EEG

by Daša Drndic

  For the pathologically jealous, the loved one is property. Consequently, that woman appropriated objects from the time Rudolf lived with Marisa to realize some material gain, fair enough, but that plunder was also a consequence of her obsession to appropriate those four decades that preceded her life with our father so she could keep him all to herself, even when he was dead.

  Jealous, envious people are skillful manipulators, often angry with no reason; which is when they can become aggressive. Then they lie. Jealous and envious liars are devoid of empathy. They are sociopaths who avoid looking their interlocutor in the eye, but are sweet-tongued. Narcissistic personalities skillfully simulate emotions. For every feast day, that woman would give Ada and me pajamas. I have more than twenty pairs of her pajamas. Manipulative narcissists can even be experienced as hospitable, agreeable.

  Narcissists are abusers. They exploit others, then reject them. That woman could not retain a single home aid for more than a month. Those aids were clever (healthy) and they would bolt. They were people, not consumer goods. I won’t go all the way back to her childhood to find when or why that woman developed her obsessive need to control. Fuck that woman’s childhood.

  Narcissus is a split personality.

  Narcissistic, envious people attack those who don’t recognize their superiority, who consider them “average.” Which, had that woman been at least average meetings with her would not have become a nightmare. When I came back from Canada, I brought her a blouse, a sweater, or something, and an oven mitt. That mitt became the switch for an outpouring of accusations along the lines of, Who do you think I am, a cook!

  The little plant on my bathroom windowsill has flowered. Two red blooms on little thin stems sway in the wind. But someone has cut down the huge tree, a healthy, powerful tree whose crown protected my little plant. From now on the little plant will have to look after itself.

  Lonely old women like feeding pigeons. They collect leftover bread and go to the little parks in the center of town. As they feed the pigeons, these lonely old women scatter the crumbled bread around and coo. The pigeons coo with them, they turn in circles, waddling and shaking their tails from left to right. Once they have used up what they brought, the women leave, the pigeons stay. They wait for a new victim, a new provider. Pigeons are insatiable creatures; relentless and tenacious, but when they don’t get what they want, they can become aggressive. Some people maintain that pigeons are among the most intelligent birds, I think that they are clever only when it suits them, only when those they wish to master, to manipulate, obey them unquestioningly; otherwise, pigeons can become foul, evil and unreasonable birds. Like some people. Such people, just like flocks of pigeons, like to parade in groups, then they become brave, they shout, threaten and generally create an unpleasant, loutish racket. When they are on their own, though, just like the pigeons, such people shrink, keep quiet, pull their heads down between their shoulders, hide, look docile.

  Some people call pigeons flying rats. There are better birds than pigeons.

  Julija Amati. I thought of her because there is an influx of pigeons at the moment. They have crapped all over my windows. As soon as I open the shutters, they bring twigs and make nests and sit on eggs, so I tend to sit in the dark. In summer I can’t open the balcony door if I have any food left out in the kitchen, because the pigeons come in and feast. Once they tore a washing-up sponge to pieces. Whenever I go out, I return five times to make sure I have closed the doors and windows. I am terrified. I imagine coming home, entering the apartment, and clouds of pigeons swirling, flying toward me and suffocating me. Julija Amati is constantly before my eyes.

  Julija Amati worked as the chief medical nurse in the Department of Psychiatry at the Belgrade clinical hospital, where I also worked. Julija Amati was my friend Adam Kaplan’s right hand. She was slender, quick and smiling, she had curly brown hair, disobedient hair that escaped from any restraint. Wicked little locks kissed her neck. She had a soft voice and a silvery laugh. She’s fuckworthy, Adam Kaplan would say. She had a cheerful energy, in her step, in her touch. Julija Amati was queen of the Department, unaware of her beauty and her powers. When I left Belgrade, Julija Amati was thirty-five.

  There was a photograph of Julija Amati among the files that Adam Kaplan left me with his farewell letter. The photograph was attached to a folder bearing the name julija amati. I thought there must have been a mistake, a swap, a joke, because, looking at the photograph of a deformed person, it was only with considerable effort that I detected some minimal similarities with the Julija Amati I remembered from the time I left the clinic in 1992. Nearly twenty-five years had passed, so in this photograph Julija was fifty-something. Inside the covers of the file lay the life of Julija Amati recorded factually, with a typewriter, while beyond that dossier, in the head and heart of Julija Amati, a tormented, painful drama was played out, about which I read in Adam’s confidential, handwritten notes. I don’t wish to dissect Julija Amati’s story for the public, it’s a complicated story, but I mention it because of the pigeons.

  So, after the death of her teenage child (leukemia), virtually overnight, Julija Amati became (visibly) obsessive-compulsive. In the Clinic, she barely functioned as she spent more and more time combing her thick, wayward hair, washing her hands and dressing and came to work two to three hours late. Her relationship with the patients also became problematic: as she considered them a source of infection, she barely approached them, and if she happened to touch them (or they her), she rushed to the bathroom, where she scrubbed her hands with a nailbrush, sometimes drawing blood. In addition, Julija Amati became an obsessive collector of trash. At the end of the working day (she often stayed until last) Julija Amati shook all the trash from the Clinic into a large plastic bag and carried it home, where she arranged the items in rows of seven. These were all more or less typical, standard symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, not to say stereotypical. What was not typical were the stories, the nightmares, the crushed lives, flattened as though in a press, which thrashed about beneath the symptoms trying to acquire a shape, restore their fullness and, before they crumbled, leap back into existence.

  As a trained medical nurse with ten years of experience in the Department of Psychiatry, Julija Amati could have presumed that there was something wrong with her. She said to Adam Kaplan, I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I won’t be treated, because the treatment takes a long time. My serotonin is low. I shall devote my life to pigeons. So Julija Amati gave in her notice and set off on a mission to save the town’s pigeons. She toured the parks and devotedly fattened up those insatiable flying creatures. And the pigeons, the more they ate, the more they multiplied. With time (I learned from Adam’s notes), the town sky became covered with blue-black birds, the crowns of trees too, roofs and squares, everything, the whole landscape darkened and swayed as though drunk. Some pigeons even got onto trams and buses, stood by the door and got out at quite specific stops. From Adam Kaplan’s notes I gathered that he had visited Julija Amati on several occasions, but also that he had met her in Belgrade parks, that he had continued to have long conversations with her, in the desire to help. That was probably when the photograph was taken. So what, said Julija Amati, Tesla used to feed pigeons in American parks. He even took sick pigeons back to his New York hotel room, where he treated them. Tesla had a white pigeon he fell in love with, it stole his heart, that’s what he said. I love my pigeon the way a man loves a woman, she is my life, said Tesla, and I love my pigeons, they know me and they wait for me, Julija Amati told Adam. And she said, Listen, Adam, there have been and are still lots of obsessive-compulsive people, including famous ones. They are pedantic people. I know one who checks a hundred times a day whether his heart is still beating. He is desperately frightened of death, but I’m not afraid of death, Adam, so leave me alone. I listen to my pigeons cooing, because they tell me about the torments of dead souls. That’s what Julija Amati said.

  Julija Ama
ti was found by her neighbors. She was lying on the floor of her room, surrounded by hundreds of black bags full of hospital and city trash, covered in a flock of pigeons. Waggling their tails, the pigeons were pecking Julija Amati, so that it looked as though she was breathing. Where her eyes had been, in those pecked-out hollows, two pigeons had laid eggs.

  In Paris, my eye trouble exploded into a threat of blindness. Although I had checked my eye pressure every two to three weeks, and, thanks to the drops I was taking, it had lain, tamed, curled up at the bottom of my small tear duct, that python, that boa constrictor, that thief of sight, but at a certain moment, no one knows why, it moved, it stretched its snakelike body, reared up and wrapped itself around my right eye, hissing, I’ll stifle you. Looking at the world from under the pressure of a bearable 21 mmHg, my eye was now floundering, squeezed in an embrace of 50 mmHg without my knowing, or feeling, anything. The doctors went ballistic. I was operated on the next day. From Paris I was supposed to travel to a book fair in Mexico, where there was already a team from Croatia, but the doctors said, You can go, but you’ll come back blind, so I didn’t go. I borrowed money and cashed my two thousand euros, which the Croatian Health Insurance Fund (HZZO) refused to reimburse me because they maintained that my procedure had not been urgent. I was even sent the expert opinion of an ophthalmologist, a court expert witness, a specialist, who described the state of my eye in detail in the HZZO notice of rejection even though he had never seen me, let alone peered into my organ of sight. I might as well chuck that European health card, which is claimed in Croatia to cover emergencies, because in France no one recognizes that Croatian European health card. Now I am dragging myself through the courts with the HZZO, although I know that I have lost this battle as well, because for as long as that dandy Varga, who turns up the collar of his dark coat, like a young sport, and flits about in it, and who likes nurses’ tight uniforms and foreign ski resorts, for as long as he was at the head of the Croatian Health Insurance Fund, he said, There’ll be no payments, no one’s expenses abroad will be covered. That edict was probably passed on to his successor, so my chances are nil. Nor was the French operation really successful, my right eye is half-dead, it looks through tears, sees fuzzily, wavily. I feel like gouging it out.

  To demonstrate that she refused to see the world around her, a schizophrenic patient of Adam Kaplan’s suddenly gouged out her eye in the course of psychotherapy and, while she was being given medical assistance, she gouged out the other one as well. It’s not that unusual. For instance, Jonathan Swift nearly gouged out his eye because it was inflamed. Five male nurses were barely able to hold him back. When his intention was frustrated, he decided not to speak for a year.

  In Paris, Kika photographed pigeons.

  Jovica Aćin also had an episode with pigeons. In Croatia, of course, few have heard of Jovica Aćin, because in Croatia there is a general forgetfulness in connection with Yugoslavia, a logorrheic emptiness prevails, full of poisonous crap, and that forgetfulness, quite logically, includes literature. But I remember:

  I sit down, almost falling backward. And then, right in front of me, a pigeon lands on the terrace railing. Another lands on my table, pecking at crumbs fearlessly, then makes for a sweet roll in the basket. Soon, on the railing and the table, quite a large one, covered with a white linen cloth, another dozen pigeons flock. I turn my gaze away from the square, for I am seeing something I have never seen before and which I do not manage to understand. All the pigeons are invalids. Every last one of them has a damaged right leg. Just the right one, not the left. Their right legs are, in fact, stumps, which, as they hop about on the tablecloth and railing, make them limp. I stayed, with my first, then second cup of tea with milk, smoking, and my sitting on the terrace drew on, while the first pigeons were replaced by others, then those by yet others, and all were lame in their right legs. Not one pigeon had an intact right leg.

  There, even invalid pigeons don’t give up. Even if they limp, they attack, they are still aggressive.

  Had I gone to Brancusi’s studio, behind the Pompidou Center before that half-successful ophthalmological intervention, perhaps his Măiastra would have protected me, because Măiastra is a golden bird that protects the blind, restores their sight. Măiastra also prophesies the future, and might have said, Andreas, you don’t see well, and what you do see is deceitful. Nothing but a chimera. That golden bird was once a cursed queen from another world, and now, covered in dazzling plumage, she lives in great isolation. Her eyes are bright and clear, her eyes are in fact crystal pearls that gleam. That mythological bird from Dacia changes her shape, but always protects life, she says: Death is not the end, finality is endlessness, if the body is not free, the spirit is, even when it dies, the spirit moves.

  I visited Brancusi’s birds, the gold ones and the marble ones, afraid of touching them, but my crippled eye didn’t blink. Then I went with Kika for pancakes.

  Later I visited Brancusi in the Montparnasse cemetery, where Sartre also lies, because it was most convenient for him to go to Montparnasse given that his apartment and the café he went down to in his slippers from his rooms were right here — near the eternal hunting grounds.

  In the end, I went to Shakespeare & Co. bookshop, which has an interesting history, but there’s quite a lot about that history on the internet, so whoever is interested should take a look. I was looking for Stefan Zweig, Have you got any Zweig in English? I asked, because at that time Zweig had settled in my head, where, like a mantra, he kept declaiming his suicidal message: My language has gone, said Zweig, and Europe, my spiritual home, is destroying itself.

  In the little rue des Récollets, in which there is a coded iron door at the back entrance to “my castle,” where there is neither shop nor café, where no tourists walk, nor many Parisians, there is a bookshop that specializes in selling photographs and photographic literature — Librairie Photographique Le 29. I go in as in a trance, I enter the distant days when, with a small Canon, I visited the hidden nooks of the town I grew up in, maniacally clicking; when, in my miniature, darkened kitchen at night I developed photographs, hundreds of photographs, and when I threw all that, that photographic dream, into a cardboard suitcase with developing dishes, tongs and measuring syringes, with mixers, thermometers, pegs and tanks for developing film, with papers of various thicknesses and composition, with developers and fixers, with an old-fashioned Russian Opemus 4 enlarger, with a lamp and a timer, into a suitcase which I would never open again, and now forty years have passed since then, but still, as additionally heavy but useless baggage, I drag it after me on all my house moves. Everything in that suitcase must have rotted by now. The photographic paper has probably turned to dust, the liquids evaporated, the bulbs burned out, the Opemus rusted. An old wound was opened. The first thing I came across in the Librairie Photographique Le 29 was a monograph about Tina Modotti with a series of her photographs. I can’t now, nor do I wish to go into that chapter, which indirectly, through the anarchic activities of my grandfather Max Osterman and directly up to the antifascist national-liberation war of my father Rudolf Ban in Istria, catches on my life too, because it’s a complicated story for a book of its own. I can’t now write about the girl Tina Modotti, born in Udine, a little town virtually in my neighborhood now, about Tina Modotti, whose photographs have only recently begun to be exhibited by much vaunted international museums, about her lovers who included photographers, painter-muralists, Soviet communist agents, NKVD and GPU agents, then anti-Trotskyists, crazed political assassins, bloodthirsty murderers and their victims. These were Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey, Xavier Guerrero, Edward Weston, Julio Antonio Mella, Vittorio Vidali and some others, I can’t, I don’t wish to leap into the years of secret and public conflicts of the Mexican, Cuban, Soviet, Spanish, Italian and then Yugoslav Communist Parties, all that could be written about by those who like that literature known as noir, or those communist know-alls, there’s a wealth of intriguing espionage subject
s there. In the Librarie Photographique Le 29, leafing through Tina Modotti’s works, I feel out of the frame again, no longer knowing into which picture, into which model, into what range I should enter, into which time; the previous century and this one had coalesced, adhered in a squashy mass, which, like a half-dead, distended wild beast, at times powerful, at times in a state of decay, wafts around itself the stench of death and madness. I was looking for a book of photographs for the friends to whose house I was going for dinner and immediately reached for Tina Modotti, but then thought better of it. Tina Modotti is mine. One branch of Tina Modotti’s life that spread over two continents, the branch named Vittorio Vidali, reaches to me. Vittorio Vidali, also known as Jacobo Hurwitz Zender, Carlos Contreras, “Comandante Carlos” and Enea Sormenti, as required, born in Muggia, the twenty-year-old founder of the Italian Communist Party, later an agent of the Comintern who, in collaboration with the Lithuanian agent of the GPU Iosif Grigulevich, planned the liquidation of Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinists, who fired with his own hand at members of the POUM, including its founder Andrés Nin and, after the war, in 1947, returned to the place from which he had been driven twenty-five years earlier, now the free territory of Trieste, where in 1954, in obscure taverns (with a pistol in his belt), he engaged in dangerous conversations about Zone A and Zone B with my father Rudolf Ban. So, I bought Tina Modotti for myself, and for my friends the monograph of another photographer, I no longer remember who.

  Bernard served mackerel pâté on little blinis, dried black olives in oil flavored with herbs and garlic, tiny chanterelle sausages and first-class champagne. We talked about contemporary Russian literature. At the table we discussed religions, gods and mostly popes, because we were all atheists and Christmas was approaching. I could talk about the pope again, because this new one came to Sarajevo and for three days before his visit all the TV channels in Croatia announced his arrival with extraordinary emotion and euphoria, and when at last he came, the announcers talked about him nonstop, while the witnesses of that performance were en masse reduced to tears of exaltation. Then, as usual, there were three days of recapitulation of the visit. I took a Croatia Airlines plane, where, at the entrance, accessible to every passenger, there was a 40 x 30-cm copper plate on which it was written that it was precisely this plane on which we were flying that had carried the pope, the one who died. My books appear every two to three years, so in each there is space for a little episode about a visit of one of the Holy Fathers either to Croatia, or the “region.”