by Daša Drndic
LINA:
I have to collect my laptop from the repairman. I’m in a hurry, but obstacles keep getting in the way. A friend I haven’t seen for ages suddenly appears in front of me, now in a wheelchair, with no left leg, just a long metal spike in its place. An open wound, swollen and bloody, gapes on her right forearm. I ask her, Why haven’t they cleaned and sewn up that wound? It’s nothing, she says. I push her in that wheelchair and smell a sour odor emanating from her body that makes me feel sick.
DORA:
After an argument with my daughter, who maintained that I am not a good person, I dreamed that she had locked me in a little room like a prison cell and slid home the bolt on the outside. In my dream I called for my mother and my voice woke me. The same night I was out walking with my grandmother, we were looking for shoes, everything around us was very quiet. Then my father appeared, alive, although he had been dead for a long time.
BREDA:
I go out of the hotel room, the door automatically locks behind me, I don’t have a key, I can’t go back. At the end of the corridor, in the half-dark, I see David. Sorry? David is dead. David is my unended love.
So, I see David. I call him, I tell him, I can’t get in. A blonde woman appears, she takes me to a different room, David is there. Then, with two children, with my hands on their shoulders, I walk to that woman who is dressed like a witch.
RUBEN:
I have a white sock over my head. Under the cloth, two large coins press into my eyes.
EDA:
My daughter has to have an operation on her heart. We are in a shack with a lot of people. I enquire about the best cardiologist. Someone suggests Karlo. Karlo is my former husband, a dentist, but he’s not my daughter’s father. Someone else suggests the cardiologist Ida Brun. I don’t know who Ida Brun is. I ask the people there, Are we in Macedonia?
ALBERT:
I go to take a shower, the bath is full of fat women squeezed into one end of the tub. I get in, but I can't stretch out my legs, which annoys me. What's more, someone has hung their clothes on the rail for the shower curtain, so I can't pull the curtain, I'm afraid I'll splash the bathroom. But there's no way I'll splash anything given that the bath is full of women. Then suddenly everything and everyone disappears, even the water. I'm left sitting in the empty tub.
ESTER:
My daughter is going for a walk with Boris Gomel. Boris Gomel was my first boyfriend, I didn't sleep with him. Then I don't know whether my daughter is going off with Boris Gomel or with Karlo Richter, the painter and fascist. One of them, I can't see his face, comes back without my daughter. We've broken up, he says. He sits down on a deckchair behind thick glass, and I watch him from behind.
PETAR:
I went to a brothel and I couldn’t find my way out again. Two weeks later, I died. When I was dead, I thought, brothels are like graveyards. What could that mean?
We dream so as to forget. So that we don’t fall into nonexistence.
All of that exists, the disorder, the fragmentation, the din, in reality and in dreams, but in literature and in life, the public and the market want order, harmony and a (logical) flow, simplicity, so that the little gray cells empty tidily and painlessly.
In a different psychiatric institution in France, the famous La Borde Clinic, also situated in a wooded valley, but this time that of the Loire — oh, those woods, those parks, with camps and lunatics — of which some fool wrote that it is in the true sense of the word a refuge, a sanctuary where patients find peace and rest, in that clinic they didn’t put on an amateur sketch like the nurses’ production of “Hedgehog’s Home,” but rather a properly rehearsed Operetta by Gombrowicz. Today it is perhaps no longer interesting to speak about the significance of the La Borde Clinic, about its founder Jean Oury and his colleagues, the antipsychiatric movement that included Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Frantz Fanon, Georges Canguilhem, François Tosquelles and many other left-oriented intellectuals of the 1960s and ’70s, a movement which (like that of Franco Basaglia in Italy) combines Marxist philosophy, educational reform and psychoanalysis, a movement according to which patients freely and actively participate in running the institution (self-management?), and where neither the doctors nor the nurses wear uniforms, in which there are clubs and workshops, in which the hospital ramparts are broken down and the doors thrown open, so it may no longer be of interest to talk about the significance of the La Borde Clinic, psychiatry, they say, has become more or less accepted, internationally equalized, globalized — with the significant help and support of the pharmaceutical industry. But then, antipsychiatric movements redefined the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, laid bare moral lunacy and psychiatric racism. Clinics such as La Borde were small societies in constant flux, clinics that shunned stagnation, stability, that bigoted untouchable rigidity where the rules are always firm and stifling.
It is no coincidence that in the La Borde Clinic there was a performance, along with many other dramas, of Gombrowicz’s Operetta, about which Nicolas Philibert made an excellent documentary La Moindre des choses (Every Little Thing). Patients and hospital staff participated in rehearsals and in the final production, and the audience could barely tell who was who. At first glance, Gombrowicz’s dialogues appear absurd, the characters change roles, costumes (and masks), and watching the way patients and staff do the same things, we see that the border between what we call mens sana and mens insana is permeable. Are the patients (and the staff) playing themselves, or characters from Gombrowicz’s grotesque?
This is what Operetta is about, says Gombrowicz, because he knows that the human eye either does not see well or sees what is not there, or does not see anything at all; that the human ear either does not hear well, or hears what is not there, or does not hear anything at all; that the human mind comprehends with difficulty what exists, that it threshes and crushes what exists, sometimes submissively, sometimes violently, in the name of a peaceful dream that is then masked as ominous reality.
Here’s a certain Potkoff, a duke and horse lover,
says Gombrowicz,
and he advises Fior, a world master and dictator of men’s and women’s fashion: Let us invite . . . guests to cooperate, says Potkoff, let it be a masquerade, and those who wish to take part in a fashion competition, let them throw sacks over the clothes of the future which they have themselves created. At a certain sign, the sacks will fall, and the jury will give prizes for the best concept, while Maestro Fior, enriched by these ideas, will announce the fashion for the year to come.
But, Potkoff is not Potkoff, neither a duke nor a horse lover!
says Gombrowicz.
No, that’s Josip, the prince’s former manservant, dismissed from service some time before, and now an agitator and revolutionary activist! Human clothing has gone mad . . . In a whirlwind, in a flash of lightning, the strangest changes of clothes can be seen: a prince/torch, a priest/woman, Hitler’s room, a gas mask . . . Everyone covers themselves up and no one knows who is who . . .
In Operetta, fashion (trendiness) devours the past, but the unstoppable past (History) penetrates through the trendy, masked rags and then all hell is let loose. Revolution! exclaims Gombrowicz, hoping too soon, because social life, political life, personal life, all those lives, big and small, still breathe behind masks; hammed up, they are woven into an existence that does not let them go into an age that grips and spins us around like tops.
And no one knows who is who.
I suddenly think of the jolly title of a theatrical production (for children and adults) on the repertoire in my neighborhood when I was living in Skopje: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I walked around Skopje saying “you dwarf” in Macedonian. Otherwise, that one-month stay in Skopje was therapeutic; there was a nearby milk bar called Venus and a shop with a sign: STOP! Buy cheap. But that Skopje of mine is (in part) outside this story because, like hardly any other c
ity, it brought me peace, a total absence of anxiety, through which I slid as in a dream.
An autumn afternoon, around half past four. The little town has grown dark, it is raining hysterically, torrentially, menacingly, there are no passersby, no one on the street, just cars hurtling by. I’m sitting by the road under the yellow awning of a café, the air is damp and warm, I’m drinking freshly squeezed orange juice, there are no voices around me, no footsteps, only the blurred outlines of vehicles and the celestial cascade through which one can glimpse distant, locked lives silent, out of reach. Emptiness and a protective downpour.
This morning I’ve been summoned by the tax office “to clarify some matters.”
You mean, you earn money abroad, so, you work abroad, says the fat official not looking at me, so she can continue undisturbed with a game of patience on her computer.
I don’t work abroad, you can see that I’m here. Those are author’s royalties.
That’s the same thing.
No. They’re fees for writing. They’re called author’s royalties.
Even so, you work for foreign countries.
I don’t work for foreign countries.
So how do you get money, if you don’t work?
I write. Here.
What do you write?
Books.
What kind of books?
Thick ones.
What about?
I don’t get a chance to reply.
Hey, Olga, the official shouts across the room, there’s a man here says he writes some kind of books!
Afterward I go to Željko’s secondhand bookshop to calm down. It’s going to rain, I say as I leave, I’m going to Terazije to get some cigarettes.
And I’m going later to the Karaburma market for some eggs, laughs Željko.
It’s twenty-four years since I left. Belgrade still crouches in my brain.
The next day I set off from Rijeka to see Armando Trevi, my friend and a psychiatrist from Pula, who “has some information about Adam Kaplan’s family.”
On the bus a man spends the whole journey talking to a nonexistent (perhaps?) Anita. I listen and don’t listen. At the same time. I’m tired of other people’s pain. Sick of other people’s worm-eaten, corroded lives.
But I keep looking, following and trying to recognize those little sparks of suffering that flit all around me, to avoid the glimmers of my own madness.
Another man sits with his arms crossed, without stirring, for the entire two-and-a-half-hour journey. Close-cropped hair, shirt with narrow blue and white stripes, hand-knitted gray cardigan (rice-grain pattern) and linen trousers. A well turned-out man with gray hair and a gray moustache. A cemented man, buried in a stupor.
The image shatters. Broken by the driver’s voice, He’s polluted, polluted. He’s not clean, he’s polluted, he’s not clean. It’s 2015.
Beside me sits a woman in a red knitted dress, blonde hair pulled back in a greasy ponytail, around forty years old. On her lap she’s holding a tattered little teddy bear made of rags with splayed paws, and squeezing it. Behind me is an old couple, they yell as they talk, but at least they talk. Somewhere in the middle of the bus two men are discussing some dramatic event, for them at least, one of them keeps interjecting How can I put it? Not to look at the woman squeezing the flattened teddy bear and her filthy nails, I count the number of times the man says How can I put it? Five. The journey from Rijeka to Pula, by a roundabout way, is full of bends and makes one nauseous.
Armando Trevi has a private psychiatric clinic and sometimes works in a “Home for Adults with Mental Disorders.” In that home (which the psychiatrists visit once a week for an hour or two), those who need to can also stay — and they do — with no time limit, or until their death. The home is now called Vila Marija. Once, the Vila Marija was the Vila Rizzi, but as a comparatively more convenient building for housing the inconvenient has recently been built next to the Vila Rizzi, which is in fact a family house, the whole complex is now called the Vila Marija, after one of the daughters of Lodovico Rizzi (1859–1945), former mayor of Austro-Hungarian Pula (five mandates, from 1889 to 1904). A fair number of old people reside in the home, but there are also younger patients. I doubt that its residents perform anything like Gombrowicz’s plays, although it is surrounded by an extensive park, a wood known as the Bosco Rizzi, where the autumns are full of autumn colors. And birdsong. Lodovico Rizzi has been given back his name in the form of a hill called Monte Rizzi, admittedly on a smaller scale, as the rest of the hill is, I believe, called Vidikovac, or “Outlook Hill.” It’s not important. Armando Trevi is fascinated by Lodovico Rizzi and as we sit in the restaurant of the Hotel Scaletta, Armando tells me that Lodovico Rizzi has, finally, and he hopes definitively, acquired his own street, called Rizzijeva, quite a long street today, he says, and not as short as in the days of Empire. When the Fascists came, Armando continues, Rizzi became Claudia, then D’Annunzio, and in the time of Yugoslavia, Partisan Marko Orešković. Now Rizzi has come back, but as you can see the sparkle Pula had in those days has not.
The Hotel Scaletta is still there, I say, although there are often no shadows on the other side of the road anymore. In the summer, in that shade, we used to sit and drink wine until dawn.
When Armando had listed everything that the Rizzi family had given Pula, starting with Lodovico’s father, who, before his son, in 1864, had become its mayor, down to Lodovico himself, Listen, when he died he left a gasworks, a water-supply system, sewers, a hospital, a telephone exchange, a market hall, a bank, a secondary school for girls, a town museum, an electric tram system, Pula at that time had four pharmacies, did you know that? It had three bookshops and seventy-five inns and restaurants, it had twelve clocks, after Armando Trevi had listed it all, with picturesque descriptions and a wealth of detail, which took some time, he ended his tirade with an apparently significant crescendo: At the beginning of the 1900s Pula had six hotels too, including Scaletta, and that is where the story of your Adam Kaplan begins.
But I already knew that. That, and much more besides. Adam had written the history of his family in the “legacy” in the form of a letter I had been given before his funeral by Dominik Marengo. I mention this so it doesn’t appear that the story of Adam Kaplan is incomplete in a literary sense, that the “bait has been thrown” but the situation left “unresolved.” It’s a complicated and lengthy story that merits particular attention; this isn’t the place for it.
But there were things I hadn’t known, something had been “left out” of Adam’s letter.
Lodovico Rizzi was buried in 1945 in the town cemetery in Pula, and at the end of the 1940s his villa was redeveloped as a manicomio, a not at all sophisticated mental hospital. There, in the Vila Rizzi asylum, in 1995, among some old health cards, the then fifty-year-old Adam Kaplan found the file of a woman by the name of Alba Kaplan. And his search began.
When the new section of the Vila Marija was opened, a process of tidying up the archives began, that is, transferring information about old, very old patients, onto computers, destroying the files, said Armando Trevi. That was when I found the photograph of a woman called Alba Kaplan, and I thought that this woman might have been in some way related to your friend Adam. Here, this is her. Long since discharged from the Vila Rizzi.
I looked at the bony face with dead eyes, an expressionless face of a small woman of roughly sixty. That photograph had not been in Adam’s “letter.”
I think Alba Kaplan was moved from the Vila Rizzi to Lopača some time toward the end of the sixties, said Armando Trevi.
Lopača is a psychiatric hospital on the edge of the town where I now live. I knew that she was there, in the hospital to which there is no public transportation, so it is difficult to get there, I knew that this was where Adam had finally found Alba Kaplan — his mother. He had found her just before she died, when Yugoslavia had already fallen apart, and Alba Kapl
an had stopped talking. She looked through me, Adam wrote, she didn’t say a word, she didn’t stir, I don’t know whether she was breathing. I had to go on searching.
And that’s enough for now. Adam’s family story branches into several countries, from Croatia through Italy, Albania and Africa, up to him, Adam’s adoption in Zagreb and his move to Belgrade. I leave that for another occasion, if and when I feel like it.
In my practice I came across two cases of sexual self-harm. A few hours after his attempt to circumcise himself with scissors, a 24-year-old man, L. B., was brought to the first-aid surgery of the psychiatric clinic. He worked as a teller in a bank. The examination found, on his penis and mucous membrane, three lacerations of around four centimeters in length, which, under general anesthetic, were cleaned and sewn up. L. B. recovered quickly and before he was discharged he came to me for a conversation. His father had died a week earlier. My father’s death depressed me a lot, said L. B., and I thought that this act would help clear my mind. In the medical history of the patient L. B., apart from an appendectomy, there is no mention of any other surgical intervention, serious trauma, nor any indication of psychiatric troubles. Nonsmoker. Doesn’t drink or use drugs. Free from hallucinations. Concrete and abstract thought, sound reasoning — all normal. He sees himself as a practical, sensible and rational person. He refuses further psychiatric or psychological support.
While we were on night duty, Adam Kaplan and I, an ambulance brought to the surgery of the psychiatric clinic a 35-year-old unemployed, unmarried man. R. N. was in a state of shock. Three hours earlier, he attempted autocastration. Resuscitation was carried out with an infusion of colloidal solution, after which R. N. became agitated and refused a blood transfusion, maintaining that this was an “inadmissible attack on his privacy.” During his psychological-psychiatric treatment, R. N. talked about his previous incarnation in the eighteenth century, when he was persecuted in Russia as the leader of a great religious movement and when he castrated himself with a red-hot poker. In his medical history there is no mention of psychiatric illnesses in the family; there is mention, as possibly relevant, of the patient’s father’s death three days before his self-castration. Adam Kaplan concluded that the patient R. N. was in a state of acute reactive psychosis and prescribed him a sedative administered by drip, after which R. N. received a blood transfusion and his wound was treated under general anesthetic — a ten-centimeter-long scrotal laceration with which R. N. had succeeded in removing his left and the lower part of his right testicle. R. N. recovered, and after another conversation with him, Adam concluded that R. N. was lucid and rational. Prescribing him more sedatives, he let him go home with a follow-up meeting arranged for ten days hence. In the meantime, R. N. killed himself by swallowing a large quantity of herbicide. Afterward, Adam told me, These two cases are unusual, because most men who genitally self-harm are already psychotic. Most have a longish history of sexual self-harming and are permanent psychiatric patients. With the patients L. B. and R. N. their autocastration was the first indication of psychiatric disorder. Those are the only two cases in the history of this department, said Adam, and they both happened after the recent deaths of their fathers. Although, Adam added, I remember a case of autocastration in a man who had lost first his dog, and then his canary.