Since it was still too early to leave for the Academy, he stayed at the window and calmly inspected his suburb, even looking over to the gardens of the illegal settlement that stretched most of the way up to the huge cross on top of the hill. He also studied the other part of the hill that was sliced like a watermelon by the cement works at its base. The morning was so completely still that he could hear the chatter from the settlement that had no water supply or sewage system, but also the hum of the dewdrops as they ran down pine needles or seeped into the grass.
Apart from atoms, which were his particular professional purview, Sisoye also loved to interpret sounds and signs in space, particularly birds in flight, the barking of dogs—the secret pathways of dreams…He believed that if the front door creaked, or a west-facing window, or if you accidentally broke some household object, someone in the family would die; if a hen crowed like a rooster and peeked in through your door, someone in the family would die; if a raven circled over your house, like that one wheeling over that house there, the one with the stone wall, someone there would soon die; while if a raven cawed in the morning, whoever heard it first would have bad luck, or else there would be some misfortune in his house; owls, ravens, and cuckoos were all birds of ill omen; cuckoos were especially dangerous, particularly their first call in the morning, Sisoye said to himself, looking through a cloud of his condensed breath at the illegal settlement opposite. When a dog howled like a wolf at sunset with its nose pointing toward the sun, this certainly portended evil—and then death, disaster, or other misfortunes were in store; Sisoye trembled at the thought. Just then, the pigeon that visited his windowsill every morning looking for crumbs flew up: “If you dream of a pigeon killed and trussed, someone close to you—or you yourself—will die a sudden death; on the other hand, if you dream of flying, someone close to you will die; while if you dream of someone else flying, diving down from up high and hitting something on the way, that person will certainly die,” Sisoye whispered, as if speaking to the pigeon; he gave a start then and looked around to make sure no one had heard him; he couldn’t have people saying that he, an academician, had started talking to himself. Down below on the sidewalk, in the precious shade of the Japanese cherry trees brought along with their soil from so far away, people were now walking around. They were going to work early, like in the old days, or perhaps they were sleepwalkers with open eyes, dreaming of rusty factory gates. But now Sisoye stepped back from his window and hid in the dark of the room; after a while he reached out to crumble some bread for the pigeon. As he watched the people rushing past his building, apparently knowing where they were going, he remembered that one should always have a bite to eat in the morning before leaving the house: “If someone hears a cuckoo—at almost any time—and if they’re hungry at that moment, someone in their family will die…or, if he lives alone, the person who heard it will die.” Sisoye yawned as he watched a roaming cuckoo trying to land on the top of the pine in front of the building; then he ate up the bread that remained in his hand, left the window, crossed himself (although he didn’t believe in God, only in atoms), and got dressed. Despite being single now, his apartment was immaculate and orderly, and he always had a vase of flowers and a bowl of fruit on the table. Now there were three bananas and one orange in the bowl. As a widower without any children (although for years he tried unsuccessfully to adopt), he had got used to laying out his own clothes for the next day. Right after sunset, as he read the stars and listened to the birds settling down in the trees for the night, he always went over his plans for the next day and what clothes he ought to prepare. Whatever he decided to wear he put out on the clothes hanger in the hall, so in the morning everything was ready—he just needed to get dressed, spruce himself up, put on his hat, take his briefcase (with his papers on the movement of atoms), and leave for the Institute of Strategic Studies…same as every morning for the last forty years. Although the two old barracks where the Institute was located—speckled with jackdaw droppings—were in the same suburb as his apartment, he always used to drive to work. There had been two cars in his life: first a Moskvich, then a Lada. But in the last few years, with gasoline becoming so expensive and Russian cars getting about the same mileage as tractors, he never bothered taking the Lada out of the garage. Now he only used its trunk to store preserves for the winter: he put jars of stewed peaches there so they wouldn’t freeze if the season was too severe and the cold came in through the cracks in the roof. Now he closed the heavy, wooden door of his apartment (his name plaque didn’t say “Academician” yet), checked three times that it was locked, and recorded this in the little notebook that he habitually carried in the left-hand pocket of his coat; he did this to avoid having to leave the bus at the third or fourth stop to go back and ensure that he had indeed locked the front door. Using the notebook for his brilliant ideas was already an everyday habit, but now it had replaced his memory entirely. When he wrote in the notebook that the door was locked he saw that he had noted the night before that his inaugural speech was already in his briefcase, and this made him smile with satisfaction; he blinked and went down the stairs from the fourth to the first floor. As far as we’re concerned, at present, Sisoye left for the Academy in good time, ready to create a sensation with the speech he had been preparing for precisely six months.
THE SPEECH
The Great Hall of the Academy of Arts and Sciences was filling up; Academician Slavko Sivakov was not in the audience, as far as Sisoye could tell in a cursory glance from the rostrum; several other elderly members of the Academy were also absent—probably because they wouldn’t be able to find their way home afterward without help, Sisoye consoled himself. The President, Secretary, and a dozen other prominent academicians sat in the front row. Among them, leaning forward with a pendulous belly that wobbled between his knees, was Sisoye’s chief mentor and friend, Prežihov, and next to him Trepetlika dozed with a plastic bag on his lap. It was getting noisy in the hall since many of the academicians had now seen one another and were exchanging anecdotes about their youth and snippets of biographical information; Sisoye cleared his throat loudly several times, the babble died down, and his speech could finally begin. Now, I happen to know—as I myself prepare this text about Sisoye—that his speech was meant to begin with the assertion that nothing in the universe is more enduring than its atoms. Atoms exist in abundance, of course, and in Sisoye’s view it is quite significant that they are indestructible—an atom can never be destroyed. Since they are so long-lasting, atoms can move to other locations and traverse thousands of kilometers; they know all the languages in the world and all the secrets of nature. “Every single atom that each of you contains has passed through multiple stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to become part of you,” Sisoye said. “In other words, dear colleagues, all of you, all of us, are only reincarnations, and ephemeral ones at that. When we die, our atoms will dissociate as when you scramble a Rubik’s Cube; they will go off to seek new configurations in other places, becoming part of a leaf, or the eye of a woman, or a tiny droplet of dew. None of us know if we bear within us an atom of a fly that died a thousand years ago or an atom from the pumpkin that the wife of Kosan, the scribe of the Macedonian King Vukashin, baked between her torrid thighs in 1366. Atoms do not die,” Sisoye stressed. “Half a million atoms placed in a row would only be as wide as a human hair,” he added, unconsciously patting down that disobedient strand on his head. “When we know all this it is easy to grasp that every living creature is the product of a single idea, and it is the fate of all living things to turn into nothing. Except for bacteria…” he added, “bacteria will still be here when the sun dies; this is their planet, and we are only here because they let us share it with them.” He stood on his toes so the audience could see the handkerchief perching jauntily in the breast pocket of his coat. “Bacteria existed for billions of years without us, but we can’t survive a single day without them,” he continued without looking at his notes under the green lamp on the
rostrum. “Why not? Because microbes, for example, provide us with the very air we breathe. Who taught the lion, when it has fever, to treat itself by eating monkey? The atoms of a physician that have become part of the lion, of course! The key to life is to be found in the atoms that dissociate and go off to seek new uses after each of us expire,” Sisoye said, and took a quick gulp of mineral water; it sloshed in his glass and a little splashed out. Someone in the upper rows burst out laughing, but no one joined in, so he cleared his throat and fell silent again. The audience in the hall was largely still attentive; only a few of the older academicians in the center were dozing, shaking their heads as if in disagreement with everything Sisoye said. He went on undeterred: “Therefore, dear colleagues, if we are descended from monkeys, and monkeys in turn from bananas, which came first—the chicken or the egg?” Now there were guffaws, as if from nowhere; the upholstered chairs in the hall creaked and all the birds that had been sitting on the frosted-glass dome above them suddenly took flight. Since Sisoye had been studying the theses of his inaugural speech for years, he knew with certainty that something like this would happen when he reached that sentence, so he made a calculated pause; taking another sip of the mineral water that by now had gone flat, and, although the hubbub had not quite subsided, he added calmly: “If monkeys are descended from bananas, then we ourselves are very closely related to fruit, and therefore to vegetables as well. It is important to note that half of the chemical functions that take place in a banana are identical to those in a human being. This can be readily verified by simple laboratory analysis, and proves that all life is one, or rather that all the life in the universe is based on a single idea, whoever might have originated it,” he concluded and coughed into the white handkerchief from his breast pocket. Many people in the audience thought he had finished, and there was some muffled applause, but Sisoye picked up his folder, took two steps to the left of the rostrum, and surveyed the hall with a quick, cynical glance: “All of you sitting on chairs are actually not sitting on them but floating about one hundred millionth of a centimeter above them—your electrons and those of the chair fiercely resist any greater intimacy!” he announced. And just at that moment it seemed that the gap between the chairs and the academicians’ bottoms began to grow and the academicians started to float first above their seats, then over the rows where they had been sitting, ascending higher and higher; they passed through the square concrete frame of the ceiling, which the frosted-glass dome rested on, rose even higher, penetrated the glass, and disappeared like shadows into the cloudy sky above the Academy.
APPENDIX
Academician Sisoye opened his eyes and was about to thank his audience, but there was no one in the Hall. He could hear only a strange chuckling in the second row, somewhere on the right behind the ornately carved column. Perplexed by the emptiness of the hall, Sisoye headed toward the door on the left, turned around…and then saw him, leaning back in the upholstered chair behind the column, wiping his thick glasses with his necktie, and laughing sweetly—his greatest antagonist, Academician Slavko Sivakov. He is as indestructible as atoms, Sisoye thought.
EPILOGUE
After Sisoye’s death, the Institute of Strategic Studies at the Academy entrusted me to look after the estate of our colleague, who, unfortunately, as you know, never managed to give his inaugural speech. Among the notes that I found in the sandal box under his dining-room table I discovered a short letter that amounted to his will: it stipulated that his mortal remains be buried in his native region, in the Sveta Petka Monastery, and that “my coffin as well as the cushion holding my medals and decorations be taken to the specified eternal resting place on Uncle Erdo’s handcart.” The investigating magistrate’s report states that Sisoye died while eating a banana, but the autopsy confirmed that cause of death was acute myocardial infarction—in other words, a heart attack. The records confirm that his inaugural speech lay on the table in front of him, as well as a vase, a bowl containing two bananas and one orange, and a brief story he had written about his oration, which shows that he had been going over the event in his mind up until his final moments. His only error was that he wrote that I would be sitting in the second row behind the ornately carved column on stage right. I was actually sitting in the front row between Academicians Prežihov and Trepetlika; the latter asked jokingly several times if making people wait was inherent to the human condition or was simply part of our national will toward self-destruction. By then the hall was full and the audience was waiting patiently for Sisoye’s inauguration to begin—but our fellow academician was already dead.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In compiling this text, I used Sisoye’s speech and the notes found in his apartment; I often referred to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, underlined here and there with a yellow pencil, as well as the books that stood neatly ordered in two columns of ten on Sisoye’s desk in his kitchen. I noted that he had been an avid reader of Harry James Cargas, Dion Scott-Kakures, Frederick Ferré, Ronald Miller, and Richard Popkin; my own book on the ethical aspects of aesthetics was also there, among many others.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Now at the end—or is it perhaps the beginning?—I would like to thank my colleagues at the Institute of Strategic Studies, who read my work even at the manuscript stage and made useful suggestions. Without them, this text would not be what it is. I would also like to thank my loving, patient, and incomparable wife Savka Sivakov, who encouraged me to persevere and complete this project. Sincere gratitude to Tacko Najstej in Paskvelija, the monks from the Sveta Petka Monastery, and to Uncle Erdo for lending me his handcart, in which I took our deceased colleague to his grave at such an ungodly hour. And of course many thanks to you as well, because you are paying attention to me as though I exist, though I know I don’t.
TRANSLATED FROM MACEDONIAN BY WILL FIRTH
[LITHUANIA]
DANUT KALINAUSKAIT
Just Things
I am a teacher of Lithuanian language and literature. Recently I asked my senior class to write an essay on the topic of “Things” (the idea was suggested by my son: “All the things around us seem so distant now…it’s as though they no longer exist…”). I wanted them to write about the most common things—an orange, a pair of shoes, a hand towel. The idea was to write about the quiet essence of the things you use every day and surround yourself with, but which you never really pay attention to. Almost all my students, however, wrote about “soshal” inequality. About the things that they would like to own, but couldn’t.
One student wrote the following: “Her daughter-in-law has a salon in the center of Vilnius while her son works at growing company, where of course he’s the director. He has a country home filled with tile and hardwood floors. And her other son has a house with a pool, a sauna, a bar, three dogs, a cat, a chinchilla, an iguana, and the devil knows what else. But all we have is a kitten named Raisin that we found under a bridge.”
Under the Soviets, when the cultural elite talked about spiritual wealth and the state of society in general, they had much to say about this variety of possession—possession of things, possession of wealth. Back then it meant the betrayal of your spiritual values. In articles that professed to analyze “the interaction between literature and contemporary reality,” critics warned of “the increasing danger of our developing a cult of material goods,” noting that there was a real threat that “love of things” might “replace the love of man,” quite commonly turning man into a “slave of things.” “Things are impervious to human warmth,” etc.
Ideologies have changed. The “cult of material goods” has been officially sanctioned, and the “greedy materialist consumer” has been entirely rehabilitated. Only the things themselves remain innocent. As the years go by, one even manages to convince oneself that they are in fact permeable—if you yourself, for whatever reason, haven’t already lost all your own humanity—to human warmth and coldness, to crime and punishment, to this world and the next, to everythi
ng.
I won’t pretend to be ambivalent about “material goods.” I like things. I find them interesting. They are the sowers of discord, but also act as peacemakers—like fungi that, with their long microscopic threads, have managed to interweave themselves into our human interactions. Things are like fragments, which nonetheless can unspool a sense of wholeness. Or else, we feel that wholeness has managed to squeeze itself into one component part. Into some black coat that’s already been reversed at least once and whose shiny lapels, cuffs, and pocket flaps are touched up with a piece of coal before you head off to an important engagement…Things: the signs of fate and all fate’s prophets. Archives or depositories, hiding places or artifacts. Things in the attic unnecessary to anyone, living out their final incarnations: nobody will ever take them anywhere again. Life after life.
It’s quite true that after death, people take up residence in things. When I look in the mirror with the chipped corner, which has a picture of Riga on the other side, or at a jackknife (price: two rubles, ten kopeks), or at a chess piece, the white rook, or at these Peponen pumpkinseed-oil capsules available at any pharmacy, I know—without any recourse to divination—that these are my father. This rosary with finger-worn prayer beads, and a note from a neighbor who was leaving on a trip: “Dogfood in the greenhouse. Wish us luck!” My aunt died during that trip. On my desk, the thorn-apple cocoon emptied of its contents by rain and wind—that’s me when I temporarily “take my leave.” And my parents’ house, which no longer exists. The dyed lock of hair in the jewelry box with the secret bottom is not “a keratinized epidermal skin cell” as the encyclopedia says, but Vilmut.
Best European Fiction 2011 Page 20