Belladonna

by Daša Drndic

  Samuel Eli Szachter (17)

  Breindel Liebe Szrajbman (11)

  Jacob Szrajbman (7)

  Sara Szrajbman (8)

  Schalom Szrajbman (10)

  Rubel Sztycer (17 mths)

  Sem Sztycer (4)

  Sylvia Sztycer (3)

  Abram Szymonowicz (7)

  Izak Tarcica (13)

  Jacob Tarcica (5)

  Rachel Tarcica (16)

  Levie Tas (15)

  Heintje Theeboom (17)

  Joseph Theeboom (15)

  Sientje Theeboom (13)

  Abraham Tokkie (16)

  Bertha Tokkie (10)

  Betty Tokkie (3)

  Judith Tokkie (14)

  Nathan Tokkie (5)

  Sophia Tokkie (17)

  Wolf Tokkie (15)

  Dora Tonninge (17)

  Helena Tonninge (17)

  Aron Moses Trachtenberg (15)

  Elias Trachtenberg (11)

  Jette Anna van Trommel (10)

  Joseph van Trommel (8)

  Carolina Rebecca Trompetter (18 mths)

  Joseph Bernard Trompetter (8)

  Wolf Trompetter (6)

  Arnold Troostwijk (11)

  Georg Troostwijk (9)

  Bertha Turfrijer (14)

  Marcus Joseph Turfrijer (18 mths)

  Arnold Turksma (5)

  Betje Turksma (9)

  Duifje Turksma (7)

  Esther Rebecca Turksma (5)

  Isidor Turksma (18 mths)

  Isidor Turksma (9)

  Marjan Turksma (2)

  Mietje Turksma (13)

  Paula Turksma (14 mths)

  Salomon Turksma (17)

  Sander Turksma (12)

  Simon Turksma (8)

  Theodora Turksma (4)

  Theresia Theodora Turksma (18 mths)

  Hartog van Tijn (4)

  Jette van Tijn (11)

  Lion van Tijn (10)

  Marianna van Tijn (17)

  Mozes van Tijn (8)

  Nathan Abraham van Tijn (4)

  Nathanie van Tijn (11)

  Renee Ullmann (16)

  Edgar van Veen (14)

  Sandra Joyce van Veen (4)

  David Veerejong (15)

  Klara Vegt (13)

  Isaac van der Velde (9)

  Jacques van der Velde (9)

  Louis van der Velde (5)

  Eliazer Henri Velleman (14)

  Ernest Salomon Velleman (12)

  Esther Mary Velleman (11)

  Greta Elisabeth Velleman (9)

  Hans Samuel Velleman (14)

  Herman Velleman (16)

  Kitty Evaline Velleman (2)

  Maurits Velleman (14 mths)

  Pinas Velleman (17)

  Wladimir Iljitsch Velleman (11)

  Esther Verdoner (15)

  Joel Verdoner (14)

  Sara Verdoner (15)

  Betty Kitty Verveer (12)

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  Henry Verveer (11)

  Joel Verveer (4)

  Malka Verveer (16)

  Max Verveer (14)

  Eliaser Vet (13)

  Frouke Betsy Vet (11 mths)

  Israel Vet (12)

  Jetje Vet (11 mths)

  Meijer Vet (9)

  Siegfried Vet (9)

  Abraham Veterman (12)

  Jetje Veterman (10)

  Sophia Rebecca Veterman (14 mths)

  Jacques Vieijra (16)

  Paul Alfred Vieijra (13)

  Jacob Vischschraper (13)

  Johanna Vischschraper (8)

  Eddy Louis Viskoper (3)

  Elias Jacob Viskoper (6)

  Johnny van Voolen (8)

  Abraham Eliazer Voorzanger (4)

  Dora Voorzanger (2)

  Elisabeth Voorzanger (18 mths)

  Lijdia Regina Voorzanger (18)

  Hanna Irma Vos (14)

  Rudolf Vos (16)

  Elisabeth Sara Vreedenburg (5)

  Joseph Vreedenburg (9)

  Alfred Saul Hartog de Vries (13)

  Aron de Vries (9)

  Arthur Max de Vries (12)

  Barend de Vries (12)

  Carolina Roza de Vries (18)

  Esther de Vries (6)

  Hartog Louis de Vries (9)

  Jacob de Vries (2)

  Kaatje de Vries (11)

  Martha Anna de Vries (18 mths)

  Oskar Joseph de Vries (14)

  Selma de Vries (17)

  Vogelina de Vries (8)

  Jacobine van Vriesland (4)

  Maurits Willem van Vriesland (17)

  Alfred Leo Vrieslander (4)

  Bernhard Vriesman (17)

  Robert Vriesman (7)

  Jeanette Bertha Wachs (13)

  Laura Wachtel (14)

  Abraham Wahrhaftig (11)

  Chaim Wahrhaftig (9)

  Edith Wahrhaftig (19)

  Esther Wahrhaftig (6)

  Gusta Wahrhaftig (2)

  Samuel Waisvics (9)

  Freddy Efraim Wajnberger (7)

  Harry Michael Wajnberger (13)

  Andries Jacques Walg (9)

  Elisabeth Walg (12)

  Frederik Jacob Walg (15)

  Levie Abraham Wallach (2)

  Jacques Kopel Wang (5)

  Jesaja Wang (15)

  Juda Wang (15)

  Emmy van Weezel (3)

  Harry Wegner (11)

  Robert Moritz Israel Weil (15)

  Aaron Weiman (18 mths)

  Gerta Weiniger (15)

  Helene Weiniger (11)

  Meijer Weiniger (13)

  David Weinreb (18 mths)

  Siegmund Weis (2)

  Suze Weis (10)

  Willem Weis (5)

  Roseliana Rochma Weiss (5)

  Clara Dororha Weissbraun (9)

  Isaac Weissbraun (7)

  Siegfried Weissman (15)

  Esther Weiszbard (17)

  Feigel Weiszbard (13)

  Pepi Weiszbard (10)

  Esther Wertheim (15)

  Michel Wertheim (6)

  Freddy Wessely (17)

  Betty Louise Weijl (11)

  Elly Dorette Weijl (11)

  Jacqueline Weijl (13)

  John Bernard Weijl (8)

  Lijda Betty Weijl (16)

  Maria Eva Wiesel (8)

  Bertha de Wilde (18)

  Bettha de Wilde (6)

  Siegfried Izak de Wilde (14)

  Ariette Wilk (14)

  Ise Wilk (8)

  Daniel Wilkens (5)

  Leonardus Wilkens (7)

  Duifje de Wind (15)

  Jacques Winkel (18 mths)

  Joseph Winkel (17)

  Joseph Samuel Winkel (3)

  Mordechai Winkel (15)

  Sara Winkel (16)

  Israel de Winter (14)

  Levi Israel de Winter (7)

  Nico Louis de Winter (18)

  Philippus de Winter (14)

  Samuel de Winter (17)

  Schoontje de Winter (12)

  Joseph Ruben van Wittene (16)

  Elisabeth Wolf (11)

  Joseph Mozes Wolf (12)

  Josephina Wolf (9)

  Levy Wolf (12)

  Schoontje Naatje Wolf (3)

  Szalom Wolf (12)

  Salomon de Wolf (10)

  Anna Rachel Wolff (8)

  Bertha Susanna Wolff (10)

  Edith Gusta Wolff (6)

  Elisabeth Wolff (11)

  Esther Wolff (3)
r />   Israel Barend Wolff (4)

  Joseph Wolff (13)

  Leentje Wolff (16)

  Maurits Wolff (9)

  Nannie Wolff (11 mths)

  Frederik de Wolff (12)

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  Leopold Israel Wolitzer (16)

  Louis Worms (5)

  Isaak Leon Wijnberg (12)

  Jacob Wijnberg (2)

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  Wilhelmina Wijnbergen (2)

  Geziena Sophie Wijnman (16)

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  Paul Zaitschek (16)

  Jacques Zeldenrust (8)

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  Jacques Zeligman (16)

  Sophia Zeligman (15)

  Mirjam Lea Zell (12)

  Oscar Zell (10)

  Willy Zell (14)

  Aron Simon Zilberstein (9)

  Gretha Rebecca Zilberstein (6)

  Maurits Zisner (17)

  Geza Jozef Zoest (10)

  Adolf Zucker (17)

  Josuah Zuckerhandel (4)

  Israel Zwaaf (10)

  Jansje Zwaaf (5)

  Izaak Zwarenstein (16)

  Joseph Zwarenstein (17)

  Marjo Zwarenstein (12)

  Dora Zijtenfeld (18)

  Henick Zijtenfeld (16)

  Moniek Zijtenfeld (15)

  Sometimes it is as if Andreas Ban sees Lethe rise from its bed and splash the porous ramparts of memory. Flooding fields, cities and people. And when it decides to withdraw, it drags after it carpets of the past and the shaky present and buries them in its dense silt. And he hears Hypnos and Thanatos shading the world with the fluttering of their wings. Then he ought perhaps to reach for poets. Even for someone playful such as the Dutch poet Toon Tellegen who, with his seemingly absurd images and unrestrained language returns people to reality and makes them hop. Who asks, Shall I go, shall I conclude that life is insignificant, shrug my shoulders and go? Or shall I stay?

  In the course of that February 2010 in Amsterdam, Andreas Ban “feels his way” through his surroundings, tourist-like. Had he stayed longer, he would have begun to live an everyday life. He would have looked for work and he would have written. Leo and Andreas leave the apartment on a Sunday morning. Washed sheets and towels are drying in the guest room. There is food in the fridge, coffee, olive oil, rice, tea and pasta in the wall cabinet; white and yellow flowers in vases, books he has read, too heavy to take back to Croatia, on the shelves. They leave the keys with a neighbor who works at the Athenaeum bookshop, as though they are going away for a short time, as though they will be back soon. The taxi comes on time, it’s sleeting, the street is familiar, the number 2 and 5 trams, which start from around the corner, are familiar, the owners of the café opposite unlock the door and switch on the lights, they are familiar too, the journalist in the building next to theirs is carrying a bag with the bread and milk he has just bought — they say good morning and goodbye.

  At Schiphol Leo sets off for terminal 2, for Zurich, Andreas to terminal 3, for Zagreb. As though they would meet in a few hours’ time “at home,” for lunch.

  The world had shrunk further.

  * * *

  * On April 30, 1941 Pavelić brought in the Decree on Race, that is “on the protection of the Aryan blood and honor of the Croatian nation,” which was repealed on May 3, 1945.

  † Preferans. An Eastern European ten-card plain-trick game with bidding, played by three or four players with a thirty-two-card piquet deck. A sophisticated variant of the Austrian game Préférence, which in turn descends from Spanish Ombre and French Boston.

  ‡ “Krasna zemljo, Istro mila,” the Istrian anthem.

  § Aleksandar Ranković was a Yugoslav communist of Serb origin, considered to be the third most powerful man in Yugoslavia after Josip Broz Tito and Edvard Kardelj. Ranković was a proponent of a centralized Yugoslavia and opposed efforts that promoted decentralization, which he deemed to be against the interests of Serb unity; he ran Kosovo as a police state and made Serbs dominant in the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo’s nomenklatura. Ranković supported a hard-line approach against Albanians in Kosovo, who were commonly suspected of pursuing seditious activities.

  ‖ The Serbian word for cinema is bioskop, and the Serbs kiss three times, as opposed to the “Croatian” word for cinema, kino, which is in fact German, the Croatians kiss twice on the cheek. This refers to the Croatian nationalistic attitude toward the Serbs during and after the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

  ¶ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

  ** The Blue Rider (der Blaue Reiter). A group of Russian immigrant and German artists (including Vasily Kandinsky, Alexei von Jawlensky, August Macke, Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter) founded in Munich in 1911.

  Andreas Ban does not travel anymore.

  After Amsterdam, invitations come, little excursions, Warsaw, Edinburgh, Paris, Ljubljana, Koper, Rotterdam, Piran, Lillehammer, London, Budapest; all two- or three-day meetings, pointless discussions, the usual parrotlike questions. Like a wound-up tin toy, Andreas Ban tottered off “into the wide world” with an empty head and came back tired, immobile, wound down, plunged once again into stasis.

  In Croatia no one invites him anymore, no one offers him anything, no little job of any kind, no fee that would have enabled him to augment his budget, to round out his little existence, which now, soon, soon, would become a really small, very quiet, closed, stifling existence. One more month, one more paycheck . . . Andreas Ban counts, counts off his tepid life.

  Besides, why should anyone call on him, who is he to “them”? And why would he call on anyone, who are they to him? And why ask, now that twenty years have passed, do you have some little (intellectual) job for me? He will buy (he must do so now, before that pension arrives), yes, he will buy one of those small carts and set off, limping, to collect empty bottles.

  But, no.

  The three garbage bins under his window have a regular visitor. The visitor comes around midnight and systematically, tidily, with astonishing enthusiasm, classifies the contents. He swiftly separates the sorted garbage into little plastic bags and places the bags on the ledge behind the bins and on the outdoor tables of the nearby beer hall, closed at that time; running from left to right, in small skipping steps, he gets out of breath. The homeless man then places the sorted garbage in the entrance of Andreas’s building, because the door of Andreas’s building does not lock automatically. Sometimes the homeless man sleeps with his garbage in the hall of Andreas’s building, sometimes he shits beside his garbage. In the past, Andreas Ban would see that bearded homeless man at small exhibitions, spreading his stench of trash, but he does not see him there anymore. When he meets him in the street, the homeless man greets Andreas with, Hello, brother.

  It is midnight. The first night train passes with a fearful shriek. The homeless man takes garbage out of the bins with increasing speed, hysterically, in a panic. The garbage truck is approaching the bins. The workers are already at the bin, they want to wheel it over to the truck where it will be lifted pneumatically and emptied. The homeless man does not let them. He hugs his bin, there is a struggle, a battle for the bin, for the trash. A quiet battle, without words. Andreas closes his shutters. And his window.

  The next morning Andreas Ban opens his wardrobe where his beautiful, expensive, perfectly kept tuxedo hangs. He takes off the plastic cover and lays it on the bed. The shirt is clean, ironed, perhaps discreetly yellowed at the edges from being untouched. Andreas Ban takes out the bow tie, the black silk socks, the patent-leather shoes. On the bed lies an elegantly dressed corpse without a head.

  Andreas Ban puts on his formal clothes. He looks at his reflection in the crystal mirror (on his grandmother’s chest of drawers) out of which surfaces his youth
to meet him, now sorrowfully misshapen. Because his vertebrae have shrunk by five centimeters, his trouser legs drag on the floor, he cannot walk because he trips on them, so he stands still. Because of his large belly he is not able to do up either his trousers or his jacket, he just blinks and squints, staring into the misted mirror waiting for that other Andreas to come out of it, young and slim and smiling. They look at each other. Neither Andreas Ban breathes. Neither Andreas Ban moves. The young and the old Andreas Ban take each other’s measure while over them both fall tiny particles of white dust that glisten in the semidark room. They glisten, both Andreas Bans, the past one and the present one glisten. Then, through a crack in the closed wooden slats slips a dirty ray of sunlight and blinds them, wipes them out and they vanish. Through the room a fat black fly buzzes nervously.

  Dressed like this, in his expensive, perfectly preserved but tight tuxedo, under the jacket of which flap the tails of his half-buttoned shirt, Andreas Ban sits on the floor, with his unlaced patent-leather shoes on his feet, and starts leafing through his piled up, sorted books, the ones he is finally prepared to part with, the collection which, he now sees, he has been pointlessly collecting and, like some kind of demented hamster, dragging back to his overflowing stores. He rearranges them, moves them from one pile to another, volumes once carefully (he is surprised with how much zeal) acquired, bought, exchanged, some even stolen, whose covers, authors, titles, contents he still remembers although they are increasingly shrouded in undulating whiteness, and a mournful dankness is creeping into them. The books are arranged for discarding, for libraries, for the secondhand shop, and Andreas Ban sorts them again, haphazardly, chaotically and crossly, Oh, what a lot, there’s something of everything, he says, beginning to leaf through them, beginning to read even with a kind of mild gaiety running through his body.

  Unnecessary ballast, seen from close up — trash. Books, adornment of my solitude, Andreas Ban says now, to be estranged as soon as possible. Suddenly he sees des Esseintes, the one who wears a white velvet suit and waistcoats threaded with gold, the one who instead of a tie puts a posy of dog violets in the open neck of his shirt, and Andreas Ban looks at the paintings and engravings with which he, that des Esseintes, adorned his solitude, which, indestructible as a dirty, perhaps even bloody stain, weighed down by this whole burden of beauty, nevertheless mercilessly broke into reality, flooding the floors, walls, the air in which the two of them now float half-dead. But Andreas Ban is not Jean des Esseintes. Jean des Esseintes had money, a lot of money with which he nourished (adorned) his solitude, cramming it frenziedly with beauty until it became so weighty (that solitude of his) that it had to say I have grown too heavy, I am leaving you, adieu. He, Andreas Ban, cannot return the way Jean des Esseintes returned, forcibly, to the tedious happiness meant for the poor, because for that, for the lethal and empty happiness meant for the poor, Andreas Ban does not have and never will have so much as a fillér* with which he could camouflage that tedious happiness.