by Daša Drndic
Then we watched and touched the nocturnal Rovinj silence, sprinkled with the “sweat” of pine trees, as my dead friend the poet Raša Livada would say, and now, as I am writing about this, it ought to be a conversation from the past. How can it be about the past, if I’m writing about it now? If we write about what seems to be past, then what seems to have passed is now, as we are writing, here. Often, while we write about what has recently passed, we write about the present. What is past may be forgotten, and what is forgotten does not exist. But if we think that what is past is forgotten, that means that it is not yet forgotten, because we are thinking about it. The Alzheimer’s tangles that we nurture, and on which we hang small decorative antidotes for survival, do not help. They are unexpectedly penetrated by dreams or reality and cause chaos. And people say, Your past and the past of your characters, that is you, that’s who they are now, today and tomorrow.
In Brussels then, in the apartment, I find an unnumbered issue of a magazine published here by Passa Porta, the Belgian International House of Literature. The theme of the magazine is “Borders.” It contains texts by some well-known writers, philosophers and journalists, such as Claudio Magris, Ingo Schulze, Régis Debray and Daniel Salvatore Schiffer. This Schiffer, I discover, is known for being an engaged philosopher of social-democratic orientation, he published a book about dandyism, which immediately reminded me of the late Dragoš Kalajić, also a great champion of dandyism, otherwise a painter and writer of fascist worldview, an emphatic elitist with no funds. Schiffer, his father Italian, his mother of Austrian-German extraction, and he himself a Belgian who lived and taught in Liège, says that it is good that there are no borders within Europe anymore, but Europe must protect itself from outside elements, he says. For example, adds Schiffer, I am against the inclusion of Turkey in the European Union. It has no common point of contact culturally or geographically with Europe, apart from that small area west of the Bosporus. Turkey is not Greece. The Turks penetrated into Europe as far as Vienna, but that was an invasion. Unlike Europe, Turkey is a Muslim country. Religious identities also have to be taken into account.
I “listen” to Schiffer as though I was in Croatia. I would like to say something, to rebel, but Schiffer doesn’t let me. Schiffer gets heated and shouts, Europe must defend itself! Europe must defend its culture and democracy.
I would like to ask, From whom must it defend its culture and democracy, how must it defend its culture and democracy, why? Schiffer doesn’t let me, Schiffer is in a trance like Hitler and Mussolini in those old film newsreels, like some contemporary speechmakers, there are some of those in Croatia too. But Schiffer is an educated man, so here and there he produces the occasional stale argument, but he doesn’t give up. We must build our ideas and our reflections on the foundations of national states, Schiffer waves his arms although he lowers his voice. I am in favor of a mixture of people, cultures and beliefs, and also cosmopolitanism, an individual must be free, but he must respect the culture of the country that has accepted him. And in order for there to be respect, there must first be a strong identity.
Instead of reading Schiffer, perhaps when I was in Belgium I should after all have taken a look at the shopping centers or, better still, the museums, especially the Magritte Museum, where René’s surrealist works would have made me so cheerful that I would have bought a reproduction of one of them in the museum bookshop and later thought about it, and if my tranquil days really do come (wherever I happen to be), which I doubt, as disquiet has so anchored itself in me, so fixed itself in concrete that I don’t know whether it is any longer possible to “kill” it, but, carry on, when such days come, I would be able to write the occasional line for the public about my encounter with Magritte. Although I doubt whether such reminiscence would console me, because the way I am, I would immediately connect Magritte’s playful pictures with his, Magritte’s, life and with the suicide of his mother, who tried several times to disappear, and in the end succeeded, although her husband kept her locked in the bedroom (in those circumstances I would have killed myself too), and in that bedroom she was probably unable to carry on with her millinery, and could only sleep, but, there, she managed to get out and drown herself in some Belgian river. At the time his mother drowned, Magritte was small, only thirteen, and they say, when they found her, Régine Magritte, née Bertinchamps, her wet dress was stuck to her face, and hence, they say, those paintings by her son René, traumatized by the sight, hence those wrapped heads, some of which are kissing. I should have gone to Magritte, I see that now, because I would have been able to tell him about that benighted Schiffer, because René Magritte was an atheist and left-wing, and, unlike bigoted right-wingers, who are always dramatically serious and scowling, as though they were some kind of prophet, he was able to be cheerful even though he may not have been. And we would have laughed, recounting how after the war Magritte supported himself by painting imitation Picassos and Braques, even though in recent years I have been ever less inclined to laugh.
I sit there in that Brussels room, I listen to the maddened Schiffer, and I hear that university bigwig in the Rovinj street on the hill wagging her tongue, You shouldn’t have written that book about the town that gave you everything.
Belgium is a complicated country. Politically, linguistically and nationally. Its colonial past seems still to linger in nooks of the consciousness of part of her population of burghers, in whose identity (fuck identity) it drills large or small spaces where ideas about “noble masters” may be born. Belgium has a considerable dark-skinned population, descendants of its former colonial subjects, not to say slaves, but today her citizens. These dark-skinned Belgians live for the most part in ghettoized districts and are less well educated.
In Brussels I corresponded with Goran about Danilo Kiš. Goran told me that, for him, Kiš was distant in time, which wasn’t entirely clear to me, because time is always here, it doesn’t go anywhere, it comes, but it doesn’t go, it doesn’t move further away or come closer, it just flows, and sometimes trickles and drips and one can always plunge into it, one can also drown in it, as Magritte’s mother did, and many others, Virginia Woolf for example, but, in the end, one always emerges from it, from time. I don’t have a problem with time, I am just ironing my youth.
And Goran Ferčec, with whom I spent time in Brussels, in that Brussels apartment, instead of at least walking and looking into shop windows, actually I did go to a VIP reception where I got drunk and on the way back to the apartment I staggered and vomited, Goran Ferčec also travels. He writes that in Budapest, on the Széchenyi suspension bridge, which, he says, is so massive that it resembles a small town, he saw a man with a beard standing, making comical gestures with his arms, and then starting to unbutton his shirt, and he says that he, Goran, was watching from the other side of the bridge. The man catches my eye, writes Goran, he starts waving more wildly, then he takes off his shirt and, bare-chested, climbs onto the protective railing and makes faces at me while still waving. If I carry on watching him, he could throw himself off, writes Goran, if I stop watching him, he could still throw himself off. And then, writes Goran, I turn and head toward Buda without looking round. I don’t know what I would have done, perhaps I would have approached him, and if the man had thrown himself off the bridge, perhaps I would have jumped after him. Or perhaps I wouldn’t.
I also attended a celebration for the employees of a company. There, in Brussels. I couldn’t spend a month literally confined to the apartment. Everyone had brought some kind of food to that celebration, I contributed two bottles of Croatian wine, from Istria. One employee boasted loudly that all the ingredients of her dish were organic, even the Parmesan, she exclaimed. That organic dish was, unquestionably, three times more expensive than the same nonorganic food, and the person who had brought it did not appear to me any healthier than the other people around the table. Although, I know, that can’t be seen just by looking, how healthy a person is, or how sick. Take me, for insta
nce. From the outside, I look like quite a decent container, neither new nor old, while inside everything is just trash. I have reservations about organic food, I’m convinced that it serves to fill the coffers of already wealthy firms.
The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku reflects on whether, in perhaps a hundred or so years, with the help of nanotechnology, that is, thanks to the so-called replicator, the global shortage of food could turn into a great abundance; That, says Kaku, would be the road to Utopia. Whether that abundance would be organic or not, Dr. Kaku doesn’t say.
Then Goran Ferčec spent some time in Moscow, with Bulgakov, and I followed him. Now we’re in the shop known as Torgsin that sells foreign goods, said Goran. This shop sells goods to the citizens of Moscow exclusively for foreign currency, and consequently it’s a place the majority of Muscovites cannot enter. Azazello and Behemot come without a single foreign coin, says Goran, they guzzle international delicacies and create chaos: they toss five or six mandarins into their mouths, with the skins on, the shop assistants are disconcerted, Azazello and Behemot then destroy an Eiffel Tower made of chocolate, swallow a few herrings, set fire to the shop and leave. Moscow burns. There’s no longer any freedom of choice, which isn’t any kind of freedom, because it’s fed with money and power, says Goran.
It’s just as well Bulgakov’s dead, not to ruin our shopping.
Goran doesn’t give up, he seems to me already a little desperate. He sees charred remnants everywhere. All right, I see them too, but I’m used to them, Goran is young. It’s among those ashes that the man from the Széchenyi Bridge is staggering about, says Goran, who now recognizes in the look the man directed at him the look of a Holy Fool who gathers up the remnants of the world, and throws those ruins, that charred residue into the Danube (Benjamin and Klee’s Angelus Novus). I suggest to Goran that he should spend a bit of time in Brussels, although I doubt that this would cheer him up.
Instead of coming to Brussels, Goran goes off, in fact as he puts it, goes back to the provinces. The conditions for alienation are ideal there, but every return to the provinces, he says, carries the risk that someone will ask me what I’m doing. I wanted to suggest that he read Heidegger’s essay “Why do I stay in the provinces?” but I don’t believe that would have consoled him. I don’t have a problem with the provinces, because I am barricaded in, I’m invisible to the provinces and so, I must say, are they to me. No one seeks me out, no one bothers me, no one asks me anything. It’s only when I go out that the horrors begin.
I went to have my hair cut, as I have to from time to time. The barber asked me. What do you do?
I write, I said.
What do you write?
I write.
For a newspaper?
No.
Some sort of books?
Yes.
For children? I’ve got grandchildren.
They’re not for children.
Are they thin?
No, they’re fat.
I don’t like fat books, he says.
The Bible’s fat, I say.
He wanted to shave me as well, I wouldn’t let him.
In Brussels I had a barber on the ground floor. He didn’t ask me anything, so I let him shave me.
Goran immediately got the joke. Every question, he wrote, is in fact seeking the answer to just one question: What are we occupied with? What are we doing? That question recurs constantly in everyday life and its repetition, its concatenation in which I ask you, they ask me, and someone will soon ask them, confirms that there are subjects to which there is no good answer, subjects for which any answer is an unsatisfactory answer. Perhaps then questions are superfluous as well, says Goran, that is, he concludes, or simply symbolic.
I’ve stopped asking questions. It’s enough to observe.
Then we talked a bit about language. I won’t quote all that here, because when people talk about language, especially about the Croatian language nowadays, I get irritated, and then it takes me a long time to recover from my irritation.
We talked about other things, that winter, Goran Ferčec and I, we talked for almost a month, he in Budapest, Maribor, Koprivnica, Zagreb and Belgrade, I buried in Brussels. If I were to mention the majority of the subjects we thrashed out, I would do even more damage to the form, the form of this text of mine, wouldn’t I? Which would further upset its blinded readers (and critics) who look for a cemented form of regular shapes, harmonious outlines, a form filled with a cascade of connected words, of which it would be possible to say that its characters are nuanced, the relationships, emotions and reflections distinctive, and the style polished; that the ease of narration comes to full expression (whatever that means), that the characters are alive and convincing and remind us of people we know, we feel close to their doubts, their fears, their expectations and disappointments. What vacuity. So, in the case of a recently published book, the critics repeated, parrot-fashion, that the book was stylistically polished, that it contained powerful poetic miniatures, metaphors even, which revealed the depths of life, but they were all simply nebulous fabrications full of holes with no substance, in fact a manipulative little text by a sad soul flailing about in the cauldron of the writer’s own fears, disguised by serving up to readers allegedly profound quasi-philosophical sermons wrapped in crumpled tissue paper. Of one of my books a critic mentioned that its story is presented to us by an omniscient narrator, after which all the other reviewers idiotically referred to this nonexistent omniscient narrator, while I avoid omniscient people in life as in literature. In another book of mine, I wrote that what I was writing was not a diary, nor a travelogue, nor a novel, but something in between, a kind of lame, crippled scampering through condensed time, through particles of time which had become detached from themselves to float through the underpasses of the present, while they, those superficial evaluators, those skiving arbiters, all, without fail, wrote, This is not a diary, nor a travelogue, nor a novel, but they didn’t say what it is.
What is wanted is a form with continuity.
What kind of continuity? What continuity? Everything around us, including ourselves, it’s all in patches, in spasms, in ebbing and flowing, our whole envelope, this whole earthly covering, is crisscrossed with loose stiches, which keep coming undone, and which we keep persistently trying to tighten. Under these unstitched tatters chasms open up into which we don’t dare look, into which we don’t wish even to glance. We try in vain to sew up and smooth out these seams, the pinpricks remain visible. Scars don’t fade. With time, that patchwork of ours, that we, becomes so thin that we forget about it, as though a magic carpet had flown away, and then come back as a huge, heavy cape, covering us.
A life of continuity, how tedious. How monotonous, monochrome. A tepid, limp flow in one direction. Like literary continuity.
Given that I am a small, unknown writer, and what I say leaks away like water through a sieve, and since Hermann Broch is a great and well-known writer, so his words are quoted and remembered, here is Hermann Broch, he may perhaps be believed:
To write means to endeavor by means of form to arrive at insights, and new insights may only be drawn from a new form. [. . .] But, a new form is always alien to the public. [. . .] Fragments are in fact nothing other than the articulated consciousness that there is no wholeness anymore and there cannot be, that it is simply not worth even trying to transform it into a work, that it is simply spurious. All that is left is man and his consciousness of the incompleteness of the world. [. . .] The possibilities of the novel as form have already been exhausted, and even exceeded by Joyce, and from a sociological standpoint “a good book” would be summer entertainment for a bourgeois woman, therefore it no longer has any function.
I was almost saddened by Goran’s search for continuity, which would, as he put it, accumulate ideas, affirm development, because in the end Goran concludes, but we are in a short-term duration, while destruction alw
ays finds enough energy to sustain itself continuously.
Goran writes that he is traveling through the city by tram and seeing the way the city is falling apart, and imagines that he is on a tourist tour called “Viewing the Decay.” Then he, Goran, takes up Broch who also says, A world in a state of decay can no longer be portrayed as a whole.
Goran also has a story about a grandmother who refuses to talk about the liberation. Although fifteen years have passed, and almost everyone has left the village. I think, if there are no witnesses, nothing has happened, and I think of that obsessive concern of some writers with apparently the same themes about which almost everyone knows everything and about which no one ever talks. That grandmother, my grandmother, writes Goran, is the poeticized embodiment of a wise woman, nevertheless, she was brought up in a society and a system about which talking and communicating was never particularly prized, because if one talked about it, it might be possible, in the end, to say something. And then what? People didn’t talk about the last war, and I didn’t ask questions.
Ah, secrets, those troublemakers, swindlers, illusionists, those stirrers and dissemblers, fickle devourers of souls. Seductresses. When they come to us, when they settle in us, they spread like oil slicks, they vomit blackness. They block, suffocate, engulf. They embrace us, press us to their soft, undulating chests and we, their hostages, forever enslaved, reciprocate. We plunge into them and disappear. The outside world becomes a chimera from which we flee. We lower our gaze, whisper, laugh with pursed lips or we cover our mouth with a hand, we tread, stooped, cautiously.
That’s a good book, that story of Goran’s, because it is not summer entertainment for a bourgeois woman, because it has the function of portraying a world in a state of decay in that state of decay, incomplete.
So. He reached mine. Via Broch.