Belladonna

by Daša Drndic

  Inside the doll maker’s workshop it was even more terrible. I am a doll doctor, my clinic has to look like this, said Albert to the horrified Andreas Ban. Glass eyes of various colors, green, blue, brown, with eyelashes and without, rolled around everywhere. Scattered, over shelves, tables, even on the floor, were plump little porcelain or stuffed arms and legs, and also rubber ones. There were all sorts of heads everywhere, broken, with holes in their napes, some with both eyes, others with only one, some with none. These are my surgical instruments, I use them to cure my little patients, said Albert, a little bent, in his white coat. At one time, Andreas Ban used to visit “Dr. Albert” nearly every day, overcoming his fear. I’ve seen all kinds of things, said Albert. I’ve brought more than ten thousand dolls back to life, he said. Albert the doll maker also made little shoes for his patients, little leather shoes, with proper buckles. And he planted real hair in his dolls’ heads, blond, brown or black, curly or straight. Even then, in the 1950s, Albert was quite old. Today, where his shack used to be, there is a modern five-story building with a pink facade.

  Many years later, in Vienna, Andreas Ban meets the doll maker Arnold Meyer, a former guard at Mauthausen concentration camp. Arnold Meyer had an impressive collection of miniature curly wigs made from real hair the color of honey, and in the glass-fronted cupboards with hundreds of little drawers that lined the walls of his workshop, were various colored plastic and glass eyes, paired and separated. Mengele had a collection of glass eyes too.

  Arnold Meyer recalled a secret order from August 1942, requiring that all the hair cut off the camp inmates be sent to Alex Zink in Nuremberg or to the Paul Reimann company in Friedland. Both firms paid half a mark for a kilo of human hair.

  If he’s prescribed chemotherapy, he’ll go bald. He won’t buy a wig. A tiny fear wrapped in feathers rolls along the hospital corridor. Old Bette Davis gropes her way toward Andreas Ban. Fasten your seat belts, she says, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

  It is the 1970s. In New Belgrade, on the sixth floor of one of the “Six Corporals” as you see them from the bridge, a retired Yugoslav Army officer sells processed aloe vera in green Fruška Gora Riesling bottles, with the labels still on; there is great demand, but also great mortality. The thick gray liquid is meant to be rubbed onto radiation burns, nowadays one does not hear about such terrible burns, oncology has become more decent. Andreas’s mother’s skin is falling off in tatters. They rub her. The officer calls his liquid “balm.” They rub his mother with balm. Andreas also makes a tincture of aloe vera for drinking. He goes with his sister to Kisvárda, a village on the Hungarian–Russian border where in winter tears freeze. Their mother is young. In the train the conductresses are Russian, in blue homespun uniforms, all of them with swollen knees in short skirts. The uniforms have gold buttons, like the uniforms of captains on long-haul ships. The conductresses are Russian because the train continues on to Moscow, it only passes through Kisvárda. The conductresses sell weak Russian tea in glasses, hot, and do not sleep at all. Kisvárda is a village like those in the Banat region. It has an inn and good goulash. It has frozen mud. In Kisvárda Dr. Baross sells anticancer drops in a little room with a low ceiling. The little room is suffocating in carpets and rugs, they line the floor and the walls and are thrown over the armchairs, because the armchairs are threadbare. There is also a microscope, out of date. One enters the room through the kitchen in which the doctor’s wife sits in a blue fustian housecoat; the doctor’s wife sits at a wooden table, in a vase on the table there are stiff plastic snowdrops. In the kitchen there is a cabinet, reseda-green, glass-fronted, with upside-down coffee cups on which pale women in crinolines float. People come in droves, people arrive from all of Yugoslavia, because this is Yugoslavia’s day, other countries have their days. Tito is still alive, their mother dies before Tito. The doctor’s drops do not help.

  They try everything.

  Including Paris.

  In Paris Andreas sleeps with the tramps, the sky is clear, Parisian-blue and it is winter again. Their mother bleeds. The blood soaks through the mattress and drips onto the polished floor of the Institut d’Oncologie, in the complex of the Paris Faculté de Médecine, or perhaps it does not happen in the complex of the Paris Faculté de Médecine at all, although there are indications that this is precisely where Andreas Ban’s mother lies as they try out various new medicines on her, they carry out trials. His mother — a submissive, half-dead guinea pig, still beautiful — We are experimenting, they say, we have nothing to lose. Maybe Andreas’s mother is falling apart and bleeding in the military hospital Val de Grâce, although he does not know why his mother would be lying in the military hospital Val de Grâce since their family has never had anything to do with the army, and particularly the French army, for a long time, for generations, their family has been an ordinary civilian, urban family. Perhaps Andreas’s mother is lying, and draining away, in the Hôpital Cochin. There is also the Hôpital Laennec, they tell him, near the Panthéon, and Maternité Port Royal, he does not remember, he only remembers the Panthéon because that is where Voltaire and Hugo and Zola lie, and the spry Jean Jaurés and the tame Rousseau who all mean nothing to him, unlike his mother, absolutely nothing, and without them his life is entirely possible. In Paris Andreas Ban sees Bergman’s “The Serpent’s Egg” and in the stuffy apartment belonging to the gallery owner and antiquarian Bojon, he eats steak tartare with Ema’s brother out of a soup plate, with a spoon. Ema’s brother is called Jean, he was once called Jovan, his wife also dies of cancer, many years later. In Paris, at the open market he buys crêpes, a circus troupe dances, the sky is frighteningly blue. It is the 1970s.

  When she bleeds, Andreas’s mother’s mucous membranes fall off, from inside she is peeling in layers, disappearing. Andreas buys her shoes, but she can no longer walk. The shoes are burgundy. Later, he gives the shoes to Katja Romany who also dies, but of a heart attack. The stockings are burgundy as well. Those he does not give away. There were a lot of moves, international and transatlantic. The stockings wait a long time, then Andreas’s sister takes them. Thirty-five years have passed. That sister died as well. With Elvira there was no time for surprises or anger, for journeys, for examinations and small lies. Elvira was a shock. Elvira melted within three months. She just vanished.

  Andreas fell asleep in his tracksuit.

  he is in a long black limousine. he’s at the wheel, his mother is sitting beside him. they drive along narrow dark streets and he realizes that he can’t go any further. he wants to go back, he turns his head to look, the street has closed into a cleft so narrow a person couldn’t pass, let alone a car. his mother says, the road has disappeared, there’s no way back, let’s keep going, a broad street opens up in front of them, quiet and filled with sunlight.

  The next day, he takes a shower and shaves both armpits. In the misted mirror he looks at his torso. He raises his shoulders, he inhales. He touches both breasts. His gaze falls to his belly and he shudders. My belly button’s gone, he says. Then he puts on his pajamas. They do not take him to the operating theater until the afternoon. They keep saying, you’re next, you’re next, he is the last on the list, he is thirsty and hungry, he wets his lips, nothing to eat, nothing to drink, be patient, keep still, wait, they instruct him. He roams around the corridor and secretly smokes out a window. Three men are brought back to his ward, operated on, unconscious. Cut to ribbons.

  The room outside the operating theater is sterile and full of mobile stretchers. This is where Andreas Ban is prepped, they look for veins in his legs, prick him to take blood, prick and try again, it does not work, they break the cast on his forearm and finally succeed. He says nothing and watches the preparations for a brief death. Beside him lies a sturdy young man with piercings on his face and tattoos on his upper arms and chest, blue crosses pressed into his skin gleam with sweat that runs down his fingers, making little puddles on the stone floor. The young man is beside himself, his eyes wide open, he i
s trembling, big as he is. The nurse says to the young man, Relax, your veins are tight, we can’t inject you. Andreas feels like singing, but he does not sing well. The nurse orders him, Take out your dentures. This annoys him, he is ready to quarrel. They are his teeth, white and healthy, with no crowns, despite his smoking. These teeth are an important trump card for Andreas in the poverty that besets him. He watches, he listens to people forever commenting on his teeth, attacking his teeth, irritating him. When Andreas Ban begins to lose his teeth, people around him will calm down, the last trace of his stylishness, his otherness, his not-belonging will disappear, he will become one of them, and they will think, now you are nondescript, we love you. And so, when he finds himself out there, Andreas Ban looks attentively at other people’s mouths, he sees hundreds of dentures clicking, growling, gleaming, some dentures are expensive, some are not, all produce stiff smiles, frightening and cold, which make Andreas nervous.

  After the operation they take him back to the ward, he wakes at once, with a clear head. Dr. Toffetti says, It’s good, the sentinel is clean, the lymph nodes have not been affected. They put lovely long white stockings on Andreas Ban’s legs that make his thighs look younger; the stockings reach from his feet to his groin. Andreas admires his legs, now firm and strong as they once were. He feels like strolling through the town in these white elastic mesh stockings for ever. The next day they take them off, his skin and flaccid muscles droop, falling flat on the bed. After the operation, Leo sits next to him watching the intravenous fluid drip. I’ll speed up the drip, says Andreas Ban, so that I can eat, I’m hungry. From a nearby restaurant Leo brings pasta verde con frutti di mare. Andreas likes that. They eat together. In the hallway. And drink red wine. The nurse says, What are you doing, you can’t do that! Andreas asks, Why? She says, Because. Andreas goes onto the balcony with Leo, he takes two drags on a cigarette. It’s no good, he says, I’ll keel over. The next day Andreas’s sister comes. She brings him pasta verde con frutti di mare.

  There is euphoria in the ward. All the patients have had their operations and are shameless. They compare their bellies and penises, they fart. Priests come to offer solace. Andreas Ban turns his back on them. Some women come from the “Hope” society and offer psychological support. Andreas Ban does not need psychological support, he needs his breast. Physiotherapists demonstrate exercises to stop their arms from swelling. Andreas Ban wants to go home.

  It turned out more or less OK. According to the histopathology results, there is no calcification, the edges are clean. There is no need for chemotherapy, just radiation.

  A week later Andreas Ban is back at work. It is summer. The appointments for radiation therapy are all booked up. He’ll have to wait a month. The temperature rises to forty degrees Celsius. Gershwin’s “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ ” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” alternate in Andreas Ban’s head, like a broken record. Andreas sings to himself, silently. As he walks. Gershwin drives him crazy. Gershwin, in fact Jacob Gershowitz, born into a Russian-Jewish family, dies of a brain tumor. He complains of unbearable headaches and is pursued by the smell of burnt rubber. He dies suddenly because the tumor spreads quickly and he keeps blacking out, he becomes lost. Until he disappears. In the thirty-ninth year of his life.

  When he is not working, Andreas Ban goes for walks. He still goes out and walks. He still has moments of liveliness although other walkers often irritate him. They walk slowly, they take up the whole sidewalk, so he cannot pass, and he shouts, pardon, and the walkers snort. When they come toward him they block his way, they want stubbornly to pass him on the right, but one should pass on the left, so he does not let them, so they aim at each another on the sidewalk, or he stops, stiffens, and lets them attack.

  He is still drawing his salary.

  He waits.

  And waits.

  One night from his window he sees an old man picking his way with small steps along the sidewalk. The street is deserted and the old man is talking to himself. Maybe he, Andreas Ban, is that old man.

  On him, on his chest, they have to radiate, they draw with a dark-red felt-tip, from his neck to his waist, he is marked. He must not wash that part of his torso because the lines would come off. The heat is terrible, the color melts with his sweat, around his (nonexistent) breast there are smudges. The nurses and doctors frown, they raise their voices, press their lips together, grind their teeth, their jaws dance, they have to do the measurements again, they have to draw the lines again, he has to go back to the simulator, which is fully booked, there are more and more patients, there is an epidemic of carcinomas, they say. In other countries, they make shallow tattoos so the lines do not rub off, so the patients can wash. Andreas Ban buys liquid henna in a small tube and draws the lines himself. No one notices anything. At last he can have a shower.

  There is no radiation on weekends. They prescribe him thirty-three sessions. Thirty-three sessions last seventy-five days because the equipment breaks down. He is on his summer holiday and he is still undergoing radiation. He spends the weekends in Viktor’s little Rovinj apartment, near their former house. When this new war broke out, Andreas and his father sold the stone family house for peanuts to some nice Italians from Bologna who now sit in the summer on “his” terrace, with a view of the bay. Andreas’s sister was left with the basement of the house, a room dug in under the earth level through which underground waters roar and moisten the walls, a room with a door into a little garden, overgrown with bushes and enclosed by a crumbling wall. Andreas’s sister is a biologist. Her name is Ada, in the family she was called Bubi. Bubi is close to Andreas. She hopped into his life from time to time, she was like a little mother to Leo. That is not important now. Ada is drawing her pension as well, she is on her own as well, her daughter has gone. As soon as she enters retirement, Ada exits her life. In Belgrade, Ada works for the pharmaceutical company Galenika, she studies the effects of estrogen on spatial learning and neuron morphology of the hippocampus in rats. That is her doctoral thesis. When she comes to Croatia, a bit before Andreas and Leo, there is no space for her in Croatian laboratories because she is too old, forty-seven. She teaches biology in a secondary school in a small coastal town. Now Ada lives in the Rovinj basement through which underground waters roar and moisten the walls. She wears old clothes. She is poor. She is fat, she used not to be. She eats cheaply. She has a gray streak. She has no husband, her partner died long ago. Her teeth are falling out. Recently, she had a small vacuum prosthesis fitted, which is prone to come loose when Ada laughs, she mocks her vacuum prosthesis. That is not the laughter Andreas knows. In their family kitchen, Ada and Andreas used to talk late into the night over fine cheeses and noble wines. They were looking for a way out of the trap.

  He travels to and fro on buses, on Friday evenings toward Viktor, on Monday mornings to the hospital. He gets to know the drivers. He observes the passengers. Many rustle their plastic bags frantically, chew, smack their lips, click, clean their teeth, ruminate and talk loudly, drowning out the turbo folk music from the National Radio. When darkness falls, the passengers sit in the dark, the drivers do not switch on the lights above the seats. Once an old lady sits down next to him with a white beard five centimeters long. Another time, a young man with beautiful hands. His, Andreas’s hands, are sort of shriveled, their backs covered in freckles. In the bus he also sees a man with very long eyelashes. Andreas’s eyelashes are short and point down. Like a pig’s. Andreas has pigs’ eyelashes, bristles. Later, that will change. That summer, in the course of his regular comings and goings, he observes all manner of bus people. Bus people one can observe because they sit, they do not pass by: a man who twitches his head for two hours, raises and lowers his shoulders and sniffles. Andreas offers him a handkerchief and sees two shallow, dead eyes, those of a heroin or cocaine addict; a woman who during the journey lasting one and a half hours runs her hand through her hair fifty-nine times; another, fat and shabby, does not stop rocking, f
orward-backward-forward-backward, as though in psychosis, in some kind of serious regression that she wakes from only when the bus stops. Beside her dozes an old woman who has stepped out of a Beckett play, the one with the garbage cans. She is well turned out and eats bananas. Bananas are sticky, so the old woman smacks her lips. As she eats, she gazes steadily in front of her. As soon as she finishes a banana, her head bows and she falls into a half sleep, into a stupor. That happens five times. Until she reaches her destination, onto which, it seems to Andreas, she has no desire to step, because her legs are paralyzed, or because she no longer has any.

  In Poreč, where the evening bus takes a ten-minute break before continuing its journey, an old toothless man in gray worker’s trousers waits regularly, but not to meet anyone. He looks at the passengers, shakes his head and hops. Later, when Andreas Ban no longer goes to radiotherapy, when he no longer travels on weekends but spends the whole summer there, at Viktor’s, the old man is not there. For years afterward, at the bus stop in Poreč, Andreas looks for the old man, in vain. Once he sees on the platform a pygmy woman, a dwarf with a large head, yellow strawlike hair, huge thick lips and short limbs scampering around the legs of her lover of normal height and build. Her head reaches his groin into which she pants shamelessly. Andreas imagines them in the spasm of love, which seems oddly pedophiliac. Then, from some lagoon in his brain onto the bus station platform surface the seven dwarfs of the Ovitz family, the seven “pets,” Joseph Mengele’s seven Jewish test guinea pigs and (for Andreas) their grim circus performance begins.