Belladonna

by Daša Drndic

  For a month Andreas Ban is not allowed to lift heavy objects so that his eye does not pop out, but he forgets his doctors’ advice and lifts a lot of heavy objects and then through his socket streams a deep thick pain that beats against his brain like a boxer’s knockout blow. Then he hurries to lie down in the dark. Yes, light hurts Andreas Ban. Too much light is fatal for his repaired eye which now wants to look independently, without him, because it sees far and sharply. That is why, when he goes out, Andreas Ban wears very dark glasses, likewise on the advice of his doctors. Perhaps he should not have had the eye treated. Perhaps he ought to have detached himself from it, from that eye of his. What does Otto Rank say? Life is made up of separation. From one’s mother, from oneself, from used-up times, all made up of bright or dark gradual separations, in stages. Until one’s final disappearance.

  He often has problems with his eyes. Andreas Ban. Once a splinter hit him in the left eye, piercing the white like an arrow and stopping him from closing the lid. Another time, as he was opening a bottle of champagne, the cork flew into his right eye, knocking it into his brain.

  Perhaps he should be killed. Andreas Ban. Given a quick senicide, since he is already fading, evaporating, disappearing, vanishing. Way back in Ancient Greece, the poet Hesiod, the historian Herodotus and the geographer Strabo wrote about senicide, about the way the closest relations leave their old people (over sixty) in buildings without food or water until they expire. In the Balkans, killings of the old were lively and varied. Sometimes they not only killed the old people, but used their corpses for village feasts, for great celebrations. In some areas sons left their old people in remote places to die of hunger, or to be torn apart by wild animals, in some they suffocated them, and in others they buried them alive. Sometimes a whole village would be involved in the senicide. Then they would behead the old people or whack them on the nape of the neck with an axe or clobber them with poles, then drag them with wooden hooks to the graveyard. It is said that a man killed his father that way and on the road home threw away the hook. His little son, who had watched it all, picked up the hook and took it home. Why did you do that? asked his father. And the child said, When you get old, I’ll drag you with this hook. To this day people still say: He’s ready for the pole. In some places they were gentler; they just poisoned the old, so they died in installments.

  Who should be the one to kill Andreas Ban? Leo?

  Lobsters do not age.

  Should he kill himself?

  The French avant-garde killed themselves in a big way, theatrically and solemnly. Jacques Rigaut divulged his contempt for reality which was for him le désespoir, l’indifférence, les trahisons, la fidélité, la solitude, la famille, la liberté, la pesanteur, l’argent, la pauvreté, l’amour, l’absence d’amour, le syphilis, la santé, le sommeil, l’insomnie, le désir, l’impuissance, la platitude, l’art [ . . .] il n’y a pas là de quoi fouetter un chat [ . . .], affirming that suicide ought to become a vocation. Then in 1929 he really did shoot himself, having first marked out his ribcage with a ruler to be sure not to miss his heart. He was thirty years old. The writer and poet Julien Torma disappeared in the Tyrolean Alps in 1933. He was thirty as well. Jacques Vaché overdosed on opium at the age of twenty-four and expired with a monocle on his nose (1919). A. Alvarez who is, thank God, still alive (born in 1929) writes that Vaché was tall, elegant, refined and eccentric, he writes that when he met his best friends in the street, he would never recognize them, he never answered letters, never returned anyone’s greetings. Then A. Alvarez quotes Breton quoting Bouvier who says that Vaché lived with a young woman whom he forced to sit immobile and silent in a corner of his room (as though she was that eyeless Olympia of Hoffmann’s), while he entertained a friend. Vaché paraded through the streets dressed as a hussar, an aviator or a doctor, writes A. Alvarez. Andreas Ban reads A. Alvarez with pleasure, because Alvarez obliquely indicates a way for him, Andreas, to kill himself.

  The boxer and poet Arthur Cravan, born in 1887 as Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, simply vanished in the Pacific Ocean near the Mexican coast in 1918. Perhaps Andreas Ban is behind schedule? Perhaps he should have killed himself sooner, then this situation would not have come to this. He would have avoided the current defiled reality, drowned in total silence, transcendental.

  Be my guest, Andreas. Death is everywhere: heaven has well provided for that. Anyone may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death. To death there are a thousand avenues.

  Seneca

  Oh, yes, death is the infallible cure of all; ’tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very often to be sought. It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before his day, or stays till his day of payment comes; from whencesoever it comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there’s the end of the clue. The most voluntary death is the finest. Life depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own.

  Montaigne

  Seneca killed himself out of vanity, not because he had nothing to live on. Montaigne did not kill himself. All that romantic talk about how life is a fiction and suicide a literary act is nothing but overwrought quasi-philosophical frivolity. Life in the dark, in the cold, is not a fiction. Illness that cannot be cured because the patient has no money for its treatment, is not a fiction. Hunger is not a fiction. Abandonment, shipwreck, heresy are not fictions. Suicide as rebellion, who needs that? Collective consciences have thick armor, like that of lobsters. Which do not age. Collective consciences, when some Primo Levi or Jan Palach or Tadeusz Borowski slightly instigates them, may stir for an instant, but then fall silent again.

  He will not write anymore, he will not write anymore. Writing is worthless, useless, barren and utterly idiotic business.

  You’re right. Writing is an occupation in which you must prove your talent to those who have none.

  You are wrong, you Andreas Ban and you Julian Barnes. The whole age can be divided into those who write and those who do not write. Those who write represent despair, and those who read disapprove of it and believe that they have a superior wisdom — and yet, if they were able to write, they would write the same thing. Basically they are all equally despairing, but when one does not have the opportunity to become important with his despair, then it is hardly worth the trouble to despair and show it. Is this what it is to have conquered despair?

  Yes, Kierkegaard. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Yours, Kafka.

  Andreas Ban shakes his head when such voices, such sophistry weigh on his brain. Dead voices, the voices of the dead.

  * * *

  * White nights.

  Then it arrived.

  The pension.

  The pension of 1,327 kunas (177 euros).

  The Croatian pension for fifteen years of work in democratic and socially sensitive Croatia. The Serbian part of his retirement riches will take who knows how long to come through, they tell him, maybe months. There, in Serbia, a further twenty-five years of past work lies in wait for Andreas Ban, for which, the very pleasant employees of the Pensions Office tell him, he will receive ten euros per year of employment, that is to say a further 1,875 kunas. What joy. Yet that humiliation could have been mitigated, deferred for two or three years, or even five, had the capering dean who raised his hand threateningly whenever anyone tried to interrupt his lengthy and repetitive tirades, had the dean mustered the nerve to speak out in his favor, in favor of Andreas Ban, instead of remaining undecided, and at the Senate meeting even against. Even the vice-chancellor of that university (ranked 1,338 on the list of world universities) could have mitigated that kick in Andreas Ban’s ass, had he wished. But he did not.

  But when the athletic Croatian Aryan bodies, wreathed in international gold and silver, those once combative, sculpted, muscular bodies, beg
in to fade and slacken forty years later, those bodies are branded with 1,100 euros a month by their sensitive homeland of Croatia, regardless of the income status of the owners of the bodies. To be fair, the thoughtful state of Croatia announces plans to reward the Paralympic bodies too, but with half that monthly allowance, because, after all, those bodies are somehow defective, invalid bodies, although still athletic. It figures. But it does not occur to the Croatian state to reward the mind, that elusive “excellence” (how grotesquely Croatia bandies about that hollow word) which hovers in bodies shriveled from sitting, writing and studying, in bodies that compose and paint and think while their muscles atrophy, their hemorrhoids swell, their vision weakens and their lungs collapse. To those miserable, nondescript physiques, often unpleasant to look at, the motherland allocates a monthly social assistance of 93.33 euros (for academicians), down to 66.66 euros (for those who have won major prizes) and forty euros (for those with lesser prizes), and that is after those bodies reach the age of sixty-five and prove their excellence with certificates and references. These thinking organisms also have to inform the local arbiters of “excellence” how many they share a household with, what their relationship to them is, what the names of all those members of the shared household are and when they were born, because should it be such a household, a warm family community, a domus ruralis with an open hearth around which its members gather and over which a pot of polenta hangs, then any kind of social support is entirely superfluous, because there is the family, that basic cell of society and life which in the twenty-first century has to take care of its waste. And, what is more, all these cripples, the creators rendered crippled, all this trash seeks crumbs of charity from the Croatian state, all are obliged to inform the Croatian state about their ownership of property, because heaven forbid that such properties should have several rooms, particularly in the event of family communities that have died out, or that there should hang on the walls of those properties oil paintings or engravings by famous artists, or that they should contain libraries, or, worse still, a concert piano. Because all that, that intellectual rabble, has to be annihilated.

  I’ve been waiting a year for a reply from the Administrative Commission to allocate me regular financial assistance of forty euros, a colleague tells Andreas Ban.

  Collect discarded bottles, says Andreas Ban, you’ll earn more.

  In the Department, they drop small contributions into a little bag for a farewell gift for Andreas Ban.

  Andreas Ban puts a stop to that activity.

  In the Department they plan a communal dinner at which they will present to Andreas Ban the gift that Andreas Ban does not want. Are you fucking with me? Andreas Ban says to them. Forget it, forget me.

  The woman in the Department says, So what, you’ll live on royalties! The woman who says So what! to Andreas Ban shouts, she always shouts when she talks. But when she says What’s up? her lips pucker together like an asshole and emit a squeaky, conciliatory and slimy little question. When she says What’s up? it is impossible to shout, the lips close and the breath has no way out.

  Now, when he talks and when he writes (which he does only if he has to), Andreas Ban mixes languages as they float in his head. Like that Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), whom Freud, ostensibly out of discretion, calls Anna O., whom he never meets and about whom he knows very little. Breuer also rummages through Bertha’s crisis, baffled by the mysteries of it, until she, Bertha Pappenheim, with her imaginative cathartic dramas, interprets what is going on with her. During that crisis, Bertha Pappenheim, whom Freud deprives of her name, transforming her into Fraulein Anna O. whom he deprives of personality, whose identity he crushes, imposing on her his image of her, as Bertha Pappenheim is crushed, pummeled and molded by the dull-witted overbearing puritans around her, her father, for one, and then that whole corseted end-of-the-century society, which does not permit her to finish school, let alone study at the University of Vienna, because the University does not allow women into its elite, even if some of them are more enlightened than the men whom the University of Vienna proudly takes under its wing, including Bertha’s younger brother Wilhelm, who is clearly less intelligent than Bertha Pappenheim, who during her existential crisis, instead of studying, traveling and having a good time, is told to sit at home, make lace and tapestries, prepare kosher food and take care of her dying father, during that existential crisis Bertha Pappenheim forgets her mother tongue. Bertha Pappenheim understands nothing in her mother tongue, nor can she express herself in it, but instead she speaks fluently a refined English, French and Italian, which seems “strange” to Freud, and “bizarre” to Breuer. Although he is no expert, Andreas Ban believes that all of them, the prominent psychiatrists of the day, along with the Orthodox Jews who monitored her every step, and her family and friends were elegantly led up the garden path by Bertha Pappenheim who was telling them she no longer wished to communicate with them, their language was not hers. Bertha Pappenheim had to overcome the pain and fear through which she discovered that what awaited her was a life that did not belong to her but to a stranger.

  Because, when they finally give up on Bertha Pappenheim, when they stop dragging her from one psychiatric institution to another and stuffing her with morphine, Bertha Pappenheim leaps into life. She sets up numerous institutions, kindergartens, orphanages, safe houses, educational centers, homes for fallen girls; she travels, gives lectures, translates important works of feminist literature, writes and publishes stories, plays, poems, both for children and adults, anonymously to start with, then under the pseudonym Paul Berthold and finally as Bertha Pappenheim; she meets people, she spends time with Martin Buber (philosophy of dialogue — you and I) and Henrietta Szold, then she dies of cancer, avoiding a second attack on her great work, on the Neu-Isenberg school and its branches, the total annihilation not only of her vision but also of the people whom her vision brought back to reality. The day after Kristallnacht, on November 10, 1938, the Gestapo orders the burning of Bertha’s Neu-Isenberg schools throughout the Reich, and in 1942 deports its pupils and staff to the concentration camp Theresienstadt, where most of them die.

  In 1954, Germany bequeaths Bertha Pappenheim a postage stamp.

  CHONKIN: First-rate stuff! Takes your breath away. You make it from grain or from beetroot?

  GLADISHEV: From shit, Vanya.

  CHONKIN: What do you mean?

  GLADISHEV: Simple recipe, Vanya. You take a kilo of sugar to a kilo of shit. . . . We react squeamishly to shit, don’t we? But if you look into the matter you’ll see that it’s the most valuable substance on earth, all life comes from shit and returns to shit.

  And so, Andreas Ban, transformed into a hybrid postmodern body, does not know how to get out of that body, how to abandon it, the way he (temporarily) abandons his semiurban refuge. But neither can he lend his body to others, because without him his body is an elusive object. His body is his otherness, which is after all not exactly alien to him. He no longer has a cat, his transitional object. She ran away and is likely dead, because she was a tame cat, unused to the outside world that to her meant nothing.

  He is still disturbed (why?) when he forgets to take the medicine that blocks his hormone receptors, the medicine that ostensibly protects his nonexistent breast from being invaded by another tumor, that Armidex which he has to take for five years, four have passed, then what?

  In Skopje, where in 2004 Andreas Ban muses about moving, he watches stray dogs marked with a yellow chip on the left ear roaming around the restaurants, and he feeds them secretly. Stray cats are not marked, Bogomil Gjuzel tells him.

  It is the beginning of November 2011.

  The days are still warm and sunny.

  One Sunday morning Andreas Ban goes to Rovinj.

  On the way to the bus station, Andreas Ban passes through the short main artery of the small town where a collective intimacy filled with loneliness circulates. He looks at women carrying bags, mostly with the
ir right hands, with only four fingers. The women’s fifth, little finger is free from the handle, while the others grip it. The women’s pinkies bend like worms and shrivel in flight.

  Women with straight hips pass by. Women with straight hips often acquire bellies, while those with full hips develop bigger behinds.

  An ugly woman passes in black sateen slacks, with fungus on her skin.

  Two street musicians, a guitarist with an evergreen repertoire and an accordion player who croons patriotic turbo-folk songs at the top of his voice. They both have upholstered chairs which they move to busy points of the pedestrian walkway where people promenade aimlessly in all directions, the walkway looks like a chaotic room, a walking room, a room to arrive in only to leave, like a vast room for collective dying. So, as he walks, Andreas Ban observes as the movement of the town collides with the breath and steps of its people.

  In Rovinj, Andreas Ban sits in the square on the terrace of the café La Viecia Batana, drinks coffee and waits for Victor to bring him the packet he has ordered. It was in this café long ago that, during empty late afternoons, the philosopher and painter Carlo Michelstaedter from Gorizia, who shot himself in 1920, wrote his poems. Andreas Ban does not write poems and he will not shoot himself. The Sunday silence is suddenly broken by a brass band, Banda d’ottoni Rovigno, with which, as early as 1765, the sapaduri, pescaduri, marineri and cavaduri have brightened the days of laborers, fishermen, sailors and farmers. Otherwise, throughout its history, Rovinj sings. And weeps.