by Daša Drndic
So, Adam Kaplan came to my coastal town several times, and then it all stopped. Where I often spend the winters, I have nothing to show anyone. It is an ordinary town, on the tedious side, a small town with a big local section in the daily paper. From that section one learns what is essential for this town: who married whom and where, who was born to whom, when the water and electricity will go off, who has celebrated their fiftieth anniversary of finishing secondary school (with a photograph of smiling old people). That local section informs one of the local tourist association’s competition for the best-cared-for vegetable plot, balcony, local architecture and regional details, for which, that expert association, awards a first and second prize (and, for the sake of positive discrimination, on the whole to women), but local readers are deprived of local awareness of the content of those local prizes (are they monetary?). From the extensive local columns, one discovers how many people (say, thirty-one) have given blood, although their names remain confidential to protect their privacy. One can learn details of the meetings of amateur harmonica players, then belated news about street entertainers — musicians, acrobats and jugglers — who had once visited the little town, and then it was truly, not just metaphorically, transformed into a somewhat bigger circus than it already is, but by the time the news was printed, the entertainers had already left, entirely in the style of weather forecasts which let people know about past meteorological conditions, and begin with the words, Yesterday it was cloudy, with outbreaks of rain. The local news is not always informative, sometimes it commands: Put on your national dress and dance a kolo for Governor Ivan Mažuranić, who was born two hundred years ago today. Then there is news about school pupils spending time together, having succeeded in parting from their mobile phones for a couple of hours, there is local news, there is no need at all to go into the town or its surroundings. Besides (during the day) the little town is unnaturally noisy, devastatingly noisy and, if you don’t have to, why go out?
And, of course, more than anything local newspapers are full of little black-bordered announcements, sometimes accompanied by doleful amateur verses about those who are no more, along with God’s blessing and pleas for the intercession of various saints. That’s why, whenever I can, I leave this town in winter.
During Adam’s short (and rare) visits, we strewed our lives throughout the rooms and rearranged our luggage. That luggage included heavy clothes and fluttery clothes, there was some decay, eroded by damp, a kind of rotting (refuse) that crumbled like ash between the fingers, there were little boxes in which jewels danced.
When was that? Three years ago, ten, twenty? Time has stuck together like the pages of a book steeped in moisture, become a great mass of grayish-black mold, which now sways over my head, emitting airlessness.
Then comes a call. Dominik Marengo, Adam’s former colleague, telephones to say, Adam Kaplan has killed himself. With his father’s pistol.
A link in my innards uncouples. It spins like a small gold coin, then calms and settles.
He left a letter addressed to you, says Dominik Marengo. A fat letter. The funeral is the day after tomorrow.
I go to fewer and fewer funerals, although they are increasingly frequent. At funerals ghosts surface, which later cruise about and frighten me. At funerals brittle (burned) bones and rotten flesh, bloodless veins and blind eyes are buried, and out of the grave spring skeletons, rattling and dancing. Priests spread incense, clergymen reel off their prayers, the bereaved cross themselves or clutch fists, the performance generally ends with some deus ex machina souring the play. Like recently when my father died.
So, at Adam Kaplan’s funeral, a woman, roughly as old as me, Andreas Ban, in other words a little younger than Adam Kaplan, stood rigid beside the open grave, gazing into space. That woman had gray eyes, glassy as marbles, and on her head a straw hat with a broad brim, black and drooping under its burden of fruit, vegetables and variously colored ribbons. The woman was unwashed, in a black cape, she had pulled deep, worn-out shoes with no laces onto her bare feet. She had dirty nails and red lipstick. Then, in the middle of the sadness and the pointless speeches by Adam’s colleagues, that woman unknown to me suddenly fainted. Before she fell, a cry broke from her. The cry flew up to the sky and heavy rain teemed onto the graveyard. It reverberated appallingly, there over that pit around which small heaps of sticky dark earth caught the light. I asked someone next to me, Who is she, who is that woman? and that person said No one knows. I stand, and in the inside pocket of my jacket I grip Adam Kaplan’s “legacy.”
Dear Andreas,
See below my truncated family tree with its rotten shoots. That would already be enough for you to learn details about me of which I was myself until recently entirely unaware. Nevertheless, there comes a moment when someone starts probing, and if they don’t discover enough, the gaps can always be filled by the imagination. Or by lies.
In my apartment I have the files of some of the people I treated, whose lives I stratified. Today I don’t know whether that was necessary. I don’t know whether I helped any of them. Take these stories and organize them, they will open up a map of lives on which nothing is definitively drawn, where everything moves and, in that movement, changes. You have your own “histories of illness,” if you did not throw them away when you moved. I have tried to make a crossword puzzle and at the very beginning I realized that many of these lives crisscross, that many of them resemble each other, that they are in fact the same life, that is, they could be one single life, of one single person, both male and female, both adult and child, lives — the life of one single time. Then my own family story caught me unawares, which chilled me. I’m leaving it to the end.
It’s a long letter, but since it is addressed to me, I can’t quote it in full. It’s an intimate letter. Overleaf is Adam’s family tree and the story it discloses will be told only in hints, perhaps now, perhaps on some other occasion. There are family trees like this all around us. Nevertheless, what is clear at first glance is that Adam Kaplan didn’t kill himself with his father’s pistol, because it seems that he didn’t know who his father was. Nevertheless, by killing himself, he had also eliminated the father who was unknown to him. At least that’s what psychiatry tells us.
One morning at breakfast at a villa for writers and translators at Wannsee, Stephan, otherwise a graphic designer, said, I’m from a small town near Leipzig, it’s strange that I’ve forgotten Russian. I learned Russian in school for five years, I had to learn Russian, we all learned Russian at school, said Stephan, but now I can’t remember a single Russian word.
Maybe your parents remember? I said to Stephan, but Stephan, who was thirty, perhaps thirty-five, with light-skinned people you never quite know, Stephan said, They don’t remember either, my parents have forgotten everything, and they haven’t found their place in the new Germany, either. My parents walk in the air, said Stephan. Stephan himself is somehow transparent, light as a tiny, hungry cat in one’s arms, and he is never in a good mood.
That evening, Stephan, the Romanian poet Nora Iuga and I drank two bottles of red wine, Stephan ate an avocado, Nora asked, What’s that? and Stephan fed her with a spoon across the table. Nora said, Mmmm, leaned toward Stephan and whispered, Why are you sad, Stephan? and Stephan let out a wail, I’m terribly sad. When I come back from Romania, he said, I’d like us to talk. When Stephan came back from Romania, Nora asked me, What do we do now? Stephan maintains that he had already lived in Bucharest, even though he has never been there. “I was in Bucharest, I was,” Stephan insisted, Nora said, “I was in Bucharest in one of my former lives, but as a woman, I was a woman in Bucharest,” said Stephan, Nora said.
Then I thought for the first time, perhaps Nora Iuga is not Nora Iuga either, perhaps I am not Andreas Ban, perhaps I am a woman from my previous or future or existing life, or perhaps I am a man whom I have not yet met. Perhaps various people squat inside me, I thought then, and I decided to research it.
Strange, I thought, that man is quite like me.
My name is Hans, said the beautiful man in his admirably tailored suit. My name is Hans Traube and I come from Salzburg.
You can’t be called Hans Traube, I said, Hans Traube is an imagined character, Hans Traube from Salzburg was invented by a writer, consequently Hans Traube can’t be here, Hans Traube can live exclusively between the covers of a book. Then “Hans Traube” said, I’ll tell you my life story, and I said, Don’t. I already know your life story.
You don’t know everything, he said.
Then Hans Traube smiled, displaying his beautiful teeth, his regular teeth, not porcelain, then bowed and disappeared.
*
For two years I sort and classify Adam Kaplan’s files and what remains of my dossiers. I travel. I visit cities, people and memories corroded by time. Over the last two or three years I have been in Brussels, in Sarajevo, in Skopje and in Paris. And a few other places, for instance Amsterdam, for a month, or two, or three. I went in the winter, so as not to freeze to death in this tomb here. That whole time I didn’t write, I just catalogued. Lives. People. Their little realities and their fragile dreams. Or maybe I didn’t go anywhere, maybe I spent the whole time sitting here, wrapped in rags, blowing onto my hands, not knowing where that “here” is.
It sounds feeble, but now, given my advanced years, I have the right to the occasional banal, kitsch utterance, up to a point it’s cheering. Life is travel. And traveling, that “small death of departure” as Virilio puts it, reduces the tension of the dead-end and brings (temporary) forgetfulness. So, I travel with suitcases or without them, I go away and I come back, I return through streets and houses — rooms, things, rediscovered and lost friends and books, small objects, toys tucked away, Leo’s cardboard boxes with little jumbled cars and Lego bricks, with piled-up LPs containing old hits, but also children’s productions, programs and songs, brittle plastic albums with scratched singles; two pairs of skis, two pairs of ski boots, old-fashioned; yellowing bed linen edged with Toledo embroidery and my mother’s monogram — I could count until I’m blue in the face everything I encounter on my returns, whether from journeys or simply from sitting in my room. A warehouse, a depository of old things, old people, old days suffocating in a dark, smallish storeroom. I could list to the limits of my memory, which, thank goodness, is contracting, so that I remember less and less of the joy and unease that such moving/unmoving brings, there remain images, blurred images, flickering blots. Were all those journeys, those numerous stirrings and evasions, were they “worth it”? I don’t know. Did they bring serenity? No, they didn’t. Did they bring pleasure? Sometimes, yes. There were not only suitcases of various sizes, there were also trunks, those transoceanic metal ones, and wooden ones, some of them two meters long, in which drawings and oil paintings wrapped in straw traveled (there are fewer and fewer of them, because I sell them), and in the end, here, as is fitting for endings, a small Chinese suitcase, checked red and black, which holds only the most essential items. The destinations are closer, departures increasingly brief and returns, although I don’t know to what or to whom, increasingly rapid.
Some twenty years ago, Leo and I arrived in Toronto from Rijeka with three huge cheap suitcases bought in haste in Trieste, with little wheels that had buckled with the weight, so we dragged our luggage along the ground. What they contained was apparently what we needed for a new beginning. But it wasn’t. We bought additional secondhand clothes, secondhand crockery, secondhand books and lived a secondhand life. Two years in Canada brought us nothing, not stability nor a future. Something was missing.
I spent a month in Brussels. I was supposed to write, but I didn’t. I could have got to know the city, visited the museums, gone for walks, but I didn’t. It was cold, it snowed, there was nothing green anywhere, the café terraces were closed, so I sat in that lovely warm apartment and looked out of the window.
The windows of the study face Oude Granmarkt, a street where wheat was once traded. Across the road is a small Greek restaurant, Menelas, where no one goes, yet candles constantly flicker in its window. There used to be a shooting club in that place. I live in the residential quarter with a mixed population: middle class, artists and writers and — the homeless. As everywhere in the world, the homeless huddle on the pavement, wrapped in rags, holding up a piece of cardboard with J’ai faim written on it. In the newspapers I read about shelter for these rejected people and about the fact that such refuges are filling increasingly fast and that all these people and their messed-up, broken lives, their presence, their visibility, is becoming a serious problem for the city of Brussels.
Opposite my apartment is a row of residential buildings with high windows and no curtains. At night I watch what people do there. When they go to bed, when they get up. I see what their pajamas are like, who comes to visit them. I enter their lives obliquely, then I throw my own over my shoulder to roll like a pumped-up ball through the half-empty rooms with their high ceilings and with walls virtually devoid of pictures, and I hear it, that life of mine, bouncing about dully and shallowly.
It’s an interesting little street, this Grand Marché/Oude Graanmarkt. Quiet, out of the way, with a small market in its center. On the street that crosses it, which I can also see, there is a secondary school. And those young people who flow toward the school gate every working day at 8:30 a.m. and come out of it around 4 p.m. are all that brings some liveliness outside my window, not to say life. At the weekend, when those girls and boys are not there, I miss them. As I stand glued to the glass during the week, I am beginning to recognize some of them, and I feel like going down to join them.
In a letter, Goran Ferčec writes from Zagreb to describe his visit to Belgrade and he mentions Ulica Gramsci and Ulica Clara Zetkin. In Zagreb there’s no Ulica Antonio Gramsci any more, nor an Ulica Clara Zetkin. Others who have disappeared from Zagreb streets (and therefore from the memory) are Karl Marx, the Spanish fighters, Friedrich Engels, Palmiro Togliatti, Che Guevara, Karl Liebknecht and many others from that album. Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg held out to the last moment, only in the end to say farewell to the streets of Zagreb too, with a prophetic Auf Wiedersehen, I hope.
In Brussels, by contrast, the house where Karl Marx lived and in which he and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto is one of the city’s tourist attractions. Even though, in 1848, the Belgian Ministry of Justice accused him of giving financial support to Belgian workers in their preparations for revolution and drove him out of the country, Karl Marx is not dead in Brussels. On the façade of the famous restaurant La Maison du Cygne, on the magnificent central square, La Grand-Place/Grote Markt, there is a plaque recording the fact that this was where Marx and his comrades talked about revolution and the founding of international communist organizations.
The suitcase I arrived in Brussels with is not the checked one, it’s large and strong. I filled it with clothes I won’t wear. Jackets, trousers, tops, it’s all hanging in a large wardrobe, waiting to be crammed back into my only expensive Samsonite, to move on. T
o go back? Like me, waiting for this journey too to end.
Goran also writes about the need to flee, and he’s so young. The world has been completely flattened, he says, there’s nowhere one can disappear, he says, then he talks about shoes, which are for him little apartments. Many people write or have written about shoes, Hamsun, or let’s say Bernhard, but one could write about the shoes of those who did not write about shoes, who died frozen in the snow, like Robert Walser, or in their cold huts, about the shoes of those who languish in madhouses, for instance. Goran sees shoes as a metaphor for constant movement, I see them as a deception. Shoes which pinch or fall off, which wear out, which camouflage or disclose, which are agreeable or disagreeable, which leave marks or cover them over. Which sometimes drive one mad.
One early spring in Rovinj, Goran and I had, as he put it, a midnight conversation beside the illuminated, blue and empty hotel pool filled with water. He asked me what we, as writers, could offer one another, where writing about the past was leading us, whether writing about the past was like writing about dreams. Who was interested in the past? That’s what he asked me.