Belladonna

by Daša Drndic

  Words, and with them images, hook themselves onto the brain like anchors and wound it.

  Anchor.

  Kindzal.

  Many people still wriggle out with the defensive platitude We didn’t know. We didn’t know about the persecutions, the camps, the slaughter then, we don’t know about the disappearances, the torchings, the new camps and killings today. That is what Wilhelm Furtwängler says too, justifying himself by saying he saved — he no longer remembers how many — Jews, especially musicians in “his” Berlin orchestra. Then an American researcher asks him, Why was it necessary to save Jews if people didn’t know? Then Furtwängler falls silent.

  Oh, there were other Matačićs and Furtwänglers in the course of the Second World War, there were plenty both before and after it, they exist today and they always will. Prominent and important musicians, conductors and composers who believed and still believe that, not art, but their art is more significant for humanity than a person. Herbert von Karajan, with his Nazi party card from 1933, membership number 3,430,914, and Victor de Sabata, Mussolini’s close friend . . . Andreas Ban does not even wish to think about writers. About painters and actors, about singers and filmmakers who “stay and serve.” But Otto Klemperer leaves, Bruno Walter leaves, Fritz Busch, Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky leave. Toscanini refuses to conduct in Nazi Germany, Oskar Danon leaves (to join the Partisans), and when he mentions this to those acquaintances of his, they say, They were Jews or Serbs, they were saving their skins, as though those who stayed and served were not. Why does Furtwängler play for Hitler’s birthday? Why does he play at Nazi rallies? Why does he shake Goebbels’s hand after one of his concerts? Why is his recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony broadcast immediately after Hitler’s death? Had the Nazis by any chance won the war, would Furtwängler have taken shelter in a more secure place? Would he have withdrawn his anti-Semitic pronouncements? It is a dubious, rickety justification that would suggest anyone is indebted to these artistic giants who are also human monsters, dwarfs. The world would have survived without their music, without the Papadopouloses and Baranovićs, without various Leni Riefenstahls, because new ones would have come, as they have, maybe even better ones. Andreas Ban sees the whole hodgepodge of defensive statements dragging themselves through history like slime as an apologia pro vita sua, by means of which not only individuals but also governments endeavor to justify their service of the ideologies of Fascism, Nazism, Ustashism and, in the last analysis, of pathological patriotism.

  In the afterword to his novel The Guiltless (Die Schuldlosen, 1950), Hermann Broch states that political indifference is closely linked to ethical depravity, that is, that politically innocent people are to a considerable degree ethically suspect, that they bear ethical blame, and stresses that the German populace did not feel responsible for Hitler’s coming to power because they considered themselves “apolitical,” in no way connected with what was happening around them. And what about the “apolitical” Croatian populace, which is selectively apolitical? How does it cope with what was happening and is still happening around it? It doesn’t. It enjoys the music and applauds. And writes rigged history.

  The Pope visits Croatia again. The new one. Once again people fall into a trance, they shout, We love you, Pope. When the previous pope was exhibited to the people, when they drove him all over Croatia, the people chanted, We are the Pope’s, the Pope is ours, and asked him to stay, Stay with us, Pope, stay with us, they begged him frantically, as though they were dying.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, the nobleman Jean-Louis Alibert (1768–1837) is preparing for the priesthood but recognizes in time the limitations of the strictly controlled masked ball, the costume theater of illusion, of blindfolded, repetitive, even threatening imagination, so he decides to study medicine and becomes a renowned dermatologist and later personal physician to the French king, Charles X. In his book Physiologie des passions, ou Nouvelle doctrine des sentiments moraux (1826), Alibert studies the way in which passion and emotion affect morality. Alibert writes about courage and human weakness, about integrity and finally about melancholy and depression, in other words, about phenomena long ago identified in a world which never was and never will be equally good for everyone. So why is Andreas Ban upset, why does he stay clenched in the embrace of a gigantic octopus whose tentacles crush his lungs, his heart and his brain, whose black ink clouds his vision?

  Alibert tells two little stories about the two faces of melancholy, about melancholy as a creative force which enriches and inspires the fragile human species, and about melancholy as a negative force which drags people into depression and despair. So, as he examines an old copperplate engraving on which the founder of Stoic philosophy Zeno of Citium (fourth century b.c.) sits with slumped shoulders and a mournful face in the shade, with some kind of parchment on his knees, Alibert extols him as an example of humility and courage, as a heroic figure with enormous influence over the life of Athenians because of his encouragement of their patience, virtue, freedom and honesty. Andreas Ban would like to embark on a polemic, a quarrel, with Zeno of Citium, but also with Alibert, because when it is applied in practice, all that talk turns out to be senseless. Zeno is not prominent in public life, he sees government and laws as fate, he believes that a Stoic, virtuous man does not have the strength to oppose the powerful, so all that remains for him is to withdraw into solitude, into his small restricted privacy. How much has man changed since the fourth century b.c.? Why is Andreas upset? In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx says clearly, Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under existing circumstances, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

  Alibert also writes about Anselm, an intrusive patient in the Bicêtre hospital known as Diogenes who, because of his inflated ego, his unfounded ambitions and imagined philosophizing, maddened by the idea of saving the world, in the end, isolated, goes mad.

  So, Andreas Ban knows what is happening to him, once he even goes to his doctor and tells her: I’m depressed, although he is not quite certain about the level of melancholy and depression running through him. I’m depressed, he tells his doctor, who does not ask questions, does not rummage through Andreas Ban’s innards, she just says, All right, and prescribes some pills.

  The tablets (antidepressants) do not help. They damage Andreas Ban’s intestinal flora, so instead of eliminating through his pores vapors of “black bile,” he runs to the toilet five times a day, forevermore, endlessly, because new shit is constantly amassing. Once he even shat himself as he was hurrying up the hill toward the drugstore, his sphincter slackened and out of him poured accumulations of muddy waters, surprisingly odorless, silted up for decades in his insides where his organs float. He kept tightening his buttocks and walked more and more quickly, while down his legs ran the substance of himself disappearing. I’m no longer fit for this world, he mumbled, breathless and feeling through his pockets for his little pump, which was not there. The antidepressants cast Andreas Ban into a still deeper depression, so he gives up the tablets.

  Gastroscopy, orders the specialist six months later, tomorrow morning, on an empty stomach, no liquids, no solids.

  Andreas Ban comes for his gastroscopy appointment at noon. He is thirsty and irritable. The nurse says, Take out your dentures, Andreas Ban says, Take out your own. The nurse asks, Do you have asthma? Andreas Ban says, Yes. Then we’ll do it without anesthetic, says the nurse. They push a rubber tube down to the bottom of his stomach and delve and push while he grunts like a pig for the slaughter there in the half dark of the underground clinic. They hand him a little picture of his stomach in shades of red, black and brown. This is your stomach, says the doctor, it’s full of craters, completely corroded. Who is eating and straining whom, Andreas Ban his innards, or they him? What now? he asks. Ma
ke peace with yourself, says the doctor and prescribes him new medication. Checkup in six months, he says. Six months later other issues present themselves, so Andreas Ban’s corroded stomach has to wait.

  What was it Freud said? Melancholy is a pathological form of mourning, the melancholic does not succeed in fully grieving for the loss of an object (Elvira? Marisa?), a place (Belgrade?), an ideal (ah, from time immemorial the world has been going through periods of madness to take a small step toward reason, says Broch), and so the melancholic omits, rejects the final process of grieving, he refuses to grieve, even masochistically enjoys that refusal of confronting his sorrow. In this matter, the melancholic is so militant, says Freud, that in the end he swallows the lost object, incorporates it into his being, transforms it into the storehouse of his ego and keeps it like a ghostly double. Since the melancholic refuses to part from the lost object, with time that lost object pursues him, so the melancholic gradually abandons the outside world and languishes in the underground of his psyche. In other words, melancholy would be a pathological form of mourning, a sick flight from reality, a flight from the outside world into a refuge, into the inner world of the psyche. What if reality is sick, what then? What if the inner world is destroyed, in ruins and robbed, where to then? So, in grief, the world becomes poor and empty, while in melancholy the ego is like some kind of abandoned archaeological discovery that has been dug up. Yes, the melancholic is a radical atheist who in his hollow discourse worships a dead god.

  Andreas Ban knows all this. Nevertheless, despite the insidious, elusive pain that bores through him, all is well, inside it is finally quiet. Quiet and dead. Tot. Mort. Lifeless.

  As when snow falls on the coast and a silent film is played. People are perplexed, they cannot cope, they buzz mindlessly, they leave work early, cars crawl, buses are late, trains stand still, while the snow, really light and insignificant, does fall, and the little town is transformed into a huge soundproof chamber in which one cannot hear one’s own breathing. Andreas loves it. He breathes deeply (the snow conceals his asthma), he walks (as briskly as he can), if he falls, it will be soft, This snow is a gift, he says, because the snow is a complete image with fifty-year-old layers of his life under different skies, under vaults that are far from the lid here, what is snow doing in Rijeka?

  Then it rains and his faint hope melts, the broad canvas of Andreas’s life vanishes, the small town becomes even smaller, once again it emits a din, a senseless street din, heavy as a wet army blanket. Faces emerge on the sidelines and conversations echo on the sidelines and once again he, Andreas Ban, emerges, he who for twenty years has been on the sidelines.

  Then, since the years pass and no more snow falls, as a product of a false longing, in the small coastal town a skating rink is opened and named “The Sea Snowflake.”

  His body is heavy, lazy and immobile, he does not know how to get rid of it, it drags after him like cargo, he drags it around on his back, bent over, he moves it within himself trying to steal from it little shallow breaths. This struggle with his body devours his thoughts whose landscape flattens, brown and deformed. His tongue grows into a huge rough beast frantically thrashing inside his mouth, trying to get out. Andreas Ban moves away, looks at himself and sees an exhibit in the bizarre collection of stuffed animals of the Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter, imprisoned in a small glass cage (so as not to get damaged). He is kept company (in neighboring glass containers) by squirrels drinking tea, festively dressed kittens at some kind of a wedding, a freak cat with two tails and three legs on its back, a dozen albino rats getting drunk in an empty inn, cicadas playing cricket. Here are gentlemen lobsters (lobsters do not grow old), scientist-lobsters in suits with spectacles on their noses, a heap of anthropomorphic scenes in which Andreas Ban too features as a monstrous creation, half-human, half-bestial.

  While Andreas Ban is talking about Zemun with three unknown men on a bus, a skilled pickpocket takes his bag with his documents. His identity card is gone, his bank cards gone, his passport gone. After twenty years Andreas Ban returns to his Belgrade apartment, opens the mailbox and out of it fall letters, flyers and a multitude of pills.

  That is when he receives the invitation to Amsterdam.

  Andreas does not have a respectable suitcase. All his cases are worn because they were cheap and they have traveled back and forth. Some do not have handles, some have lost wheels, the Chinese one has broken in two.

  Buy this Samsonite one, the shop assistant tells Andreas, only three hundred euros. That’s class.

  I am class, says Andreas. That’s why I can’t buy the Samsonite.

  So he borrows a suitcase.

  Andreas Ban had also advised some of his patients, Go away somewhere. Travel, that “little death of departure,” as Virilio puts it, reduces the tension of impasse and brings (temporary) oblivion. So Andreas Ban, wrapped in his extended “aesthetic of disappearance,” lands on a little island of time in which tomorrow does not exist, in which yesterday is buried. On a quiet, free-flowing illusion.

  .

  Pocket Amsterdam

  George Hendrik Breitner, Oudezijds Achterburgwal, Amsterdam (Het Kolkje)

  The flight from Belgrade to New York has a stopover in Amsterdam, where Andreas Ban leaves the airport and stays for three days. It is the mid-1970s. Andreas Ban is twenty-something, he has energy and a soaring step. In his pockets he carries his university degree, a few love affairs, after the tumultuous and disappointing year of 1968, an unsuccessful battle with bureaucratic Communist Party officials and the frightened employees at the psychological support center of a Belgrade municipality, after which he was dismissed, then a two-year stint as a psychology lecturer on an evening course at an open university and — a Fulbright scholarship to study for a master’s degree in the United States. Andreas Ban does not remember where he stays in Amsterdam, he does not remember what he does with his vast amount of heavy luggage, or where and what he eats. Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris has just been released, provoking conflict between the protectors of morality across the western hemisphere and the aesthetes, the rebels, for the most part left-wing. Andreas Ban does not remember in which Amsterdam cinema Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider unfurl their life stories, but to the present day he retains their bottled-up sadness which has for almost forty years been overflowing from a, let us say, fictional reality into one that time is wearing out and breaking into pieces. Andreas Ban does not know exactly when Last Tango danced in Yugoslavia, with a “delay” of several years certainly, anyway now it makes no difference, neither Marlon Brando nor Maria Schneider is alive. In Yugoslavia Last Tango was first banned for minors, and screenings, of an abridged version, began at eleven p.m. or later. It was not shown on television until 1981.

  In a small Amsterdam theater, then, in the 1970s, Andreas Ban sees a production of Beckett’s one-act monodrama Not I (premiered on the small stage of New York’s Lincoln Center in October 1972), and walks through the Red Light District. At that time, Andreas Ban knows nothing about Holland, nothing about Amsterdam, a peripheral stopping place on the way to a different world (and life), but it seems that the images and aromas of their mutual three-day seduction settled in one of those mysterious little chambers of the mind that we believe have disintegrated, crushed by the years, and turned into grains, into insignificant markers of our past, only to open up again unexpectedly, even several decades later, uninvited, swollen with vitality, introducing slight disorder into our reality. Now Andreas Ban sees that the twentieth century has been rattling off the same old story, but he had to grow old to grasp it. Not I is set in a dark space in which just one ray of light illuminates a woman’s mouth placed up high, three or four meters above the stage, and, at lightning speed, logorrheic, breathless, that mouth tells its story, our story; in the darkness lit by one penetrating beam. The creature, reduced to a mouth, is hearing a tale buried in profound silence which the audience does not grasp, but it catches it, almost in flight, rem
nants of the life of the unnamed woman who after many years of silence has been converted into her own (or someone else’s?) mouth. The audience members catch scorched flakes, particles that fall, billowing, onto their shoulders and chests, so that the small stage appears to be turning into a repository, a storehouse of carbonized corpses. What can be made out is a disjointed narrative about a life without love, about desertion, violence, deaths and disappearances, about aimless wanderings through devastated landscapes. Round and round in a circle. There is no new beginning, there is no beginning because there is no end. Both Last Tango in Paris and Not I, combined with the Red Light District where young and old, fat and thin half-dressed women sit in windows behind which can be glimpsed cheap narrow beds with crumpled sheets, are nothing but a soundless cry (or plea?), unavoidable and showing no way out. A search for a new voice that ends in defeat. In the 1970s, Last Tango in Paris and Not I and the Red Light District destroy the norms of craft and profession, and introduce confusion into tidily arranged lives. Later, at the end of the twentieth century, art had largely relaxed (imploded?), people were inured to prostitution, time had stopped undulating, it had begun to stoop and to age unattractively, with a stench.