The first kitten in our house was Mocca, brought by Mitko, my son from my first marriage, who was nine at that time. I suspect now that she was probably just a normal kitten, playful and naturally well disposed toward people, but our family had been living in such misery at the time that she was a constant ray of sunshine. I had just quit drinking, but kept on anesthetizing myself: whenever I wasn’t translating or writing I was reading. Lying on the couch and holding a book with both hands, I wasn’t able to play with Mocca—so she decided to teach me some tricks. She trained me, among other things, to fling a marble for her around the room. As a patient trainer, she ran after it every time, grabbed it with her teeth, and deposited it most considerately in my slipper so that my groping hand could find it there and throw it again. Oh, Mocca!
Then came the Shangri-La escapade: all at once, Charley went missing. His parents were so worried that they even went so far as to call me. But after a couple of days, there came word through diplomatic channels from India. Charley had flown there on borrowed money but was being detained at the Delhi airport because he didn’t have a visa. It was then that his parents—who had to pay his fine and then repay his debt to a loan shark—decided he would be better off if he just stayed in the house. They employed a ruse at the beginning, asking him to record daily episodes of a soap opera (Santa Barbara, I think) while they were away at their respective jobs. I knew that half an hour’s stroll would dispel Charley’s swarming thoughts, at least until the next day, so I showed him how to set the VCR timer to record the show automatically every day. But as soon as Charley’s father saw it, he couldn’t stand the “timer set” icon flashing on the display. So while they were at work the next day I taped a small piece of black electrical tape over the icon—its surface area couldn’t have been larger than a thumbtack. But Charley’s father still couldn’t stand the thought that there was an icon blinking invisibly underneath. And Charley’s mother started to believe that I was somehow provoking her son (she never could admit to herself it was a disease). She accused me of stealing Charley’s ID card in order to use it for some undisclosed, black-magic purpose. Next time she called she cursed my twins and I decided that I had to step aside, at least temporarily. As a parting gift, I bought Charley a dieffenbachia plant named Offenbach and a parrot named Vitzliputzli—let him have at least a bit of nature in his room, I thought.
I was terrified of dogs. I used to turn in any other direction as soon as I heard barking ahead. The last, the most humiliating panic came when my first wife was pregnant with Ivana: there was an Alsatian barging toward us over the neighboring Castle Hill slope, and I hid for a petrified moment behind her swollen belly. But with Ivana born, I mended my ways. I simply had to, for her sake, even if I was still a bit cautious. And when I started running, that was in 1986, even this vestige of fear went away for good. A few years after that, while visiting my mother to help her with groceries, she lagged behind as I entered the store. “What’s the matter—aren’t you coming?” She wouldn’t say anything; just stood there like a child. I looked around—and there it was: the cutest Skye terrier possible, tethered to a radiator in the lobby, waiting patiently and peacefully for his master. And I saw, for the first time, even though it must have been obvious all those years: “It was you!” She’d always hid her fear behind mine. Grabbing the baby. Pulling it closer. Raising it into her arms. “It was our neighbor’s dog,” she explained at last. “It was on a chain, behind the courtyard fence, but so terrible that I had to run past it whenever I went by, and once I fell over and spilled all the milk!”
Labyrinths are good places to be, because you can so easily end up crossing your own path and finding yourself where you once were. A labyrinth might prove to be a giant lost luggage office. Like my dad used to say: “Things don’t get lost. They just wait for us where we mislaid them.” But there are no labyrinths in Slovenia. The one in the Chartres cathedral happened to be covered with congregational chairs when I was there in 1987, and now I can see on the Internet that it consists of a single, stony, straightforward path that, after having made some turns, ends at its center. It’s a symbol of life, I read: nonsense—life can’t be a yellow-brick road. It’s more of a Cretan labyrinth, so complex, so secret that archaeologists still can’t find it, despite having turned all of Crete upside down.
There was a brief period, even before the iconographic incident in school, when Charley tried his hand at writing. I’m sorry now that I didn’t encourage him more. But his writing seemed too confused. You couldn’t make head or tail of it. I repeated to him—paraphrasing Gardner, I think: “You’ll have to switch to poetry. In fiction, one is as free as in poetry to erase one’s tracks, so to speak, to offer one’s truth as a puzzle, but after the reader has deciphered the clues and established a continuity—figuring out the causes and the consequences—there should be a story, and if this story isn’t interesting, then no amount of juggling and smuggling will make it any better.” But now I’m not so sure: if continuity means progression toward an end, what’s the point of ever getting there?
“If you have an enemy, buy him a dog. I’m a businessman. I get up early in the morning in order to be the first to my office, but on my way out I always see my neighbor taking his dog for a walk on its leash, neither rain nor fog forestalling them. In the office, I pull some strings, make some arrangements, call some people, apply some grease here, some grit there, and lo and behold!—here I am, the proud holder of a controlling share in my neighbor’s company. If he has a wife worth the effort I can even make love to her during my lunch hour—he’ll be taking his dog for another stroll. In the evening, I lock up and go home—and I see my neighbor, the enemy, not knowing that his business isn’t his anymore, that his wife is conquered, I see him huddling under his umbrella and trying to persuade his dog not to step into a puddle . . .”
Alcohol: it can brick up some passages and open up others. The last time I was drunk was at the general meeting of the Slovenian Writers’ Association in the autumn of 1982. The New Year was closing in, there were some bottles of fine pinot . . . and all of a sudden, I found myself sitting next to my wife in the movie theater (the “Commune,” as it was called in those days), wondering aloud, more and more horrified, why it was that nobody wanted to lend a helping hand to a man struck by lightning—it was a scene from the movie Victor, Victoria, and was supposed to be funny, except that I was too drunk not to take it seriously. I’d had a total blackout. Years later, a colleague of mine who collaborated with me on writing a comedy proposed that we put in my “famous 1982 Christmas meeting-of-the-SWA speech.” “My what? I don’t remember anything of the sort.” “You gave us a very passionate and very funny ten-minute speech.” “On what?” “On your late lamented white mouse—or maybe it was a rabbit, we couldn’t tell.” “At the SWA meeting? Why didn’t you people stop me?” “We knew better. Yes, you kept on smiling and talking in a soft voice, but your eyes were on fire and we knew that you would lunge at whoever would try to take the floor, and tear his or her jugular out with your incisors . . .” What I tried to hide behind my laughter was the realization that, for so many years, poor Crackle had had no place in my thoughts—or, rather, that in order to let him resurface this once, I’d needed to let my mind go completely blank.
The Franciscans said Charley should present a “medical certificate” before they’d let him in. He was allergic to maneuvers of this kind because they had been used on him so many times before. (The civil authorities, for instance, had let him attend driving school, do all the work, take the paper part of the test, pay for the whole affair, and only then they’d ask for his “certificate.”) I assumed this would be the last straw, so I suggested that he should wait at least until the end of the world—it would be stupid not to be present at such an occasion, I said. Armageddon got rescheduled, though: first into 2002, then into the next year, and so Charley carried on.
We have a dog now, a border collie by the name of Ferris. His ow
ner is nominally Ana, who reminded me when she was nearing her thirteenth birthday—October 2009—that I had promised that the degus would only serve as a temporary test of her maturity in terms of caring for pets. I say nominally because Ferris doesn’t recognize his ownership by anyone—he takes himself to be a family member with (at least) equal rights. His father was a blue-eyed, his mother a black-eyed bicolor. Ferris was number seven, the last of the litter. The first six were divided evenly, as far as eye color: three of them came out blue-eyed and three of them black-eyed. Since Ferris was the odd one out, one of his eyes is pitch-black, the other sea-blue. And this blue one used to upset me, because combined with its drooping eyelid, it gave Ferris an air of drowsiness, even of ennui—and yet he was never idle, never uninterested. A few days ago he came up—he’s now eight months old, nearly grown-up—to my desk and laid his chin on my right elbow, as he does when he thinks it’s high time for us to take a walk. But I just had to translate the sentence I was working on to the end—I always do that so I won’t lose the thought, even when they tell me that lunch is being served or that a movie has just started—so Ferris flashed blue from under the drooping eyelid, snapped up a Russian book on the table, and ran off with it. And then it came to me as a bolt out of the blue: “This eye, this eye! I thought I knew it from somewhere, and now I see at last—it’s my dad’s eye, of course.” It was my father, telling me not to repeat his sin of doing the same thing again and again. And even though border collies are a working breed, we get out every day and do nothing more strenuous than walk into the woods and through the fields, and chase away the occasional crow, and cross over the swollen brooks, me jumping over, he swimming, and run with wolves.
Charley was one of those accommodating children who keep on trying to meet their parents’ expectations—until the last moment when, right in sight of a goal, they fail. During graduate exams in art history he had a terrible fight with his professor about the Immaculate Conception. The row escalated until Charley swept the good Professor M.’s iconographic diagrams out the window and walked away—forever, even though the university turned a blind eye toward this escapade. In a brilliant whim, he decided that he would be a painter (he had never painted before in his life) instead of, as he put it, a “fart-history professor.” This same sense of resentment incited him to start writing art criticism too. As a critic he also became a staff member on the arts magazine for which I worked a few short years as an editor. But his critiques were becoming increasingly complicated, and through his progressions of abstract genitives (“the impact of the plasticity of colors limited by the chasm of the frame of the picture”) one could discern more and more of something Charley called the Absolute.
I’ve been trying now for a few days to unsort these memories, give them freedom, but they don’t want it. However I toss them around, they seem to have a tendency to get back in line. Early things told late seem to bring revelation; late things told early seem to forebode. It makes me think of Dad’s theory of relativity: “Things that seem to be difficult from afar prove to be not so difficult when you approach them, and things that seem to be very simple from afar get much more complicated close up.”
I don’t believe Charley was violent, ever, but they forced him to check into a local psychiatric institution for a few weeks. Medication straightened the flamboyancy of his thoughts somewhat, but still he tended to—during some chance meeting—raise his voice in a tirade against the moral decay of humanity, and he still used to visit the Franciscan brothers and try in vain to engage them in discussions as to why they’d renounced their former poverty. He still painted, but his initial, uncertain art informel gave way to Orthodox-style icons. His parents were upset, not only because of the Absolute, not only as members of the Communist party, but because of the high costs of the golden paint shining around the girlish faces of his angels, divulging the faces’ probable points of origin.
In 2006, in a cornfield near Villach in Austria, I finally stumbled upon a vast maze made as it should be, with unforeseeable dead-ends and trick passages that landed you back where you started. But people—as people do—had smashed passages through the wavering walls, and since the children making up our expedition were tired from their visit to Minimundus—the Klagenfurt park with miniscule models of various wonders of the world—I gave in to their demands and we snuck out through an illegal gap. It was there that I got the idea for a game. I had it all figured out. I even had a name: it was to be called Memorinth. You just write down fragments of your memories in paragraphs and number them according to a random sequence obtained from the family bingo spinner. Then you carry out the necessary textual switcheroo, following the numbered balls’ instructions, and at last denumber the paragraphs. The resulting sequence should be both unexpected and obvious, just like dreams, or madness, or life.
Thank God—there must be a gene that makes people ascribe good luck to Providence—in 2005, Charley met some orthodox monks who were in Ljubljana for the Ecumenical Convention. They looked pretty much like him. When he approached them, they cheered him: “Hristos voskres!—Christ has arisen!” They had assumed that his long, disheveled beard was a sign of humbleness in the face of God, not the slackness one succumbs to after years and years of being fed with antipsychotics. And when he started to tell them about the Heavenly Jerusalem, the one who was from Ukraine pushed a pamphlet about his monastery into Charley’s raised hand. A few months later Charley received the hegumen’s summons and affidavit so that he could get the necessary visa—and now he’s a monk. He sent me a letter: “Everybody here knows that the world is coming to an end. Nobody talks unless what he has to say is of the utmost importance to God. The monastery life is a very silent one. And this is good, because, you see, there’s a solovey, a nightingale, singing in the garden.” And out of the watercolor painting he had enclosed, an angel with outstretched wings sings to me through its beak.
When Crackle died, Mitko hadn’t even been born yet, even though, following my premonition, the poor mouse took part in a short first-person story of mine, “Mouseday,” about the author and his two kids who, while gathering chestnuts, discover the skeleton of a mouse. The children start to form simple animistic concepts as the narrator tries to placate them, arguing that “a mouse can’t die because it has no consciousness—it’s immortal, in a way.” But the truth is that I had, in presence of desolate Ivana, who was too small to dig, buried Crackle under a poplar on the grassy embankment right in front of our bedroom window. There, not in the woods, is where his bones rest. There we can visit and mourn him almost every day while I’m hanging out Mitko’s diapers to air on the manila rope stretched between the creaky trees.
TRANSLATED FROM SLOVENIAN BY THE AUTHOR
[SERBIA]
MARIJA KNEŽEVIĆ
Without Fear of Change
My name is Mariana. Though not always. I was actually christened Mira. That’s the name I got from my parents. Like the love that I’m sure exists, and my religion too. Almost everything else is work.
In my working life I’m the heroine of the telenovela Always and Forever. There I’m the daughter of a rich building contractor—spoiled and difficult Mariana, as the producer described me. Even as soon as Episode 3, people started calling me Mariana—family and friends included. Now we’re up to Episode 186, which will be broadcast tomorrow. I don’t even think of the name Mira any more, except today when I’m writing to you, and I’m writing because I’m feeling down, I need to bitch about things. There’s no “irrational” reason for this confession. This is my story, remember—me writing about myself and how I see things. I don’t care if anyone likes it or not. I feel I’ve been obliging to others all my life. Now I want to do something for myself. Or at least be obliging to myself. Like with this story. That shouldn’t be too difficult, I don’t think.
My father’s name—I mean my father on TV—is Max. Like I said, he’s a successful businessman. He runs several of the best
-known building firms in our small but wealthy republic, cooperates closely with foreign partners, never comes home, makes heaps of money, and enjoys himself. In addition to my mother, my brother, and me—that’s starting with the knowns—he also has a lover, Juliana, which was revealed in Episode 28. We didn’t know about her before that because the producer chops and changes things at random. Obviously a developer has to have a steady and reliable mistress, so that was decided on the spur of the moment, on the cusp of shooting that episode. You know how things work these days. They have to be done quickly, on the double. We know the next three episodes at the most. If you haven’t acted in this kind of show before—never knowing what’s going to happen at the end of the week—you just can’t imagine how tense it is.
The producer only came up with Juliana in Episode 20. I didn’t hear a word about her until the day we started shooting. My “real-life” father’s name is Nenad. Until recently he worked as an engineer for a well-known firm that produced those huge pipe sections for oil pipelines—an export giant that paid high salaries. My mother, my elder sister, and I lived in the lap of luxury, as they say. At least that’s how we see it now. Several years ago the company collapsed. I didn’t understand why. Sure, Dad explained it to me, but I’m chronically exhausted from shooting the show and wasn’t concentrating properly. Besides, his distress was so immediate that it distracted me from the details—it became the only focus.
The laid-off employees were paid a kind of “compensation” for a while—I remember that much from what he told me about the Crash. But after that there was nothing. They had the option of retraining or saying good-bye. The company was bought up by a guy who had immigrated to Australia and then come back (talk about crude and arrogant—I saw him once and once was enough) and turned it into a workshop for making tracksuits. Being fifty-two, my father decided to stay on at the factory. Now he works in the zipper department. The boss rarely speaks to his workers, and when he does it’s in an uncouth mixture of rusty Serbian and bastardized English. The pay is terrible. That’s how I came to be on TV, to cut a long story short—I was in the middle of my second year in Oriental Studies when my father got demoted to a zipper man.
Best European Fiction 2012 Page 27