made two records, then he made her change from the Catholic to the Orthodox faith, then he gave her five children, whom he regularly woke at four o’clock in the morning to take to swimming and athletics training. For decades, up until today, he sent Ada threatening letters, increasingly vicious, because no one listened to him anymore, his grandchildren ran away from him, he got a dog, an abandoned mongrel, which was immediately taken from him, that is, it was taken by that timid and obedient Catholic-Orthodox Esmeralda, and all his tenderness, if he ever had any, drained away.
I dreamed about Oskar, Ada suddenly announced. I don’t remember what, I just know he was conflict-free.
I had dreamed that I was doing a radio interview with Kafka, but I didn’t tell Ada that.
Kieseritzky was also quite an abrupt, tense person, he used to say I’m the chess Messiah, remember, I’m the chess Messiah. He used to say that mostly after his defeat by Anderssen. It isn’t known where Kieseritzky is buried, into what pit for the homeless he was thrown, because there were no witnesses, no one came to the funeral, no one from the crowd of crazed chess players who used to hang around the Paris Café de la Régence, racing from one table to another as though they were in a casino. One waiter went, in fact, but presumably he doesn’t count. And Ada’s former boyfriend Oskar is still alive.