by Daša Drndic
When he was taken in, Sol Basco had abundant black hair and a thick mustache. After several months of hospitalization, Sol Basco pulls the hair out of his head and face. Sol Basco pulls out his hairs with such dedication that he is soon left without hair, eyebrows and beard. He also pulls out the hairs from his armpits and his pubic hair. The doctors are unable to cure his mania. Sol Basco remains in the Psychiatric Department of the University Clinical Hospital in Belgrade.
Pepita Bobadilla. Andreas does not know whether she is still alive. Call me Pepa, call me Pepa, she kept saying, and they called her Pepa. She was treated by Andreas’s mother Marisa, who said, Such people need not be treated at all. Marisa’s patients used to visit the Ban family, and on feast days they also came to lunch, sometimes several of them at once. True, there were patients who never came. Some of Andreas’s mother’s patients were quiet, others were not. Marisa loved her patients.
Pepita cut her hair short and unevenly, with nail scissors. She liked to show off her underwear, Look how clean it is, she would say, I’m a clean woman. Pepita Bobadilla, Pepa, was fat, but firm, she talked rapidly and a lot and she smelled of baby cream and walnut oil. Later, she would often bring flowers to Marisa’s grave, whether she still does Andreas Ban cannot say, everything is far away, including his mother’s grave, and Pepita has probably died. Pepa used to light small yellow candles beside the flowers, the yellow candles went out right away because there’s always a breeze over Marisa’s grave, it’s that pine tree. Andreas and his sister had transplanted the pine from a pot into the ground beside their mother’s headstone nearly thirty-three years earlier. The pine was small then, now it is tall. How it managed to grow so bushy is a mystery; cemeteries are constricted and crammed, generally overcrowded. The pine waves, as though it is saying come — or, perhaps, flee! — and it makes the air sway, sprinkles it with the Mediterranean. That is unusual. Andreas’s mother’s graveyard is a continental graveyard where the painter Paško Vučetić lies, also Mediterranean, and his wife Marija, in polished, dark coffins. Their remains, placed in those coffins long ago, have already rotted, nothing but brittle bones and gray dust, devoid of any trace of human form. The little transplanted New Year tree, bought in an earthenware pot at a Belgrade market, had also been displaced, dug in, interred somewhere it did not belong. So, Andreas is now beside the sea, Marisa is not, and here beside the sea he has not one important grave, not one to visit.
Pepita Bobadilla wore nylon petticoats edged with nylon lace, yellowish, because nylon turns yellow with age. Pepita — Pepa — adored everything nylon and plastic: plastic containers of all shapes, sizes and colors, nylon clothing and nylon curtains, she also had green plastic sunglasses. Pepa liked to bring small gifts, two oranges for instance, which reminded Andreas of the 1950s, of smiling poverty woven of difficult improvisations. The maroon wax tablecloth Pepa once gave him had until recently covered his kitchen table, a miraculous remnant of his past life. As the maroon plastic tablecloth was worn out, stiff as a cadaver from lying there and being wiped clean for twenty years, Andreas had recently thrown it out.
Junk, nothing but junk, he had said as he filled black trash bags.
Pepita Bobadilla, the Ban family’s Pepa, who called Marisa her “doctor-sister,” suffered from trichotillomania. Like Sol Basco. Only, Pepa was at liberty, Sol was not. Pepa never entered a hospital (thanks to Marisa), Sol never came out again. Of all her hairs, Pepa most liked to pull the private ones. Look how smooth it is, she showed us, look — it’s clean and soft, she would show us from the doorway and then would give Andreas and his sisters two moist kisses because she always had a dewy upper lip, even in winter. I want to see, Andreas’s sister once said, but Pepa replied, No. I pull the hairs when I’m alone, she said, I pull them when I don’t know what I’m doing, she said, when I don’t know what to do, I won’t let you look, no.
Beside the folder marked “Destinies” there is another thick folder, a little suitcase made of transparent pinkish plastic, with the label “Tests and results.” In that folder languishes Andreas Ban, disassembled. In that folder lies Andreas’s blood with all its components, with the thrombocytes, leukocytes, erythrocytes, with glucose and cholesterol, with triglycerides, with keratin, here are AST, ALT, FFT, ALP, and those markers CA125, CEA and CA 15-3 which, for the time being, rise and fall within the limits of what is normal; in the folder is Andreas’s urine in varying shades of yellow, with sediment and specific weight, with bacteria or without, with proteins or with none, depending, with traces of blood or with none; in the folder Andreas’s fragmented body languishes, tidily classified into subfolders, by organs; the pink folder also contains Andreas’s breast, viewed from different angles, from the biopsy, from the process of incision through radiation, here are quantities of ultrasound scans of his breast; here are his kidneys (with little accumulations of sand), his liver (with cysts), his whole abdomen. The pink folder also contains Andreas’s vertebrae, Andreas’s lungs, Andreas’s knees, Andreas’s broken arms and legs. The pink folder contains innumerable results from spirometer tests, there are recommendations for an array of asthma pumps, powders and tablets; here are Andreas’s intestines (in color), here are the electric beats of his heart, more or less regular, and here are ten years of reports on measurements of Andreas’s optic pressure, which from time to time goes berserk, sky-high. In it, in this pink case, as in a shrine, as in a temple, Andreas Ban’s assets are stored. Thanks to that folder Andreas Ban is able to move away and hand over (bequeath) his body to others — oncologists, neurologists, surgeons, physicians, pulmonologists, ophthalmologists, laboratory technicians, physiotherapists, pharmacists — for short or long-term use. Sometimes Andreas Ban hugs the little pink case, presses it to his chest and walks with it through his darkened rooms, as if rocking a weak child. How light I am, he says. When he takes the pink folder to doctors, they rummage through it in silence, root around in it, dig about, muddle everything up, while Andreas sits to one side, watching. Then he says, I’m off. You’ve got all of me there, on those bits of paper, in miniature.
By now Andreas Ban has been thoroughly examined, although he is still under constant surveillance. Internal and external. Thanks to the pink case it is possible to follow the slightest of Andreas’s deviations and departures from the normal. As time passes, the folder swells. He will have to get another one, a different color, so as to differentiate himself from before and after. That one will be made of transparent black plastic and in its bottom left-hand corner Andreas will stick a little zebra with a blue glint.
So, since he arrived, twenty years ago now, there had been and there still are people with whom he could have become friends, who could have become close to him, he sees now, now that they write to him. Oh, yes, he was invited to their homes, for spinach pie, for bean stew, for lamb soup, for yaniya, he had wheat berry with whipped cream and without, he had eaten chestnut puree, he had licked teaspoons of thick rose and watermelon syrups, he would arrive with some book or other, with flowers, with a bottle or two of good wine, he had talked, casually, almost gaily, about the past, he had talked with his accent (Damn it, man, he has Belgrade fur), there had been card games or chess, and then — he would return home heavy, lame and sad, it was all an illusion, shreds, crumbs, a charade, he would say and plunge once again into his impoverished, dried-out solitude. He could have had some people over, he could have, his dried-cod ragout and his baccalà mantecato are first-class, his crème caramel is unsurpassed, his black risotto, his minestras, his pasta e fagioli and his pastitsada con gnocchi, then, his brodettos, his fritters . . . he had full sets of various crystal glasses with gilt rims, glasses for every kind of drink, he had silver cutlery and a special set for fish, he had Toledo tablecloths for twelve people, a white one and a pink one, although none of that was needed, he could have invited people to goulash with polenta (he makes that well too), to sausages or chicken breasts, to tripe, and then what? Now it is over, now even if he wanted to, he could no longer gat
her those people together. What could he offer them? They would look at each other in silence, in the half-dark of his half-empty rooms, in winter dankly cold, as though they were in some home for the infirm and abandoned. Those others, those who had and still have a single-track past and a present without creases, arranged in drawers named “life,” in which there are no wars, no displacements, in which weddings are all alike, just as funerals are, in which there is no life, those people he could not invite because they floated in their safe határs where the lawns are soft and one’s steps springy, while he had fallen out of the frame, hanging and swaying from a rusty hook and creating disorder. What would they talk about? What would they touch upon?
That last letter had fucked him up. In the days when he was still traveling, he had been surprised at how unknown lives whispered their stories to him, the way they would spring up from nowhere, leap out at him and roll along after him, straddle him, dangle from him as in his youth he had dangled from moving trams, and they would not let go until he (the psychologist Andreas Ban), with a hush, hush, dear friends, would free them from their bad dreams and nightmares. And now, it turns out that he need not have gone away, need not have researched, leafed through, listened to, watched anything. Here, under his nose, in this small, forgotten, forgetful town, languish the same kinds of stories, scattered through cemeteries, stuck to names, pressed onto photographs, left to lie around like excess, like redundancy.
S. Trajković begins his letter by stating that he must finally tell his story because, having kept it locked up for fifty or sixty years, it is rotting, but to his astonishment it refuses to go away, it keeps recycling, that is what he said, it recycles, spreading its stench, it is eating into him and in this imprisonment he sees that he is disappearing. I am the prisoner of an incidental historical tale, a secondary historical drama, says S. Trajković, and now my own life is eliminating me.
After that S. Trajković relates to Andreas Ban the contents of a documentary about two subspecies of chimpanzee, one of which is strikingly aggressive. Periodically, without any provocation, these aggressive chimpanzees, particularly the males, S. Trajković stresses, organize themselves into military formations and attack, torture, dismember and in the end kill members of the other subspecies so similar to themselves. From the documentary, S. Trajković discovers that this is a unique phenomenon in the animal kingdom and experts find it incomprehensible. Otherwise, says S. Trajković, when these chimpanzees are not attacking, mistreating and killing the others, they live peacefully alongside groups of all species and subspecies, and it is unclear what is going on in their heads to make them turn wild, that is to say, mad.
S. Trajković then switches to his family story. He writes that his late mother, Suzana Atlas, daughter of Blanka Atlas, née Steiner, and Armin Atlas, came from Senta and that the Atlas family was one of the wealthier families in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Then S. Trajković writes that the outbreak of the war finds Suzana Atlas, later his mother, in Nice, in a private school pour les jeunes filles de bonne famille, and that despite her teachers’ advice not to return to Senta, she does. Soon afterward, writes S. Trajković, Suzana Atlas, with her mother Blanka, is sent to Auschwitz. The deportation of Jews from the Banat region begins in August 1941, writes S. Trajković. His grandfather, Armin Atlas, is taken away in a special transport, while his uncle, Suzana’s elder brother Gjuri, then studying medicine in Zagreb, evades arrest and joins the partisans. S. Trajković writes that the only one to return from the camps is his mother Suzana, while Blanka is killed soon after their arrival in Auschwitz. Armin Atlas apparently survived the camp, but on his way to Senta, independently and on foot — S. Trajković emphasizes — disappears. Uncle Gjuri died recently in Novi Sad.
On her return from the camp, Suzana Atlas finds the family house occupied by strangers, and for a time lives in a rented room, as a subtenant. She never sets foot in her house again. After the war, Suzana Atlas sees personal items, antique furniture, linen, coverlets, Persian rugs, Rosenthal dinner sets and much more in her neighbors’ houses, writes S. Trajković. It is only in 2010 that S. Trajković goes for the first time to see the house, once the family home of the Atlas family. Today, the building accommodates a branch of Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia, writes S. Trajković, and the house is in a state similar to Milošević’s party.
S. Trajković writes that Suzana Atlas soon gets a job in a nationalized firm, since she speaks several foreign languages. She works as secretary to the director whose desk once belonged to her (late) father Armin Atlas. One of the numerous drawers of the desk cannot be opened, so Suzana contacts a workman who before the war — what a coincidence! — worked as head of a department in her father’s firm. It turns out that the drawer was not locked, but jammed, with a golden Pelican pen and pencil in a snakeskin etui. That is one of the rare family objects that Suzana Atlas ever acquires, and which, writes S. Trajković, I still possess and from time to time, as though it were some kind of unreal reliquary, I look at it and shift it between my fingers.
Soon afterward, Suzana Atlas has a chance to leave Senta and after a number of trivial events, unimportant for this story, writes S. Trajković, she settles in Opatija, where she is given a job as librarian in the town library.
S. Trajković’s late father, Veselin Trajkovski, was born in the village of Duf in Macedonia, into one of the poorest families in the region. Having graduated from the Academy of Commerce (doing physical work and making expert baklava by day and studying by night), by order of the Communist Party Committee of the Republic of Serbia, Veselin Trajkovski is transferred to Rijeka. Shortly before that, Mihajlo Trajkovski, father of Veselin Trajkovski and grandfather of the S. Trajković writing to Andreas Ban, is obliged, during the process of Serbianization of the Macedonian population and to keep his rented sweets and cake shop, to change his surname from Trajkovski to the Serbian variant — Trajković.
S. Trajković writes that as a child he remembers his parents arguing about their surname, his mother Suzana, née Atlas, insisting that it revert to Trajkovski, because, having learned from the dark game History had dragged her Stein-Atlas family into in 1941, she can still feel the breath of that capricious lady. So, Suzana Trajković, née Atlas, maintains that it will be fatally dangerous, writes S. Trajković, when one day their Croatian neighbors start believing that they, the Trajkovićes, are Serbs.
In the mid-1960s S. Trajković begins elementary school. To his mother’s astonishment, he barely passes first grade, with a score of 2 out of 5. For “achievement” in the first half of his second year, S. Trajković gets a score of 1. Then S. Trajković tells his mother that in his classroom everybody sits with a partner and only he sits alone at a desk facing the class, not like the other desks, facing the teacher. S. Trajković tells his mother that his teacher has made him cardboard donkey’s ears which she puts on his head like a hat, and she shouts at him not to use the Serbian words “hleb” and “mleko” for bread and milk but the Croatian ones, “kruh” and “mlijeko.” S. Trajković tells his mother that he doesn’t get a snack, so his friends share theirs with him. This was the 1960s, S. Trajković stresses in his letter, I didn’t know what the teacher was talking about. Naturally, Suzana Trajković makes a fuss, the teacher disappears, S. Trajković gets his morning snack and good grades.
S. Trajković then writes about the multiple identities with which he lives in the wrong places, because all identities are porous, he writes, and all places inconstant. And, he writes, he is not the only person who lives such layered days. As a member of the Jewish community of this town, if such a thing exists, S. Trajković adds (making Andreas Ban wonder whether S. Trajković means the town does not exist or the Jewish community), S. Trajković gets two papers every month, two journals, he writes, Ha-Kol and the New Omanut. Although they are different, both journals deal with the Holocaust, printing personal and family stories from which he, S. Trajković, would most like to escape but cannot, so he locks himself in t
he toilet, he hides, he says, he vanishes, after which he returns again to a more or less normal life. So, writes S. Trajković, he lives a double life: the one in the toilet, where the bestialities of disturbed minds reside, and the one outside, in which he seeks glimmers of humanity. S. Trajković writes that then, in the 1990s, the stories from the toilet, with their fecal accompaniment, spill over into our mild, half-Mediterranean climate, and that under this sky, he, with his given name and surname, he, Slobodan Trajković, becomes superfluous and undesirable. Slobodan Trajković ends his letter with a Macedonian expression, Od šta bega ne uteka!* and addresses Andreas Ban directly with the words: You are not alone. Then adds: Thank you.
* * *
* You can’t evade what you’re running from.
Then it was his eyes.
The story of eyes began before Andreas Ban enters the story. Martin had an eye issue, Gombrowicz loses his eyes on the deck of a large ship, outside the door to his apartment Andreas Ban finds a white kitten with one eye and no nose that dies the following day.
Martin was found to have a melanoma of his left eye. Overnight he went blind, bang, the tabular melanoma made its way to the surface and pierced his eye. They took the eye out. That’s the safest thing to do, they said. Martin had big blue eyes, now he has a big blue eye. Andreas does not know what happened to the eye that was removed, he forgot to ask. If it was thrown into the trash, it could have been eaten by a cat. In the head, eyes are watery; when they are extracted they dry out and shrivel. Like raisins, like sultanas, like currants.