His story has reached our time, has reached me, safe from incalculable deformations. And today I’m just another link in the chain, merely passing it along so that solitary men of the future can take up the task of organizing themselves, just as the father of my grandfather’s Russian friend wished to. I’ve told his story with a scrupulous respect for his desire to spend his life as nothing more than a character in a story. A Russian story, I’d like to add, while sitting here comfortably on the terrace of this bar in Malibu, under a striped umbrella, in the middle of a tropical heat wave. I’m wearing magenta pants, shoes in a cherry shade of leather, and a casual shirt that looks like a thin blue pajama blouse. I don’t dress very stylishly—I’m American, and, honestly, it’s very hot today and I’m not in the mood to put on a jacket and tie. I turned thirty recently and I feel a subtle and strange nostalgia for the snow, perhaps because I have never, in my whole life, seen any. Sometimes I believe I can feel raindrops slide shakily down my brain cells, which is just as gloomy a prospect as the dead, interwoven tissue within which all the families of Malibu wend their way: families buried their whole lives in iron coffins, relaxing in the sun on the Pacific beaches, where, in a matter of seconds, a simple Bloody Mary transports me—as it’s doing right now—to paradise.
TRANSLATED FROM CASTILIAN BY RHETT MCNEIL
[SLOVENIA]
DRAGO JANAR
The Prophecy
1.
One peaceful August morning, on the inner door of a bathroom stall, Anton Kova saw an inscription that made his blood run cold. The loud echoes of commands and the clomping of thick-soled boots against asphalt could be heard from the distant parade ground—the mustering ground was called “the circle,” although it was hard to figure out why when it was shaped like a large square; the new recruits were practicing marching under the hot sun. Here in stall 17 it was cool and quiet, just as it was in the whole row of empty stalls that had recently been cleaned. Anton Kova was an “old soldier,” which meant that he had only about a month to go before his tour was up. He worked in the library and was no longer required to drill, which was why he didn’t begrudge himself the luxury of sitting on the toilet in the middle of the afternoon reading a newspaper. He hadn’t read the inscriptions on the bathroom walls for a long time. When he was still a “pheasant”—that’s what new recruits were called, no one knew why—he’d eagerly read the vulgar thoughts, the names of girls from far-off places, those bitches who were sleeping around while the guys here were pissing blood, groaning about the number of days left to serve, all the messages liberally ornamented with drawings of sexual organs. Since he was a professional reader, a librarian, he’d thought for a while about jotting down the most inspired graffiti and putting together a small anthology of bathroom literature, which is to say an anthology of all the yearning for civilian life, an anthology of jealousy, melancholy, quickly formed petty hatreds, conceits, mockeries, and comments. But he soon dropped the idea. The Balkan military vocabulary was colorful and varied, but it had one ancient leitmotiv, fucking, sometimes used literally but more frequently allegorically. Everybody was fucked, from mothers and sisters to brothers and grandfathers, from dogs and cats to abstractions such as sadness and joy, from trees to objects; someone had even written: Fuck your home address. Thus, the quantity and monotony of all this bathroom creativity had eventually begun to bore him. And that’s why, when he was able to spend a few minutes in that space, once he was no longer a pheasant, he returned to the usual civilian bathroom reading material: the newspaper. He never took a book into the stall; that seemed improper somehow, and not just because he was a librarian. He was a passionate reader for whom books, at least the majority of books, were receptacles of great spirituality, chalices of wisdom, vessels of intoxication—whereas newspapers were simply not.
When he lifted his glance from his newspaper that August day he saw the new inscription amid the drawings and the graffiti; it did not lack the well-known leitmotiv, but its message was so unheard of, so blasphemous, so dangerous that, again, the blood ran cold in Kova’s veins. Almost by the wall, on the right-hand side of the door, in blue pen in uneven letters and in Serbo-Croatian, someone had written something that Anton Kova would never forget, and that he would translate into Slovenian years later:
You’ll eat grass, King of Yugoslavia
Donkeys will fuck your fat ass.
2.
His first thought was: get out of there. Get out of this place as quickly as possible. It seemed he was hearing the hellish ticking of a time bomb that would end his life. He was about to fly out the door when he stopped himself. If anyone saw him coming out of stall 17, he would be a suspect. He listened carefully. He could hear nothing from the corridor except the dripping of water from a broken faucet. And the beating of his heart, which was now up in his throat. From the circle outside he could still hear terse commands and the pounding of boots on asphalt. It sounded like bursts of machine-gun fire: the pheasants didn’t know how to march yet. Marching should sound like a single step, not like machine-gun fire—that’s how sheep walk. A single step—he recalled the motto written on the barracks wall: We are all in step. A new command brought the marching in the circle to a halt. He heard the young corporal telling the recruits how to move their feet, that they should bang their boots onto the ground so that your balls fall out.
Anton Kova walked to the aisle with the sinks; it was empty. He would have preferred to run, but he calmly washed his hands and then forced himself to walk slowly and lazily, as if to let everyone know that an old soldier was passing by, always moving at his own pace, with straps loose and his cap stuck into his belt and not on his head. He avoided the yawning man on guard duty who was dozing against the gun rack.
When he entered the library he yawned himself, as though nothing exciting had happened in his boring soldier’s life for a long time. And he let himself relax. For the moment it seemed to him that he was safe. The senior officer who ran the library was fiddling with the dial of the crackling radio set, and his colleague, Professor Rotten, who like him was finishing out the last month of his tour, was typing away.
“How goes it, Anton? Did you finish reading the paper?” Rotten asked without even looking up.
Anton Kova wanted to ask him to walk over to the shelves in order to tell him what he had just read. Recently he’d become quite friendly with this professor, this Belgrader who’d been nicknamed Rotten. Both of them were finding their last month of service hard to take; they’d gone into town together a couple of times to listen to a café singer in a short skirt and get a bit drunk. Rotten was a serious young man, a quiet academic with impeccable military and library discipline. He sometimes loosened up on Sunday trips into town, and would silently down a few shots of brandy. It seemed to Anton Kova that it would be all right to tell him about the horrifying thing, the time bomb that was waiting in the cool quiet of stall 17. But at the last moment he decided against it. If two people know something, everyone does.
“Fine,” he said, “just fine, as always.”
He sat down at his desk and began to write book titles down on catalogue cards. “It’s hot,” said the sergeant, who turned off the crackling radio, walked over to the window, and opened it. The pheasants were still out there, endlessly thumping the asphalt with their boots.
“Sing!” called out the corporal down there on the circle. The lone, pure, and resonant voice of a single young pheasant cried out a song to the rhythm of the marching boots: the “Hymn of the Artillerymen”:
We’re artillerymen
The army has called
To guard all our borders
And Marshal Tito
And the chorus of recruits shouted out the refrain:
Tito’s a marshal
A genius is he,
He’s in command
Of our splendid army.
Anton Kova asked himself how many times he had sung that song before he’d mastered the art of marching. A hundred times? So many times, in
any case, that he no longer thought about the meaning of those words. Now he suddenly knew how arrogant they were, how horribly at odds they were with what he had read a little while earlier. And he thought about the courageous lunatic who had dared to write the bathroom verse. Anyone who could do that could as easily place a bomb in the barracks.
3.
He slept badly, every time the duty officer in the big bunkhouse woke a new soldier for watch duty he would bolt upright. In a half-awake doze he saw an invisible hand writing letter by letter on the bunkhouse wall the words: You’ll eat grass, King of Yugoslavia… The other half of the couplet was so coarse that Anton Kova didn’t allow himself to see it; instead he’d blink his eyes and try to think of other things. The second half of the horrifying graffito, that vulgar expression of hatred toward the Supreme Leader, was by itself more or less harmless, as its tone was in keeping with all the variations on penetration immortalized on those walls, from top to bottom. Anyone could have written it. But there was something mysterious about the “grass.” He recalled a bad joke he had heard once in a bar: a beggar is sitting by a road along which big-shot government officials are traveling, and he’s eating grass. A first official stops and gives him a ten, a second comes along and gives him even more money, and then the white-uniformed Marshal pulls up in his black Mercedes. Instead of giving money he asks: “Why don’t you go eat away from the road, where it’s clean and fresh?” No, no good. You’ll eat grass…Why grass? And if we all know who the King of Yugoslavia must be, why did the author resort to such a fancy, archaic tone? You’ll eat grass, King of Yugoslavia. Maybe it meant, “You’ll be killed with your face in the grass”? Anton Kova had terrible thoughts that night. And the worst of all was that he might be suspected of writing the couplet himself. He usually used stall 17 because it was the cleanest. Now he knew why. Anyone who had been there even once must have avoided it thereafter. Only he was stupid enough to keep going in there every morning. Like a murderer who keeps returning to where he’s hidden the body, until at last he’s found out. Kova imagined that he was already under suspicion. Of course, anyone could be under suspicion, but if anyone could be suspected or even accused, then that anyone might easily be him. It was only after four A.M., when the last soldiers returned from guard duty, that he managed to catch a couple of hours of sleep before reveille. In the morning he looked, against his will, to see if anyone would go into stall 17. No one did, at least while he was watching.
4.
He spent the next few days in the library in a state of incessant, low-level anxiety. He sensed that something was going to happen: an officer from the counterintelligence service would open the door, step inside, and ask: who wrote that? But nothing of the sort happened. Peace and quiet reigned in the library. The officer spun the radio dial as he always did when he was there; either that or he was off taking care of his own affairs. Kova’s friend Professor Rotten was the silent type, generally bent over his papers. In those August days he was already preparing his university classes. He kept a copy of the Old Testament underneath a pile of papers and would pull it out and begin taking notes as soon as their officer closed the door on his way out. Rotten was preparing to teach a seminar on biblical themes in world literature in the fall semester.
Rotten’s real name was Milenko Pani, but at that artillery base in southern Serbia, no one remembered this anymore—everybody called him Professor Rotten, or even more frequently, just Rotten. He had received his new name soon after joining the army. He’d still been a pheasant, no more than a month into his service, when once, during the morning muster, Major Stankovi came to a halt in front of him and fixed his eyes on the open button of the left-hand pocket of Pani’s shirt. Two pens were sticking out. Major Stankovi was a gruff but pleasant man whose large, heavy frame might have made him look dangerous to some—indeed, like a pit bull preparing to attack—but in fact he was a good-natured sort, always ready for a joke. And so the soldiers liked him.
Even so, however, Pani was ill at ease when the Major stopped in front of him.
“What’s that?” the Major asked, pointing to the two pens. Pani shrugged his shoulders and the major shifted his eyes to those of his young corporal, standing at his side, who was now paralyzed with terror at having to answer for the undisciplined appearance of his men.
“I said, ‘What’s that?’” the Major repeated.
Pani replied stoutly: “Two pens, Comrade Major!”
Silence fell. This wasn’t a good answer; everyone could see that there were two pens, and the Major could easily get angry. But he did not get angry; he just stared at Pani for a time.
“I see. For a minute there I thought they were some sort of military decoration,” he said slowly.
Then he chuckled, the relieved corporal laughed, and the whole long row of soldiers joined him.
“What do you do in civilian life, soldier?”
“He’s a professor,” the corporal answered.
“I asked him,” said the Major.
Pani looked around somewhat abashed as about a hundred soldiers and several officers waited for his answer. He explained that he was a classical philologist, he’d studied Latin and ancient Greek.
“And what on earth do you need them for?” the Major asked.
Pani did not reply.
“Those languages are dead and buried—rotting in the ground!” the Major guffawed, and all the soldiers in the ranks joined him so loudly that the walls of the barracks echoed. Pani blushed. Rotting—that is to say, decayed—languages were unnecessary, comical, like the first, rotten Yugoslavia that had to collapse so that the new socialist Yugoslavia could appear. Pani wanted to say that it wasn’t proper to speak this way about Latin and Greek, about subjects to which he had chosen to devote his entire life. But he realized he had no desire to hear any other jokes from the bemused Major. He swallowed his saliva. Satisfied with himself, Major Stankovi continued to walk along the row of soldiers while professor Milenko Pani just stood there among the men, alone and humiliated, a professor of rotten languages.
By the afternoon he had become Professor Rotten, and by the evening, when some of the men wanted to needle him still further, he had become just Rotten, and Rotten he remained.
He never became reconciled to this new title, which gave him no end of trouble. Anyone saddled with that sort of nickname—which, worst of all, he received in public, to the general amusement of his fellow soldiers—automatically becomes the target of daily mockery, over familiarity, pranks. Who doesn’t know how to take apart a gun? The professor of decaying languages. Who’ll wash the latrines this morning? Professor Rotten. And the angrier he let himself look, the more fun everyone had with Professor Rotten. One night they even made him do “the bicycle.” This was a favorite nighttime trick of soldiers. You stick a piece of paper between the toes of a sleeping person and light it on fire. When the flame gets close to the skin, his leg begins to twist, and the closer the flame gets to his toes, the faster he pedals. Only when the pain gets really bad does the person finally wake up, bewildered, and look around in amazement at all the laughing faces. Rotten had had to put up with the bicycle on a number of occasions, precisely because he was a professor of rotten languages. He was only able to get a bit of relief when he and Anton Kova were assigned to the library. There he threw himself into his studies. And every time the officer who ran the library and its piles of Marxist scholarship, partisan historiography, and patriotic literature walked out the door, Rotten would pull his copy of the Vulgate from his heaps of papers and lose himself eagerly in the mysteries of the text. This shortened the hours and days that remained before the end of his tour; with every page he turned he got closer to his home and farther from the laughingstock called Professor Rotten.
His calm was infectious. For a few days Anton Kova still trembled every time the door to the library opened, but then, alongside the tranquil Professor, he soon got back to his usual routine, waiting for his demobilization. Gradually he began to forget abo
ut the dangerous writing in the bathroom, and he also stopped waking up at night to see the invisible hand writing letters on the bunkhouse walls. On his morning visits to the bathroom, which he could not avoid completely, he noticed that no one ever used stall 17. One afternoon he marshaled his courage and opened the door to that stall. The message was still there. He leapt away as though from a snake.
5.
August turned into September and only fourteen days were left to their tour. On Sunday he and Rotten went into town, did some drinking and listened to gypsy music. With the sound of trumpets echoing in their heads they returned to the base in a petulant mood. It was their penultimate Sunday.
And now the penultimate Monday began. It began with the sound of running down the hallways and sharp commands that cut through Anton Kova’s head, which was still a bit hazy thanks to Sunday’s brandy and gypsy trumpets. He squirmed through the pile of bodies that were looking for their boots in the corridor and headed for the toilets. The bathroom was locked and the guard who stood in front of the door said that the plumbing was out of order and that he should use the bathrooms in another part of the base. Anton Kova knew the plumbing was fine, and that anyway when something really went wrong with it, no one ever thought to post a guard at the door. He headed for the library, but he met Rotten on the way.
“The library’s closed,” he said, “we’ve all got to line up outside.”
“What’s going on?” Anton Kova asked cautiously.
Best European Fiction 2011 Page 9