by Daša Drndic
I telephone his neighbor on the first floor, the neighbor has no idea.
I check the hospitals. Nothing.
I come.
The apartment is empty. There’s some furniture, but there are no books, no ornaments, where the pictures used to hang, just yellow-brown tobacco-colored outlines of the frames. No clothes in the closets.
The kitchen is intact. As though someone was living there. There is food, there is wine. The fruit is rotten, flies dance around it.
Andreas’s bed is covered with a red Bukhara rug, no bedding.
The blinds are down.
In the bathroom everything is as it was before, towels, soap, toothbrushes.
My room is untouched as well.
In Andreas’s study there is no laptop. On the desk is a black folder with a label inscribed belladonna. In the bottom right-hand corner of the folder shimmers a little blue-and-silver zebra facing outward, about to step over the edge.
I have not corrected Andreas’s manuscript. Many events and facts are missing from it. The manuscript has gaps. In the manuscript Andreas Ban skirts around facts and events which to him may no longer mean anything. The story of Andreas’s father is incomplete, it’s a long, dense story, a complex story from a painful time. The story of my mother Elvira is unfinished. The story of Ada has no past. My story is a stump.
All those stories trouble Andreas Ban, he does not succeed in guiding them to a happy ending, as though some game of destiny had bequeathed him the task — of unraveling other people’s lives. Then he must have given up on them. On the stories that suffocate him. He lets them go.
This manuscript of Andreas’s surprised me.
Up until I was twenty-something, Andreas and I were a little family in which life breathed in an orderly fashion. We went to films and to the theater, we visited exhibitions, we read, we ate modest meals, we sometimes traveled, together or separately, we talked a lot, few people came to visit, sometimes friends of Andreas’s from his former life, then a celebration, activity, cooking, conversations, all the beds filled. Only Ada — Bubi — came regularly. We didn’t have a ladder. The ceilings are very high. We had a cat. And a lot of noise outside the windows. On the whole, we didn’t have any secrets. Maybe some small, intimate secrets. There were no big secrets. Or lies. I acquired more and more friends, Andreas fewer and fewer. I left. Andreas said: Go. It’s claustrophobic here.
The end of summer 2009. Andreas and I go from Rovinj by boat to the Venice Biennale. In the Giardini, Andreas scampers into the exhibition pavilions and looks at the exhibits superficially, without interest, then he rushes out of the pavilions and lights a cigarette. On the whole, crap, he says, art has gone flat, he says. As we leave the Giardini, Andreas catches sight of the Hungarian pavilion and stops dead. We have to see this, he says, this Péter Forgács. Péter Forgács talks about parallel lives, as does Péter Nádas, as does history in general, which is all parallel but tangled in knots.
At the time, I didn’t understand what Andreas was talking about.
The exhibition was called Col Tempo. Now, leafing through the catalogue of that exhibition and recalling Andreas’s stories from another of Forgács’s installations, which he visited in 2007 in Berlin’s Jewish Museum, I succeed to a certain extent in understanding the story of Rudolf Sass, working out why it is important for Andreas (and for me).
The Col Tempo exhibition is made up of parallel events which connect the painful course of history into a quite logical image, reminding me of Andreas’s episode with Carlo Ketz, the former husband of his deceased sister, the madman who steals other people’s lives. The exhibition-installation Col Tempo offers a glimpse of the Other, as the curator explained to visitors.
That’s Levinas, Andreas said, when I see the other, I understand myself. To understand myself, to respect myself, I have to respect the other, because I am the other. And responsibility for the other is a fundamental human value. Without it, we become monsters. Besides, said Andreas, in every dialogue, even a latent one, between one artist and another, between the artist and the audience, between the artist and his work, whether it is a painting, music or language, is also hidden the self-portrait of the artist himself.
I didn’t understand what Andreas was saying. I didn’t understand Péter Forgács’s installation. I intended to read the catalogue when we returned home, but I didn’t. It was a little volume of essays dedicated to the works, films and other visual creations of Péter Forgács.
We ate pizza and drank beer on the terrace of a trattoria near the terminal where the catamaran would leave for Rovinj. We had two hours and Andreas talked at length.
You see, he said, in November 1939 individual groups of Jews were fleeing from Nazism and trying to get to Palestine in boats. Groups set out from Vienna, Berlin, Gdansk and Bratislava. But the winter of 1939 was so cold that the Danube froze and travel by ship was impossible. After all kinds of setbacks, instead of reaching Palestine, those Jewish refugees ended up in a small Serbian town, Šabac. And then, after the Axis forces occupied Serbia on April 6, 1941, all those people, more than a thousand of them, were shot or killed with exhaust fumes. You see, said Andreas Ban, it was only when I saw Forgács’s installation in Berlin, that I discovered that almost simultaneously, but in more favorable climatic conditions, in the early autumn of 1939, some six hundred Jews from Bratislava did reach Palestine, did manage to survive. The Danube was still navigable then and from it came the beat of waltzes, which were quickly replaced by funeral marches. Those six hundred Bratislava Jews embarked on the riverboat Erzsebet Kiralyne, that is the Queen Elizabeth, mastered by the famous captain and amateur filmmaker Dr. Nándor Andrásovits who carried them across the Black Sea to freedom. Less than a year later, in the autumn of 1940, that same Queen Elizabeth, mastered by the same Nándor Andrásovits, sailed the Danube in the opposite direction, upstream, transporting the minority German population settled in Bessarabia, in the territory between the former Moldavia and Ukraine. These Germans were to be resettled within the borders of the German Reich. In his installation, Forgács uses amateur footage taken by Nándor Andrásovits on both journeys to tell two diametrically opposed émigré stories that do nevertheless touch, connected by the waters of the Danube. That Danube exodus, that Rippling Flow of the powerful European river, as Péter Forgács also calls his work, shows the world through a totality of facts. Because the world is determined by facts, and since facts are everything, everyone may or may not become a “case.” With his eight-millimeter camera Captain Andrásovits records life on the boat. He records the faces of his passengers. He records expectations and hope. Love, even a wedding. Conversations, dancing and songs. The story is personal, not historical. There are no uniforms or weapons, no insignia. It is only through Forgács’s intervention and through music that one discerns the muffled rumbling from the Danube foreshadowing a general catastrophe.
Who were those Volksdeutscher?
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Russian Emperor Alexander I permits Germans from the German lands to settle in Bessarabia, on territory deserted in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. A hundred or so years later, the signing of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact between Hitler and Stalin led in 1940 to the repatriation of those ninety-three thousand Bessarabian Volksdeutscher to the Third Reich. The SS organized the deportations. Ships, among them the Queen Elizabeth, waited in ports, and from those ships, after sailing along the lovely blue Danube, the displaced farmers ended up first in German transit camps, then on the estates and in the houses of displaced Polish families in the western areas of occupied Poland. Then the men were mobilized and most of them never returned home.
A long time ago, said Andreas Ban, through my friend the psychiatrist Adam Kaplan, I learned of the destiny of a certain Rudolf Sass. Like millions of other destinies, the destiny of Rudolf Sass moved along a trajectory which is parallel to some life’s path of mine, and therefore also y
ours. It turned out that the destiny of a man I did not know, sent out ripples which affected my life. Facts and states of being that I recognize as my own. Little fears and painful doubts. That is why we delude ourselves if we think that other people’s parallel stories will never rub up against ours. They will. In one form or another. In an expression, in some incidental, casually uttered statement, in some apparently insignificant encounter, also parallel, even if they never reach us directly. Endless parallelism confirms the connectedness of facts and lives. The gulf between the mind and the body.
If you look, you will see, said Andreas Ban, Rudolf Sass, and not only he, could be recognized in us or we in him, in others. Somehow.
The story of Rudolf Sass unsettled me. That was the first and last time, as we waited in Venice for the ferry to Rovinj, that Andreas mentioned Rudolf Sass. He said nothing about his destiny, about his life. I knew nothing about Rudolf Sass.
I am a doctor. I am currently in Zurich training in cardiology, on a modest grant. Andreas Ban has a good heart, healthy, he does not need my knowledge. I am thirty. At the university I occasionally run tutorials with the students, I assist my mentor. I have a student whose name is Emma Sass.
What do I do now? People disappear. Adults disappear. And children disappear. Many simply evaporate. As though they had never been. Andreas Ban must appear somewhere, he cannot leave me with such a burden. This burden oppresses me now, Andreas knows that, he will come back because of me, to make it easier for me. It is hard to completely erase history and memory, history and memory like to come back. They get under people’s skin and penetrate their bloodstream. There, I have learned: people are invisibly connected without knowing it, they touch one another through lives that to them remain forever foreign, they step into times which they think are not theirs, they walk through landscapes which are new only to them but which have existed for centuries. That Rudolf Sass is proof. So, he will appear, Andreas Ban will come.
In the catalogue of that Venetian installation of Forgács’s, Col Tempo, László Földényi asks:
Is it possible to carve a slice out of space?
And he says: Yes, and then again, no.
And he asks: Can life be chopped up into pieces?
And he says: No. But then again, what makes it whole is the fact that it is made up of pieces; parts that can never be fitted together seamlessly. Life is full of cuts, says Földényi, even though we devote a large part of our energies to making the cuts invisible. We would like to believe that our life was coherent, seamless, with the stitching not showing and everything appearing to be smooth and logically constructed. Stitches, however, are even more conspicuous than cuts. Worse, they keep coming apart, again and again. These are what one might call the heavy moments in life; these are the times when one catches a glimpse of the divergent structure of life behind the stitches and cuts, when instead of what we are used to, we see something that is unprocessable, on which nothing lasting can be built.
For those who have stepped through the looking glass, who have gone behind the screen, external time no longer exists. Death, when it comes, risks not finding anyone there.
Leo Ban, Zurich
2012
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In Belladonna Daša Drndić has incorporated or quoted the words of a number of writers. If there is any writer whose work has not been acknowledged here, we will make due reference in any future edition.
Lines adapted from Édouard Estaunié’s Solitudes, a collection of three novels published in 1922.
Excerpt from Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, first published in 1911.
“Troy” (“And the wind brought people . . .”) from Bogomil Gjuzel’s A Well in Time, first published in English by Arc Publications in Six Macedonian Poets, edited and translated by Igor Isakovski (2011). Reproduced by permission of Arc Publications.
Lines adapted from Diana Budisavljević’s Dnevnik (Diary) 1941–1945, Croatian State Archives, Zagreb, 2003. https://theremustbejustice.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/bravery-of-diana-budisavljevic-is-stronger-than-oblivion/
“The Scholars” by William Butler Yeats, written between 1914 and April 1915, and first published in the collection The Wild Swans at Coole in November 1917 by Cuala Press.
Lines taken from Emma Goldman’s report “The Relation of Anarchism to Organization” submitted in 1907 together with Max Baginski to the International Anarchist Congress, first published in Mother Earth, 1907, then in Anarchism and other Essays, first published in 1910.
Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, Fordham University Press; 2 Rev Ed edition (October 31, 2000). Translated by E. B. Ashton. With a new introduction by Joseph W. Koterski.
Radomir Konstantinovic, Filosofija Palanke (“The Philosophy of the Province”), published by Nolit, Belgrade, in 1969.
From Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova translated by D. M. Thomas, published by Martin Secker & Warburg. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Excerpt from Towards a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today, by Leszek Kolakowski, translated by Jane Zielonko Peel, copyright © 1968 by Grove Press. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Excerpt from Briefe an Milena by Franz Kafka, letters to Milena Jesenská written between 1920 and 1923, originally published in German in 1952.
Lines adapted from T. S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”, © Estate of T. S. Eliot, first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry, later printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet entitled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 by The Egoist, London. Published by Faber and Faber in The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I. By permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Lines taken from “Burnt Norton” in The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, © Estate of T. S. Eliot, first published in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936). By permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Fragments from Imaginacija by Pedrag Finci, published by Antibarbarus, Zagreb, in 2009. Reproduced by permission of the author.
Excerpt from the diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen. Archives of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Lines taken from “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, first published in 1852. Parts I and VII translated by Saul K. Padover from the German edition of 1869; Parts II to VI are based on the third edition, prepared by Engels (1885), as translated and published by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1937.
Lines from “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial matter copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. By permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
From The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, translated by Charlotte Mandell, published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Lines adapted from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (1884), in John Howard’s translation from the French, published as Against the Grain by Three Sirens Press, New York, in 1931. http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/jkh/rebours.html
Lines adapted from Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, available in an English translation by Richard Sieburth from Harvard University Press (1986).
Excerpt from László F. Földényi’s “Analytical Spaces — The Installations of Péter Forgács” from Cinema’s Alchemist — The Films of Péter Forgács, edited by Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, published by Minnesota Scholarship Online, 2015.
Lines from Alfred Musset’s “La Nuit de décembre” (“Partout où j’ai voulu dormer . . .”), first published in 1835.
Lines from Witold Gombrowicz’s “The Events on the Banbury,” in the short story collection Bacacay, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston. Published by Archipelago Books, New York, 2004. Courtesy of Archipelago Books, New York.
Jacques Rigaut
, lines from “Je serai sérieux comme le Plaisir”, first published in Revue Littérature N°17, in December 1920.
Seneca, lines from the Thebaid, Book I. i.
Michel de Montaigne, from his Essays vol. 4, an excerpt from “A Custom of the Isle of Cea” (“Oh, yes, death is the infallible cure of all . . .”), translated by Charles Cotton, published by Edwin C. Hill, New York, 1910.
Excerpt from Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, Indiana, 1967; London: 1968), edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.
Lines adapted from Vladimir Voinovich’s The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Translated from the Russian by Richard Lourie. Published by Northwestern Uni Press; Reprint edition (March 29, 1995) by arrangement with FSG. Translation copyright © 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
We also thank the following for the use of illustrations:
health-science-spirit.com, Walter Last (p. 7); Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-191-1656-14 / Walter Henisch (p. 51); Jutarnji list archive (p. 72); Warner Chappell Music GmbH & Co. KG Germany (p. 120); United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the permission of Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev (p. 164); Eva Kris (p. 195); Croatian State Archives, HR HDA 1561/00078 (p. 219); © 2006 Vladimir Faibyshev (p. 257); Alexander Lavrentiev (p. 262); AKG-images (p. 272); Sara Benhamou and Eric de Vries (p. 277); Bigstockphoto (p. 302); iStockphoto (p. 315); Jan Ejsymontt (p. 358); Rudi Valtiner (p. 360); AKG-images / Gilles Mermet (p. 368).
The list of names of 2,061 children deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps from 1938 to 1945 was compiled in 1985 by Kitty Coster and has been added to over the years by the Israeli Embassy in the Netherlands. The list of šabac Jews and Jewish refugees who were killed in Zasavica in October 1941, compiled in Belgrade on December 24, 1945, is kept in the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.
Copyright © 2012 by Daša Drndić