by Drago Jancar
Benjamin Zec did not like science, but he loved to read books. The Literary Reader was his favorite textbook and Serbo-Croatian language class the only class that he ever looked forward to. Classrooms were just suffocating walls and the soporific monotone of the teacher—but in the countryside, surrounded by the thick shade of spruce and pine, he was free to make himself the hero of every adventure he read.
Yes, indeed, some would say that Benjamin Zec was just an ordinary boy.
And he might have remained so, until, that is, he decided to become a ladybug . . .
One time, as he fell off the branch of a cherry tree, he lay spread out, one freckled cheek on the wet ground. His eyes were caught by the frosted grass through which a ladybug was slowly pacing. A ladybug is a marvelous thing, he thought: it’s never in a hurry. Acrobating nonchalantly from one blade of grass to another, as if surprised that its own tiny weight is still sufficient to bend the tip of a blade of grass. Strange, he thought, how ladybugs seem to make their decisions at the spur of the moment, and suddenly, stretch out their wings from under their black-spotted armor and fly off who knows where, taking your good luck with them.
The palm of his hand was turned toward the sky and the ladybug jumped onto his life line.
He’d always wanted to become an actor, to star in action movies or play a major role on that famous American Broadway . . . whatever that meant . . . But now it seemed to him that becoming a ladybug would suffice. To be able to turn into one of these insects, like this one here, which was so delightfully walking over his palm—to grow wings and disappear, well, that would be something . . . Ladybug, ladybug, show me the way, he whispered the children’s wish-song.
At that very moment, a bang burst through the back of his head, while the whole cosmos buzzed through his ears, and a cold silence poured down over his forehead. And then, Benjamin Zec was gone. Only a monotonous beep was left behind, brash and piercing, bouncing off the trees in the forest. The sound wandered for a while through the neighboring villages and then was reduced to a faint echo, only noticed by birds, until it was lost forever.
That hot summer day was the last anyone heard from the boy. Some kids from the neighborhood alleged that Benjamin had grown wings, no really, that he did in fact turn into a ladybug and had flown away. Others, however, kept faith in the prospect of his eventual return, believing that he would come back one day and organize nothing less than the most spectacular soccer tournament imaginable. Others, again, were completely indifferent, saying that even if Benjamin did miraculously rematerialize in the bazaar, everyone would get tired of him in three days time, and who knows, maybe he’s here already, maybe he walks among us and is getting a good laugh out of the whole town wondering where he got to. There seemed no rational explanation, or at least none that could be reached by mere mortals. And yet, who cared? So another difficult kid had vanished. It was neither the first nor the last time someone like Benjamin disappeared, evaporated, just like that . . . It happens, right? In fact, maybe Benjamin just got a little lost, wandering the surface of our little planet, and when he realized he’d escaped his warders, just seized the opportunity and ran like hell. People had bigger problems to worry about. So no one troubled themselves about Benjamin Zec for very long. What was he good for but watching movies anyway? He didn’t fit in. He couldn’t play along. No great loss, that one.
Years later, and did anyone still care about the mystery of Benjamin Zec? Perhaps only his swaybacked mother, who still kept watch over the canopy of wild chestnut trees, and with her bare hands dug up primroses . . .
Time dripped into gutters of oblivion. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick . . . Drop by drop, Benjamin’s mother drank rainwater from the gutters and sadly chewed cherries every late July . . .
The curious case of Benjamin Zec eventually became folklore. A fairy tale. And even though most people had forgotten the real boy behind the story, there were those to whom the question did occur, every now and again. They would conjure up their memories of him, if only for a moment or two—a freckled boy with green eyes who used to pinch the girls and holler like Tarzan while climbing trees—and so he became the ghost of the town, a myth to be recounted around shifting candlelight, a legend that was flying around on the black spots of ladybugs, a fathomless public secret that no line of inquiry could penetrate, a surreal remnant of a forgotten past. The only evidence of the boy’s actual existence was a black and white photograph: he, Benjamin Zec, in pants torn at the knees and a threadbare sweatshirt, squinting at the sun from underneath an unkempt head of hair, with marbles in his hand. His mother kept that photo close to her heart, walking the wide world to pull this memento out of her brassiere from time to time and shove into the face of oblivion a disheveled Benjamin Zec.
People prayed to him for a good harvest and begged for forgiveness when a drought hit their fields, as if worshiping some ancient pagan deity. When they told their children the story, they always began like so: Once upon a time, there was a boy . . .
It’s been said that Benjamin Zec was sighted in America; that he hadn’t become a fairy tale at all but a religious fanatic who blew up thirty-three people at a fish market along with himself. Whereas some said, no, he hadn’t done himself in; he was in a loony bin now, though happily everyone agreed on the number of people he’d killed. And then, another theory: he’d joined the US Marines in penance and was working as a landmine clearer in Iraq. And another still: certain people were claiming that Benjamin had become a Wahhabi, had let his beard grow, had taken to wearing a turban, and had married a woman with dark and mysterious eyes.
But there was only one grain of truth to the whole story: that Benjamin Zec did end up in America. But, to complicate matters, Benjamin himself had no idea how or when he’d arrived. He didn’t remember a thing. All he knew was this: he’d simply appeared one day, on a stage, in a theater, in the middle of a Shakespeare play, and in the spotlight to boot, wondering:
“To be or not to be?”
And he was . . .
He was on stage, on Broadway, and the audience was on its feet. They applauded Mr. Benjamin Zec for so long that he thought he would die of old age standing there, adored by his audience.
“Bravo! Bravooo!” the amazed masses shouted, throwing flowers at him.
No one knew that Benjamin didn’t know how he’d come to be there. He didn’t even know who or what he’d been before his arrival. But he was game, as ever, and soon had readily accepted his role.
While enthusiastic crowds continued to cheer his name, Benjamin was ushered toward a dressing room. On the way, he signed three autographs and absentmindedly nodded at a pushy pitch for a movie role as a Serbian war criminal. How did they learn his name, he wondered. Benjamin said nothing but simply glided through the crowd. There, in the wardrobe mirror, he stared at his freckled face. He stripped himself of Hamlet and rediscovered Benjamin Zec. He wondered how old this familiar yet unknown figure could be. Not more than twenty-five, he thought, pleased. Twenty-five!
Oh, Benjamin Zec was very satisfied with the body he’d found himself in possession of. Proud of his manly facial features, strong chin, and piercing green eyes—whoever he was, he certainly deserved this new life of his. No question about that. It felt good to be grown-up and successful. He decided to go along with this adventure, to ignore the past he didn’t remember anyway, to be whomever he had to be, for the situation was already whatever it was . . .
After the show, a limo driver called out to him in a familiar way and Benjamin understood that this was his personal chauffeur. He treated Benjamin like an old friend, politely inquiring whether the opening was as successful as the year before. He drove Benjamin to a beautiful house, grandiose with its Greek columns and Gothic arches, facing the Atlantic Ocean.
Inside, the servants had already kindled a fire in the fireplace. They referred to him as “Mister Benjamin,” and he replied in perfect English, though something told him that it wasn’t his first language. He could feel his tongue twis
ting and straining, and words tumbling around in his mouth in a strange accent.
Benjamin decided to go through his house, look through his own stuff, and hopefully find some clues as to his past life. It was out of the question for him to ask his own servants where he’d come from and how long he’d lived here! He didn’t want them to think that he had lost his mind somewhere between slipping into and out of Mr. Hamlet’s skin. Benjamin thought that they must have known him very well, as they treated him with respect, but also a kind of intimacy.
The house was his, of course, because he found he knew exactly where every little thing was located, but he didn’t have conscious memory of any of these apparently familiar objects. Any emotional understanding of the things around him was distant and unfathomable. Even his portraits and photo albums were no help: all of them showed a recent Benjamin, in the here and now, with the same dark hair, the same spots around the eyes, and the matchless youth of his face. It seemed that he had never been younger than he was now. As if he had been born just like this, twenty-five years old, and now was meeting himself for the first time. But how was it possible that he didn’t remember anything? How was it possible that there was nothing from his past that he could grab hold of? How did it come to be that he was playing Hamlet on Broadway, just like that? Did he have any friends or family? A father? Mother? Where had he been born? When was his birthday? Benjamin knew nothing. It was as though someone had just made him up, whole-cloth.
He looked at the photographs on the walls. The pictures were unflattering, he thought—they showed an arrogant man, struggling to smile. Cold eyes followed his every move. And why did he have so many photographs hung around the house anyway? And they all seemed as if they’d been taken yesterday. Even his painted portraits appeared to have been completed just the day before, as if the oils had managed to dry overnight. Was he trying to tell himself something?
Well, yes, he realized almost immediately: I do not age!
Oh, how confused Mr. Benjamin Zec was just then . . . He had the face of eternal youth, like that Dorian Gray fellow! And that was another thing. The same way he’d known Hamlet by heart, the same way every line had somehow been etched into his gestures, now this “Dorian Gray” raced into his consciousness—equally inexplicable.
And that was nothing compared to the next miracle.
Remembering Dorian Gray, Benjamin ran into the bedroom. The room was upstairs, the first on the left, and in the night-table drawer was a book—he knew it. So he opened the drawer. The book that he found in there had a cracked, fragile cover and yellowing pages. And it wasn’t in English. But Benjamin knew how to read it, and the cover said:
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Benjamin opened to the first page and began to read. He understood every word; they rushed inside him, first ingratiatingly, warm, pleasant, and familiar, but then painfully, as though this strange language was piercing deep into his soul. Every breath Benjamin tried to take caught in his chest; he felt as though something was sawing his lungs in half, as though his ribs were closing in on his innards. He was going to faint. Pictures of his well-mannered smiles spun around him and his pupils rolled under his fluttering eyelids. A deafening bang forced its way into the back of his head, and all the silence in there escaped out of his forehead.
Benjamin lost his balance and fell to the ground.
Bright light soon swallowed the darkness and he found himself back on stage . . .
“To be or not to be?” The audience applauded, he bowed. He saw his face in the dressing-room mirror. He wondered who he was and why he was there. His limo driver knocked on the door, identified himself as Benjamin’s chauffeur, and asked if he was ready to go home. Benjamin had a beautiful house with Greek columns and Gothic arches. All the walls were decorated with his portraits and photos. Benjamin looked at himself in the mirror and realized he wasn’t aging. Just like Dorian Gray! In the bedroom, he found a book by Oscar Wilde, opened to the first page . . . and fainted.
When he next opened his eyes he found himself once again under the glaring spotlight. To be or not to be, again, oblivious to the nature of his predicament. Another standing ovation. He became reacquainted with his face in the dressing room. The figure in the mirror was somewhat familiar. His chauffeur drove him home, a grandiose house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Benjamin looked at his reflection and realized that he didn’t age, just like the main character in a book. The Picture of Dorian Gray! He ran to his bedroom. Panting, he opened his night-table drawer and found a book by Oscar Wilde. He opened to the first page . . . and was quickly comatose.
When he came to again, he saw the spotlight, the stage, he spoke Shakespeare’s famous words, the crowd was shouting his name, and it all happened as it did the first time, and the second, and who knows how many other times . . . It always started with him waking up on the stage and ended when he opened to the first page of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Then, unconsciousness, and begin again. Benjamin Zec was like a skipping LP, trapped at one point of his revolution, in a vicious circle of time. And he would have stayed there, in this parallel world, forever, if there hadn’t, finally, been a slight variation in his routine—hurrying upstairs, he stumbled and something spilled out of his pocket: a marble.
The next time Benjamin Zec ran through his usual loop, when he dashed upstairs to seek out Dorian Gray, he slipped on that marble and fell. And . . . time skipped ahead of time, just like a stuck record player might finally break out of its rut only to skip the refrain and jump right to the third verse. Benjamin did fall into his usual oblivion, but the light that welcomed him when he awoke this time wasn’t from a spotlight, but from a summer sun . . .
He saw a vast green meadow and in it a single cherry tree. The fruit of the tree had the dark red color of blood, and its sweet flesh hung heavy with juice. Cherries that have no worms are no good, Benjamin thought. The tree was bursting with life, and its fragile branches swayed easily in the wind. Hints of cherry scent played across Benjamin’s lips. He licked them so as to carry off even the least trace of sugary stimulus.
Some people were digging close by the lone tree.
Benjamin wanted to pick some cherries. He extended his hand, but just at the moment his fingers plucked a fruit from its branch, the ground beneath his bare feet went as dry and loose as the interior of an hourglass. He fell. The soil pulled him down, devouring him in a single bite. He tried to hold on to the cherry tree, but, to his surprise, he dragged it with him into the abyss.
The terror of being buried alive shut his eyes fast.
When his consciousness got hold of a little light at last, Benjamin found himself on a pile of bones and grinning skulls, disfigured and broken: skeletons hugging each other in a heap. Benjamin held firmly to the cherry tree, which was now just a root attached to a tiny skeleton in the fetal position, like an umbilical cord . . . The shrunken bones were the bones of a boy, Benjamin knew. The skeleton’s skull had a hole in the back and an even bigger one in the front, and between its teeth was gripped the seed from which the roots of the wild cherry tree sprang.
And then, oh, only then did Benjamin Zec realize it was his own skull. His teeth . . . His bones . . . His life . . . His death . . . His restless soul that wandered around like a gypsy song.
Benjamin looked around and found that he wasn’t alone. Many other souls were down there, looking for their bones. He recognized some of the kids from school . . . There were also people from the neighboring village . . . And his physics teacher . . . And Benjamin’s father too! And one of the neighbors . . . And then another . . . And many, many others . . . Many that he didn’t even know . . . They were all there for their bones. Quietly, obediently, they searched through this shrine-abyss filled with skeletons.
The dead were coming for their bones while the living above them were exhuming a mass grave.
Skeletons were placed side by side and numbered. Benjamin Zec was number 25 . . .
And, there he was: a
little boy again. He was eating cherries when one of the soldiers violently yanked him down off the lowest branch of the cherry tree. As he fell to the ground, he felt a marble slipping out of his pocket; it got lost in the deep grass. The smell of grass wafted around him. The soil was still wet. It calmed him down. He didn’t want to think about his fear; he completely ignored the agony of the moment. He watched the carefree ladybug whose tiny feet crossed his life line. As the Kalashnikov barrel was pointed at the back of his head, he thought . . . he thought of Dorian Gray and his never-ending youth . . . He wanted to be an actor on Broadway, to have a personal driver and a house with great Greek columns, Gothic arches, and a view of the ocean . . . Or if he could at least . . . if he could at least transform into this beautiful insect . . . and fly away . . . Ladybug, ladybug, show me the way, he hummed . . .
At that moment, the ladybug spread its transparent wings and flew out of his open palm to fulfill the wish of Benjamin Zec.
To the victims of the Srebrenica massacre . . . in remembrance, with love.
TRANSLATED FROM BOSNIAN BY THE AUTHOR
[BULGARIA]
KATYA ATANASOVA
Fear of Ankles
The first time, I was fourteen. I remember it clearly. It was August, we were at the seaside, and I still have this thing about the sea, so I remember everything I experienced there, starting with the ever-surprising fragility of seashells, the amazement at seeing the sand flowing through your fingers like time, somewhere in the late afternoon, say around six, in the loneliness of the empty beach, and the swimming further and further in, and finishing with the endless noisy parties in Southern and Northern bars—as ecstatic at night as sad at dawn. It was also the first time that I spent several evenings with friends, without all the advice, reproach and prohibition that parental presence inevitably implies. The most important thing, however, happened on an unabashedly ordinary sleepy afternoon.