Coming

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  I entered the hotel and saw the terrible lift. Just a few steps lay between me and that shaft to hell. To the left was the reception desk, which was always staffed by several pretty and friendly young women. They knew me by now and called out: ‘It’s you, Emmanuel! How is the little Master today?’ I’d cautiously go up to the desk, raise my hand in greeting and lay it on the marble top. That was part of my rescue strategy: if the doctor appeared in front of me, I counted on the young receptionists whisking me behind the desk. I’d stand there for a while looking at the lift: it was an imposing contraption with thick, black bars and glass which definitely fitted the part. When one of the guests got in, the bars closed behind them and the lift would head upwards with a creak of chains. But when I heard the lift coming down, I’d think it was the evil doctor coming for me. Fear would get the better of my curiosity and I’d turn tail and bolt from the hotel.

  I’d run until my cough made me stop. But I didn’t go back home. No way, my adventure had only just begun! I’d turn into the first street on the right and stand in front of the windows of old Marcus’s shop. There were bottles of liquor with colourful labels – I liked the green ones best, which looked as if they had nothing but smoke in them. More interesting still, Marcus’s window displayed a whole range of chocolate bars from exotic parts of the world. Brazil, it said, five, five, and then a funny sign. Ecuador, six, five, and the funny sign again, and South Africa, Kenya, and again numbers with signs I didn’t understand…There outside that luxury food shop, which after Marcus’s death was turned into a kebab outlet, I learned that everything I don’t know or don’t have can be substituted by things I imagine and believe in. There was no chocolate taster for whom those delicacies were more real than for me. Experts could try a little cube of chocolate with their eyes closed and unerringly identify its origin and the class of the cocoa, but what was that compared to the stories I could tell about those chocolates? I trembled with excitement at the yellow, green and orange wrappers with little maps of the countries from which these chocolates arrived in my world: on pack-horses through the jungle, on rafts through foaming rapids, in seaplanes through clouds and storms, on ocean-going ships past icebergs and waves as tall as the Staatsoper…The wrappers also showed palm trees, whose fronds the natives used to make huts to shelter from the tropical rain; I saw lions, black women with long necks carrying wicker baskets on their heads, and to top it all off there were stern warriors with spears and blowguns which fired poisoned darts deadlier than the fangs of a cobra; I convinced myself that every thought and word was true.

  I’d stand there in front of the shop window until Marcus, who was forever sitting behind the counter reading, looked up through his glasses with lenses as thick as the jars in Hed-vige’s pantry. Then he’d come hobbling up to the door and pull me inside. ‘You’ve come out without your woollens again,’ he’d reproach me, ‘you’ll be in bed with fever again for a whole month!’ And before I could say a word in my defence he’d slip a hot cup of tea into my hand.

  His shop always smelt of cinnamon and tobacco. Gentle music was playing which I’d recognise years later as Bach, whom my friend prized above all other composers. Business was going from bad to worse, so Marcus smoked most of the luxury cigars himself when their use-by date expired. He’d blow out the smoke of a thick cigar and say to me, imitating black-and-white-film icons: When you take poison, you have to do it with style, a lesson even Socrates read to humanity. Alas, in vain.

  Marcus wasn’t a man of many words. If I tried to ask him something, he’d reach me one of the books he kept under the counter and say with a crafty smile: Here, read this, only to return to his cigar, book and silence. When I’d drunk my tea, and I made sure not to hurry, he’d see me out and send me on my way: ‘And now straight home!’

  Later, when I was at high school, Hedvige told me that Marcus had sold the shop and used the money to pay for a place in a retirement home in Aspern, on the outskirts of Vienna. Since he had neither children nor any close relatives to look after him, he thought it was the best way of providing for a peaceful retirement. Before leaving our area for good, he met Hedvige on her way back from shopping and asked after me, although I hadn’t dropped into his shop for years. He told Hedvige that he’d lived in Aspern throughout the Soviet occupation. After the Russians shot his father in 1946, he grew up with his grandfather there. ‘The old man’s reign of terror was no better than the Russians’, he told Hedvige, who then told me. Marcus also mentioned that his father lay in a shallow grave in Aspern, as well as his grandfather, who had maltreated him as long as he’d had a breath left in his body; there were other gruesome memories, too, which he hadn’t been able to lay to rest and put behind him. Since that’s how things were, he felt it was only right that he also be buried in Aspern when his time came. And with that he politely said goodbye and headed off down the street, leaving a trail of smoke; I can just picture him with his cigar, like an old steamboat proudly chuffing away on its last voyage, to the salvagers.

  I didn’t go to visit him. Not out of laziness or because I didn’t care about him. On the contrary: because he was so important to me. Marcus had known he mustn’t give me any of the chocolates from his shop window, however often I came, because that would ruin everything: our little game, all my reveries about faraway countries which began at his shop window, and our whole delicate and sincere friendship. And I knew I mustn’t go and see Marcus in the nursing home: he wouldn’t be behind the counter, on the throne of his empire, but enfeebled in a bed or wheelchair. No, it was best this way: kind old Marcus would forever stay in his shop, pretending to be strict and sending me home at the end of my visit.

  I ran through the ankle-deep snow. Then I turned round, and when I saw through the veil of snowflakes that Marcus was no longer watching to check that I’d turned into Schikane-dergasse as he’d told me, I kept going straight on towards the Naschmarkt market.

  They said on this morning’s news that snow fell in Ulcinj in the middle of summer, and now people will probably ask themselves why. Why, indeed, does snow fall? In the childhood stories I’m telling you it falls to bring peace and joy. I don’t think my story is different to that of most other people: childhood is a widespread phenomenon. And childhood’s most pleasant moments are often concentrated in blissful, snow-covered winter days.

  James Joyce, for example, has snow fall so as to set the final scene of one of the most touching stories in the history of literature, which, although not as long as the history of snow, is similar to snow in that it reveals the footprints of those who’ve trodden this world. The ending of ‘The Dead’, where Gabriel Conroy realises that his wife will spend the rest of her days at his side but that the greatest event of her life was in the past, when a young man died because of his love for her, and Gabriel comprehends that everything he can give her in life is worthless compared to what the dead Michael Furey has already done for her…Oh, perhaps I take it all too personally. I have a soft spot for sad love stories.

  Now you know why the snow falls for me. The world shines differently beneath the snow – that light falls from the sky, covering us, all we can see, and everything our senses perceive. However many times we’ve seen snow, the spectacle is always as fascinating as the first time. You can consider snow to be just congealed water, of course, but being rational is only good up to a point, beyond which reason destroys all joy in life. Things like snow have to stay unexplained, and therefore pure, so we can enjoy them. To stand beneath the sky as it sprinkles us with snow and reflect on the atmospheric processes which formed it is not irrational but is certainly a sorry state deserving of sympathy. For such a person, snow is just a nuisance – one of many which await them before death, the greatest unpleasantry lurking at the end.

  I remember one snowfall better than all the others. It was during the war years, though I don’t remember exactly because they’ve all merged into a continuum of nausea and I can’t distinguish them any more. I didn’t experience those years then and the
re, but I did spend them with you as I sifted through newspapers and books, remembering every cutting and every Web link to do with the time and place where you were living. Human nature is hopelessly corrupt and this corruption is to be found in every system which people establish. So it is with the market, so it is with the Church, so it is here, too, where I’m confined for my own good. It’s fortunate that there’s corruption, I must add, because how else would I manage to get a computer into my room if no one was bribable, and how else would I get hold of the books I need so as to be with you as often as I can?

  Yes, snow was falling that winter. There was a power failure. It lasted for days, so I walked with you every night through empty Ulcinj. The ice cracked beneath our feet as we talked about all that needed to be done, about how wise and careful we needed to be to survive one more year. That’s how a person cracks too, you told me: they stand firm and look as if they’re going to outlast eternity. But then just a little brush with misfortune, one hardship on top of that, and one more which treads on them and they shatter like shop windows on city squares under bombardment.

  The north wind blew away the clouds over Ulcinj and the cold descended on the landscape to preserve it, like the canvases of the Old Masters are conserved. The radiance of the stars reflected on the snow-covered ground. Now, when the sub-stations had burnt out and the power lines were down, when people lit their houses with candles and there were no street lights, the town shone brighter than ever before. Radiant it was, like cities beyond the memory of the living, from times which no one now remembers. We know these things only from books printed on paper as white as snow, paper which awaits the moment when snow falls on the margins and it shall finally be revealed to us why snow falls: so that we see the word impressed on paper more clearly and also read the word – the text from which everything began.

  Chapter Three

  which describes human resourcefulness and falling cows, while a butcher tells us his tale of cold and loss

  The line of cars was finally starting to move. I drove past the market and the suburb of Nova Mahala before heading down the narrow streets towards the Port. The thousands of people who’d been packed together like sardines on the beach that June day were now fleeing in panic. Every few seconds, one of them would bash into the side of the car. A few moments earlier they’d been putting on sun lotion to get a better tan, and now they left greasy pawprints on the windscreen when they tumbled over the bonnet. I stopped and looked down at the beach. I saw a family encamped under an umbrella: a man, a woman and three small children. Tourists from Kosovo have the custom of taking woollen blankets to the beach. The older members of their thirty-head immediate families lie on them all day, smoking and drinking çaj rusit, their heavily stewed black tea, which they sip out of small glass cups like a designer hybrid between a schnapps glass and a Turkish coffee cup. Now the blankets and the hot tea will come in handy. How could I not have noticed before: they have a panoply of beach/mountain gear good for both summer and winter outings. This pile of things in their PVC bag means they’re equipped for all climatic conditions, from – 50 to +50 degrees. The family under the umbrella sat huddled in the blankets and stared towards the left-hand end of the beach. In the wind-shadow of the headland where Hotel Jadran used to stand, a group of beachgoers were splashing around and playing volleyball in the shallows. They can only have been Russians.

  I stepped on the gas a bit and drove round to Hotel Galeb, which was demolished a decade ago. The town council promised to build a new luxury hotel complex in its place, but today there are only eerie ruins with no function except perhaps a sentimental one: to remind the small Jewish community, which has settled not far from here and bought houses from the old-timers, of all its demolished temples and houses in their original homeland over the sea.

  I continued on and came to the monument to the fallen fighters of the Second World War. This memorial, located just above Mala Plaža, the cove and the Old Town, hovers with outstretched wings like an oversized dove of peace and victim of radiation. Although a white dove, it doesn’t seem peace-loving: it strikes me as an animal trained to carry bombs instead of letters, as if the sculptor’s chisel caught the very moment when it was preparing for indiscriminate bombing. The monument has been decaying for decades, but the town councillors don’t dare to have it demolished and sell the site to one of the local tycoons. If they did, they know they’d be shot by one of the former Partisans, who might need a walking stick to get around but still have a sharp eye and a steady hand.

  I needed all of half an hour to get through the throng and make it home from the monument – a drive of one or two minutes under normal circumstances, without people running about in the snow in their swimming trunks and flinging themselves in front of the car. But the last and biggest obstacle of the day was still ahead of me.

  At the last bend before my modest home, a cow was lying on the road. I got out of the car, lit a cigarette and went up to my neighbour who was standing beside the animal and scratching his head. I asked what had happened and he replied with a candid, if somewhat rambling description of the events which had led up to one third of his assets lying here on the carriageway. Of all that he wanted to explain, the only important thing was made clear to me by his pointing finger: the concrete wall on the right-hand side of the road. I knew all the rest. A good four metres high, the wall was built to prevent rockslides from hitting the road. As far as I know, there are only two species on the planet capable of climbing near-vertical slopes: the Himalayan chamois and its predator, the snow leopard. Now the neighbour’s cow had tried to graze on that near-vertical hill. It was driven by hunger because people in our region keep hundreds of cows which they don’t feed. Every morning they let them out of their sheds, and herds of the stressed animals – the nightmare of every respectable Indian – roam the town until dark, feeding on the sparse grass in the parks and scavenging among the garbage which farmers leave at the market when they close their stalls. The cows are thus forced to climb over stone verges, like goats, and to use the roads, like people. The eternally hungry bovines have already browsed off all the fig bushes, grape vines and gardens in the neighbourhood. The only grass within several kilometres grows up on the hill above the retaining wall. Where many cows do not venture, one will boldly go. And that cow fell. The poor animal tried to land on its legs but the bones broke from the impact and were jutting out of open fractures on its legs. A bloody trail led from the place of the fall to where it now lay at the end of its tether, with no more strength to move.

  In the meantime the neighbour’s family went in action. They hopped around the cow like Lilliputians around Gulliver. His mother carted up a wheelbarrow, his youngest daughter brought a set of rusty knives and the eldest arrived with an axe in tow. Finally his son appeared, brandishing a chainsaw and full of enthusiasm about the impending massacre. When you live alongside other people you get used to all sorts of things, but slaughtering an animal in the middle of a main road still seemed a bit extreme even by our standards.

  ‘What else can I do?’ the neighbour whined in his defence. ‘She’s too heavy to move, and I can’t just leave her here for the dogs. We’ll have to cut her up, take the pieces back in the wheelbarrow and put them in the freezer, there’s no other way. The butcher will be here any minute. I called him because this cow was my favourite – I can’t kill her myself. I’m afraid, and my hand will tremble,’ he said.

  ‘I know this is a difficult time for you, but I won’t stay. Don’t take it amiss. I haven’t had a proper drink yet today,’ I apologised.

  I glanced in the rear-view mirror as I was driving away and saw the lumbering figure of Salvatore, the butcher, arriving with his slow gait at the place of execution.

  When I finally made it home, I hastily knocked back the double Cardhu I’d decided to treat myself to. I threw myself into the armchair and turned on the television. Snow in Ulcinj in summer hadn’t made the headlines because it was hindered by other, even greater wonders
of nature. CNN reported a rain of frogs which had blighted Japan. The reporter was standing under a fly tent next to some Japanese who were calmly eating sushi. He tried to interview them, but they didn’t share his fascination with the event. I hope the frogs stop falling soon – my lunch break ends in ten minutes, one of them muttered between two mouthfuls. It sure is hard to fascinate the Japanese, I thought. Even if Godzilla emerged from the ocean dressed in a white shirt, black miniskirt and little white socks like a schoolgirl, with its eyes bound with pink lace knickers, Nipponese passers-by would hardly bat an eyelid.