by Daša Drndic
He does not buy kaymak in Belgrade then, in 2010, others from the group — who do not live in Serbia — do, they take it home, to Croatia. Unfounded adoration with no ties.
Within himself Andreas Ban carries layers and layers of Belgrade. From the nursery school in ulica Užička, the primary school with the mustachioed teacher Branka who won’t let him write with his left hand (though he does) and the First Belgrade Grammar School and university, publishers and editorial boards, dentists and doctors, psychologists, painters and sculptors, architects and plumbers. To Ksenija Anastijević with whom he recently had a painful conversation after Bogdan Bogdanović died. Four years earlier, in Vienna, Bogdan asks Leo, How do you, young man, feel about Romanticism?
No one has ever talked with me so wisely, says Leo.
Thirty-eight years. And yet.
The ruins of the Headquarters continue to embellish ulica Kneza Miloša. But the statue of Boris Kidrič is no longer there. It was an enormous statue, on the plateau below ulica Narodnog fronta (National Front Street), near the building in which Marijetka Kidrič lived, she looked extraordinarily like her father. Marijetka Kidrič is no longer in Belgrade either. When Belgrade was shelled, Erik called and asked how the Croats were reacting.
No how, he had said. They’re not dancing.
Erik said, It’s terrible in Belgrade.
Is there electricity, is there water, is there food? Andreas asks Erik. He asks him whether he knows how long the siege of Sarajevo lasted. Does he know that during the winter the people of Sarajevo did their business in plastic bags, that the contents would first freeze and then, with the coming of spring, thaw. When Vukovar fell, Erik had said, So what, fuck ’em all. Who? In Rambouillet, before what a small bombardment, Milošević & Co. had tapped at the keys of a piano and ordered bottles of expensive wine while the world waited. One ought to forget.
He rarely used the wrong word for lightbulb. At a Belgrade market, in 1991, he had asked for a light bulb in Croatian. The stall-holder told him, Piss off!
Andreas Ban is not Marlene Dietrich. He doesn’t have beautiful legs and he is still alive. He has nowhere to return to. He has nowhere to put down roots. What remains is his language. A mishmash of languages which exclude him, with which he excludes himself. Which “betray” him, with which he “betrays” himself.
New people are coming, with shorter memories. Perhaps the air will blow with fewer gap-toothed emotions. But for Andreas Ban that is small consolation. Too late. The train left the station. And under it, under that train, he now lies motionless. Crushed.
Even so, Belgrade was done with somehow. After that last visit, Andreas Ban said to his sister, Belgrade’s no longer in my dreams. For twenty years I’ve been dreaming of Belgrade, now I’ve stopped. It seems I’m finally done with Belgrade. And now, what will Andreas Ban dream about? What?
* * *
* Branislav “Brana” Crnčević (1933–2011) was a well-known Serbian writer and politician, and during Milošević’s rule a hard-core nationalist.
Andreas Ban does not have a column in any newspaper, no one has offered nor does he ask. He can no longer ask, he will not plead, no. While he had no work (five years), he asked the local paper if he could write reviews, scholarly or literary, anything, the editors kept changing, but the reply was always the same: The section’s full. Eventually, one of the cultural editors suggested, as a magnanimous gesture to Andreas Ban, that he write digests of new books, in fact copy the blurbs from the jackets, which seemed pointless. So Andreas Ban said, No, thank you.
It’s tedious to think about it all, about the impenetrable silences that grip the ribcage and stop the breath, even his characters speak about that, how many times must he go over those facts, and for whom? Literature and life are full of human trash and debris. At first Andreas Ban feeds on those slaps in the face, he contemplates his sullen expression in the solitude of his bathroom, and he says, I give up. He no longer examines himself, he’s forgotten what he looks like. To start with, when he first got here, he sold paint and varnish for a chemical company, but the company soon went bust. Then he wrote speeches for the mayor (insultingly meager payment), he translated the itineraries of foreign delegations: reception, luncheon at three p.m., evening visit to the bay, formal dinner; he worked occasionally in a school as a psychologist, then they told him, We don’t need a psychologist, our children are healthy; over the summer he took little groups of tourists around Istria, he looked for any kind of full-time job, typing in an office, at least that, he asked in the 1990s, but was told, No way, you’re overqualified. Back then, Andreas Ban was still angry, as they say — defending his integrity of which all that was left was a thick splotch like melted chocolate or smeared shit. In the beginning he would not give in, he would not be crucified on his own cross, nailed to his own body, as a piercing penetrates the tongue, nose, navel, penis or clitoris. He would not permit their story to be etched onto his skin, to let himself be branded with some identity from over there, constricted, local, provincial. Just one. He wanted, like a schizophrenic, to roam through his own lives, free.
And now, again.
It’s not that Andreas is completely inert, it’s not that he does not take steps, tiny steps admittedly, quiet steps, let’s say he asks in a dignified way, but nevertheless he asks, then he stops. As twenty years earlier, he goes again to the mayor and says, I have nothing to live on, the same old story, only the mayor is different. He has meetings with advisers to the president of the state, with ministers, with country councilors, with newspaper proprietors, he presents them with his books, award-winning and translated, while they shake their heads and lower their gaze. In Istria they tell him, You’re not from Istria, in Zagreb they tell him, There are problems here, in this little town they don’t say anything, they scribble in their notebooks and can hardly wait for him to leave. Andreas Ban visits all these people but never again, and so his little tale ends “not with a bang but a whimper” and he now watches his present slipping away from him, crawling, sliding to the office counter where they give him his free annual bus pass to all four zones, which he does not want to use, which he will never use. No one is going to help you, Angela had told him bluntly, Give it a rest, she said. The only person to stand upright was the colorful publisher from a small Croatian town who said, I’m sending you a book to translate. And, for a moment, as if gathering up scattered seeds with both hands, Andreas put his dispersed life back together.
Some cockatoos with behavioral problems get depressed if their surroundings are forcibly changed and start plucking out their feathers, usually from their breasts — because that is presumably where the weight oppresses them the most. Some cockatoos also peck at their legs until they bleed, piercing holes in them. One bird chewed off its claw and died of blood loss. To prevent further self-harm in their pets, psychiatrists recommend that their owners treat them with sedatives and tie a stiff collar around their necks to immobilize their heads.
And now this sentinel, this nodule, this invasive tumor like a long line cast into his innards, has shaken everything up. It sends his brain little bubbles of memory that then burst. The images blur, double, move out of focus, tremble as if in flames.
A body like a town.
A body like a citadel, a tower, a fortress. Under siege.
There are sentinel tablets for dogs (and cats), given to dogs (and cats) once a month to protect them from heartworms (Dirofilarije immitis), from parasites carried by mosquitoes, which settle in the right-hand side of a dog or cat’s heart and in their lung arteries, and the animals quickly tire, they breathe heavily, they cough, lose weight, stagger, get fluid swellings in their rear extremities. Enough! Andreas Ban is like a dog, like a sick dog. Perhaps that’s why he has a growing tenderness toward dogs, toward small creatures in general, especially birds.
A sentinel is a lymph nodule. A guard before the web of lymph nodes, the keeper of the door of the armpit, the first si
te where metastases settle, protecting the other lymph nodes from attack, until it runs out of energy. A biopsy of the sentinel (under anesthetic) reveals whether the tumor has emerged from its case and begun to branch out. Thus, if the sentinel has been seized, the whole web of lymph nodes is removed, if the sentinel is found to be clean, only the tumor is removed, but then the sentinel is no longer there, it has been sacrificed, slain, cut up, chopped, sliced into thin sections, examined and discarded. This makes Andreas Ban think of the people who set fire to themselves in the name of some imaginary better tomorrow, as Jan Palach did, and people first stopped to look, then went on their way.
So, the surgeon Toffetti looks for a free slot for the operation, operations are carried out on Thursdays, and Thursdays are booked up as far as the eye can see, two months ahead. Andreas Ban will not be able to carry his tumor around for that long, he will break, he will listen to it waking up, stretching, spreading out its tentacles, he will go mad but it’s the wrong moment, he has some jobs to attend to, to complete. For the first time in his life, Andreas Ban asks for help, which makes his shoulders sag under the weight of shame. To the director of the university (otherwise a medical doctor, so thank God he doesn’t have to lay out the details, nor modulate his voice into helplessness), he says, Find me a Thursday not too far off. Two weeks later the surgeon Toffetti says, We’ve fitted you in.
In the meantime, I’d like to go to Leipzig, says Andreas Ban.
Go, says surgeon Toffetti. And when you come back, get that cast off your right arm, he says, I need that arm for the anesthetic.
In Leipzig, the pain in his plastered arm does not stop. Andreas Ban swallows three boxes of painkillers, in vain. The cast is increasingly heavy, it has come loose, it moves around, sliding to the tips of his fingers, and Andreas acquires the tic of pushing it back up to his elbow. When he returns from Leipzig, Andreas Ban goes to Lovran. There Dr. Salomon exclaims, What have they done to you? Your hand is ruined. We’ll have to break every bone that’s grown together. Reposition your wrist. Dr. Salomon vividly prophesies the future of Andreas’s hand. He says, Your hand will be completely out of commission unless we break the large and small bones that have grown back together crooked. He says, Otherwise you won’t be able to lift anything with that hand, not even an empty ashtray. And he also says, If we don’t break it, your hand will be left as crooked as when you twisted it in your fall, at an angle of forty-five degrees, which would have looked especially frightening, completely crippled.
Andreas Ban is placed on a table and his arm is pulled into a sort of inquisitorial torture machine. A groove for each finger. They first stretch it with a winch, separating the hand and each of the fingers from their joints. Then they begin winding, or rather unwinding it. Andreas Ban lies on Kafka’s torture machine dreamed up for his tender letters to Milena Jesenska, and in that terrifying sketch sees himself:
There are four posts, with poles running through the two middle posts to which the “delinquent’s” hands are fastened; poles for the feet are run through the two posts on the outside. Once the man is thus secured, the poles are slowly pushed outwards until the man is torn apart in the middle. The inventor is leaning against the column with his arms and legs crossed, putting on airs as if the whole thing were his original invention, whereas all he really did was watch the butcher in front of his shop, drawing out a disemboweled pig.
Andreas Ban was rent apart. He had disintegrated, his integrity was shattered.
Dr. Salomon is pleased. I’ve reduced the angle from minus forty-five degrees to minus fifteen, he said. And added, I thought you were going to pass out. Go home and waggle your fingers, says Dr. Salomon. (That evening Andreas Ban’s fingers turned completely black and swelled up like fresh blood sausages, it was impossible to move them.) Your arm will remain somewhat crooked, Dr. Salomon said, but in a couple of years we’ll be able to break it again, under full anesthetic.
Then Eliot sprang up. He stood in front of Andreas Ban and said, Do not disturb the universe. He said, In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse, and then what? I have known them all already, known them all, he repeated, have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons, I know the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room . . .
Enough, Eliot, says Andreas Ban. Get lost.
But Eliot scampers after Andreas Ban, he talks, and talks, and talks, increasingly loudly, increasingly loudly, he shouts, Listen, I no longer dare disturb the universe, I am sprawling, pinned and wriggling on the wall, how then can I begin publicly to spit out all the butt ends of my days and ways, how?
Andreas Ban leaves the orthopedic hospital. I won’t write any more, he says.
Andreas Ban will have to go for the operation on the small tumor on his left breast, in a week’s time now, with a cast on his arm.
He goes for all the preoperative tests: blood count, pulmonologist, internist, ECG, anesthetist. There are lines everywhere, he waits everywhere, wastes time, everywhere the nurses tell the patients, Sit here, sit there, sit, don’t talk, as though the patients were dogs, and the patients, as though they were dogs, are obedient, they sit and for a moment are silent. Otherwise, in the waiting rooms, they converse, they chatter, babble, grow close, the moment they leave the clinic they are strangers. Most patients stand, there aren’t enough plastic chairs in the waiting rooms, and besides, the clinic chairs are uncomfortable, they are joined together with steel rods so the patients don’t pull them out and make a mess, so they don’t make themselves too comfortable, so they don’t keep coming back, which otherwise patients do, they come, regularly, ever more frequently, they love going to doctors. The patients are tense, anxious, they twist around, they wriggle and frequently sigh. They babble. They have nothing to focus on but their fear. Of course, in waiting rooms no one ever reads, because in waiting rooms it’s dark and because the people waiting are frozen with uncertainty, they are in suspense, and besides, people don’t read, even on intercity bus journeys which can last from two to twenty hours, few people read, especially at night, though in buses there are those little lights above the head, designed specifically for reading. As soon as it gets dark, even in winter when it gets dark by six, maybe even by five, the passengers sprawl like hens and fall asleep. Or they peck at their mobiles, or converse through those little devices, mostly spewing nonsense, sometimes unimaginably loudly. So, in clinics, the waiting people abandon themselves to time which devours them. They leave the hospitals or polyclinics worm-eaten, amorphous. Andreas Ban follows the conversation of two women.
Do we know each other? asks one. Your face looks familiar, it rings a bell, she says.
This business with bells ringing comes from various TV quiz shows in which the contestants always hear ringing when they don’t know the answer and mostly they don’t.
Didn’t you work at the market, asks the woman with many eight-carat gold rings on her fingers. I used to work at the market.
Andreas Ban feels his stomach suddenly clench.
Andreas thinks about working at the market when he retires, he’ll see what can be done.
Yes, I used to work at the market, says the second woman, I sold fruit and vegetables.
In Crikvenica?
Yes.
I sold clothing. Now I don’t sell any more, it’s not worth it. I work in Italy.
You look after old people?
Old people have too much skin. Like mastiffs. Their eyelids are thick and their eyes sunken. Their upper lip thin, their ear lobes long, and their skeleton fragile. Their vertebrae degenerate, their spine bends. The diameter of men’s chests can be reduced by as much as four inches, women’s by six. The shoulders narrow, the pelvis broadens. The thorax takes on a sagittal aspect, especially with women. The muscles atrophy, the joints lose mobility, osteoporosis takes hold, there are frequent breakages.
Excuse me?
What do you do in Italy?
I look after old people.
I don’t sell fruit and vegetables either.
On his other side, Andreas hears one woman say to another, She keeps dying and dying, but never does, fuck her.
Then his name is called and he goes in. The anesthetist asks
him, Do you by any chance have asthma? Andreas says, Yes.
Go at once to the pulmonologist, says the anesthetist. Then come back so I can determine whether you can have the operation.
The pulmonologist is in another hospital, on the other side of town. There they take X-rays of Andreas Ban’s lungs, then Andreas Ban waits for three hours for the image of his lungs to fly by computer from the first floor to the fourth where the pulmonologist’s office is. They take another blood sample, he blows into little tubes so they can assess the capacity of his lungs, they are surprised, You have great capacity, they say. Swimmers usually have great capacity and a big heart, Andreas knows that, but says nothing. No sign of the pulmonologist, five people are waiting for him, it is late afternoon, this is the morning residue, leftovers, dreg-patients. Andreas Ban knocks on the door of the doctor’s office and asks, Shall we get on with it? The pulmonologist is eating a dry roll, crumbs fall onto his chest, onto his white doctor’s coat. The pulmonologist is astounded by Andreas’s intrusion into his privacy but says nothing. The pulmonologist thinks he is God. A plump woman comes up to Andreas, she is also waiting for someone, for something. You seem familiar, says the plump woman. I’m from Rovinj, she says. I used to sell bread and milk at the top of ulica Švalbina.