Belladonna

by Daša Drndic

  I saw a man who was selling small skates pour les poupées

  I saw tapestries showing Adam and Christ in white against a green ground, naked, but bereft of genitals

  I saw a “red” funeral procession: coffin, hearse, harness, all were red

  in a glass case I saw a landscape hanging on the wall with a mechanical clock built into it; the mechanism was broken and the clock whose strokes had once set into motion windmills, water wheels, window shutters and human figures no longer functioned.

  I saw a man selling small cages made of glazed paper and containing tiny paper birds

  I also saw a real parrot, a white macaw, sitting on a basket containing linen goods a woman was selling to passersby

  in a trunk I put away all my lovely toys and manuscripts

  doll’s house furniture made by convicts in Siberia

  three wooden whales with the Earth on their backs

  a samovar Christmas-tree ornament

  a box in the shape of a duck

  I bought a kitsch postcard, a balalaika and a little paper house

  I found a carved wooden axe — for children

  a whole world, worlds

  Melancholics do not kill themselves, with their solemn Masses they pollute the air; they are the lackeys of a dying society. Blessed and isolated in the rooms of their comfortable Grand Hotel Abgrund built on the edge of an abyss, on the edge of nothingness and the absurd, in the interval between extravagant dishes and so-called entertainment, they ponder over that chasm, groping in the dark, feeding on the cadavers of the new, “new age” madhouse so similar to the old one, the famous Salpêtrière, say, that town within a town with forty-five buildings, with streets and squares, with gardens and glades and a beautiful old church. At the end of the nineteenth century, 4,383 people live and work in the Salpêtrière hospital: 580 employees, 853 “alienated” people and 2,950 mentally or physically handicapped, including some children. Salpêtrière, originally a gunpowder factory, becomes the dumping ground for the Parisian poor, a prison for prostitutes, a refuge for the mentally disabled, for criminals, epileptics and the homeless. With time, the old mental hospital is modernized, like a faithful dog it runs after reality, so an increasing number of nonresidential patients go for “treatment” there. Otherwise, Salpêtrière was well known for its enormous population of rats. No, Andreas Ban is not a melancholic. His sickness has a different name.

  Old age and memory weave themselves into time and come increasingly to resemble braids; time is in fact a whirlpool in which past and present events circle, prehistory and posthistory, in an eternal embrace. And as the future collapses, as there is in fact no future, the time that is coming is wrapped in the past like a scroll becoming the underground world of the future, a world obsessed with everything old. And so empires collapse, the leaders of gangs parade like statesmen, and under their equipment people become invisible. Therefore, no stories emerge from a disintegrated past, only lifeless images. There is no construction without stitches, everywhere there are fragments, because it is out of ruins, out of wrecks, out of discarded parts that the new comes into being.

  Andreas Ban glances around the apartment. On the stove the crouching granite Eskimo woman is still waiting, her legs folded beneath her, her hands thrust into a stone wrap, looking like a little black ball so small that it fits into the palm. Legend has it that the Inuksuk protects and feeds those who give it a home. It brings them security and accompanies them on dangerous journeys. The Inuksuk is spirit and tenacity, tiny and quiet as it is. Andreas has kept his Inuksuk on the stove for years now, its face turned toward the door. She, that Eskimo woman, does not stir, just as Daruma does not stir for years in his cave, so his legs and arms atrophy, they shrivel so much that Daruma becomes round, like this Eskimo woman of Andreas’s. Daruma’s vigil lasted a long time, such a long time that every now and then he would be overcome by sleep, so as a punishment he cuts off his eyelids, believing that thus he will stay awake for ever. And today, as souvenirs, Darumas of various sizes carved out of jade, onyx, granite, ivory, marble, alabaster, with eyes wide open, are circulated in the markets without it being known whether they are still looking at the world around them or whether they are already completely blind. Andreas’s little Eskimo woman smiles and blinks.

  People write to him.

  Strangers write to him about their darknesses. They do not demand anything, they present him with the pasts that chafe them, they try to shake off their personal and family nightmares by sending them to him. He no longer knows what to do with all those stories, with other people’s lives, with spirits that swirl through the air in front of him. There are disintegrating people, there are terrible stories. When he reads those painful tales, Andreas Ban is overcome with shame at his twenty-year blindness in the course of which he observed only his own inner eye rooting through him, his own disintegration, his own breakdown, and he bows his head, leafs through those pages, carries them from room to room and in the end puts them away in a file labeled “Destinies.” It is only now that Andreas sees how many superfluous people this small town amasses, keeps and stores in its jails, how many people float in timeless voids imprisoned in their own lives which become alien stories circulating through their bloodstreams. Why had he not gotten to know those people? Why did he not seek out those superfluous people, those prisoners, he ought to have found them and touched them. As it is, he, Andreas Ban, now has no one to write to.

  There is one letter to which he never replied. The letter is undated and Andreas Ban cannot remember when it arrived, how many years ago he had put that letter aside intending to do something with it, perhaps write to the person who sent it. In some places the letter is smudged with the imprints of his coffee cup, and the pages are already brittle with age. In that letter L. says that he had heard a radio play written by Andreas Ban (Andreas Ban has no clue which play it is) and that it left him very upset and sad because he belongs to the generation that had lived through all of that. (Which play is that?) L. says that he is seventy-seven years old, that he is in the deep autumn of his life and is beginning to see the end which is coming frighteningly close, that is what he writes: frighteningly close. L. writes that he has always been a rebel, that he worked as a journalist, that he had fought against injustice, that then came surveillance, persecution and imprisonment, that he had gone to Czechoslovakia in 1968, where he was awoken on August 21 by Russian tanks, that in Prague he had joined the intellectuals — actors, producers, writers — who on those Russian tanks had drawn in chalk five-pointed stars with swastikas in their centers, he was arrested there, in Czechoslovakia, and taken handcuffed to the Austrian border, after which he, L., ended up in Germany and stayed in Germany for twenty-three years. In Germany, writes L., he meets all kinds of people very like those Andreas Ban describes in his play (Which play is it?), among them a certain translator named Pavel, who later confesses to him that he personally shot schoolchildren in Kragujevac,† that he had watched their school caps fly off their heads, that he had used a Maschinengewehr 42, a Šarac, L. writes, although that Maschinengewehr 42, that machine gun was produced in Nazi Germany and used by the Wehrmacht from 1942, while the Šarac was produced under the MG42 license in Yugoslavia much later as the MG53, by the firm Crvena Zastava.

  L. says that as early as 1964 he writes about death camps, about Dachau, but also about the crimes committed by Israeli soldiers against the Palestinians, about which, he says, he has written a novel which speaks of two swallows drinking nectar from an agave flower, because the agave blooms only once in a hundred years. L. gives a detailed account of the plot of this novel and says that he will send Andreas Ban the manuscript so that he can see how it all works, how the events become entangled and disentangled. (The manuscript never arrived.)

  Then, L. writes that new generations have no clue about much of what occurred in the Second World War, even young Germans who ought to know those facts very well do not kno
w them well enough. In questionnaires, L. writes, to the question what does the word “Hitler” define, some reply that Hitler is a make of car. L. writes about his pain, about the large scars he bears on his soul because of past and present injustices, because of the vile world we live in. So he has written a play about all this, he says. But L. can no longer bear that burden, he needs distance, he says, and in the seventy-seventh year of his life he begins to write a novel about love.

  Just before New Year (which?), L. concludes that there are no new years nor old years, that time neither comes nor goes, but we are the ones who go.

  L. ends his letter with the statement that he is ending his letter because he does not want to write too much about himself and asks Andreas Ban not to reproach him for the typos because he, L., is in fact half-blind from diabetes and is typing from memory, and when he wants to read something he has to use a magnifying glass as big as the biggest apple. L. adds that he is not in fact from these parts, he was born in the Banat, on the three-way border of Hungary, Romania and us, that is what he wrote: us, and that he had settled here, in these parts, a long time ago but that he is now a widower. And, despite the fact that he is almost blind, L. writes that he does some painting, oil on canvas, and has taken part in several exhibitions.

  Maybe today Andreas might even have replied to L., although he does not know what he would have said to him. The letter has been waiting too long. Maybe the diabetes means that by now he is completely blind, perhaps he has had his leg cut off, perhaps his arm, or both arms, have been amputated, so that he can no longer type, or perhaps L. is no longer even alive.

  Andreas Ban does not pay attention to his swollen, painful knee. That right knee piped up suddenly, unannounced, but Andreas Ban does not wish to communicate with it. So his knee becomes insolent, increasingly insolent and high-handed, it asserts itself when Andreas goes down the stairs and when he climbs up to the fourth floor. That knee is capable of giving way, falling into its own hole, then Andreas collapses, and his knee is gleeful. At each step, his knee announces itself with an ill-mannered snigger and starts to drill, to aim its arrows into Andreas’s hips and between his eyes.

  His back makes itself known ever more often as well, we’re disintegrating, Andreas’s vertebrae howl, after which Andreas begins to sway down the hall to relieve them, those crushed vertebrae. Andreas goes to bed with increasing trepidation, because after just two or three hours a dreadful pain starts up around his pelvis, a fierce rending that sends surging waves through his entire body and he sinks, suffocating. Then he turns over and groans, tosses, gets up, sits down, throws himself onto the floor, gets up, walks (limps), makes himself coffee, and with yearning apprehension crawls on all fours back to bed hoping (by deceit) to snatch just a bit more sleep. Four years have passed since his doctor’s advice to mess around in the garden, where Andreas Ban had, of course, not messed around, believing that he would work out a way to soothe the rattling of his demented vertebrae. Four years, just what the neurosurgeon gave him.

  There are days when Andreas greets his pains with open arms. They fall into his embrace like rotten apples, drum on his chest and send their echo through his body. In his embrace, those pains slowly drain and like an infusion, drop by drop, flow toward his insides until they flood them with a thin layer of dark damp. Then time narrows to the present which is becoming short and shallow, and he no longer has anything to reflect upon, nowhere to wander off to, nothing to remember, he is jammed in the void of a miniature world. Andreas Ban no longer exists, there are only parts of his body — the left breast, the lumbar, sacral and cervical vertebrae, the right knee, the broken arm, the broken leg, the corroded stomach, sluggish intestines, the blocked bronchi, black lungs and half-blind eyes — parts of his body and organs which in the restricted present sometimes collide, sometimes pass each other by.

  Waiting rooms, prescriptions, appointments, magnetic resonance imaging — then more waiting rooms, prescriptions, appointments, all that shifting from one hospital to another, from one doctor to another, all that jostling, all that senseless expense of time to finally, after a year or maybe two, go back under the knife, after which one could develop bedsores, after which his body would abandon him entirely and he would watch through a mirror as it flounders toward exitus. Andreas Ban will pop up in front of Andreas Ban, stand beside him and watch his crippled hobbling, his jerking movements and his grotesquely distorted face. There will be moments when the other Andreas Ban, dressed in an old, tight, black suit (a tuxedo?) will turn his back on Andreas Ban and, silent, motionless, simply wait for his double to blow him away. There will be days when the other Andreas Ban will appear like a transparent shadow, when he will lie down beside the first, throw his arm over his shoulder and whisper always the same little ditty:

  Partout où j’ai voulu dormir,

  Partout où j’ai voulu mourir,

  Partout où j’ai touché la terre,

  Sur ma route est venu s’asseoir

  Un étranger vêtu de noir

  Qui me ressemblait comme un frère.

  * * *

  * Fillér. The name of various small coins throughout Hungarian history. It was the one-hundreth subdivision of the Austro–Hungarian and the Hungarian korona, the pengő and the forint.

  † The Kragujevac massacre was the murder of Serb, Jewish and Roma men and boys in Kragujevac, Serbia, by German Wehrmacht soldiers on October 20 and 21, 1941. All males from the town between the ages of sixteen and sixty were assembled by German troops and members of the collaborationist Serbian Volunteer Command (SDK) and Serbian State Guard (SDS). An entire generation of secondary school children were taken directly from their classes.

  When horses spend a long time in stables, isolated in their boxes, they become agitated and bite themselves. They bite their haunches, their bellies, their groins, neighing loudly and kicking furiously. As soon as the horses are harnessed to any task, they calm down. This applies to domesticated horses, wild horses don’t do such terrible things to themselves. Domesticated horses can be soothed if they have company, not necessarily equine. It could even be hens that peck around among their legs.

  The most effective method of counteracting equine self-harm is castration, it is applied just once and the effect is enduring.

  Oscar Artiz was a relatively healthy man in late middle age. But, with time, his rheumatic problems became so serious that they prevented him from performing his regular job. Oscar Artiz worked on building sites, he was constantly on the move and carried heavy loads. After two years of illness, Oscar Artiz becomes, well, a bit depressed, his behavior is unusual, one might say strange. He keeps repeating: I killed my sister. One morning, he leaves his apartment, telling his landlady: I won’t be long, I’ll be back for lunch. But he does not come back. Two days later the police find Oscar Artiz, naked to the waist, lying in a field in the suburbs of the town where he lived. He is wearing only trousers, socks and boots and has numerous wounds to his head, neck and chest. Oscar Artiz, with almost no pulse but conscious, capable of following questions yet too weak to answer them, is taken by ambulance to the local hospital. A wound to his neck is festering and full of maggots, not bleeding. Eight hours later, Oscar Artiz dies. The autopsy finds no abnormalities in his internal organs or his brain. All his organs had an adequate supply of blood, so the doctors’ commission concludes that death was not caused by bleeding. There were more than four hundred cuts and stab wounds on his body, mostly superficial, although the muscles on the back of his left hand, on his fingers and neck were damaged. The largest wound, the one on his neck, began at the lobe of his left ear and ended under the center of his lower jaw. So, Oscar Artiz has wounds all over his forehead (5 stab wounds), on his chin and neck, in his left armpit and on the left side of his rib cage (27 stab wounds), on his chest (72 stab wounds), on his abdomen (168 stab wounds), on his left arm: on the palm (24), on the fingers (15), on the wrist (4), on the forearm (6), on the dorsa
l side of his left arm: on the hand (2), on the fingers (3), on the wrist (2) and on the forearm (6), on the right arm: on the palm (26), on the wrist (12), on the dorsal side of the right arm: on the hand (2), on the wrist (10), on the fingers (21).

  The wounds were made with a relatively blunt pocketknife which was found close to where the unfortunate Oscar Artiz was lying.

  Conclusion: the number and nature of the wounds inflicted are typical of cases of self-harm and nervous breakdown. Medical history records an impressive number of similar cases, even more extreme than the case of Oscar Artiz.

  They called him Laid, the little Arctic fox. He was born in a zoo. He was one of the eleven cubs in a litter produced by the “married couple” who had arrived in town the previous year. As a rule, Arctic foxes are exceptionally resilient; they survive temperatures as low as -50°C, in treeless lands, frequently covered with snow. They have small ears and pads covered in fur so that their step is quiet and careful. A week after they come into the zoo-world, vets separate Laid, the smallest of the litter, and Zig, the largest, from their parents to be hand-reared. Laid and Zig seem to progress just as well as the cubs left with their parents. But, after forty-nine days of living apart, Laid wakes at two o’clock in the morning and starts biting his foreleg, yelping desperately. An examination of the little polar fox does not reveal any anomalies, but, to be on the safe side, the cub is put on a six-day course of sedatives (0.3 milliliters of pentobarbital). Laid self-harms several more times with varied intensity. Then he is fitted with an immobilizing collar, which he tolerates. He is given antibiotics to prevent infection of the wound on his foreleg. For three weeks Laid is calm, he does not harm himself. Then, suddenly, thirty-seven days after the first episode, he tries again. They send him to the veterinary clinic where they hope that specialists will discover the cause of his unusual behavior. After a detailed physical and neurological examination, the university veterinary clinic cannot identify any anomalies in the little Arctic fox. Soon afterward, Laid begins to self-harm again, so the vets again sedate him. Forty-eight hours after he is taken to hospital, Laid dies. A thorough autopsy is carried out and no lesions that could have caused Laid’s strange behavior are found. There were no abnormalities in his brain. Laid was diagnosed as suffering from “idiopathic behavior disorder.” Laid’s brother Zig developed normally, as did the other cubs in the litter.