by Daša Drndic
When she bleeds, her mucous membrane falls away, Marisa is peeling in layers, from inside, disintegrating. I buy her shoes, but she can no longer walk. I’d like burgundy ones, with thin leather straps, says Marisa, smiling. Later I give the shoes to Katja, who is also dying of cancer. The stockings are burgundy too. I give them to Ada.
They’re here, Ada said recently. They surface from time to time.
Thirty-eight years had passed.
You can throw them away now, I told her.
These are not my recollections, these are little images, notes written long ago, dead sketches outside myself, words pressed into paper, which watch me, which I watch until they turn into blotches, a smudge, a bloodless scribble, which doesn’t make my heart tighten or my stomach clench. This is one of those stale, definitive deaths, which I collect, this death of my mother, who had been transformed into a state, into nonexistence, who had abandoned me. That’s why I went to Paris in 2013, to bring Marisa’s death to life, not to die completely myself, not to be extinguished.
For three months, three winter months, like a truffle-hunting dog I search through Paris, back and forth, walk then sit, look down so as not to fall, look up and find nothing, just that winter sky, a pure laundry blue, as Marisa used to say. I limp, my lower back hurts, my neck hurts, my eyes hurt, from one circle to another, from one urban, Parisian ring to another, in the hope that the links will not break and the hoop will tighten. I, flaneur, lost in memories with no reflection.
Where is the brothel-hotel I stayed in in 1977? It was not far from the hospital, I remember that, because it took me about ten minutes to get from there to Marisa on foot, but I no longer remember which hospital she was in. Not a single image flickers, glimmers. I walk around the district, the Latin Quarter, 5th arrondissement, I look at the façades, there are almost none that are dilapidated, like mine. I go into inner courtyards in the hope of finding the external staircase from which one entered rooms with no toilet or washroom. Have a shower here, said Marisa, clean up, bring your dirty laundry, I’ll wash it for you, she said, with her withered veins they could no longer get needles into, there was no longer anywhere to prick her. Don’t worry, she said, there is, my ankles. So they pricked her ankles.
Before me is a Paris I don’t know. In which Paris had I stayed back then? Am I looking for a city that does not exist? Am I seeking a time that has vanished, or a vanished time that is coming back? I stand on the corner of rue du Pot-de-Fer and rue Tournefort, by the former convent for girls named after Saint Aurea, protector of Paris and prioress of the Benedictine monastery Solignac near Limoges, who died overnight of the plague in 666, along with a hundred and sixty nuns. Saint Aurea, the story goes, performed miracles. Through her prayers, she brought an abbess back to life after she had lain dead for three days. I don’t know a single prayer, and the plague is, they say, more or less eradicated.
Under the recently affixed street name “rue Tournefort” one can see traces cut into the façade of the name of the former, old rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève. On rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, lived Balzac, at number 24, or perhaps the young Rastignac, their biographies have got mixed up, they merge with one another, as do the centuries, and the years, mine and the historical ones, they flow into one another, but no longer in playful curves, just in one tedious line that, like a worn string, emits one monotonous note. Here, not far from the place where I am standing, the comédie humaine acquired its outlines.
I go to 24 rue Tournefort. The building is not like Madame Vauquer’s boarding house where, in a humble little room, the ambitious young Rastignac shivered and planned his rise to high society.
On the small, out-of-the-way rue Victor Cousin I come across a little hotel, the Hôtel Cluny Sorbonne, I go in, I climb the wooden stairs to the fifth floor, open the door of a poorly furnished little room with no heating and see Lucien Rubempré, né Chardon, bent over a heap of papers. What are you doing? I ask. I’m losing my illusions, says Lucien, et j’ai faim. I take an open packet of peanuts from my pocket, I always have some sort of seeds with me, or grains, so that my stomach doesn’t go berserk and start secreting acid, Tu veux des cacahuètes? I ask, and I put the little packet on the edge of the table and leave. I reach Marisa in eight minutes, I reach the Hôpital de l’Institut Curie, 26 rue d’Ulm, which means that is the hospital in which she fades away, I finally settle for that hospital, that hospital advertises, in two languages: Ensemble, prenons le cancer de vitesse and for the tourists, Together, let’s beat cancer, so that all those foreigners who swarm along the beautiful boulevards of Paris, who visit picturesque shops and flea markets, who sample expensive and less expensive cheeses, first-class or diluted wines, who stand for hours outside museums in queues for exhibitions, sometimes excellent, sometimes phony, who go to theater performances by famous international artists, likewise sometimes fake and sometimes brilliant, just as that one I myself saw by Robert Wilson, in which Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe sing and shout, whisper and dance Daniil Kharms a little too passionately, and I laughed in horror to watch ineptly knocked-together, crooked window frames filled with darkness falling from the sky, and hideous, stinking old women just refusing to fall out of them, I saw beds (prison beds?) slinking onto the stage, swallowing their sleepers, little (harmless?) drones, like children’s toys, flying up, wooden clocks ticking away the last days, huge two-dimensional cockerels, in rainbow colors, as though they had stepped out of a naïve Yugoslav painting, announcing the arrival of (a new) day, a blessed dawn, and all of this was observed by Estragon and Vladimir swinging, small, lost in space, cheerfully waiting for God, so that all these foreigners who swarm through the beautiful Paris boulevards, so that we all, staring at that bilingual advertisement of a vast smiling face bursting with health, so that we should believe that there is hope for us, that every illness, even the worst, can be defeated if we only step bravely onto the battlefield.
Kika, my patient companion on this pointless search for a lost time, says, Andreas, les maisons closes no longer exist, at least not in this district, while table d’hôte restaurants, those from your youth, like Flicoteaux à prix fixe, are now frequented by working people with not exactly shallow pockets.
And I stop looking for the room, which I don’t remember in any case.
So, the Hôpital de l’Institut Curie. Rue Mouffetard is nearby, the shop selling Marisa’s raspberries and warm crepes is nearby, the Panthéon is nearby, and the Sorbonne, and the botanical garden, which I only glimpsed. The retail shops (with burgundy shoes) aren’t far away either.
It looks like a prison. A complex of brick buildings like those in a ghetto. Was it through this entrance that I came in the morning and left at night, thirty-eight years ago? Was it through this same entrance that my father and Ada came, because on our trips for Parisian experimentation on Marisa we took it in turns? What hotels they stayed in, how they felt, I don’t know, we never talked about it, because there wasn’t time. Afterward, there was no point.
Was it in this building, in one of these buildings (which?) that I jabbered nonsense to Marisa, with a lump in my throat, while she twittered, bluffing, as she performed the last act of the comedy of dying? Short-term sentences are served here. All the windows are closed, lifeless. There’s nothing inside them, no bottles of juice, no jam jars, no biscuits, no coffeepots, not a single face appears in them to open the window and breathe in the autumn chill. People lie attached to drips, cytostatics make them vomit their innards or they die, just then, when together we are beating cancer. Kika and I stand there, not speaking, then Kika looks at me and says, Well? and I say, Nothing.
Then Kika says, Let’s at least look for that square where the circus troupe dance.
We found the square. I don’t know whether it was that square, but it would do. That square lay in the embrace of neglected buildings with crumbling façades, this one was bounded by chains and flowerbeds, in its center there was a sprinkling water featur
e, it’s hard to get to, it’s not easy to occupy it, circus acts don’t take place on it, it’s a tidy little square that does not tolerate acrobatic feats. It’s where nomads, wanderers, played music, les Bohémiens, les Manush, les Gitanes, handsome and cheerful, while Kika and I sat in a bistro opposite, drinking calvados and nibbling on fresh cacahuètes.
And to console myself I said to Kika: Listen, to prevent the battle being lost, to transform its loss into gain, maybe that battle should be left to lie in oblivion, in a cocoon of absence, in a shield of nonexistence.
Kika said, Tomorrow I’m taking you for fresh oysters.
And the next day we ate fresh oysters, outside, standing and leaning on tall barrels, surrounded by noisy Frenchmen.
There was a word Daniil Kharms had forgotten, he simply couldn’t remember what word it was, but it seemed to him so important to remember that word, so important, as though his life depended on it.
Beginning with M?
With R?
Yes, with R.
I said: Reason.
Kharms said: It’s driving me mad.
I said: Radiance.
He said: I’m going to cry!
I said: Frame.
He threw the picture onto the ground.
I said: Reins.
He took the bridle off, leaped onto the horse and rode off bareback.
But I do remember. I remember the whole of Marisa’s three-year illness, whenever I wish I can summon images, in color and movement, I see her face, I hear her voice and follow our conversations. Outings from her room in a new black skirt, made up, her hair short, grown back again, How does it suit me? she asks and laughs wickedly, I find her in the kitchen in an aquamarine housecoat, she is using a knife to scrape off burnt matter from the tiles around the stovetop, I have come back to Rovinj from some journey or other, it is winter, she lights the oil stove in the cellar and greets me with squid and chard and first-class Malvasia wine, bald, smiling and baked from cobalt radiation, You see these little knots on my neck, she says, leaning her head to the right, they are metastases on the lungs. How do you sleep? Take care of your health, she says as we sip cognac into the small hours, until early morning, I’d like to sing, she says, she tries, but it doesn’t work, a thin thread winds out of her throat, jerkily, cracked, she shrugs her shoulders, I think I see a tear, but there’s a smile on her lips that breaks my heart. In the hospital, when we came back from Paris, she had said, I’m seeing double, metastases on my brain, peripheral collapse, call Dr. Škokljev to give me an injection of dexamethasone, and she died in my arms half an hour later. In the basement of the Oncological Department where she waits her turn for radiation with the theater director Marko Fotez, and advises him in connection with his carcinoma. My mother’s illness fits entirely harmoniously into the story on the huge canvas of my life, of my days with a cast of thousands, lesser and greater, close and distant, it is only Paris that floats, sfumato, rocks in the background, threatening to fly entirely out of the frame.
Then came the epiphany. A small, insignificant image surfaced from nowhere, in an instant. Now it glimmers, stuck to the front of my brain, and accompanies me: roofs, a view of roofs in the Latin Quarter, the view through the open window of the attic room in the brothel where I sleep while Marisa lies in the Hôpital de l’Institut Curie. And the pure, blue sky. That’s all.
In this last Paris, I got lost. My purpose frayed. My focus misted over. It’s cold in my room, I have no power socket in the bathroom — I shave with no mirror, blindly. When it rains, the roof leaks. I wander about and come across closed bookshops, their windows covered in sheets of brown paper, and, every so often, buyers of gold — achat d’or. The streets are full of dog shit, men piss at the corners, both those in expensive suits and the homeless, but there are too many homeless, so as soon as the sun warms up or the wind blows, the urine evaporates. One homeless man has set up camp in front of the building where I’m staying; I circle around him, wonder whether to join him, then he says, Take my photo, as a memento, and tells me his life story. I go down “my” rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin and in a side street, rue de Nancy, I “capture” two more homeless men preparing for the night. One, in rags, curls up beside the wall and immediately falls asleep, the other assembles a small tent he has just bought, he does it briskly, jerkily, checking the sketch on the instruction sheet every few minutes. Then he takes a new bed, or rather a blow-up mattress, out of a box with inflatable bed written on it, and blows. He throws his bed into his “little room.” He does it all with concentration, as if in a trance. He takes a lot of tiny steps, but doesn’t go anywhere. He’s wearing an ironed beige raincoat and winter shoes with rubber soles, new. Later, in front of his “little house,” he spreads out a red and black checkered rug, sits down on it, places a clean tea towel over his knees, and from a canvas bag he takes a piece of cheese, a wilted, squashed baguette and half a liter of wine in a carton. He “dines” slowly and ritually. As he drinks the wine (from the carton), he raises the little finger of his right hand, his nails are clean and trimmed. Then he withdraws into his bedroom, his shelter, and disappears. It is a cold and wet winter evening, half-dark. I stand leaning against the wall of the building opposite, still watching the homeless men, whom I can no longer see as they are sleeping, I fiddle with my phone, waiting for Marisa to call me. We’ve arranged to meet at Chartier at eight. Marisa doesn’t call, so I go back to my castle. As I climb up toward Gare de l’Est, my mother finally calls. I can’t go to Chartier tonight, she says. I have to go to Lola’s to see how she is.
It’s the Day of the Dead. The streets are as empty as the Day. Saturday.
At midnight Marisa knocks on my door. In one hand she has warm croissants, in the other a small blue thermos. It’s my birthday, she says. Are you hungry?
Now, as I write, it’s Mental Health Month. I don’t know what that means. Is it only in this month, May, that mental health is celebrated, while in the other months it isn’t, because only in May are people mentally well, and in June and beyond they aren’t, which would mean that people are always mentally ill (apart from in May), or it is only in May, when everything is burgeoning and there is a lot of pollen, that people are mentally ill, and then become problematic for society, and therefore in May their incapacity and their mental illness have to be brought under control. I don’t even know what mental health is. I don’t know who decides or whether it hurts.
In Paris I meet Didi. Didi lives in the same complex as I do. Didi is a graphic artist.
I’ve got some fine wine, says Didi, taking a swig from the bottle. I can drink again, she says, for years I wasn’t able to. Because of an allergy. I came out in blotches all over my face and body and I couldn’t breathe. Wine could have killed me. Now it’s okay, the allergy has gone, says Didi, then she adds, My mother was an alcoholic, perhaps there’s a connection.
I said, Your mother died.
Yes, she died, says Didi.
In fact, in Paris at that time I was living in a castle. The square on which Gare de l’Est also stands, in that tenth arrondissement, was dominated by a castle, a former Franciscan Récollets cloister built in 1603. But, two hundred years later, the monks had presumably done what they had to do, and they headed off to Canada for a bit, and the castle is now inhabited by those who leave it feet first. They’ve opened a similar hospice in Rijeka as well, and in Rijeka too it is run by those who think they are close to God, and, I hear, the waiting list is quite long.
Then, in 1862, the castle-cloister is taken over by another rigorously strict order — military — and refurbished as a military hospital, the Hôpital Saint Martin; there is a French campaign against Korea in 1866, then a French raid on Tunis in 1881, then the Franco-Siamese War of 1893, and Gare de l’Est is right here, on the doorstep, so to speak, so the transport of the wounded is swift and effective. Then comes that Great War in which around one million four hundred thousand French sol
diers and civilians perish and four times that number are wounded, then the hospital changes its holy name to a secular one and is renamed the Hôpital Jean-Antoine Villemin, but it remains military; military hospitals are essential.
Then, in 1913, Jean-Antoine Villemin was, of course, already long dead. Jean-Antoine Villemin had been a military doctor in the famous military hospital Val-de-Grâce in which until recently the corrupt international elite was treated. Today treatment in that hospital is rapidly eluding them, as there is ever less money for its maintenance, so the Val-de-Grâce will probably soon reemerge as a luxury hotel complex, owned by a sheikh. It is only in the middle of the twentieth century that Jean-Antoine Villemin acquires a city plaque on which it says that, through his research into consumption and his experimentation with tuberculosis bacilli on rabbits and other small animals, he finally proved that TB is a dangerous infectious disease, although his work remained unacknowledged for many years, Jean-Antoine was posthumously awarded a prize of 50,000 French francs.
It is important to have military hospitals; wars keep happening, bloody young men emerge from them with their lives hanging by a thread, some without arms, some without legs, some even without faces, urgent cases which would need to wait in a queue in a civil hospital, but in their hospitals they are the bosses, the doctors endeavor immediately to patch them up somehow, although the majority, if they don’t die, remain until their deaths maimed in one way or another.