by Daša Drndic
People talk too much. In addition, they repeat their stupidities tirelessly, sometimes with variants in the scale of intonation, sometimes in a monotonous tone and rhythm, so that the listener feels as though he is being hit with a hammer. Know thyself, they say, know your non-self, your other self, know your collective self, know thyself, thine own self.
A few days ago some guy hit his close friend of many years on the head with a hammer because the man would not shut up, he kept going on and on, and the evening had started beautifully, with music, sausages and beer. I recently overheard a woman in the square saying, Who are you anyway, and what right do you have to ask me about my political preferences? She could have said, Who are you anyway? or better still, Who are you?, she could also have said, Fuck off. There are many possible abbreviations.
It’s best not to go out. Every time I go out, I tell myself, earplugs, don’t forget your earplugs, then I forget them. I was also advised to do this by a silly woman once when I was traveling on an intercity bus, for three hours, and she would not shut up, she babbled behind me into her mobile from the beginning to the end of the journey, so I asked her, Are you going to stop nattering? And she said, You can buy earplugs, they only cost thirty kunas. On another occasion I asked a man, When are you going to shut up? He said, When my battery runs out.
Subtle distinctions of pronunciation in our language are being lost and words are becoming slimy, spoken often with an idiotic smile as speakers fashionably soften nonexistent consonants. Degenerate. Like children, half-articulate, vacuous, infantile orators roll words around their mouths like hot potatoes, as though they were toothless, they shift them about, squash them, then open their mouths to eject a mash, a sticky pre-masticated porridge, which slides down their chins.
There are zillions of idiocies spurting out of the caricatured off-key pronouncements, doctored like a caricature, which contort both my mouth and my stomach. No one knows any longer what reflexive verbs are for. Or vocatives. Or that a plural verb can’t follow a singular noun. There is such great confusion drilling in their heads, conspiring to devour every superfluous thought, it smudges every image into mess, into shit.
What an illiterate, haughty, puffed-up nation.
But, bit by bit, year by year, these monstrous polluters of words and thoughts will succeed in digging tunnels into my brain, and then, like a colony of ants, their acid will poison (devour) my memory.
The language has shrunk. It has become smaller and moved to the suburbs. Now “clash” is all the rage, there are no collisions or conflicts, hell no.
Of all the communicative horrors that get to me here, the worst may be when I’m trying to tell someone something. People just don’t listen. While I’m talking, they keep interrupting and repeating yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, they say that five times, sometimes six (I count to myself). For some time, clusters of three have been in fashion, yes, yes, yes. Generally speaking, it seems that we have entered an age of frenzied repetition. As though the human brain has totally degenerated (perhaps it has), and it has to be told everything several times so that at least something should make an impression.
My irritations are not decreasing, which surprises me. Now I’m also annoyed by the rustling of jackets, which seems always to pursue me. In winter, people in rustling jackets swing their arms wildly, so they rustle as they walk. They swing their arms in summer as well, but summer clothes don’t rustle like winter ones, so in summer you don’t hear them. And I’m annoyed by women’s heels clicking on the pavement, cheap shoes that follow me, beating into my brain. A few days ago, I heard quiet footsteps behind me, those steps dragged, they ground the pavement, and I instantly felt my nerves tingling. That’s why now I stop and let all those loud and all those abnormally quiet walkers, their rustling jackets and their brittle heels pass by me. When they are in front of me, I don’t hear them at all, I don’t get irritated.
I haven’t watched TV for ages, especially not in winter, because it’s cold in that room. It’s not exactly agreeable in that room even in summer, particularly when the announcer greets me like this:
Because of clouds, it was cloudy today in Croatia.
Or, In today’s accident 365 dead perished.
The Evening News I find particularly irritating, especially since it’s got longer. It’s full of nonsense, gossip and tedious images of everyday tedious life, so, of course, the announcers repeat themselves, but they can’t accumulate enough banality to appear astute. All right, some of the women announcers have stopped fluttering their forearms and upper arms as though they are about to take flight, but some news programs are presented by two people, male and female, never two men or two women, or just one person, and those two people look at each other at regular intervals, as though they were relating (reading) the events to each other, which looks even more stupid. And, on top of that, they smile, and when they are not smiling they remain jovial, even though what they are saying is often neither funny nor amusing, and can indeed be tragic and alarming, hideous murders, heaps of corpses, hundreds of thousands of refugees and innumerable destroyed cities. But I keep paying my subscription because if I get caught by Hanžeković's office for enforcement, it’ll be recorded in my bank account and I’ll get an automatic fine, which happened once, although that time they were wrong.
I also have problems listening to the radio. It’s dangerous to listen to the radio early in the morning, when one is still groggy, because if a song ambushes one, as happened to me once, a song in which some guy was whining “I knew that I would give my love to her — my lovely Croatian land,” then some people’s blood pressure leaps to abnormal heights, while that of others plummets so that they have to lie down straight away.
I’m getting old. Everything about me and in me is giving way: it’s either giving out or not functioning as it should. My eyelids droop, so the ophthalmologists stick them to my eyebrows and only then start looking at the back of my eye and measuring my eye pressure. Then they exclaim, Oh, how pale your nerves are! Then I ask, Are they going to be snuffed out soon? and they say, Don’t talk like that. Glaucoma will cost me my sight in due course, I discovered that in Paris. About that, glaucoma and Paris, later. I spend more and more time hanging around clinics, after which my irritation increases maniacally, which is fatal for one’s health. My face is sagging. On both sides of my chin, there are now little bags, like a bulldog’s. As soon as I can get a bit of money together, I’ll go and get those little bags lifted. I know that I’m not alone, some admit it to themselves with difficulty, but publicly— heaven forbid. Men, the more stable of them, leave the situation as it is and act the fool, they grow beards or in public wrap scarves around their necks that reach to their lower lip. Women do that as well. I once watched a colleague of mine reading her works on a TV program. She was wearing a polo-neck sweater that almost came up to her nose, so one could barely hear what she was saying.
When Easter comes, I don’t go out. But I get wound up if I turn on either the radio or the TV. At least I only hear words from the radio, while on the screen for three days actors process in heavy, gold-encrusted robes, all deadly serious as they talk about Easter as a festival of joy and good cheer. At the same time, those animators, those performers, frequently repeat to their flock that Easter Monday is a time for remembering Jesus meeting with his disciples after his resurrection, as though all of them, bishops and priests and their entire suite and their believers, had been present at that meeting between Jesus and the disciples, as though they remembered that meeting, and on Easter Monday they must all together devote additional remembering to that meeting.
I produce a lot of trash, it’s unbelievable how much rubbish I generate in just a couple of days, and I don’t seem to eat anything. I still don’t separate my trash. Particularly not paper, and I have an excessive amount of wastepaper. I do not separate paper because they’ve put dumpsters here with a short, narrow opening and a lid that cannot be lifted, so I would h
ave to insert each little scrap of paper separately, which is truly annoying, especially when people walk past me probably thinking, that guy’s lost it. Besides, I’ve watched, because they’ve plonked those dumpsters down literally under my window, I’ve watched: at one o’clock in the morning a truck comes and collects all that trash from the yellow, blue, green and gray dumpsters, all of it, supposedly sorted, all of it is chucked by the garbagemen into one and the same container.
Sometimes I don’t go out for three days. Then I go out. Or travel somewhere. Yesterday I went out and immediately stepped in some shit.
Should I leave?
No.
Sometimes nice things happen, they immediately make me stand tall. I go straight for a brandy. For instance, once a large man rushed past me, he can hardly have been thirty, big, muscular, tattooed, with a shaved head, a bodybuilder one would have thought, a bruiser, a bouncer, he was hurrying and shouting to a friend on the other side of the street, Later, I’ve got to pee, I need to pee badly. What tenderness, almost poetic. Then I remember little Dolores from the terrible kindergarten of Croatian-American friendship, who used to shout, I have to wee! and I would shudder. So I tell myself external appearance is sometimes misleading, simply in order to restrain these negative passions of mine.
I like to stop by my little market around the corner, somehow shriveled, flattened, deflated between dilapidated, dark, Austro-Hungarian five-story blocks with no lift or heating. There’s a little café under an awning on the square, and every time I go I drop in there (although my home-brewed espresso is better), because the people who come are poor, threadbare people, they carry half-empty little bags of vegetables or fruit bought at a reduced price and, strangely enough, their speech doesn’t irritate me at all, even though it’s rough and stilted, often too loud, so these people remind me of mongrel dogs, which I adore, unlike dogs with a pedigree, which disgust me, all tarted up but degenerate.
I buy beetroot. And broccoli. Marisa used to love beetroot, Beetroot is refreshing, she would say, but I can’t bear it, it’s like chomping on earth. I don’t like broccoli either, but both beetroot and broccoli destroy cancer cells, they say (they didn’t help Marisa, or Elvira), so I buy them and eat them to prevent the possible renewed crawling of the tendrils of some tumor that is crouching in me, waiting, I know. In that little café they bring me a macchiato with a hideous spoon made of tin, so light and tiny that it would be hard to stir anything with it and every time I remember how we refugees (political and war) were treated in Canada. We were, each and every one of us, given the same cutlery, four knives, four forks and four soup spoons with such a shallow scoop and such a short handle that it was impossible to hold any fluid in them. I don’t know why I didn’t throw out that cutlery when we left Canada, because here if I happen to pick up one of those pieces, especially a spoon, I move my hand away as though scalded and leave it lying on the bottom of the drawer, where it is now acquiring a green coating, oxidizing. Not to mention the sheets, synthetic, with barely 10 percent cotton, beneath which sweat is abnormally abundant.
I adore croissants. Nowadays you can get first-class ones here, when I first came twenty-four years ago, they were not first-class, but thick and heavy and mushy. Sometimes I go down into the center of town and sit on a terrace on a little side street, drink a short espresso and order two warm croissants. It’s quiet all around me, that early morning quiet, a healing quiet that excites and soothes at the same time. Then, only then, do I hear the sea, for no one’s shrieking or senseless yelling or hysterical crooked footsteps force it to retire (as they do me), and the sea withdraws from its cover and pours out into the town. Only then is the sea not silent. My asthma vanishes, I breathe deeply and evenly, and at the café table from somewhere, out of some stale, worn-out past, appear memories of waking à deux, beside the Seine, when, after loving embraces and meaningless whispering, a touch is enough for peace, and in that soundlessness we look at one another, my past time and I, and I wonder how it happened that all that is left of us is pure waste. Then I shake myself and think, what stupid sickliness, what shallow, pathetically touching rapture. And I limp off to my lair.
When Leila and I met again after some twenty years, she was entranced by my little market square, here a market square is not called a “pazar” but a “placa,” an ugly word, limp, after the sticky “pl” the mouth opens unreasonably wide and the tongue flicks, Leila was so entranced that she made a series of panoramic photographs into postcards, which she sent around as proof of Balkan exoticism, including, quite unaccountably, one to me.
I read about this market square in some book or other, never dreaming that I would be burying myself in its neighborhood. I read that at the beginning of the twentieth century Clara lived near here, a former beauty and nighttime entertainer, seller of flowers and love around numerous bars, cafés, terraces and hotels in Fiume, and that, in more recent times, on this square, with its pavilion for fish, meat and milk products, surrounded by stalls of genetically modified vegetables from Italy and Spain, on this in fact miniature square, huddling in an inner courtyard surrounded by the solid-stone, several-storied houses of former merchants in textiles, leather and silk, Clara sold flowers. Further on, the author of that text wrote, That little square is like a trap, and behind what is today the noisiest and ugliest street in this town, behind the once fashionable Deák Street, that little square throbs like a hidden life breathing in secret. Clara, writes that author, Clara died at the end of the 1990s, alone, wrapped in smelly old rags, and beside her desiccated corpse was a cardboard box with wilted flowers she had collected from the cemetery, and used to sell on the square, around the corner. Toward the end, wrote the author, the box became too heavy for Clara, so she tied it with string and dragged it, the way children drag wooden toys which won’t go straight, because they are ineptly carved, with a penknife, as homemade craft. I’m quoting this here because today I feel like Clara, I can barely walk, I breathe with difficulty and totter along, dragging my shabby luggage behind me.
I spoke English with Leila then, long ago, and then, when we met again, so as not to get annoyed. My English is excellent (I was recently asked by a Canadian here, with undisguised doubt in his voice, whether I could read English, so I gave him my book about the time I spent in his wonderful country which discriminates against refugees and in which I describe my scientific psychology lectures), Leila’s English is not excellent, in fact it’s terrible, so in order to understand one another, when talking with her, I maximally simplify my statements, and therefore also my thoughts. Leila speaks German. Leila also speaks Latvian, but when I got to know her, she didn’t have much opportunity to speak Latvian except with her family, because at that time Latvia was a Soviet region, in which most people spoke Russian, while Leila lived and danced in Germany.
So this association with Leila lasted, remarkably, in phases like the moon, for several years. She skipped about and I traveled, so we would meet up for a day or two in hotels, in theaters in the evening, she on stage, I in the audience, then in bars all over the world, in Chicago, New York, Hamburg and most of all in Stuttgart, because Leila’s home base was Stuttgart, and then Nuremberg. I met the famous Marcia Haydée, lovely as a goddess, and John Cranko, persecuted in England for his sexual orientation, then director of the Stuttgart Ballet, Cranko who collapsed after an anaphylactic shock several months after we sat together into the early hours in a gay bar whose name I don’t remember, after a production which I don’t remember either. During the flight back from his successful US tour, John Cranko experienced an allergic reaction to an antinausea tablet and died. I also experienced an anaphylactic shock, completely absurdly, but I didn’t die. Until then I had believed that I was not allergic to anything to the extent that it could kill me, but I discovered that all manner of unpredictable things and horrors are constantly lying in wait for us and that the worst are those apparently innocent ones that can prove fatal. I ate a washed, although not peeled, apple
, evidently sprayed with some poison, and it activated my asthma in an instant and I couldn’t breathe, and my whole body shuddered, and then, I don’t know after how long, I came to on the tiles of the kitchen floor, having peed and crapped. Now, of all fruit, I have an indescribably keen desire for apples, which could be interpreted in all kinds of ways.
In the course of my encounters with Leila, I also got to know the blond Danish angel Egon Madsen, the irresistibly attractive Richard Cragun, and Birgit Keil and her dance and life partner, the Czech Vladimir Klos.
I met many people, not just ballet dancers, I had a rich life.
I also met Leila’s family, who lived in a dark, dank Bavarian forest south of Munich, in a little house with a lot of rooms and with a lot of little wood-burning stoves. In those rooms Leila’s mother knitted multicolored socks for cold days and she gave me a pair of gray and black striped ones, but of course those socks went missing in one of my various house moves. There were some sisters of Leila’s and some brothers, and there was Leila’s father, a stately man of about seventy, with hard facial lines and grimaces that he kept under absolute control, an astonishingly immobile face on which even the eyes barely blinked. A leaden face, some would say, handsome, but disturbing. I don’t remember the name of the place either.