by Daša Drndic
Yes, Andreas remembers. The woman has swelled up now.
I’ve retired, says the woman, I don’t work in the shop any more. I’m having an operation on my thyroid, but I have to get back to make sarma for the children.
Then she says, My parrot died.
Maybe it got bored with life, your parrot, says Andreas to the former shop assistant.
It didn’t get bored. It was alone. It had always been alone. It never had a companion, but it had a mirror and used to kiss it. So it wasn’t alone.
What were they thinking, that because of his asthma Andreas Ban would expire on the operating table?
The pulmonologist tells him, You’ve got COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, stop smoking.
COPD has nothing to do with smoking. Parrots don’t smoke, but the blue-and-gold macaw can suffer from COPD too, it has the same difficulties breathing as he, Andreas Ban, does. In one veterinary clinic, in the course of five years they hospitalized twelve blue-and-gold macaws suffering from COPD. This beautiful long-tailed parrot is very sociable and exceptionally intelligent, it can learn to speak and, when it learns to speak and does not feel well, it says, It’s stuffy here, cramped and I can’t breathe. The blue-and-gold macaw is an endangered species. When it develops the unpleasant chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the blue-and-gold macaw can hardly inhale and exhale, it is tormented by hunger for air, its breathing becomes shallow, the skin on its face turns blue and it keeps coughing dryly, squeakily, straining its lungs horribly. Over time, the illness gets worse. It is only when this powerful, tame bird returns to its spacious forests that the blue-and-gold macaw can recover a bit. Even though there, in “the wild,” there is no one to teach it to speak, even though it will never utter a single word.
The day before the operation, Dr. Toffetti asks Andreas Ban into his office and explains what is going to happen. From the top pocket of his white coat, Dr. Toffetti takes a wad of paper torn out of a notebook, scrawled with blue ballpoint. Andreas Ban has already heard it all. Dr. Toffetti had drawn his armpit and his tumor when he had prodded at his breast earlier, and later, when they were setting the date. He made a large dark-blue smudge. While he was speaking, Dr. Toffetti bored his pen into the paper, creating a circle which grew, outgrowing the size of Andreas’s tumor by one centimeter. Now the surgeon looked for a clean piece of paper to continue sketching the course of the operation on Andreas’s tumor. Among the sheets of paper, Andreas notices “his own.”
There it is, he says, that’s my tumor.
Dr. Toffetti raises his eyebrows. Dr. Toffetti explains to Andreas the procedure with the sentinel.
Sentinel, Andreas repeats, the guard.
Dr. Toffetti raises his eyebrows again, a bit higher this time. What shall we do about the cast? he asks.
Andreas says, It hasn’t knitted, another three weeks.
All right, we’ll think of something. The body has a lot of veins.
Andreas likes Dr. Toffetti. He came to him because Dr. Toffetti happened to be in the clinic when he ran into the hospital with the ultrasound picture in his hand, when his doctor friend had telephoned and said, See this man today. He’d heard that some women, who got stuck in a line as he had, went to another well-known surgeon, not Dr. Toffetti, they had not heard of him. But Dr. Toffetti is a big man, calm and relatively young. He does not talk much and he does not smile politely. When he smiles, he lifts the corners of his lips barely perceptibly and blinks slowly, soothingly. Dr. Toffetti has big hands with soft fingertips, which are able, like probes, to feel small tumors, the very smallest. So Andreas Ban abandons himself completely to Dr. Toffetti.
Before he is admitted to hospital, Andreas Ban goes to the theater, he quickly forgets what he sees. He finds theater productions tedious, they are turning into kitsch spectacles with bad acting and acrobatics. No longer able to distinguish good from bad, the audience is whipped up, it loses its capacity to judge, and shallow emotion trumps reason. And so the audience applauds. Bravo! Bravo! The previous winter, for the New Year holiday, Viktor had come and they had gone to a concert, in spite of themselves, Viktor was a theater man. Otherwise, for a week, they cooked and ate, sat and drank, watched films by Peter Greenaway, Quentin Tarantino and Lars von Trier and raked over les temps passés. At that New Year concert the musicians sat on maroon plastic chairs, but as the theater presumably did not have enough maroon plastic chairs, a few wooden chairs were put on the stage, while the women (musicians) were dressed dramatically, each one differently, in long dresses with frills, mostly in combinations of violet and red, which all in all looked alarming. The auditorium, full to bursting with excited people, dolled up, smiling as they clapped in total rapture, gave the event an additional provincial dimension. During intermission, Viktor and Andreas learn that a former male dancer at the theater spends his nights in casinos and his days begging.
Instead of watching the play, the evening before going into hospital Andreas Ban observes with great concentration a plump little old woman with a pretty face and thin hair pulled into a ponytail with a rubber band, the kind used for sealing jars of jam and chutney. The old woman had hooked a large plastic hairclip over the rubber band, a white one, which slipped, because her little ponytail was thin and greasy. Andreas Ban does not dress up for the performance, to someone in the foyer he says, Soon I won’t be able to afford tickets and I won’t have anyone to push me in my wheelchair to the theater. At the end of the performance it is pouring, so from the open cloakroom Andreas Ban borrows someone’s umbrella and calmly leaves the building. It’s windy. The south wind blows the rain wildly in all directions, slapping the sky. Andreas Ban stops and watches a seagull battling with the wind, unable to take off.
Had it not been pouring, he would have sat in the unsightly fenced park right beside the theater, a little park with low-growing shrubs, dwarf trees and gravel paths, a park where by day there is no shade nor quiet nor real greenery, but which passersby visit and sit pointlessly on benches fixed in a circle.
Over the last few years his friends and acquaintances have been dying. Poof — just like that, they vanish. Bunched, they go, one after the other. It is a time for dying and suicide.
BEKIM
Thank you, Andreas, says his Branka every time she meets him.
BOGDAN
His Ksenija, there in Belgrade, was always elegant, she had black hair, very tidily brushed, a distinguished bearing, restrained, although she wasn’t at all restrained, when required Ksenija is very direct, and before they, Ksenija and Bogdan, left Belgrade, Ksenija said to Andreas, Come and see us, we are so isolated, she said at some meeting of Reformists at the Duško Radović theater or perhaps at a meeting of the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative, who knows now, they were excluded because they had understood, too soon according to some, they had understood what was happening, Bogdan had written about it, Andreas remembers everything, everything, what people said, how they behaved, there in Belgrade, from Žika the carpenter and Mića the painter, and the writers, Antonije, Dragoslav, Dušan and Moma, some blinkered writers, foaming at the mouth, but also psychologists, then directors and actors, and so, Ksenija said, Do come, because someone had written a “U” in huge letters on the corridor walls, right up to the door of their apartment, Bogdan comments on it in his book The Cursed Builder, but Andreas Ban knows, he was there, he saw the “U,” in The Cursed Builder is also one of the loveliest love stories Andreas has ever read, it’s called “Les nuits d’octobre,” when an old man writes about love, he does so with a lot of terrible, powerful, liberated passion. He still has to look for the grave of Bogdan’s grandfather in Delnice, that is what Bogdan told him the last time he was in Vienna, Try to find that grave, he said, it won’t be hard, it’s a grave with the headstone in Cyrillic, he said, if it hasn’t been removed. By chance (really?), at that time Andreas Ban is living in Vienna at 11 Davidgasse and Bogdan and Ksenija, now only Ksenija, at number 9 Davidg
asse, in the 10th district, a working-class, peripheral district, as more or less all of them are now, among peripheral people who talk with an ease that evokes the bliss of a dream followed by a dangerous uneven beating of the heart, if that is medically possible.
ZAGA
Buy me the latest crosswords. And a roll.
TOM
JASENKA
BOŽIDAR
BRANIMIR
JOŠKO
NELA
it’s terribly aggressive, it metastasizes quickly, I can hear its hoofbeats scraping over the dry earth: da-dum, da-dum!
RUBEN
he has radiation treatment at the same time as Andreas, in 2008, when Andreas Ban is thinking mostly about his breast and has no idea that Ruben is ill, because there is no chance of meeting him anywhere, around the hospital, in the street at least, because their streets diverge along distant meridians, there is no possibility of asking anyone, What’s up with Ruben, where’s Ruben? There are no friends to tell Andreas, Ruben’s ill, out of that group of schoolmates, no one visits this country, and it is only three years later, in 2011, that Andreas discovers that Ruben is no more. Ruben Han, a world expert in nuclear medicine, he dealt mainly with the prevention of disorders caused by iodine deficiency, so when Chernobyl happened, Andreas brought four-year-old Leo to him with the question, How can we protect him? Chernobyl is still emitting and Leo is little, really close to the earth, in Pazin they pick dandelions in the park and Ban smiles, Shall I make you a wreath like a king? he gathers dandelions and breathes in particles that tremble invisibly on the tiny flower suns, and he says, Look, little broken suns have fallen onto the park.
KLAJA
from Rovinj he returns to Amsterdam and leaves his glasses on Andreas’s table.
MARKO
and his aunt are killed in Srebrenica. Marko sells hot dogs from a cart on the streets of Toronto because he has no one to whom he can offer his skills in applied linguistics, in psycholinguistics, so he brings hot dogs, together with small bags of fine oriental teas, to him, Andreas Ban, who is displaced in Toronto too. The Bosnian refugee Marko leaves Canada because selling hot dogs prevents him from completing his doctorate. He goes to Budapest, where he works as an editor, then returns to Belgrade and dies aged thirty-five. Not from drugs, which he had given up, but from kidney failure. In his computer, Andreas Ban keeps his, Marko’s, published and unpublished works.
He is still alive, Andreas Ban.
The night before the operation, Andreas Ban calls Leo in Zürich. Leo lets out a bloodcurdling cry and arrives early the following morning.
That night Andreas Ban is visited by miniature people resembling statues, small people in various poses, sitting, lying, running, with legs outspread, with open arms, kneeling, jumping, crawling, each person wrapped in a tiny cellophane packet tied at the top with a red ribbon. Like children’s gifts, lead figurines fall from above interminably, burying Andreas Ban.
God, where can I go, he asks, I’ll suffocate, he says.
All the patients for the next day’s operations have been admitted and registered, then distributed around the wards. That takes five to six hours. It’s a sunny April day. Early afternoon. The doctors leave, the nurses walk around, some are medical nuns, they skate and float. The majority of the patients jump into their pajamas, put on clean socks, all the women wear white socks, they drag their slippered feet around, some cruise the corridors mindlessly, some lie down, stiffen and gaze straight ahead, exhausted. The women wear new housecoats in pastel shades, long, made of velour or terry cloth, they roam around. It looks frightening. Andreas Ban puts on a tracksuit and goes into the hospital garden. There he walks and smokes.
One of the women is about to have both breasts removed. They’re cutting both of mine off, she says, looking out of the hall window. She is calm. There are ten men in Andreas’s ward. All cancer. Testes, prostate, throat, lung — that man can hardly breathe, he keeps coughing, hacking. You can get medication to stop smoking, Bruno writes to Andreas from Budapest, it’s not based on nicotine, he writes, I tried it and for me it worked, only I started smoking again. The medication is very expensive, but it’s worth trying, writes Bruno from Budapest. It’s called Champix. Should he tell the man who’s coughing? The one who will have half his lung cut out tomorrow? Four years later, still smoking, Andreas Ban reads that Champix has been withdrawn from sale because it has serious side effects: anxiety, depression, suicide.
Viktor comes, he brings cakes. Andreas and Viktor eat cakes with their fingers in the hospital garden, chocolate cakes, with cream. They break out of the hospital complex and go to a nearby café. There they sit and talk about nothing in particular, as though nothing was happening. Viktor has seven and a half acres of lavender, at thirty-six hundred feet above sea level. I’ve been harvesting, he says, we made bouquets and sold them. Viktor had also planted rosemary and thyme, ginger and chives and Italian basil. Viktor likes gardening, he had tired himself singing, his voice had given out. Viktor and Andreas know each other from their past life. They left Belgrade at roughly the same time, twenty years earlier. Viktor is now the closest friend Andreas has in the little town. Viktor did not get by. The opera theater is small, they did not need his singing, his singing stood out, Viktor’s singing was first class, world class, so Viktor performed as a guest artist in Vienna, a bit in Venice and Trieste, a bit in Berlin. Then he gave up, age and weariness got into his vocal chords, dripped into his lungs, constricted his windpipe. So Viktor starts breeding pedigree dogs, but that fails. Now he lives in a village in Istria, checks on his olive trees and plants potatoes. He looks well. He has pink cheeks and cracked hands.
When Andreas Ban returns to his ward, everyone is already asleep. Some have taken out their teeth and their mouths are puckered like an asshole, while others gape like corpses. One man is sleeping with a thick black wig on that has slipped to one side and covers half his face. He had been given a course of chemotherapy to reduce the size of his tumor, then they decided to operate. Another has been waiting for his operation for two weeks now, guarding his bed. His badly washed socks and a small yellow towel are steaming on the radiator. On all the bedside cabinets stand bottles of beet and carrot juice. Oncological patients believe that beet and carrot juice can save them. And soy. As well as green and red vegetables. So they pour those juices down their throats and stuff themselves with broccoli and tomatoes. They also believe, and the sicker they are, the more fanatically, that white foods are poisonous, very harmful, so they don’t consume them, they don’t consume sugar, flour, sweets, milk or soft cheese and then they calm down, they believe they are, sort of, saved.
What keeps my mother going most is praying to the Holy Virgin in our little village chapel, the man in the drugstore says after blowing four hundred euros on all kinds of shiitake, maitake and reishi in various aggregate states, on powders, tablets, Beta-Glucan, Bio Bran and spirulina and an extract of goat’s milk. He, Andreas Ban, only takes vitamin tablets, vitamins are antioxidants, C, A, E and selenium, to counteract the impurities that attack him.
So Andreas Ban goes into his hospital ward. The sleepers, to a man, look old and worn, shabby. In the weak fluorescent light coming from the hallway, they look like huge dummies, des poupées gargantuesques, giant puppets, marionettes, limp rag dolls — bluish rigid corpses in a storeroom of lifeless, rejected figures — mannequins.
Andreas Ban cannot lie down, he does not want to become an exhibit in that grotesque display of rejected human flesh. So, like a visitor to some long-ago exhibition of degenerate art, he sets off to peer into the wards. Everywhere he finds immobile figures in clean striped pajamas, figures on which a procedure had already been carried out or was about to be. Processed bodies, deadened. Manipulated bodies, some visibly, others invisibly deformed, completely surreal, or perhaps that’s only how it seems to him, Andreas Ban. Perhaps those flickering images are little fata morganas, You have a vivid imagi
nation, the doctors tell him when he describes his vision of his damaged internal organs. Ward after ward, it is as though he is looking at the injured on a battlefield, mutilated, crippled, as though he is in a concentration camp where every incarcerated being that by faith, ideas or blood does not conform to the mystical German (or Croatian) spirit, rural, moral and ennobled by ancient wisdom, is sadistically mutilated. Are these people of weakened, damaged egos, who seek salvation in the reconstruction of their bodies, like those who expose themselves to plastic surgery, to implants, or are they simply the victims of an aggressive notion of the purity of the race? No matter. That hospital routine of sleep at nine, lights out, of forced waking at six, the patients’ acceptance of obedience, collective bathrooms with a rotten, damp wooden grid under the shower and chipped ceramic tiles, the lack of toilet paper, the severity of the hospital staff, the commanding tone, especially from the nurses, the order, all this oppresses Andreas Ban before the next day’s operation and he is vaguely aware of the sanctions of the powerful over even the slightest creative, rebellious chaos, and says, I’m trapped.
Andreas Ban walks through the hospital hallways, surrounded by captive, dysfunctional, mutilated humanoids. The healthy are outside, although their bodies are merely a shield, a prosthesis for supporting distorted images of their own organism, of the damaged, rickety construction of their ego. And so, after the operation, Andreas Ban obsessively observes pedestrians, the audience at meetings, performances, matches, parades, and endeavors to grasp how many of them are carrying lethal cells, small or large tumors with numerous visible or invisible branches, without any inkling; who are the marked people walking around, eating, sleeping, crying, kissing and fighting in the company of living cells clustered in little balls that glide through their bloodstreams or sway in their brains, in their lungs, in their livers, in their testes, ovaries, bones, in their pancreases, while they know it, while they do not know it.