by Daša Drndic
However, the people outside, the ones with healthy young bodies, unmarked, have no time, have no cause to long for bodily contact, because they are integrated, because their lives flow, they do not pause, they do not stop. While a sick body is condemned to suffer to its corporeal limits, violence upon violence. A clean body as opposed to a rejected body. What are the limits of a person’s control over his own sick corpus? The oncologists decide on chemotherapy for Andreas Ban, in the best case just radiation, they will prescribe antihormone medication, recommend regular ultrasound monitoring of the organs which could be reached by metastases, at first three-monthly then six-monthly blood tests and analysis of blood markers, an army of strangers will crowd around him, fiddling with his organs, his erythrocytes and leukocytes, peering at his liver, listening to his breathing, touching him, palpating him here and there, in his groin, and mostly near his collarbone to see whether any kind of tumor has appeared on his lungs, which he, Andreas Ban, would find particularly annoying, because there, near her collarbone, his mother had felt a growth and said, You see, these are metastases on the lungs, so now whenever doctors’ fingers approach his neck, Andreas Ban says, Don’t, I check myself.
What is left for him? He will after all form an alliance with the doctors, cooperate with machines, with that Oncor and Mevatron, he will hand his body over to others, share its functions with others, entirely rationally, entirely in the spirit of Western civilization which treasures control. He will pack away his emotions, because emotions blur the vision, fog the perception, he is fed up with emotions in everyday life, he is fed up with sentiment in literature, in film, in empty logorrheic speech, he is sick of the diluted weepiness that threatens to drown the brain in formaldehyde, he has had enough of life as advertised.
Andreas looks at the pile of sleeping bodies and sees undressed, lifeless dolls. And in the morning, when he wakes up, when they are shaken awake to start moving around, they will go on being just that, dysfunctional machines constructed of mechanical, poorly wired moving parts.
So he says, disgusted,
Ça me fait pisser.
Since she was eight years old, Andreas Ban’s mother had borne a huge scar on the calf of her left leg, brownish skin with no pigmentation. Andreas’s mother Marisa acquired that large burn trying to save a favorite doll that had caught fire, the rag doll had human hair which her father, Andreas Ban’s grandfather, arranged on its head, the grandfather Andreas Ban had never met because this grandfather of his, otherwise a wigmaker with a leather-bound collection of Goethe and Schiller in the original, was from 1923 until his death a member of the Austrian Communist Party and because he died in Zagreb in 1943. Afterward, Andreas’s mother was put into a plaster trough because of the burn and broken bones and lay there, rigid and misshapen, with twisted, turned-out extremities like a Bellmer Puppe, immobilized for six months.
In ward 42 one man’s arm has slipped off the bed and is hanging to the floor, one of his legs is in a cast, hooked up to a small swing installed at the foot of the bed. In the corridor, on a white bench, propped up with pillows, the woman who will have both breasts cut off has nestled down and does not stir. She looks like an art installation. Andreas Ban touches her shoulder to see whether she’s alive. I can’t sleep, the lady says, all the women in the ward are snoring. In the ward where the women are snoring, one is sleeping naked but she is not naked, she is swathed in bandages, mostly around her belly, they must have dug, chopped, rummaged, removed something down there, her breasts flattened so she appears to have none. Another is breathing deeply and clicking her dentures which she has forgotten to put into a glass, tkk — pause, tkk, pause, tkk, tkk. In ward 39, a man has a tube attached to his penis that connects to a plastic bottle at the edge of the bed, the bottle is half-full of brown liquid. In the same ward another man has tubes sticking out of his nose, and tubes attached to his veins into which some solution is dripping from a bottle on a stand. In the women’s ward at the other end of the corridor, one woman has her head in bandages, stained with congealed blood, maybe they have been rooting around in her brain and when she wakes up she will no longer be herself; another has her chest bandaged to her waist, on her left side a swelling can be made out, her right side is flat, they’ve probably chopped off her right breast, people don’t die that quickly, Dr. Toffetti had said, There are women who won’t go under the knife and drag their breast tumor around for ten years until the breast rots and falls off on its own. No one is awake. Or they are pretending to be asleep. But in ward 47, Andreas Ban finds one man who is not asleep. I’ve shat myself, he says. Call a nurse. The corridors are filled with wheelchairs. Andreas Ban imagines how crowded it will be in the morning when invalids, cripples, set off for walks, milling cheerfully around.
Dolls, Andreas’s obsession, Andreas’s weakness and longing. He buys a rag doll for two-year-old Leo and draws a fat red heart on its chest. Now, twenty-eight years later, Leo’s doll is torn at the seams, but the heart is still there. All the dolls he comes across, in life and beyond, mirror old stories, Andreas Ban knows that, stories of sexuality and birth, of patriarchy, tales of men and women, hidden tales, buried and uncovered, sometimes dangerous, fascist, cruel and incomprehensible tales. But he cannot think about that now, before the operation, although all kinds of images dart before his eyes, in the sterile, clinical semidarkness. Was it Adorno or Horkheimer who wrote that Nazis see the body as a moving articulated mechanism, a skeleton covered in flesh. Like armor. That Nazis extol the body above all else, the splendid superhuman male muscular body in movement, oiled for the photograph, and the supple female body leaping, also naked. And he says, Adorno or Horkheimer, or both, that these godlike gymnasts are inclined to kill, just as lovers of nature are often hunters. That fascist sculpted body (fitness clubs, gyms) makes the other body, the body of the other, weak, ugly, decadent, undesirable. The “potent” body is a defense against everything fragmentary, noncompact, fluid and elusive, so, because it is powerful, the protected body annihilates, alienates and destroys everything that is broken.
Oh, from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the present day, deviant artists have been carrying out all kinds of experiments on mannequins, to the irritation of ideologues and the propagandists of the Aryan body and spirit. There are bald dolls, dolls wearing thick nylon wigs; headless dolls, whose skulls roll at their feet; dolls covered with lettuce leaves over which crawl three hundred edible Burgundy snails, those bisexual gastropods which are capable of crossing a razor blade unharmed; mannequins with dislocated limbs, with glass eyes or with no eyes at all, with a penis instead of a nose, a vagina instead of a mouth, with protective goggles on the snout of a shark; hermaphrodite mannequins with the torso of a woman and the head of a man with a bearded face, like Dali’s “sexy lady” Christopher Columbus on which is written I’ll be back. That “I’ll be back” will echo through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ominously, not reaching deaf ears, reverberating unheard. There are hybrid mannequins, Siamese twins joined with horror; monstrously dressed or half-naked little girls in provocative poses with innocent white socks and patent leather shoes on their feet; there are soldiers, war cripples (Kriegskrüppel); female mannequins with a blindfold over their eyes, lacking one or both arms, with several limbs or without any, some with two torsos, with two pelvises and four breasts, dressed in men’s jackets, wearing men’s shoes; women with little green lobsters scattered over their naked bodies; women with mustaches, les mannequins moustachés, wrapped in wire (behind the wire); and ones that shed crystal tears; there are hidden dolls, covered in transparent, ethereal veils, and Masson’s beautiful doll, one of Andreas’s favorites, its head stuck in a wooden birdcage, with a band over its mouth from which a pansy hangs, silent, silenced, in a cage, with a narrow red ribbon concealing its sex and with little stuffed birds in its armpit.
All these dolls, all these mannequins can be dismembered, parts of their bodies moved around, swapped over, discarded or
multiplied, so that it is no longer clear whether they are male or female dolls or at the same time both male and female dolls, like some people. Ah, all those “real” dolls under the noses of the blind, so different from today’s living (Nazi) dolls which propagate the Aryan norm, that magnificent, dangerous kitsch. A whole disturbing, warning world of phantoms, object-beings that come to life, that caution, and to which, Andreas Ban senses, he himself belongs, deformed, dislocated, with his arm in plaster, his hand twisted, his spine crooked, with damaged lungs and myopic eyes, lame, and soon with a torn-up breast. A well-known mannequin, a phantom with no voice, no eyes and no face sometimes visits Andreas Ban, both in his sleep and when he’s awake, and it is with him now, gliding behind him along the hospital corridors, and Andreas Ban says, Maybe that’s me, a total mess, ever closer to death. Yes, Andreas Ban, in fragments, in rags with which he is trying to cobble together a whole.
Then, those books of his, Andreas’s, in which he endeavors somehow, perhaps feebly, with firm, black ribbons, to tie the idea of blood and soil to the present day, as if to tighten a terrifying corset in which it is hard to breathe, those books of his have begun to annoy their readers. But this too is one of Andreas Ban’s diseases which he does not know how to cure, because the attacks, although they come in waves, do not wane, after a brief remission, the symptoms return and Andreas’s immunity weakens. People write to him, people, uninvited, with no provocation, tell him their old yellowed stories, in case he (oh, the irony), the psychologist Andreas Ban, might show them a little passageway to tranquility.
Andreas Ban looks at what he has packed and is surprised: people usually buy new things for a hospital stay, new socks, new pajamas, new dressing gowns, new toothbrushes, new underwear, new soap, new slippers, as though intending to display their tidiness, their orderliness, the order that reigns in their disordered, disintegrating bodies, as though they will emerge from the hospital reborn, remade, repaired, new. Andreas brings everything old, flawed; a washed-out tracksuit with its right pocket coming off and legs covered in cigarette burns, Leo’s alarm clock with no hands, a clock with its numbers rubbed off on which time stands still, on which there is no time. He brings thin slabs of black chocolate with 80 percent cocoa, he brings Marina Tsvetaeva (in English) and a few pieces of music which make him feel stylish. He then arranges all those elusive scraps of desiccated dreams, illusions of polish and the sublime on the cabinet beside his bed.
Not long ago Andreas Ban read a manifesto by the master of street graffiti, the subversive enfant terrible of the contemporary art world, the puzzling Banksy enamored of rats of which he says, They are everywhere, they attack from all sides, the lowest levels have them, the highest levels have them, Banksy whom the obedient and correct, the categorized and sterilized Aryanized robots call a dangerous antisocial vandal. In that manifesto Banksy quotes a section from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin who was, in 1945, among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen:
Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen.
It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. Early on, one had to get used to the idea that the individual did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day went on dying for weeks before anything we did would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.
Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.
It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though there may be no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish I could discover who did it, it was an act of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on their arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
It is late. A nurse appears and says to Andreas Ban, Go at once and take a shower, put on your pajamas and get into bed. Andreas Ban says, No. Tomorrow. I’ll do all that tomorrow. Standing in the corridor, Andreas Ban eats a cold chicken leg that was brought that morning, for lunch. The nurse gives him a suppository, Put this in to clean out your bowels, she says. It is not clear to him why he should clean out his bowels, his digestion is in order, and the bowels are a long way from his armpit and breast, the surgeons will not go anywhere near his bowels. He puts in the little suppository and it rips his guts. Till they bleed.
A Bedtime Story — Bambole senza guerre
Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Italy, there lived a man by the name of Peppino Russo. When war broke out, Peppino Russo joined the Resistance Movement and set out, gun in hand, to fight the Fascists and Nazis who were oppressing his people and his homeland. One night, with a group of his co-fighters, Partisans, Peppino Russo arrived in a small mountain village after a terrible massacre carried out by enemy troops that slaughtered all its inhabitants and burned down their houses. But in a hollow full of corpses, Peppino Russo caught sight of a little girl whose wide-open eyes showed signs of life. He took the little girl in his arms, carried her to his home and looked after her. When the child grew up, she and Peppino Russo became man and wife. The years passed. One New Year’s night, as was the custom, on a square in Rome people burned old, worn-out, no longer usable objects. Among the rubbish Peppino Russo caught sight of a doll with wide-open eyes. It reminded him of the little girl he found in the hollow, among the corpses in the burned-out mountain village. Peppino Russo pulled the doll from the flames, returned to his little town and hung the doll on the fence in front of his house. Then something in him clicked. Peppino Russo set off in search of broken dolls, first in Rome, then throughout the whole of Italy. Many years later, in the foothills of Monte Maria, the highest hill in the environs of Rome, a field of two and a half acres stretched out, covered with more than a hundred thousand damaged dolls. In 1983, traveling through Italy, the Russian photographer and director Valeriy Sirovsky, coming across Peppino’s graveyard of discarded dolls, spent two days photographing it, taking more than seven hundred photos which he later exhibited in Moscow. It was a very moving exhibition. At the exhibition, one visitor declared, The hecatombs of deformed dolls — with no eyes, with no arms or legs — are horribly reminiscent of photographs from the Second World War and the concentration camps. And Rilke said, Inside, a doll is empty, it emits a chilling silence.
Peppino Russo died at the beginning of the 1990s. His wife sold the land and a bulldozer obliterated the collection. And Valeriy Sirovsky’s assemblage of photographs also ceased to exist long ago.
When Andreas Ban was living for a short time in Zagreb in the mid-1950s, at his grandmother’s house, 24 Medvedgradska, the street was dilapidated and impoverished. Small one-story houses without plumbing, with taps in muddy courtyards and
little craftsmen’s workshops, strung in a gray, sfumato, on the edge of the town center. At number 24 there also lived disheveled, crazy Klementina, her feet wrapped in dirty rags, who shouted from the balcony to passersby, Fuck me, fuck me, now! In her arms, crazy Klementina rocked a large rag doll, flecked with spit from Klementina’s drooling kisses and the food she fed it in little spoons, while the rag doll’s arms and legs swung limply to and fro as if doubly dead.
With Hans, who lived opposite the building at 24 Medvedgradska, right beside the cramped, dark shed used by the cobbler Lojzek, it was said he was the illegitimate son of some SS officer who roamed Zagreb in the NDH days, Andreas Ban made catapults and shot at people and birds. At number 24, on the floor below Andreas’s grandmother, there were Mrs. Koch with her fair-haired blue-eyed daughter Anneke, also named Koch. Before the end of the war, the low-ranking SS officer Otto Koch abandoned Mrs. Marija Koch, leaving her his surname and his child, for ever. In 1943, this same Otto Koch informed on Andreas Ban’s mother, then a medical student, to the Ustasha Intelligence Office, so, instead of joining the Partisans, Andreas Ban’s mother ended up in prison. After the war, Andreas’s mother avoided Mrs. Koch, while Anneke was involved in casual prostitution, which everyone in the street knew about. When Andreas Ban (with his sisters) was living briefly with his grandmother, no cars passed along Medvedgradska, but carts with tall milk churns clinking on them. One day Hans hit the horse with his catapult, the horse reared and its hoof hit ten-year-old Petar, who was kicking a ball in the empty street, right on the forehead. Petar fell, never to get up again. The whole street was beside itself, because Medvedgradska was a family street, fairly compact. In the attic of number 24 lived Ante, a train dispatcher who mended clocks. In the courtyard of the building numbered 24, Andreas Ban’s sisters put on puppet shows. The puppets would fall and lose parts of their bodies. The doll maker Albert also lived in the street, also in a shack, and Andreas’s sisters would take their maimed puppets to him to be mended. The doll maker Albert’s street window was full of deformed, not yet mended or unmendable dolls. That window was spooky.