by Daša Drndic
Gentlemen!
Lovers of profanation,
of crimes,
of slaughter,
have you seen
the most terrible—
asks Mayakovsky.
About the Memorial Center Srebrenica-Potočari, the monument and mezarje for the victims of the 1995 genocide, I cannot write. By 2015, a total of 7,100 of the 8,372 listed had been identified, but this number is not final. On the vast space, which the eye could only encompass from a great height, on the undulating space covered with little islands of green grass, which await new tombs, are row upon row of gravestones. A wall with the engraved names of the killed stretches in a semicircle two meters high and some fifty meters long, and reading those names makes one sick and dizzy. A crimson tree, in flames, follows me. On the hillocks daisies and dandelions grow. I walk and hear — I am disintegrating. On the way out of that victims’ cemetery shackles snap round my ankles and I understand, from now on I must drag all this after me, all these Muslim gravestones, and one Christian cross (for Rudolf Hren), these tombs and the secret stories buried beneath them, the trees and grass, as though I were dragging after me the cover, the face of the earth.
On the other side of the road there is a pre-fabricated kiosk, where Fazila Efendić sells flowers, books, films, and souvenirs. On a little table by the till lie Gombrowicz’s stories. Who reads Gombrowicz? I ask. I do, says Fazila, offering me little biscuits, she makes me an espresso and, with a smile, tells me about a recently published novel by Hasan Nuhanović. Read it, she says. Fazila’s smile is devastating. Fazila Efendić is known to the international and local public because of her struggle for the truth about Srebrenica. Fazila Efendić could have chosen where to live, from Sarajevo to Germany or Sweden, but Fazila Efendić went back to Srebrenica, restored her house and now tends the graves of her nineteen-year-old son Fejz and husband Hamed, which lie across the road.
Now I write less and less about the Holocaust, so people no longer ask me, Why do you write about the Holocaust so much? Write about love and nature, but now they say, Why do you write about the war? Write about Sarajevo now, about life in general. What should I tell them?
For a month I followed Bosnian and Herzegovinian political, social and cultural happenings, I watched and listened to what was going on. The obsession of homogenized Herzegovinian Croats with the legalized foundation of a third entity, a retrograde Herceg-Bosna, which would definitively destroy this country, is increasingly aggressive and fierce. Despite the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, in the “Sejdić and Finci case,” for three years now the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not changed, although the court judgment confirmed the fundamental constitutional discrimination against all who do not declare themselves members of the constitutive nations. Every Montenegrin, every Roma, every Jew, every Hungarian, and so on, everyone, regardless of intellectual abilities, of acquired knowledge, of his or her political and religious views, all those who believe that they have the right to choose and do not declare themselves Bosniak, Serb, or Croat, in this sad country become trash.
I also followed the grotesque local TV programs, ethnically disinfected, ideologically frightening, rigid and truculent, especially those from Republika Srpska, and programs about abandoned hamlets in that same Republika Srpska, through which one passes (through which I passed) as through a nightmare: locked-up butchers’ shops, wrecked bakers, demolished chemists, the skeletons of burned houses on which singed lace curtains flutter.
Enough. That’s the past too. They say.
In Sarajevo there’s an incredible number of chemists, arranged at roughly two-hundred-meter intervals. And a lot of hotels. In the trams, young people stand for their elders. Shops selling ćevapčići, burek, and other specialties are full of local customers. And people smoke everywhere. There are confectioners and cafés that could be in the center of Paris. From the Metropolis to the Zlatna Ribica, about whose owner Slobodan Matić, a zoologist and taxidermist, a story could be told that moves from life straight into literature. It is true of the cobbler Edo who makes first-class shoes to measure in three days, about the students who edit a magazine for poet(h)ical research and action, about the qualified doctor Adnan Smajić, today owner of the little world-class Franz & Sophie tea shop, where there was once the famous Jerlagić bakery with, they say, the best pita bread in town, about General Jovan Divjak and his perfect French, about his work with children throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina whose families are victims of the war, about his role in the Association of Independent Intellectuals, “Circle 99,” about Enver Kazaz and his war journey, about Nenad Veličković and his series of postcards called “Monty Dayton’s Flying Circus,” “Yuks by the Roadside,” and “Welcome to Sarajevo,” of Marko Vešović, Boro Kontić, Zdravko Grebo. One can talk and write about how the journal Sarajevske sveske is struggling to survive, while the Government of the Republic of Croatia does nothing to support this mission seriously. Or how the excellent editor of that journal called Sarajevske bilježnice, Sarajevo Notebooks, Сарајевске свеске, Sarajevski zvezki, Sarajevski tetratki, Fletoret te Sarajevës, Lettere da Sarajevo, Les cahiers de Sarajevo, Sarajevos Litterära Tidskrift, Hefte aus Sarajevo, Szarjavói füzetek and Kirjeitä Sarajevosta, how its editor Vojka Dikić makes her famous chicken pie, for which an old cockerel must be boiled for five hours, the egg-yolk pastry rolled and soup poured over it, how that was impossible during the war. About the wrecked windows out of which gush darkness and the warning on the first floor of the building into which my room looked and on which two old ladies had tied a string and pegged up pages and pages of their manuscripts. Various lives here could be written about in such a way that no one would ever again say what an internationally known European intellectual woman from former Yugoslavia once wrote to me, I can’t imagine how depressing your peaceful Bosnia is.
Vojka Dikić, too, told me, You’d do better to write about Sarajevo today.
And I said, What about the people who were killed?
But Vojka said, We’ve all been killed, those down below and we who are up here.
I was living in a triangle made up of three buildings. On one side was the canton’s public communal firm Pokop, which organizes and carries out burials in the city’s graveyards, opposite is the firm Pozder Nekropoling, which makes gravestones, and in the middle, in the middle is the Academy of Music. Violins, pianos, drums, harps, wind instruments, exercises and compositions, harmony and disharmony, successful and less successful attempts to celebrate life through music came into my room whenever I was at home. That is Sarajevo today. Squeezed between deaths through which life penetrates. In Ulica Pehlivanuša, or the “street of playful acrobats and heroes,” in the general Sarajevan playfulness, in insubordination.
When was all this? Time is getting away from me again, overflowing, it will not be tamed, insane time carries me off into the madhouse of its expanse, into the underground of its gloom.
I come home and again, as soon as I go out, someone or something assaults me. I order a drink, ask for ice in it, the waiter says, Why do you need ice, the drink is cold. I buy burek, ask the shop assistant to heat it for me, and he says, It’s warm, why should I heat it? I go to the late-night chemist, it’s Saturday, 9 p.m., I’ve used up all the drops for my glaucoma, the chemist says, The system is down, I can’t give you the drops, come back tomorrow.
I say, I can’t come tomorrow.
Why not? It’s Sunday!
It was the same when the nurse at the eye clinic told me to come for an examination of my endangered macula at the beginning of August. I told her, I’m not here in August. And, frowning and wrinkled, she pierced me with a thunderous look, then shouted for everyone in the waiting room to hear, What do you mean you can’t? You’re a pensioner!
So, I barricaded myself again and started disentangling the files, the histories of the illnesses of Adam’s and my own former pat
ients.
IRENA BECKER goes to exhibition openings. As soon as the refreshments arrive, she approaches the table. She eats slowly, masticating, like a cow chewing the cud. Her lips shift from left to right. While her lips move, she looks straight ahead, motionless, then, first with her index finger, then with the nail of the little finger of her right hand, she picks at her teeth, then she takes the ham off sandwiches, and bananas and mandarins from the serving dish, and fills a small plastic bag with them. The ham is for my cats, she says, the bananas are for me, because I’ve mislaid my teeth somewhere, she says, and then she leaves. Irena Becker can be seen strolling through the market, picking up discarded fruit and vegetables. Where are your teeth? the stallholder asks every time, In the trash, says Irena.
Irena stops going to book launches and chamber theater performances; they don’t let her into the big theater anymore, because she no longer washes. So, she doesn’t quarrel with writers and the audience anymore; if she does appear at some public meeting, she doesn’t say anything. Then she disappears from the town.
Irena Becker was a sociologist. She studied society. People in society. Irena Becker was born into a well-off bourgeois family, which, until Irena disappeared, provided her with good-quality clothes and shoes, so that externally she didn’t look unusual.
I buried all the cats in wet sand and decided to leave, said Irena Becker. But when I stirred up the sand, she said, the cats were still breathing, so I brought them back to life. It was June. The cats sniffed the air, I took them to the island and opened a new chapter.
In the new chapter I was visited by a new, strange cat, which was like one of the previous ones, but I no longer know which. I thought, said Irena Becker, perhaps it’s one of my former cats after all, it has come back and now sleeps on the couch. I was worried, I didn’t have sand for that cat, or a litter tray. Where would it do its business? I wondered. I went to the kitchen, put my hand under the shelf with books, you know, the one under the window, said Irena Becker, but the space was too small to place a tray there for that cat. Out of that space under the shelf there began to crawl some forms in the shape of a narrow letter “U,” they were May bugs it turned out, I tried to squash one with my foot but it didn’t work. In the meantime, the cat ran away. Where to? I don’t know. It disappeared. Then from under the shelf, an enormous May bug peered out, first staring at me, then crawling toward me. It was covered in scales like a rhinoceros. It had armor. I once kept two wooden decorative rhinos, they had each lost a leg, they lay on the bookshelf. I could see that out of the jaws of the May bug that was walking toward me there hung a half-eaten smaller bug, waving its skinny little legs. I was really scared, I called my sister, Irena Becker said. My sister is called Flavija. Flavija said, Let me just have a shower and I’ll be on my way, but she didn’t come. In the meantime, my new cat disappeared, it must have jumped out of the window, because it was half-open. I called my neighbor. She came. We had a coffee and talked about our dead. That was when I decided once and for all that I had to leave.
RAFAELA ARENDT was born in Vienna in 1948. She spent eighteen years in a psychiatric institution. She is of short stature. Diagnosis: mania. Under medication she is calm and submissive, but if someone or something angers or provokes her, she becomes vulgar and obscene. She takes care of her personal hygiene, perhaps excessively. She is in good physical health. She thinks all the doctors are her husbands. During the day she mumbles constantly to herself. At night she screams and slaps herself on the flanks.
Yesterday Willy Brandt was flirting with me, said Rafaela Arendt. He telephoned me so I invited him to lunch. I didn’t have any food in the fridge. I asked Willy Brandt what I should buy. What do you like to eat, I asked him, because he likes good food, sophisticated food. Don’t buy anything, my chauffeur will come for you and we’ll go to a restaurant, said Willy Brandt, Rafaela Arendt says. It was an impressive restaurant, luxurious and brilliant. Then everything suddenly became clear. What became clear? My life. I took out my long Zigarettenspitze and slowly blew out smoke. Then Willy said I suggest we have an Après. I didn’t know what kind of drink that was, so I asked Willy: Is there an Avant? The waiter was surprised. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me scornfully. Then a woman with garishly orange hair came up to us, she whispered something to Willy, then laughed out loud and went away. Willy said, Later we’ll go to my attic. When we reached his attic, I saw that it was an enormous space filled with couples fucking, while some masturbated. I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t find the way out. I asked Willy Brandt, Willy, where’s the door? I think I’ve got lost, and he said, Dear Rafaela, the door is there, I locked it.
From the side, my father watched all of this. With restraint.
Otherwise, my father walks a lot, said Rafaela Arendt. He is always elegantly dressed. When he goes for a walk, he wears a long black coat and a black hat. He mostly walks on sandy beaches. When my father walks, I look at myself in the mirror. Then I see myself, Rafaela Arendt, very clearly. I have a small black cap on my head, as though I was a Jew. I’m always wearing a halter-neck shirt, I have big eyes and tanned shoulders, and white socks on my feet.
Today I climbed onto the bathtub to hook a chain onto a nail high above the tap. Right away, Marlon Brando climbed up after me, he came behind me to help, because the nail was high, just beneath the ceiling. Our bodies touched. It was a very close touch, something like an embrace. I stiffened and said, Not yet, and Brando asked, Why not? Then he kissed me. My heart almost leapt out of me. Then something snapped in my lungs. What could that mean?
BARBARA BUSS collects junk. She walks around town with little bags full of rubbish. She is untidy, her hair is unbrushed and unwashed. She doesn’t speak, but she sings. Opera arias. She spent nineteen years in the psychiatric hospital. She knows Rafaela Arendt. Rafaela used to walk about naked, said Barbara Buss. She would sit on a pile of dirty laundry, so the cleaners couldn’t take it away to be washed. I’m looking for a white T-shirt, Rafaela Arendt used to shout, said Barbara Buss. Then they’d give her an injection, and she’d calm down, she didn’t wear panties, said Barbara Buss.
As she is no danger to the public, Barbara Buss is finally released from hospital. She lives in the attic of a dilapidated stone house. Barbara Buss is an older woman, around sixty. Well built, with a large stomach, as though pregnant. Barbara Buss is lively and energetic, she walks fast, jerkily.
My grandson tried to kill me, says Barbara Buss. He said I had cut his duck’s throat, that the duck had been his pet, which isn’t remotely true. He maintained that his father had bought the duck for him, but his father died before he was born. My grandson, he’s called Bernard, Bernard accused me of killing the duck, cooking it and putting it on the table for lunch. It’s true that I never liked that duck, nor did my daughter, Bernard’s mother Šarlota. The duck waddled around the apartment and shat everywhere. One day Šarlota said, Listen, Bernard, this duck is too big for our apartment, now it’s an adult duck, it needs more space. Granny has a garden, your duck will be happy there. That’s right, I had a garden then, I don’t anymore. But Bernard couldn’t understand, he kept saying, Bela, that was the name of the duck, Bela, Bela is happier here with me in this little apartment, she doesn’t need Granny’s garden, he wailed. He became tedious, he wouldn’t shut up. Bela’s my best friend, he whined, you see the way she follows me everywhere. Still, we moved Bela to my place. I admit, she did pine for Bernard for a while, then one day she simply wandered off and never came back.
I’ve got my own version, said Bernard. One Saturday I was sent to my Baka Barbara and I couldn’t find Bela. I searched the whole garden and called her, Bela, Bela my lovely, come to your Bernard. Nothing. She must have run away, said Baka Barbara. Yes, said mother, she must have run away. Then it was quite clear. I was called in to lunch. Lunch was on the table, Baka Barbara and my mother Šarlota called me in. And, of course, in the middle of the table lay Bela, with no head, plucked and roasted. That’s Bela,
I said. No, it’s not, the two of them said at the same time. We bought it at the butcher’s. They tried to force me to eat Bela, but in the end they gave up. I was five years old then. I’ve never had roast duck since. Maybe once, thirty years later. I’m full of hatred for Barbara and Šarlota, but now that I am a parent myself, that hatred has diminished a bit. I never tried to kill anyone.
Barbara Buss knows Florian Winter too. Sometimes she sings to him, to him or perhaps to his pigeons, one wouldn’t know.
FLORIAN WINTER. Thirty-five. He collects pigeons and other birds, those that sing and those that do not. Florian Winter does not know the happily-unhappy Hervé Joncour, of whom it isn’t known whether he is an invention of Alessandro Baricco or not, so he doesn’t know that seeker, that collector of elusive passions, that Hervé who locks his longing in little specially sealed boxes so it may live forever, but it still dies. Florian Winter converts all the rooms of his apartment — four of them — into birdcages, while Hervé Joncour dreams and builds aviaries, because Hervé Joncour has a park, while Florian Winter does not. Florian Winter has an apartment into which he moved when some other people were transferred out of it, long ago. Hervé Joncour said, First you fill your aviaries with birds, as many as you can, and then one day, when something nice happens to you, open the aviary wide and watch the birds fly away, while Florian Winter hardly says anything, he whistles and it does not cross his mind to return his birds to the celestial spaces, because nothing nice happens to Florian Winter, and it is only the silvery twittering of his birds that keeps him alive. Florian Winter goes into the untouched countryside. He watches birds for a time, then catches some and takes them home. Some of Florian Winter’s birds sing, some just look dully, turning their heads, as birds have eyes on the side of their heads, so they turn their heads to at least see something. Every morning, Florian Winter goes into his cages and sits among his flying creatures, which in time forget how to fly, that is why Florian Winter can’t let them go, even the letter-bearing carrier pigeons. As Florian Winter has no life apart from those birds, he doesn’t need letters, so he doesn’t see why he would send the carrier pigeons anywhere or let them go. One day Florian Winter will join his birds forever; he will close the mesh door behind him, the door will click to and Florian Winter will say, That’s the real thing. He will be found covered in feathers, the way Oscar Wilde’s shat-on statue of the Prince shivers under its covering of snow. Someone will write about Florian Winter in the Black Chronicle, where deaths are reported, readers adore the Black Chronicle because they know that all those horrors happen to people they don’t know, so they needn’t worry. Florian Winter will diminish, he will be reduced to his initials, F. W., and his disappearance will be quiet and painless for everyone, including himself. By the grave of the homeless, Barbara Buss will sing to Florian Winter, because she will be the only person there. Not a single bird will cross the sky. Around Florian’s grave, Barbara Buss will arrange her trash in the shape of a wreath. It will rain.