EEG

by Daša Drndic

  Bernard also served foie gras — goose pâté in cognac — thin slices of apple in vinegar with aromatic herbs, sautéed blusher mushrooms, petits pois and fried endive. To finish, various cheeses, some with truffles, others without, and a rich chocolate mousse. The red wine was from Bernard’s personal cellar in Provence, thirty-three years old. If I knew French and Russian well, I would be a translator from Russian to French, in Paris.

  Then, with Bernard, Gabriel and Gojko, I at last went to Chartier, to the café of Rudolf and Marisa’s youth, a café in which everything is simple and refined, as in fact all simplicity is refined. Chartier has a website with both the history of this legendary restaurant and photographs from both the past and the present, so there is no need for me to elaborate.

  In Paris I dreamed too much. I dreamed in various languages, hideous scenes. For instance, that my kidneys were sucking the marrow out of my spine: Renal suction of spinal marrow! I cried. I dreamed that my nose had vanished, that I had a bird’s head. One morning I woke up repeating, Just feed him the branches of an uncontaminated being, wondering what that could mean. After the operation, I was given injections in my eye. One was jabbed into me by a half-trained nurse who asked me in passing whether there were ophthalmologists in Croatia, and my eye swelled up, bled and all but fell out, plop. I shrieked with pain and fell out of a bus.

  Dreams must be forgotten. That’s why dreams come, to be forgotten. That’s why we dream, to forget. Such dreams, the psychiatrists maintain, are in fact parasite synapses and it is best to shake them off as a matter of urgency. But what can we do if our dreams drag themselves after us like phantoms, if they come back and multiply, if they stick to us like feathers to tar, if they run around inside our heads, humming in various tones, and if we do cast them out, they come back.

  In Paris I met a man, a Frenchman, who always welled up when he heard Bosnian sevdalinke songs. Get me some sevdalinke, he said. That man was convinced that he had some inexplicable connection with “that part of the world,” he said. Everything there provokes powerful emotions in me, he said. Everything there touches me deeply, he said, I’m always on the verge of tears. He recounted that, whenever he arrived in “that part of the world,” he always wore dark glasses, so that people would not see his tears. Kika got some sevdalinke for him after I left Paris, so I don’t know whether he cried when he listened to sevdalinke away from “that part of the world.” I had lunch with that man (who writes good books), and then, before he traveled to Jerusalem, where, he said, haircuts were expensive, I went with him for a haircut to an Indian hairdresser (for six euros) in the Passage Brady near “my castle.” Paris is full of hidden arcades each of which has a story, but on the whole tourists rarely visit Parisian arcades. Walter Benjamin wrote about Parisian arcades, the nineteenth-century ones, in his unfinished texts, but then most tourists don’t read Benjamin (or have heard of him), so why would they visit the arcades? I visited a dozen of them. They are not what they used to be, they have become a caricature of a world within a world, a town within a town, a one-time commercial utopia on the tenets of capitalist ideals has been transformed into a freak. Through their glazed arched roofs, the Paris arcades let in a murky light, their pavements laid with marble or ceramic tiles that echo with footsteps in the same rhythm, their shops have died. The Paris arcades no longer dream anything, their world does not offer hope. From a miniature universe of dazzle and luxury, the Paris arcades have merged with the outside world of disintegration and decay. For thirteen years Benjamin tenderly waved his little red flag, then the hand of madness hammered nails into a coffin of dreams and Benjamin killed himself.

  In Paris I walked backward. And so consoled myself.

  A year after Paris, I let myself be catapulted into timelessness, into outside-time, into a dead past, a deceased time in which there was no me or my memories, nor memories of my forebears, into a time so archaic and distant, so disjointed, a time through which thick, stagnant blood flows, so that its petrification, its extinguishedness, its delusive, truncated existence, its needlessness and superfluousness began to suffocate me. Here is all the preserved beauty of past centuries, natural, architectural, artistic, scattered over the hills of Tuscany, and dappled (stamped) with huge estates of fenced olive groves and vineyards in the middle of which, like plump sturdy women spread out in the sun, broad single-story or at most two-story villas lie in the embrace of immense lawns, flowerbeds, rose gardens and orchards, tended gardens with little streams and artificial lakes, with little paths leading up and down to swimming pools with loggias, in which staff from the Philippines, Ukraine, Poland and Romania, and perhaps also from Croatia, from wherever there is wretchedness and poverty, serve light afternoon snacks to their employers whom they address as barone and baronessa, contare and contessa and their guests, and in the evening dinners that often lack un certo non so che, glad that they have an income (sometimes even a good one), a roof over their heads and in that shithole a free Sunday when they have nowhere to go (escape) to other than perhaps the local church or the local cemetery. The cutlery is silver, the glasses are crystal, the stone floors are covered with rugs from all over the place, from Persia, China and Mexico, the walls weighed down with engravings and oil paintings by well-known and unknown artists and by rows of old and new books. All this would be all right if that world agreed to remain nestled in its illusions, in its worn-out dreams and to bask in them. But no. These people would like to stay in their cocoons, steeped in the tassels of an extinguished past, but they would also like to stroll through our contemporaneity, however painful, dark and ruined it is. They would like to peer into life, this one now, reaching right to the edge of danger, to its threshold, and then swiftly to return, which seems inarticulate, clumsy and sad. They step into the present sometimes cautiously, sometimes haughtily, dragging after them their heavy, decadent, decrepit luggage not knowing where to take it, where to put it down. They are confused, they wonder what they could do to make the time pass, to make their lives pass, but they don’t do anything, or else they study forever, or they set up charities which help the hungry, they look for sponsors, they organize cultural events such as literary festivals with monetary prizes for well-known, but also for virtually unknown writers, such as myself, then they found privately funded residences where those writers write and pretend that they enjoy all this, this luxury, this convenience, as though they have come from this world, as though they were born into it, but they were not. And these writers become servile, which is disagreeable to see and hear, and in addition to constantly praising and approving something, although no one obliges them to, some of them dedicate their books even to the dogs that live (and die) on the property.

  It isn’t nice that, all spruced up, I am supposed to enjoy a luxury that is offered me unconditionally, I am supposed to be grateful for the fact that I have a room to work in, a whole floor to myself and airy silence dappled with little pinpricks of birdsong. I am supposed to be happy that someone prepares my meals, that every morning Nimala’s husband brings fresh bread into “my” kitchen, that I have two caffettiere for espresso, skimmed milk in the fridge and jam, that Irina from Lvóv, with whom I stutter in Russian, wants to wash and iron my underwear, but I won’t let her, because in that tower where I am housed there is a washing machine, there is also a sitting room, and on the floor above me they have placed the then 38-year-old Filipino writer with a Canadian address Miguel Syjuco, who won a prize for his first work Ilustrado, published also by the Serbian press Geopoetika, but since books from Serbia don’t come to Croatia, I hadn’t heard of it.

  It doesn’t matter how good or not so good Miguel’s book is. A novel could be written about Miguel Syjuco, or if not a novel then certainly a novella, the story of his search for a space within his authoritarian family, for freedom from the intellectual and political (corrupt) elite that stomps on, stifles and punishes every attempt at rebellion, even if it is reduced to the declarative non serviam. The story could be told
of Miguel’s flights and wanderings from Australia to Canada, about how, after his father had disowned him for disobedience, Miguel worked as a bookmaker at horse races, as a barman, as an extra in order to survive, he did some other strange little jobs (a guinea pig in scientific laboratory experiments) and finally, with a doctorate in his pocket, he began to write reviews and columns for American and Canadian journals. Today, it seems, Miguel, having adopted the Anglo-American code of communication, that artificial, singsong one, full of high false tones with a lot of “oh, please” and “oh, thank you” accompanied by a half-suppressed smile, stands on the capitalist feet of mass-produced correctness.

  The fashion of writing columns about restaurants and their gourmand offerings has begun in Croatia as well, but, it appears, it has not exactly taken root. In the West, this empty absurdity continues to stimulate the salivary glands of those with deep pockets. Those with shallow pockets, that is those who have no pockets at all, don’t read them, instead they may sometimes walk past some brightly lit restaurant and watch the people eating inside. An American prestige magazine pays between five and ten dollars a word for a review of one or two pages. Miguel Syjuco is happy when an opportunity for a little job like this turns up, so he hopped out of our backwater to Paris for a couple of days to cover the opening of some little suburban brasserie. He came back with a stumpy little story about his brief trip, and with a bag of sliced bread over which everyone at the table had drooled, as they had over a small box of nondescript chocolates. I said nothing, gobsmacked. The bread in any Istrian village is a hundred times better, from corn bread to bread with olives or onions. Not to mention griottesi. Later Miguel ran off to the controversial Milan Expo 2015 and served us up imbecilic drivel about nothing, and the others listened piously, although they didn’t exactly relish those little anecdotes of Miguel’s. What matters to him now is being au courant. But there are other things in Miguel’s life; a daughter, now grown up, born when Miguel was seventeen and when they travel together people think she’s my girlfriend, he says; there’s a mother pining for her runaway son, there are five more brothers and sisters scattered over the world and there is that Manila, those Philippines from which Miguel runs, but they follow him like a vast rolling burden, they get into his head, between his eyes, drill into his brain and leave indecipherable messages which give Miguel terrible, long-lasting migraines, and he can never make out whether they, the Philippines, are calling him back or threatening to crush him.

  We know nothing about the Philippines. For us, the Philippines, with their population of almost a hundred million and eleven million more scattered over the globe, are a distant, exotic country. The Philippines, with an incomparably more tempestuous and richer history than that of little self-centered Croatia, are of no consequence to Croatia. And therefore the people who live in the Philippines (or those who run away from the Philippines) are of no consequence to Croatia, as are the books they write. Not now to go back in time, into history, let’s stay in the twentieth century, perhaps we ought to know that during the Japanese massacre in 1945 in Manila, 100,000 civilians were killed and that in allied bombings Manila suffered most in the Second World War after Warsaw, that it in fact disappeared as a city. Croats, however, know only about Imelda Marcos and her three thousand pairs of shoes.

  Miguel is reserved and transparent, refined and fragile as a porcelain figure through which swollen waters flow, furious waters whose glint and roar may be discerned only by an attentive observer. I won’t tell his life story, it’s in print, so if anyone wants it, it’s there.

  I also met the young Ethiopian-American writer Maaza Mengiste, sent by her parents at the age of four to the New World to save her life, and who wrote in her first book about the bloody revolution in Ethiopia, about the civil war that lasted from the 1970s until 1991, in which members of her family died and who got upset, I was so angry she told me, when in a prominent place on the walls of this villa she noticed photographs of the former barons in the service of Mussolini’s army in Abyssinia. That invasion of Mussolini’s into Ethiopia in October 1935 was unexpected and brutal, involving the use of a combat poison similar to mustard gas. Between 1936 and 1937 Mussolini’s Blackshirts carried out a series of appalling massacres against the Ethiopian population, and then plundered and torched their houses. During the Italian occupation, around 275,000 Ethiopians, and altogether 670,000, lost their lives. For these and other atrocities carried out by the Fascist military hordes in Africa and in the Balkans, not one Italian has ever been taken to court, never even accused, let alone sentenced for war crimes. When the British troops in Africa defeated the Fascists, they interned many soldiers in camps, some of which were set up in Kenya. There, in those Kenyan camps, individual members of the Italian aristocracy lived, but that was never mentioned on this estate, so I asked. My questions did not provoke discomfort, only contempt for the effrontery of a Schiavone with no noble pedigree sticking his nose into other people’s family relations. So, on that aristocratic estate, on which, in addition to people and dogs, secrets were buried, it occasionally seemed to me that life, that instinctive, dark life was pulsating under the earth, while outside life flowed calmly on, cleansed and painless, illuminated by an opaque glow of tedium.

  Now, about that, about that imperialist dream of conquest of the elevated fop Benito who adored bowler hats, small airplanes, chamomile, pedicures and his body, about that monstrous dream of his of the integration of Africa and the Balkans in a New Roman Empire, Maaza Mengiste is writing a new book.

  Nevertheless, that Tuscan estate, that refuge for writers, offered little sparks of fun. Those sparks illuminated the small obstinacies of this world, the threadbare everyday, which (perhaps because of a lack of funds, perhaps because of fatigue with the false luster) crept into our days. The curtain in my bathroom was old, spotted with mold, and some of the hooks holding it up had fallen off, so it drooped untidily. In some places the ceiling was crumbling, the plaster between the beams had fractured and cracks had appeared. The wooden garden chairs needed to be varnished and possibly lacquered; the bottom of the Teflon pan was scratched and the handle loose, so the pan “wandered” over the heat, the dishes could have been newer and there could have been more kitchen utensils. Nobody changed the burned-out light bulbs. In some rooms the electrical sockets had come off the wall and hung by bare wires. Oh joy! I imagined that this now empty empire of blurred sheen was gradually falling apart, that mirage, that shabby, worn-out dreamcatcher, as I had imagined and dreamed of the day (which I shall not live to see) when the roots of everything we live through will begin to get entangled and gradually dry out or rot, no matter, together with those circus-like royal families and the cardinals and all those bishops dressed up in gold-studded robes scattered across the globe.

  I could have enjoyed my time on that Tuscan estate, but I didn’t. At least not the first ten days or so. All of it, that pointless luxury garnished with hollow, Emmentaler conversations reserved for the evening hours, conversationlets, became a murderer of thought, a leech of the spirit, a thief of worlds and dreams. Conversations over dinner began with exclamations of gratitude; like that TV cook Ana, every single one cheered mmmmm, after which they asked each other (and me) Whose cuisine do you like? Do you know how to cook? What do you cook? What do people eat in your country? (I felt like saying Shit, we all eat shit, which would have been taken as unforgiveable vulgarity.) Then they’d start gossiping, then a euphoric exchange about the latest episode of Game of Thrones, where I was completely handicapped. Roy Andersson, I said, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Has anyone seen that? Silence thudded into the risotto and the Tuscan red wine, hogwash remained on the table.

  One evening we went to the next-door villa for a garden party. I walk along the woodland path accompanied by the future owner of the estate on which I am staying and ask him who we’re going to visit, who are these people?

  She’s a wonderful person, says the forty-year-old Italian
with a Brooklyn address and a barely explicable occupation.

  What does she do?

  She’s a great mother.

  I’m a great father, as well, I say, a single parent.

  The wonderful person and great mother did turn out to be a pleasant hostess, only she was a little anxious that her daughter would soon be coming from London (where she had just finished school) with eighteen friends, and she wondered whether she had eighteen sets of bed linen and towels. But when I’ve welcomed them all, I’ll escape to a spa, even if it’s not at all cheap, three and a half thousand euros for a week, no matter, I have to protect my nerves, said the wonderful person and great mother, then I’ll come home when the servants have cleaned the house up. The brother of the hospitable hostess, who otherwise lives in Naples, did the cooking that evening, and afterward everyone again went mmmmm, and while he was cooking, I helped, so we talked, and he told me, because I asked him, I asked them all how they spent their time, what they did, to hear whether these people did anything at all, did they earn their living, and he said I’m an artist.