Coming

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  I saw on television that farmers in America have jeeps with rubber grille guards. The driver just drives straight ahead and anything in the way gets pushed aside. The vehicle doesn’t injure the animals but directs the movement of the herd. Give a little gas, and then it’s just straight ahead. Go West, eh? But America is far, far away. For someone who’s decided to go to the pine forest today and get nicely drunk amid the pinecones and the scent of resin, the mistral and the shade, the problem is not just the pedestrians, not just the tourists – his fellow citizens are enough of a calamity. The ones with cars are the worst: they have driver’s licences, names, surnames and even biographies. They have everything except regard for other human beings.

  People can rein in their desires. They really expect little of life. Simple things count – like getting in the car and driving to where there’s lots of whisky and ice. But however little we desire, we end up getting even less. I sat and waited in a line of cars hundreds of metres long. People were hot and edgy. They sounded their horns, some cursed and swore, others were calm because the priests had taught them to accept fate (another word for chaos). After one or two minutes which seemed like one or two hours, the line gradually got moving again like a giant snake. I know from experience that when there’s a traffic jam in Ulcinj it’s always because of some brain-dead neanderthal stopping and talking with another driver, or because he’s parked in the middle of the road so he can go into a betting shop. We passed the culprit of that day’s stoppage: a square-headed young guy with a look of vacant stupidity who had stopped in front of the bakery and blocked the lane leading down to Mala Plaža beach. He ordered a pizza from his car and waited for it to be made and brought to him. Then he didn’t have the right change, so he waited – meaning we waited – for the assistant to go and fetch change for a twenty-euro note. All this was done without any hurry, with the greatest philosophical composure, paying no heed to the other people and cars, to the heat and the horns blaring…like a cow in serene Zen meditation – for only cows on the road manifest quite the same indifference toward the surrounding world, a tranquillity and resolve to do the first thing which comes into their heads: usually to dump a load of dung right where they’re standing.

  A person’s degree of primitivism in an urban setting can be gauged by his indifference toward other people and their needs, by the firmness of his conviction that he’s alone in the world and has a right to do whatever he wants here and now, regardless of the misfortune it may cause other people. His place is in nature. There he learned that to exist means to mistreat. He’s unburdened by the illusions of Homo urbanus – for him nature is not a delicate equilibrium, a sensitive and complex organism; nature has only mistreated him and his tribe throughout history, harassing them with droughts, storms, floods, and frosts; they’ve fled from nature and have brought nothing but nature with them because they are nature. A person’s degree of primitivism in an urban setting can be gauged, I maintain, by the disturbance he represents for other people. A primitive person is unable to exist in quiet discretion: he always creates noise, unsightliness, and stench. He does everything he can to be noticed – he constantly emits his existence. His being is a blow to the senses and an insult to the intelligence. He mistreats us with his very existence. When he celebrates, a considerate, tasteful person unfortunate enough to live next door to him is bound to suffer. What a primitive person enjoys inflicts pain on the civilised.

  I read in the paper about an Austrian in Vienna who shot his Bosnian neighbour. It turned out that the Bosnian had driven the Austrian out of his mind for years with the loud Balkan folk music which he listened to in his apartment every afternoon. The Austrian complained to the police several times, and they intervened in accordance with the law, but that didn’t prevent the Bosnian from continuing to mistreat the Austrian. When he realised that all legal possibilities of protecting his calm and privacy had been exhausted, the Austrian shot the Bosnian in the head and calmly turned himself in to the police.

  That story stuck in my mind because it tells us that the law can’t protect us from the primitive, who is nothing but a walking disaster. However brutal the law is, it can’t compare with the brutality of nature. When law is about revenge, as in the case of capital punishment, it’s closest to nature – and thus furthest from the law.

  That’s why it’s so unbearable here: primitivism is not some random excess but the very essence of local culture, which therefore isn’t a culture. If you’re not primitive here you’re a foreign body and you’ll be made to feel it every day. With a lot of effort, luck and money you can construct a fortress and preserve your own order of things inside it – for a while. You can erect high walls, dig moats and build drawbridges to shut off your world for a while. But they’ll find a way in: like in Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’, their nature will get through and wipe your little world off the face of the earth.

  Here people dump garbage by the roadside and turn the landscape into a landfill. Their sheep and goats, which they need in order to survive in their suburbs, wander the asphalt and graze the parks, or what’s left of them. Their children imitate the cherubs in fancy fountains and pee in flowerbeds in front of the passers-by. They shit on the beaches and in neglected recreation centres. Music is the form of art they like most because it doesn’t demand interpretation or reflection. Like the salt strewn on a vanquished ancient city they sow the world with noise – repulsive music lasting late into the night is what they need in order to enjoy themselves. Walls and billboards are plastered with pictures of their big-titted women with frightening faces and grimaces which we can only assume are meant to suggest lust but which actually attest to nothing but stupidity and vacuousness. The males of the species thrust their ever-erect organs into that void, and from that nothingness their children are born to ensure the continuation of their world, nation, family and culture – of their kind.

  There are times like that day, stuck amid all those people, every one of them a nerve-grating nuisance, when anger grips me so tightly that no insult I could ever think of and no salvo of sarcasm I could fire at their civilians – their women and children – could bring relief. Those are times when anger grips me so tightly that I can’t move, as if the black monolith from 2001 was weighing down on my chest, times when anger is all that exists – when I’m anger itself. Then I think: death. What comes next has to be death. If there’s anything after and beyond anger, it can only be that. Those were my thoughts that day as I nestled into my car seat, gripped the steering wheel – and waited.

  It’s fascinating that something as dependable as death becomes so utterly unreliable if we dare to count on it for release, because as a rule it arrives too late. The only mitigating circumstance is that, because it takes its time in coming, we’re never truly disappointed. They say that Homo sapiens are animals endowed with reason. I’d say that, despite this reason, they’re animals punished with optimism. Because as soon as the pistol is removed from their forehead, the boot lifted from their neck and the blade pulled from their belly, they think: things will get better. But before they can even cross themselves and pronounce faith, hope and love a few times, they’ll be cast face-down in the mud again, and then death won’t seem so terrible and unfair.

  Nope, not this time either – everything’s as it was before, I said to myself, and noticed that the people around me were starting to get out of their cars. They raised their eyes to the sky, called out to one another, seized their heads in their hands, and spread out their arms in wonder. Then the first flake fell on the windscreen. I opened the window and peered out: as serene and dignified as a Hollywood White Christmas, snow fell on Ulcinj that June day.

  Chapter Two

  in which the snow continues to fall, we meet good Hedvige and old Marcus, and stroll with Emmanuel from Schikanedergasse to Naschmarkt

  from: emmanuel@gmail.com

  to: thebigsleep@yahoo.com

  Even here, in this room where I’m confined – for my own good, they never f
ail to say – the first snow brings serenity and joy. And even though the narrow slice of landscape I see through the window is now my whole world, that world is sublime in its beauty once it’s covered in white. The west wind casts snow on the gnarled branches of the plum tree, the browning grass of the hill and the bristling willows. There are other days when the lake is a leaden grey and impossible to distinguish from the sky, which is eternally grey here in the Alps. The surface of the water sometimes shakes as if someone were walking on it, unseen and unheard. The water ripples and the little waves move towards me. They won’t shake the willow branches dipping into the lake and don’t have the strength to reach the shore. If it weren’t for me patiently awaiting them every winter as I stare out through the window, probably no one would notice their so potent existence.

  Those waves which won’t foam, let alone carry away or smash anything, are a sign: they herald the first snow. The wind which raised them will soon strengthen and bring driving snow to the lake. A flurry of snowflakes will descend on the landscape and white will re-establish its order. But not before several large, watery stars have stuck to my window. By evening, ice will have covered the glass: I’ll press my face up against it and feel the cold on my forehead. Outside everything is at rest, and inside everyone has fallen asleep. That is my time: I can melt the ice with my breath right through until morning. Every few seconds I breathe life into a shape – and a being on the window-pane starts to move. Now it’s a bird, next time it’s a wolf. And however often the cold comes for them and the ice reclaims them, I bring them back with my breath.

  My world lacks breadth, perhaps. It lacks people, above all, because apart from the village children in summer who go scooting down the grassy hillside on sheets of cardboard and plunge head-first into the lake with a scream – hardly anyone calls by. But there’s no lack of order. My world is as ordered as a Chekhov play. If I mention a plum tree, children will come and pick its fruit in the autumn. If I look at the willows, some youngster is bound to jump from them into the water by the end of the summer to demonstrate his manliness, which in my world and all others is always done in primitive and superfluous ways. And then there’s the lake! It, too, is a nail which someone will hang their coat on by the end of the play. Its waters are calm and buoyant, it accepts visitors…and sometimes keeps the particularly careless and weak. As I say, there’s no lack of order in my world. Nor any lack of excitement: there are quite enough changes for my liking.

  Not to mention memories. When you’re confined, you learn to live backwards. Tomorrow will be the same as today. The only future you have is your memory. The only uncertainty which awaits you is what you’ll remember tomorrow. You go back and tell yourself stories in which you’re the main hero. Most of those stories never happened, but who cares – they could have happened, and that’s all that counts. Your past contains innumerable possibilities for lives different to the one you live. So: go back, young man!

  I go back to the hall of our Vienna apartment in 5 Schikane-dergasse. I’m seven years old. From my hiding place behind the shoe cabinet I can see that my nanny has fallen asleep in the armchair beneath Lucian Freud’s painting. The picture had belonged to our neighbour who committed suicide after the bank took away all his property, but not before papa bought the picture from him ‘for a fair and reasonable price’, as he and my mother emphasised every time Freud was the topic of conversation in our drawing room. Fair and reasonable wasn’t good enough for the bank, which confiscated and flogged off all the neighbour’s possessions, turning the heir of a tailor’s shop which had clothed the Viennese for over three centuries into a homeless pauper who had no choice but to drown himself in the Danube, a way in which people in a similar quandary had ended their lives for more than three centuries.

  So Hedvige, my nanny, was sleeping beneath the picture painted by the grandson of the great dream interpreter. My parents had gone to visit Aunt Esther, who’d been dying for at least as long as I’d been alive. When they took me to see her the first time, she was lying like a big white polar bear on a wide, heavy bed, the same one I found her on when we’d visited the last time, at New Year. When they introduced me to Aunt Esther, she said: ‘The boy is most irritatingly blue-eyed – I can’t help it, but those misty blue eyes have something distinctly Prussian about them.’

  Three paces and I was at the front door, which I closed behind me noiselessly. A descent down the wide, marble staircase awaited me. The stairs were made so that they not tire a person out. Papa always made a point of emphasising what he called ‘the humaneness of Vienna’s stairs’. I don’t think we ever went up to our apartment together without him remarking that these stairs could teach you all you needed to know about Viennese architecture. Although it mirrored the narcissism of tradition and the power of the former empire, it above all reflected the idea that ‘buildings, even the most palatial ones, are to serve people’ – I think those were his words. To his mind, Viennese stairs had to be made so that walking up them was no more strenuous than a Sunday stroll on Stephans-platz. Vienna’s opera houses were the only buildings on the planet fit to host operas: everything else was a barbaric blasphemy which ought to be banned by law. The proportion of the height of the ceiling to the length of the windows in Viennese cafés was simply perfect, and visitors got the impression they were drinking their kleiner Brauner in the very centre of the world. Overpriced Parisian cafés were claustrophobic and kind of obscure, papa claimed. The cafés in Rome, on the other hand, seemed frivolous: when you were drinking your espresso there you felt the visitors and waiters were about to tear off their civilian clothes or uniforms and show themselves in costumes, revealing their true nature as characters from a commedia dell’arte. In a nutshell: papa loved Vienna, and a life outside that city was unimaginable for him.

  The stairs which were made so that even the oldest residents of Vienna, at least those who were still mobile, could mount them with a minimum of effort, were also made so that I could imitate the hops of a kangaroo – the animal which fascinated me most at the time – and go bounding down them two steps at a time without danger of falling and getting hurt, although I doubt that was the intention of the constructors. When I’d jumped the last few steps, it was just four more hops to the main door of the house. One more after that and I’d finally be out on the snow-covered pavement, staring at the bright sign on the other side of the street: Carlton Opera Hotel.

  I was a sickly child. If my chronic bronchitis improved for just a second, I’d be bed-ridden with sinus pain. There was probably no day I didn’t have a cough, a sore throat or an annoying cold. To top it all off, there were the allergies. I wasn’t allowed to eat strawberries: just a morsel of the red fruit sufficed to cause an attack of asphyxiation. We also discovered under dramatic circumstances that I was allergic to penicillin. I was two at the time. After I’d been given an injection of penicillin an intensive red appeared, starting at the point of the injection. Then my temperature shot up, and it took them days to get it to come down again. Just when maman et papa had given up hope for me, my fever subsided, and the doctors wrote CAVE PENICILLIN in thick red letters on my medical record card.

  What I want to say is that I wasn’t allowed to play most children’s games. Running out into the snow in only a jumper – without my fur coat, cap and gloves – was a blatant violation of the unwritten but no less rigid rules. It was always the same: I’d use my parents’ absence for my street adventures. I’d always return home before they did. Poor Hedvige would be waiting for me in tears after having woken up, called for me, looked in all the hiding places in the apartment, and then burst into inconsolable sobs. It meant nothing to her that I came back running every time: she seemed not to perceive the pattern behind such simple repetition. She’d always be worried out of her mind as if I’d run away for the very first time. She waited for me on the landing at the apartment door, beside herself with anxiety. Instead of scolding me when I returned, she’d lift me up a little, embrace me and repeat: ‘Oh Mas
ter Emmanuel, thank goodness you’ve come back to me.’ That woman is up with the angels now, I’m sure. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t say a word to monsieur et madame,’ she’d tell me. She demanded only one thing of me – precisely the one thing I couldn’t promise her, however sincerely I regretted the misdemeanours I’d committed each time: that I never, never do it again, she repeated in the tone of voice I imagined Heidi’s grandfather used to tell her important lessons. And sure enough, she never gave me away. But I would go up to maman et papa while they were still taking their coats off and admit everything. ‘This child is beyond our help,’ my mother would sigh and start to cry. ‘May God protect you because I obviously can’t,’ she sobbed and withdrew into her room, complaining of a headache.

  Papa would tell Hedvige to give me a warm wash and put me to bed. Later he’d sit on the edge of my bed until I fell asleep and tell me in a low voice, like a lullaby, how much my mother had suffered because of me. It wasn’t good to return her kindness like this, he whispered. I felt warmth washing over me, my limbs became as light as wings and I sank into sleep, with his gentle, patient voice a distant echo in my ears: She’s made so many sacrifices for you. She’d do anything for you…

  Whenever I was outside, opposite the Carlton Opera Hotel, an irresistible adventure would begin. There was a story connected with that hotel which probably all nannies in the neighbourhood told to give the children a fright. I heard it from Hedvige: A horrible man hung himself in the hotel. He’d done terrible things during the war many years before you were born. The army he commanded was defeated. But, being cunning, he dyed his hair black, grew a beard and moustache to conceal his identity, donned glasses, changed his name – and disappeared. For ever, people thought. Until one day a woman happened to go and see a doctor who practised in an apartment on the top floor of the Carlton Opera Hotel. She realised it was the same evil man whose hospital she’d been detained at during the war. She called the police and demanded they immediately arrest the doctor, whom she blamed for the death of her husband and thousands of other innocent people. The horrible man probably knew what was in store for him when he saw the police car pull up in front of the hotel. The police called on him and demanded that he give himself up. In the end they broke into his surgery and found him hanging from a light fixture, dressed in the uniform he’d worn during the war. Boys like you mustn’t go there because the ghost of the doctor still haunts the halls of the hotel. They say that if he finds children who go there despite the warning, he lures them into the lift with sweets. The lift is like a cage: its doors clang shut and he takes them straight down to hell. That’s what Hedvige used to tell me.