by Daša Drndic
Andreas Ban watches the smiling, but old by now, Rozika, Francika, Avram, Frida, Miki, Elizabeta and Piroška, known as Perla, members of the Lilliput Jazz Troupe, dancing a Hungarian csárdás, greeting passengers and seeing them off, passengers who circumvent them, bypass them, because they neither hear nor see them, they pass through them while, during their ten-minute breaks (before they set off again), they run to the toilets, for a bottle of beer or a hot dog.
For a year and a half, the Angel of Death (Mengele) keeps his seven dwarfs in a human zoo and examines their insides.
The worst were the gynecological experiments. They would tie us to a table and the systematic torture could begin. We got shots into our womb, they took blood from us, samples of our flesh and fluid from our spinal cords, they pierced and cut us, pulled out our hair, examined our brain, our nose, our mouth, our legs and arms, they dug around and drilled through us in the name of “future generations,” in the name of living dwarfs and in the name of those who will come. I am Elizabeta.
While he talked to his colleagues about our genetic deformities, in front of the older Nazis Mengele would line us up as naked objects on display, then he would gaily clap his hands and say, Come on, Lilliputians, play and sing, and we played and sang German songs, standing there like that, small and naked. I am Piroška, I was the last to die.
I died first. The Angel of Death even made a short film in which we acted, and sent it to Hitler as a gift. Hitler liked watching films, entertaining himself. Miki.
Yes, we survived Auschwitz. Thanks to Mengele. Afterward we performed all over Eastern and Central Europe and did our Totentanz for him, for our Angel of Death. Rozika.
It was the worst for twins, for twin children. I don’t know whether any survived. Mengele explored their eyes, he researched twins with different colored eyes, particularly those with one blue and one green eye. Mengele would first kill the little twins, then dig out their eyes and send them to Berlin.
He sent them to Otmar von Vershuer and to Karin Magnussen in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics. Not one was taken to court. Mengele died on some Brazilian beach, with waves lapping at his feet. Magnussen died at eighty-nine in 1997, when of all my sisters and brothers I was the only one left. Piroška-Perla.
Oh, fuck off you circus performers, you dwarfs no one needs, a threat to the pure Aryan race, get lost, you dirty Gypsies, the only thing of any value were your eyes, and I was able to collect enough of them in time, I have a fine, rich collection for my research. I was the one who decided which races and people were worthy of life in the Europe of tomorrow. I was the one who worked on eliminating the Black Danger that threatened the West, I was the one who worked on stopping the Bolshevik advance in the East, I was the one who was concerned with the fundamental question of all the European states, that of the Jews. Because the Jews, who still enjoy the hospitality of Europe, are our greatest and eternal enemies. Karin Magnussen.
The driver calls All aboard and the Lilliput Jazz Troupe flies to the skies, gliding over their native Transylvania back to Haifa.
That summer Andreas Ban sits under a sunshade at the swimming pool and watches water polo training and swimming training and gazes out to the open sea. With the water polo players he drinks beer, plays chess and briscola, in his swimming trunks. At first people stare at his scar, the breast that is not there, then they relax. Distant swimming days, his youth, hover inside him. Andreas Ban spends all his summer weekends in the shadow of his former good health. Drawn on, violet and yellow-red. The henna and felt-tip merge on his breastbone like additional scars. Andreas Ban lives in two worlds, perhaps even in three. He begins to miss waiting outside the clinic for his radiation therapy. He misses his companions in sickness, in treatment. In summer, plastic chairs are placed outside the clinic, someone brings terracotta ashtrays in the shape of a smiling sun, the patients wait, drained, bald and drawn on, smoking and exchanging life stories. Togetherness bonds them in an invisible circle of air. Sometimes one’s turn comes quickly, in half an hour, in an hour, sometimes one waits from morning till noon. When the radiation is finally done, the patients do not disperse, as though they have nowhere to go, no one to go to. Most people who come from far away for radiation stay in the hospital during the week. Those who have transport or can afford to rent an apartment do not stay in the hospital, they do not walk around on the hardened, dusty earth, over dry lawns in their pajamas and old tracksuits, they do not roam around, dragging their frantic thoughts as if they were aging pets, blinking their desultory gaze into the void. By the entrance to the radiation room, there is a small dilapidated house, with beds for those who, from Monday to Friday, wait for hours for their two-minute therapy. On Friday afternoons they all disperse, there is a lot of running around after which a two-day silence thuds.
The Mevatron and Oncor machines, my companions, says Andreas Ban as he lies on the table watching the globe above him send lifesaving rays into his body, he feels like hugging them, but he isn’t allowed to stir, Don’t move! Don’t breathe! so he directs tender and grateful glances first to Mevatron, then to Oncor. With their invisible tentacles, Mevatron and Oncor grasp the potential (or existing) micrometastases which are waiting for their moment, gathering strength for a leap, for an attack, and now there is no sentinel to protect Andreas Ban. Andreas Ban feels like a slug. The radiation room is empty and cold. Just the two of them, twenty-five intimate encounters with Mevatron, eight with Oncor, both working soundlessly apart from the starting and finishing clicks. Heavy, two-minute-long immobility reigns, interminable. On a shelf to his left there are four rows of white latticed masks like those used by fencers. Andreas feels as if he is being watched through each of those masks by Hannibal Lecter. They are masks for cancer of the throat, nose, forehead, mouth, Andreas concludes, the masks have their owners, on each hangs a little label, Andreas cannot see the names.
Madame Ema is always well turned out. She comes to her radiation in a pink silk suit, or a light-green casual outfit. She changes her brooch regularly. She has a neat hairstyle. She sits on a bench, leafing through women’s magazines. She is very calm, sometimes excessively cheerful, then loud. Andreas does not remember what Madame Ema talked about. Andreas knows nothing about Madame Ema. He concludes that Madame Ema lives nearby, otherwise she could not change her suits and outfits, she could not be well turned out. Then one day Madame Ema comes with a turban on her head, in a dirty white terry cloth robe under which can be seen the crumpled legs of hospital pajamas, striped, prison-style. The turban is crooked, beneath it can be seen Madame Ema’s bald skull. No brooch on her chest. She does not have summer sandals with straps, there is nothing delicate, feminine about Madame Ema, no rouge (from a little box) on her cheeks, the corners of her mouth, cracked and bloodless, hang, slack. Madame Ema sits on her bench, in her place (the others move out of the way), and looks at her little socks. Then she says, I’m sick of this comedy, I’m an inpatient, I don’t even go home on Fridays, I’ve got no one to go home to.
This illness is deceptive. People with cancer are excessively euphoric or excessively secretive. The secretive ones monitor their bodies without showing it. Those who do not want to hear, pretend to be deaf. The most euphoric soon die. Such exalted optimism irritates Andreas.
Ivetta is in her seventies. She does not wear little suits or outfits, she is not starched like Madame Ema, who is in her sixties. Ivetta carries a refined decadence in her gait and voice, it is summer, Ivetta wears a wide checked taffeta skirt in blue-green tones, a skirt that rustles with each of Ivetta’s steps, just as his, Andreas’s, mother’s step had sounded, just as Elvira’s hair had rustled. Ivetta comes back with her PET scan, the patients in the courtyard wait expectantly in the July sun, they smoke in silence, they look at Ivetta. From the cool interior of the clinic, in her green ballet pumps, Ivetta enters a shimmering ring of heat, of invisible extinguished fire. She lowers herself onto a wobbly plastic chair again
st the wall and says, Metastases all over. The silence following her words, full of leaden weight, drags everyone down. Then Ivetta stands up, breaks off a twig of wilted rosemary covered in the dust that has invisibly fallen over everything surrounding the hospital that summer, because the street is close, and she says, I’ll make a marinade for my family. And goes away. Each to his own ploys.
As he waits for his turn, Robert reads Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. He does not converse with anyone. Andreas likes that, at least someone is reading, the others talk. Mrs. Dalloway, a little book about a disturbed woman from the upper middle class who experiences a moment of epiphany when she feels like killing herself, and reconsiders, because finally she finds herself. Instead, someone called Septimus kills himself, he does not find himself, on the contrary, he is completely lost, destroyed and rejected. Mrs. Dalloway is not exactly popular reading matter, and for oncology patients there are more cheerful books. What do you think? Andreas Ban asks Robert who immediately writes him a note: I can’t speak, I’ve got throat cancer. After that Andreas just smiles at Robert, he imagines him lying under the Mevatron with that hanniballecterish helmet-muzzle on his head, are his days numbered?
That summer Andreas receives by mail an invitation to some kind of healthy food promotion in a café in the railroad station. Leo says (telephonically), Go, it might do you good. Nothing will do him any good, he already knows all he needs to know about healthy food, about nutrition, Leo would not be so handsome and big and healthy, without a single filling ever, but all right, it’s not the weekend. It is five o’clock in the afternoon, the sun is scorching, a crowd of dolled-up pensioners is pouring into the café, fresh from their afternoon siesta, pensioners begin their day early, they get their tasks, their insignificant duties done early, as though they were in a hurry, as though they were going to be late, as though they had important things to do. The women are revoltingly neatly combed and fat, in synthetic floral blouses, the men freshly shaven, sometimes with a little cut on their chin, a spot of dried blood (shaky hand), they all wear checked summer shirts, perfectly ironed, by four o’clock, perhaps three, these retired couples sip their thin afternoon coffee and now they set off in a cheerful mood, in expectation of a lovely outing. An occasional train goes by and toots, but rarely, for this place, like the pensioners gathered in the café, is on the edge, outside. Andreas waits for the healthy food, but the bright young demonstrator is using a transparent saucepan to prepare a small chicken for the twenty old people assembled there, a chick so small that it fits into the palm of her hand, and she reels off a memorized speech that Andreas does not understand. Then the young demonstrator adds one potato to the pot, while in a food processor she prepares an “aperitif” for the guests, one carrot, one small apple and one other thing which together barely cover the bottom of the plastic cup. This is the festive meal that the toothless pensioners knead with their gums. Andreas feels a cocktail of nausea and disgust rising within him. Then the demonstrator announces the prices of those transparent healthy saucepans, which are astronomical, especially suitable for pensioners, and then onto the stage steps the main demonstrator, a man who, in 40°C heat, advertises special bedclothes made of pure fleece wool at a price of five thousand kunas (666 euros) for a small single-bed set. Andreas gets up, he wants to go home to down a glass of Rémy Martin, but the demonstrators protest, they shout after him, Aren’t you going to have dinner, here’s a pair of complimentary slippers made of pure fleece wool, come again.
The radiation comes to an end as well. Andreas Ban grabs a summery September fortnight for himself; he swims when there is no sun, in the early morning and late afternoon. He reads, off and on, in fact he leafs through books, browses through other people’s thoughts, buries his own. On Viktor’s terrace he makes light suppers for acquaintances and an occasional friend, suppers which, to Andreas’s surprise, blend into tedium, because his old friends are no more, they’ve remained over there and are already scaled down, whether because of old age and dying, or because of never thrashed out, never clearly articulated attitudes in connection with the last war, particularly in connection with Bosnia and Kosovo. At these suppers of Andreas’s someone occasionally utters a witticism or two, there are those who ask stupid questions, but also those who do not talk at all, who just eat, because these silent people at his table have their own truncated past, their youth, their memories, their experiences, impossible to share with him. So, at a dinner which lasts from nine until two in the morning, M. says, The meat is excellent, and an hour later adds, This dessert is tasty. The dessert is crème caramel, Andreas’s specialty, which on this occasion, for the first time, collapses, falls apart when he turns it out. But then, and for a couple of years thereafter, in his little coastal town, in his Rovinj where he still feels like the old Andreas Ban, even though his home has fallen apart, even though he is falling apart, in that little town he is at home, and in that little Istrian town in the summer, an occasional old, elderly metropolitan pal, a swimming chum, a cardplaying mate does nevertheless call on Andreas, then there’s a celebration, fireworks of adventures summoned up, an encyclopedia of names from their lives at nursery, primary, secondary school, university, their sporting, love, military and professional life, oh, how many shared circles in whose whirlpools they spin like terns. Then it all stops. Little doses of decency are filled to the brim, Andreas Ban relegates them to the trash basket of his diminutive Croatian life, and in the place of that past life, in his head, in his chest, a hole opens up through which a mirage, weightless as a ghost, moans. And Andreas Ban decides to pine away in silent solitude.
In the small town where he lives, during the day, and particularly at night, there are times when all the traffic lights could go out. No one passes, nothing passes. The streets roll along of their own accord. The traffic lights flicker tirelessly in a void, to themselves. For themselves. In a town for itself.
In the small town where he lives the days are sometimes composed entirely of not-having, so Andreas Ban lives a life of nonliving.
All right, sometimes he does go to a restaurant. His acquaintances persistently and thoroughly leaf through their youth. He cannot join in. Andreas Ban knows no one from their youth. He has no one from his youth, from his life in this small town. So he listens, he watches these people nevertheless remote to him clearing a path to their past, so their past swells and fills the gaps of not-having, and they laugh.
Oh, Eliot.
Yes, milord,
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
As in some thriller, for twenty years Andreas Ban has been living undercover. Not anymore. He has no reason to. The town inside him has collapsed, his town, his towns. The avenues have been dug up, skyscrapers flattened into hovels, there is darkness all around. The cheerful bustle, stylish as music, swells into an insupportable cacophony of noise, crude and hysterical, like a woman who pulls out her hair and beats her breast. His poetry is stifled in the din, in the blaring that drums inside him, devastating his being, organ by organ, breaking him from within. He lies in the ruins, shakes his head and snatches increasingly shallow breaths. Andreas is like a ravaged city. Like a leveled city. His landscapes are imprinted in every cell of his body, that scenery with which he has been branded from birth, the little genetic archetypes like the remains of minute insects buried in nuggets of amber, those hallmarks, now all smashed, crushed under a monotone, monochrome, limited space that paralyzes him.
Andreas Ban tried, it’s not that he didn’t. Over these twenty years he has tried to hold onto at least aspects of this alien, discordant imprint, but it has proved unstable, shallow, in the long run impossible. That outer landscape, for Andreas false, has sucked up, demolished, devoured his internal world, he was too alone, too weak to plant it into new scenery. His hourglass is now an empty glass jar through which nothing flows.
Andreas, only a person who has departed for good will understand this. All my images are etched inside me. That which is absent is present like a wound, like a wound that does not heal, present like the presence of pain. Look after your fragments. A fragment can be a remnant, something from which and with which the always risky reconstruction of the lost begins. Such is the fragment that is a remnant of the destroyed, the residue of the vanished, that mutilated whole that bears witness to destruction, the obliterated whole, an unearthed ruin or preserved document, every trace that confirms existence and disappearance, as well as the often barbaric, violent destruction of a spiritual and existential complex.
Finci, there are no more fragments inside me. They are beneath the ruins.
Then record your nothingness by writing down the fragment, because the description of annihilation is the right fragment, because it is itself an expression of the destroyed whole. The event of destruction exists even when it is no longer happening, because it returns and is ever repeated in memory, for through memory it is annihilated anew.
But I am destroying my memories, I pluck them from their bed, because their bed is under water.
And I can’t help you.
It is the end of September 2008. The nights are colder, Rovinj is emptying. For several days Andreas does not make his bed, the room is crumpled and narrowed. A gloomy day is coming, with rain on the verge of falling, Andreas goes to the main street, recently paved with white stone, beautifully meandering and cheerful, and now, at the end of summer, blessedly deserted and quiet. He catches sight of an old man dragging out “O sole mio” on an accordion, but nobody passes, there is no one, only plump pigeons walking and staggering (as does he, Andreas Ban), so he sits opposite the player, on the ground and, leaning against the wall of the old palace, listens. The old man has gnarled fingers and a shaky voice and he smiles at Andreas. The clouds linger. The sky is ominously dark. Andreas heads back up the hill at a limping run. The swifts are coming, he says. That summer, that autumn, Andreas is maddened by swifts, as once when he had almost touched them, sitting under the sky in the house where strangers now live. Long ago. After Elvira’s death.