Crumbs

by Miha Mazzini

  Suddenly I became aware of a terrible smell, which I smelled every day. I should’ve been used to it completely but it still hit me with all its strength and clarity.

  It stank of sulphur.

  At the same time as the smell hit me, a sentence from Spränger’s book, the one about there not being anything inexplicable in this world. Those things that seem inexplicable fall into the sphere of demonology.

  Footsteps could be heard in the corridor. I pressed myself against the radiator, trembling with fear. The footsteps were coming nearer. The hard sounds of hooves. With my back against the wall, I slid into a squat.

  From around the corner came a thin guy with huge winkle-pickers. He noticed me and immediately looked down. He was probably more scared than I had been earlier. He sped up, staring in front of him, and disappeared up the stairs.

  The presence of another human being helped me. The world was still holding together. Maybe I’ll manage to put my missing stone back in. A lot of things that seem inexplicable at a certain moment are explained later on.

  I decided to wait. I had no other option. I jumped onto the road and set off home. The wind was taking the clouds of smoke from the tops of the chimneys and blowing them towards me.

  I pushed my hand under my jacket and felt the T-shirt on my back. It was soaking wet. I trembled in the cold.

  I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that something was sitting on my neck.

  The whole way home I tried to stop my body from running. A headless rush.

  It clouded over. The sky was completely black without a ribbon of light. The air was heavy and thick with smoke, which was settling on the ground and dissolving the outlines of the blocks of flats under the weak light of the streetlights. A dead cat lay on the ground, its innards squeezed out onto the road.

  The smell of sulphur was getting stronger and stronger.

  PART TWO

  Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

  – PJ. Bailey, ‘Festus’

  6

  For two weeks, I didn’t see any of the people I talked about earlier. I wasn’t there. I was absent, as they say at school. After I got back, the first thing I did was to take a walk along the foundry. With my ears and eyes open. Looking for any changes. There weren’t any. There never are.

  A note was stuck in my door. It told me to collect the books. Alfred’s signature, dated the day before. I took a shower and set off to see Poet. I didn’t have to climb the fence. Marble stairs, guarded by a female guard, led to his place. Before she let me go up the stairs she made a phone call.

  Poet’s office was on the first floor.

  He had his head stuck between two heaps of paper.

  ‘The books are printed.’

  His face lit up.

  ‘Did you bring a copy?’

  ‘No,’ I shook my head, thinking of how I could politely remind him of the payment.

  There was no need to do anything.

  ‘If you meet me when I finish work, we’ll go to the bank together to get the money.’

  ‘Okay.’ I waved Alfred’s note in front of him. ‘This is a receipt with which you can get the books.’

  I put it in my pocket.

  He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a bottle of red wine.

  We toasted each other. To success. That was his suggestion, not mine.

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Half past ten. Another three and a half hours.’

  I left him stewing with impatience and counting the minutes.

  I went to the bar. I saw Karla through a supermarket window. She was just paying.

  She grinned at me from ear to ear, all the way to the door, carrying two full grocery bags.

  ‘Hi, Egon.’

  ‘Hi,’ I said hesitantly. I found her cheerfulness suspicious. I wasn’t used to it.

  She put the bags on the floor. From the top of one of them she produced a booklet, printed on the worst possible paper.

  ‘Look.’

  I took it. It was the romance I’d written. It had been published very quickly. I couldn’t see anything unusual about it, no reason for Karla to be so amused. The cover was in the usual style. Two lovers on the spring grass. They had left my title. Naked and Barefoot, it said.

  ‘I don’t understand, what’s this got to do with me?’

  I gave the book back to Karla.

  She grinned even wider and pushed the cover right in front of my eyes. I looked at the photo and the writing twice before it dawned on me.

  ‘Ooooooh, shit,’ I said with great difficulty.

  I knew the editor wouldn’t forgive me my outbursts in his office. He’d published the novel under my real name. No English female name. Egon Surname was what was under the title.

  Karla became serious.

  ‘You’re blushing, you know?’

  I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. I couldn’t feel a gush of blood in my cheeks.

  ‘Now you can start apologising.’

  ‘I’ll just explain.’

  ‘It’s the same thing.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘Let’s go to the bar. I don’t want to listen to stories in the middle of the street.’

  She ordered coffee with cream and a beer. She opened the packet and poured the sugar into the hole she’d made with a teaspoon in the whipped cream.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’d often wondered what you did for a living.’

  I told her I’d had a fight with the editor and that this was his revenge. I told her his real name. She started laughing. She laughed even more when I told her some other names hiding under English pseudonyms.

  She asked me if I knew the person writing under a French sounding name.

  ‘I don’t know all of them. I only found out about the ones I told you by chance.’

  ‘It’s me,’ she said.

  We looked at each other. Felt laughter growing inside us. It exploded. We roared with laughter, nudging each other with our elbows. I looked around.

  The surprised, already accusing looks of the waitress and the pensioners made me laugh even louder.

  She told me a few names of the writers of love stories she knew. There was no end to our amusement.

  ‘Karla, you’re the only woman who can still surprise me after all these years.’

  She became serious, sipped her coffee, and added, ‘you too, sometimes.’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘I didn’t. Even though you’re the right sort of person for these things.’

  I frowned and looked at her angrily, with exaggeration and not really meaning it.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Nothing to thank me for.’

  ‘No, there isn’t.’

  I poured the beer and emptied my glass.

  ‘I call this penetration into the very essence of stupidity. Give me the book. I’ve got to look at something.’

  I took the book, turned a few pages, and found the sentence I was looking for.

  ‘They didn’t leave it out. Listen to the latest result of my searching.’

  I cleared my throat. Waited a moment. Then read ‘She sighed as if she’d been stabbed by a penis. Oh!’

  Laughter again.

  ‘I’m surprised they left it in. Usually they don’t leave in any words that might offend the puritans.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be an illustration of how low an author can fall when published under his real name.’

  She looked at her watch. I knew what she was going to say.

  ‘I’m late. I’ve got to go. Bye.’

  I puckered my lips.

  ‘A kiss?’

  She looked at me as if she was hesitating. And then nodded.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid that some fine gentleman in his prime might see you?’

  She immediately reciprocated.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid that some girl at the sweetest time of her life might see you?’

  ‘Let’s do it secretly.’

 
; ‘And quickly.’

  We looked around to see if anybody was looking at us.

  Everybody was.

  We kissed.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  I helped her carry her bags. She unlocked her door and turned around.

  ‘I really am in a hurry.’

  But there was still time for a long kiss. That’s what the Hollywood movies had taught us. In a house on fire, on a sinking ship, or in any other impossible situation thought up by a script writer, there’s always time for a kiss.

  I went to the bar to wait for Poet to finish work. Hippy sat alone at a table in an empty bar. I hadn’t even sat down properly when he started to express his shock. I knew a lot of people read trashy novels but I never thought everybody did. I don’t read them. Honestly. I just write the odd one.

  I didn’t make the effort to explain why it had been published under my real name. I did tell him the names of the editor and a few other authors, though.

  He laughed from the bottom of his heart.

  At that moment I realised the power of the media. The editor printed my name. At least half a million people knew it now. I repeated the editor’s name twice and was already fed up with saying it. At the thought of having to repeat it another four hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight times in order to get even, I decided to give up.

  ‘I understand, you need the money,’ started Hippy, ‘but still, it’s crap what you write. You should take a pen and use your talent, if you have any, to improve the world.’

  I leaned forward and started talking with a voice used for telling deep secrets, when you want lots of people to find out about them.

  ‘Listen, Hippy,’ I looked him in the eyes, ‘do you really believe?’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘That it’s possible to change the world with writing?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘There you go then. Me, too. That’s precisely why I’m writing cheap paperbacks. On top of the financial reasons, of course.’

  He looked at me idiotically. He didn’t understand anything anymore.

  ‘I’ll explain. If I wrote moralistic tragedies, they’d say I was just another preacher. If I was writing any kind of literature that you call art, only a handful of people would read me. A closed circle. Other writers reading the works of their colleagues. Outside that small group of people, nobody gives a shit. That’s how it really is.’

  He thought for a bit before he nodded.

  ‘Look, I write a romantic novel. More erotic than romantic. Let’s call it what it really is: a fuck novel. People read it. Many people. They get excited. They become lustful. They need a fuck. They’d like to re-enact one or two scenes from the book. They go and try it out. They fuck. Can you imagine? A large number of excited readers rolling on beds. And what are you like after a good fuck? Tired and satisfied. A crowd of tired and satisfied readers. A lot of energy going into fucking. Immense quantities. Energy that would otherwise have been used for fighting and being nasty to each other. And look, the world has changed a little bit. For the better. There you are.’

  He was looking at me with his eyes wide open. He couldn’t believe it.

  ‘I’d never expect you to make a speech like that.’

  ‘I do occasionally surprise people.’

  ‘You certainly do.’

  The justification of the fuck novels from the nirvanistic standpoint made me terribly thirsty. I looked around. At that moment Sheriff came in. I said goodbye to Hippy and sat at a different table. I pulled out a chair for Sheriff. He sat next to me and ordered two beers.

  He was already in his civilian clothes. So he must have escaped from the foundry before the end of his shift. He was about my age. A leader of quite a large circle of western lovers. They wore cowboy outfits, or what they thought cowboys wore. Sheriff outdid them all. All the others wore ordinary hats; he was the only one wearing a real Stetson. A white one, like Tom Mix. A denim suit and a red scarf around his neck. They all wore boots. Black or brown pointed things with raised heels. His were made of snake skin. With silver spurs.

  He must have spent a fortune on them. He had his sources, which he used to obtain the clothes he wanted. He never told anybody who his connections were. The novices had to find their own way. He had a crew cut. He was smoothly shaven with a real razor, not just a razor blade. His neck was shaven, too. He hated blacks. I doubt he’d ever seen one. The worse insult he would utter before a fight was to call somebody a Yankee. I’d visited him at the dormitory. He’d hung an enormous Confederate flag on the wall. A poster on each side of the door. On one there was Clint Eastwood, tied up, naked down to his waist and with pistols in his hands. On the other was Clint in a poncho, sitting on a horse, unshaven, with a cigar butt in his mouth.

  When he’d get drunk, which only happened occasionally, he’d wish he’d been born in Texas and not here.

  Had he really been born in Texas and that was the only change in the story of his life, he’d have been born black.

  I’d never said that to him or teased him with it. Just the fact that he claimed I was the only one he trusted with his secret wishes and troubles was useful to me sometimes. For a beer, paid for by him, or for saving me from a circle of guys eager to fight because I’d offended them. And not least because I was probably the only man in town who was allowed to call his beloved Clint by a nickname in his presence.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said ‘Is this yours?’

  He pulled a small book out of his pocket and put it on the table. I couldn’t believe it. My bottom jaw dropped.

  It was the Rimbaud. The very same one that got lost, disappeared, went missing at the dormitory.

  ‘Hey, where did you get it?’

  ‘My roommate threw it in the bin. After cursing like a Yankee. He’d made a mistake. He’d walked down the corridor and saw the book on the radiator. He thought it was a comic. He looked at the title to see if he’d already read it. It said REMBO. And he thought to himself, ‘Oh, look, so they started publishing the adventures of Sylvester Stallone here, too.’ He took it and noticed his mistake when he got to the room. He threw it away. I looked to see what’d made him so angry and thought it must be yours. Had you forgotten it there?’

  ‘Yes, I’d forgotten it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’d been carrying it with me for two weeks, but you were nowhere to be seen.’

  We toasted to General Lee and drank up our beers.

  ‘Sheriff, I’d like to ask you a small favour.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Could you bring your cowboys to the bookstore tonight at six?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Poet’ll be reading his poems.’

  ‘And you’re the organiser?’

  ‘I am, I admit it. And how successful it’ll be depends on you.’

  He emptied his glass and nodded.

  ‘All right, we’ll come. How long will it last?’

  ‘Half an hour, no more.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The foundry sirens went off. Time to meet Poet. I got up and nodded to Sheriff.

  ‘Say hello to Scarlett. Cheers.’

  He grinned and spat between his teeth.

  ‘Yankee,’ I heard behind my back.

  I went out. Crowds were pouring out of the foundry and the secondary school. I was looking out for Long Legs. It wasn’t difficult to spot her.

  She was a lot taller than her schoolmates. When she went past we looked at each other. I joined the crowd with my eyes glued to her hair. I zigzagged among the workers, bumping into school bags, saying hello to acquaintances, slowly approaching her. I bumped into somebody. I jumped to the left, not wanting to take my eyes off Long Legs for fear of losing sight of her, launched forward and again the same body got in my way.

  ‘I’m here. It’s me you’re looking for, isn’t it?’ said Poet.

  Long Legs disappeared in the crowd. I w
anted to tell him to wait a bit, but he already had both his hands on my collar.

  ‘Let’s go get the books, let’s go get the books,’ like a stuck record.

  And we went.

  They weren’t very glad to see us at the printers. They were just about to leave. Alfred was firmly formal. Sign here, sign there. Poet looked as if he was giving his autograph. With great pleasure. We all shook hands and we found ourselves on the doorstep with the packets of books. Poet went to borrow a car from somebody while I sat on the books, smoking. I tore the wrapping and looked at a copy. A thin but neat book. Poet had brought me a whole parcel of poems. I gave half to Alfred for printing and he then printed half of those. It really was Selected Works. There was a folder with posters, too.

  Poet returned with the car. We loaded the packets. He looked through the book and was visibly satisfied. We drove to the bank, where I waited in the car until he came back with the money. I felt the envelope and stashed it in my pocket. I didn’t count the money.

  I told him that he had a reading organised for six o’clock that evening at the bookstore. He started panicking. He had to rush home to have a wash, iron his suit, have a shave, et cetera.

  He complained that nobody would turn up as there were no ads for it.

  ‘Were you listening to the local radio station yesterday at four?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They announced your reading.’

  And I added that he still had enough time to call everybody and tell them about it. He drove off.

  On my way home I stopped at the bookstore. I told an assistant about the book promotion and so on. She went to ask her boss. I convinced her as well. But we were only given a corner at the back for no longer than half an hour.

  I left a couple of posters with her. For sticking in the window. I stuck three on notice boards on the way home. I counted the money at the flat. He hadn’t cheated me.

  I opened the Bible and put the notes between the pages one at a time. I got as far as Exodus. My biggest financial success so far.

  I stashed a few notes in my pockets, just in case, and went out.

  Ajsha was walking on the opposite side of the road. I waved to her, she smiled, and I ran across the road. She was looking at me as if I had put on gold plating in the time since she’d last seen me.