by Miha Mazzini
‘Ibro’s bottle is full of homemade stuff,’ I explained.
I had to tell him how I knew the newcomer’s name. I got up and turned the bag so that the front was showing. In the middle, under the fly, there was a nametag written in pencil: ‘Ibro Hadžipuzić, Dolnje Vrbopolje.’
‘No house number,’ said Selim, as if that explained everything.
I sat back down.
‘At least he’ll be able to tell you what Mecca’s like.’
‘A Muslim,’ said Selim quietly, shaking his head. ‘He’d have been better staying where he came from than coming to croak in this foundry.’
The schnapps was superb. Smooth and gentle while running down your throat, but a real explosion of heat in the stomach. I switched off the light. The floodlights at the foundry gave off enough light. Slowly, we sipped the schnapps. The uninterrupted rattling of the trolleys loaded with iron ore covered our silence.
The night became red. They’d opened a furnace.
Selim got up, searched for a key in his pocket, and unlocked a wardrobe by the bed. There were three pairs of jeans and a denim jacket hanging inside. And nicely folded T-shirts and underwear. He looked for another, slightly smaller key on a ring, bent over, and unlocked a drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. The room was still completely lit up. In the drawer there was a bundle of letters in a clear plastic bag. At the bottom there was a poster, folded so that Nastassja’s face was at the top, and on top of that a pistol. A German Walther from the Second World War. He reached for the poster for Maria’s Lovers. He folded it, lifted the pistol, put the poster at the bottom of the drawer, and covered it again with the black metal.
He locked the drawer and closed the wardrobe.
Sat back down. Took a sip from the bottle.
‘My father took that gun from an SS officer. He didn’t have anything else to give me when I left for here.’
The bottle was in my hands again. The night was fading
I got up and opened the window. He nodded encouragingly. The room was filled with fresh air and the noise of the machinery.
A crane was moving under the foundry roof.
‘I knew somebody else would come. Mehmed went home the day before yesterday. Thirty years he’d been here.’ He was speaking slowly, as if he was reading a bedtime story to a child. ‘I looked at him when he was leaving and I said to myself, You’ll be like that. Dried out from the fire, bent over, and unwell. And then some Ibro will come to replace you. Fuck, is that all that’s left?’
This rhetorical question was pronounced louder. Ibro turned in his bed and murmured something.
It didn’t sound like an answer.
‘And then I went to the cinema,’ added Selim, and the story was finished.
We emptied the rest of the bottle without talking. The schnapps went to my head. I leaned out the open window and spat. There was a small radio on the table. I switched it on. I started singing in time with a woman’s voice from the little box. Quietly first, then louder and louder. Selim was staring at something in front of him and didn’t care.
I was bellowing.
‘Ah those sleepless nights, they break my heart in two yodel-e-hu-hu yodel-e-hu-hu…’
It was beautiful. Ibro shot up. He crouched on all fours in the middle of the bed looking like a sheep. He didn’t have a clue what was going on.
He’d get used to it.
Something came flying at the wall. Somebody shouted in the next room, ‘Shut up motherfucker. I’ve got work in the morning.’
He was right. There’s always work in the morning.
Selim was sitting motionless, cradling the empty bottle in his lap. I stepped outside. Closed the door behind me. Ibro was still foul-mouthing.
Frankie was singing Strangers in the Night on the radio. If I had a voice like Frankie I’d do nothing but sing all my life. I wouldn’t think at all.
Just sing.
The corridor window I’d got in through was open.
I jumped out as if I had a horse parked below. It didn’t hurt too much.
I rolled in the dust, shook it off my clothes, and pressed my hands on the wall.
I looked at my palms.
They were red.
3
Sunday morning is made for a bit of music. And for food. I rummaged under the bed for the cassette player and put it on the table. Searching for the only cassette took much longer. I found it in the bathroom, behind the toilet. For the life of me I couldn’t remember when I’d put it there.
The on button was a bit stiff and resisted the pressure of my finger. I turned it on with a well aimed karate chop with the edge of my palm.
There were times when I’d always carry that cassette with me, in my top pocket, and record a piece that I liked at the time, while visiting a girl or an acquaintance. I’d record over the things I didn’t like anymore. Because of the different lengths of songs, the whole tape consisted of short fragments, usually beginnings and ends of different pieces of music. If I got really tired of it, I’d sell it as a special edition in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of rock’n’roll.
I took a shower. I shook and squeezed the Cartier bottle. Nothing at all came out. I put on my underpants and moved the door on the wardrobe.
It’d had broken hinges even when I first got it. Inside, there were two nails, and on them, two hangers. I hung the combat jacket and my trousers on the empty hanger and took my Sunday suit off the other hanger and put it on.
The suit consisted of blue overalls with a jacket: the foundry-workers’ uniform, with an emblem consisting of a gold hammer sewn onto the breast pocket.
The road was empty. Folk Muzak of different nationalities and the smell of wiener schnitzel, chips, and mixed salad floated through open windows. A spring Sunday. When you’d like to be somewhere else. Anywhere but here. And when you’re there you want to be somewhere else again.
Anywhere but there. And so on.
I looked around for the guard and climbed over the fence.
I avoided factory halls, jumping over tracks, trying to avoid trolleys with red hot ingot moulds. Workers poured out of one of the buildings. I joined them. Became one with the crowd.
Here I am, all yours. Oh, motherland!
For the next hour.
They were all women. Mainly older, ugly, and fat. Rough and revolting. From behind, you couldn’t distinguish them from men. Women without womanhood.
We formed a line along the wall of the canteen, each holding a tray in our hands. Quite a bit further along, almost at the counter where the food was handed out, I noticed a girl’s face. It stood out from the others in the line so strongly it hurt me. I felt real physical pain in my eyes. I’d never seen her before. She must’ve been a newcomer. She took her tray to a table and sat down. There was an empty chair next to her. I started to push the mighty back in front of me impatiently, but nothing could speed things up. When I got my portion of the bean broth, the chair was already taken. I took a thick wad of lunch vouchers from my pocket and paid for the food with one of them. Happy that at least for these I wouldn’t have to go into action for a while. I sacrificed another voucher for a bottle of beer.
I sat at the row of tables next to hers. Broke a slice of bread. We looked at each other. For longer than an ordinary look of two faces passing in a crowd. I was wondering whether to smile or not. I moved the muscles around my mouth. Too late. She was already down at the steaming bowl. A group of her noisy colleagues surrounded me and separated us. I couldn’t see her anymore.
Had I had a newspaper with me I’d have read it. I was eating the sort of food that didn’t need any attention. Whoring sort of food. You satisfy a physical need, then you go. There’s no foreplay with a bite, no loving lick of the spoon, no gentleness or pleasure.
I stared at the menu for the next day. Today a bean broth with sausage, tomorrow pork ribs in sauce. Which meant they’d put some ribs in this broth and stew it again. On Tuesday Hungarian ribs. They’d add some hot paprika to th
e leftovers of the broth from Monday, boil it, and dish it out.
That’s the way the story goes.
I left the sausage in the bowl. I still wasn’t so desperate that I could eat fragments of fat, gristle, bones and other rubbish wrapped in a condom.
I stretched my neck and looked between the two people sitting opposite. The girl was still eating.
I stayed seated and amused myself by looking at the woman in front of me. She was of an indeterminate age, one of those women who are never really old or young, whose only wish in childhood, it seems, is to grow up to look like their mother as soon as possible. She was toothless and terribly hungry. She was attacking a sausage, trying to tear off a piece. The rest of the sausage was sticking out of her mouth, dangling about.
Obviously she didn’t know how to use a knife and fork. All this intense, wanton battling resembled a parody of sex. It was both funny and revolting.
I got up, took the tray to the hatch, and pushed it through. On my way to the exit, the girl and I looked at each other once more. Eyes, oh what eyes she had. You could drown in them. Large and boundless. I was falling into them. I knocked a woman’s broth out of her hands just as she was sitting down. I caught the bowl with my thumbs pushed almost to the bottom of the broth. It splashed on her trousers. I wasn’t in the mood for persuasion or argument.
I gave her one of my vouchers and apologised. She didn’t grumble too much at all. She put away the voucher and started eating the remnants in the dish. I wiped my fingers on my trousers. A look back. The girl was looking at me but immediately looked away. I was angry with myself for having been so clumsy. The reflex of a hunk on a beach who struts with his lungs full of air in front of the admiring girls and then trips over something hidden in the sand and falls.
I stopped outside the door and leaned on the fence.
I bummed a cigarette. When the woman offered me a match, too, I refused, saying, ‘I’ve got my own, thank you.’
She came out. The only one around who looked like a woman in spite of the sexless blue dress that fell to her knees. Below that, beautiful legs in black tights. She leaned on the fence at the other side of the stairs, slightly lower down. We smiled at each other. I went to her and asked her for a light. With a lighter she lit my cigarette first, then hers. I was falling into her eyes. She said, ‘Any time.’
The moment between her opening her mouth and her voice coming out seemed like eternity. A terrible fear. There are women who, however attracted you may be to them because of their looks, spoil everything when they open their mouths. Some get over that hurdle okay. The ruin comes later, with the meaning of their words. Maybe that’s what I was frightened of, I don’t know.
I nodded and returned to the other side. Very rarely had a woman disturbed me so much. First, because of the surroundings. Looks are what you see first. But there was something else, something radiant. Spiritualists would call it a spirit. That’s what I couldn’t understand. Considering where she worked, she shouldn’t have had one.
But I wasn’t convinced. She confused me. I would’ve died if I’d found out that her eyes were so deep only because there was nothing behind them. I realised I was staring at her. I looked away, greeted acquaintances. My eyes kept going back in the intervals. Her eyes, too. She looked at her watch, put out her cigarette, and set off back to work. I followed her, a metre behind. She didn’t look back. We were in the same group of women with which I’d come to the canteen. They sat down at the conveyor belt, which was going faster and faster. She was sitting at the end of the line. Small packets full of nails were sliding past her, already sealed. She pressed a large stamp with the date and a code on them. Her colleague, sitting a metre ahead of her, counted the packets.
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten.
Counted again.
Changed the boxes.
She was mouthing the numbers without a sound, as with a rosary.
Thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud thud fell the packets from a pipe.
Stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp went the girl who I couldn’t take my eyes off.
One two three four five six seven eight nine ten, counted her colleague. A new box.
Every stamp filled me with a new horror. Fucking hell, these two are here only because they are cheaper than a machine. Cheaper than an automated stamper and a photocell that would count. This was true about all the women in the hall. A sea of bodies.
She turned around and looked at me.
Her eyes.
My God, I’m falling in love with a machine.
Stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp went her hand.
Forever and ever. Amen.
I wanted to shout, ‘Hey, watch out, the machine will get you!’
But I didn’t say anything. I went out. Quickly, nearly ran out.
The noise of the falling nails stayed behind.
I leaned my head on the wall and wanted to throw up.
I changed my mind and suppressed my disgust. A shame to waste two vouchers.
I went to my flat so depressed I could only lie down and stare at the ceiling. But before that I undressed. I held the overalls between two fingers and hung them back in the wardrobe. Moved the door back into its place.
Firmly.
I wasn’t horrified by the fact that most people were like machines. There was something else about all the people I knew, men and women, who worked at the foundry or anywhere else, that made me shudder.
A quiet, calm satisfaction.
With everything.
It’s not such a problem to stamp and stamp and get a salary at the end of each month. It’s not really work.
All of a sudden I loved them all. Those others. Hippy, Poet, Noodle somewhere there in the hills, all of them.
I fell asleep.
When I woke up, not long after I went to sleep, I thought I’d had a nightmare.
There was a smell of lunch coming from all the flats.
Just the right time for going to the National Library.
I walked a long distance along the fence to the opening for the railway tracks. I jumped from sleeper to sleeper, cut through the foundry, then across the bridge over a river far below, and came to the other side. At the foot of a mountain ridge that, like its neighbour opposite, had forced the foundry to grow only lengthwise. I went past the old, abandoned workshops and warehouses, rusting trucks.
I stopped in front of the National Library.
A huge mountain of used paper which the foundry bought by the ton. The long wooden shed intended for storing the paper was too full. The side wall had collapsed under the pressure. The paper spilled out. A chain of paper mountains rose above the bodies of rusted car parts piled into heaps. Our nation’s mourned literary and automotive treasures.
Smoke was coming from the side of the hill. There was a Gypsy settlement on the hill, and this mountain of paper and steel was their shopping centre. Every Sunday I’d see them – usually children – rummaging through the cars, scrap metal, and paper. They’d pile their catch on a trolley and take it home. The next day they would sell back to the foundry everything except any of the more useful or slightly more valuable parts, which they sold to mechanics or anybody else who might be interested in them. The fence was rusty and full of holes. I looked around the yard, even though there was no need to be afraid of the guard. There was only one man guarding all the scrap yards. An old man. Once, he must have been a giant. One of legs had been cut off in the middle of his thigh. All his strength was now trapped by the clumsiness of his wooden-legged walk.
I went in bent over, a suitable entry into such a distinguished establishment. Walking on paper mountains demands special skills. You’re constantly losing the ground from under your feet. You can slide back by metres, there’s nothing to hold on to. You have to go on all fours. That’s how it is with paper.
I got to the shed by crawling on top of the mountains. Outside, there was newspaper and cardboard,
inside this and that, as they call books around here.
At the shed door stood a large paper press for compressing the paper into enormous rolls, out of which you can’t get anything, because it’s all packed so tight.
I started rummaging, searching without aim. You can get real pleasure out of that. Every discovery is a pleasant surprise. I had a list of comics in my head I could sell to the brats in the blocks of flats. Some of them were passionate collectors.
My eyes got used to the semi-darkness. I discovered two gypsy girls who’d hidden in the corner of the shed, frightened of the guard. We’d met before. They carried on calmly. They were collecting the heaviest paper and tying it into bundles. They’d carry them over to their trolley and bring them back again the next day.
They resembled each other. Probably sisters. The older one was tall and the younger smaller and slightly chubby. Indeterminate ages.
Children in the bodies of grown up women. I met quite a few here on Sundays. None of them lasted long. Their stomachs would start growing, and they’d stop coming.
I was knee deep in the well-known novels of social realism. This style must have once been very popular around here. I opened a thick, threadbare book. Read the first sentence:
‘In Moscow lives a leader, who is fairer and wiser than any other born on this Earth, our comrade Stalin…’
I looked at the author’s name on the cover. I’d never heard of him.
I threw the book away and rummaged on. I pulled out a first edition of Meyrink’s The Golem from 1913. It went in my pocket.
The Gypsies were picking through the pile non-stop. They didn’t seem to see me as competition. After an hour’s rummage, I only had a couple hundred grams of paper on me.
The younger Gypsy brought another bundle of heavy magazines to her sister. She threw it on the heap.
Her sister got a piece of string ready. From the top a face familiar from somewhere was looking at me.
I pretended to approach them accidentally and made sure. It was a Playboy. Nastassja Kinski was on the front cover.