Coming

by Andrej Nikolaidis

  And then, within less than a year, Marushka and I were left alone in the world. First of all my mother died. They searched all the way from Vienna to Thailand to find a cure for her illness, but in vain. She passed away in a Swiss clinic in ‘the miraculous hands’ of a quack who ‘healed those whom the medical profession has written off’, as the pamphlets claimed which kept turning up in our home for months after the funeral. Knowing my mother, I have no doubt that she believed until the very end that she’d come through it. She could never accept the idea that she’d die; even the possibility of ageing and of her beauty waning was unthinkable for her: off the edge of all mental maps, deep within the dark territory no thought would penetrate, because those who enter there must abandon all hope. Her mother was like that too – the grandmother whom I never met. Apparently she had the habit of saying: If I should ever die… My mother, keeping with her convictions, didn’t write a will. Papa followed her example, which cost me a fortune in lawyers’ fees over years of litigation with his relatives, who descended like a flock of vultures on his estate. Fortunately it was quite large. Papa was a weak but good man. And a good father, too – except that he wasn’t my actual father.

  Before long, Hedvige also died. After papa was buried, I insisted that she not leave – she was to stay and live with me in the apartment. At one stage I was determined that Marushka should move in too, but she energetically rejected the idea and forced me to repeat after her, for the umpteenth time: My mother must never find out. Hedvige did actually stay, but today I know it would’ve been better if she hadn’t. She hovered about the apartment like a ghost. I’d find her polishing a piece of furniture endlessly, as if in a trance, and raining down tears on it. Poor madame, poor monsieur, she’d say all of a sudden at dinner and burst into tears. Everything in the apartment reminded her of them. Schikanedergasse became Hedvige’s Calvary: the memories caused her great sorrow, and everything which still existed turned into a monument to the ephemeral. There was so much death all around: the neighbourhood changed, people died or moved away, and she no longer even knew the saleswomen at the local baker’s. Everything that had been hers, except for Marushka and I, was now in the world of the dead. She didn’t show it in any way, although it must have caused her pain, but I know she knew that we were no longer hers either. Then one day she joined the shadows she’d been living with in her last few months. She’d been with them in the other world for days on end, and it was only her body which periodically came back to us. So when she died she didn’t go away: she just didn’t come back.

  Her death didn’t bind me and Marushka together. After they’d all been buried, you might have thought that nothing more could stand in the way of our happiness. Indeed, there was nothing – apart from my illness, which took on new and ever more frightening forms with every passing day. It worsened after my mother’s death, only to culminate in my breakdown on the day of Hedvige’s funeral. This turned out to be just the first in a series of breakdowns which ultimately led me to this hospital, here in the Alps.

  They came on fast: first I’d have an attack of vertigo, then a terrible pain in my head, and next I’d black out. I’d wake up in a bed at the casualty ward where they’d rushed me from the library, the park or the street where I’d collapsed with inhuman cries, they told me. I’d seen a rapid flux of sights, places and epochs tied together into a story whose connecting thread I was unable to apprehend, and that seems to have literally driven me mad. Sequences of historical events alternated with the sequences of stories of those who saw history from the side, askance – its victims. From the beaches of Normandy to Petrograd, from medieval abbeys to the glass-and-steel towers of multinational corporations, a story unfolded in my mind, imperceptibly fast and incomprehensibly complex, but one grand story; and whenever I felt I was finally so close, just one proverbial step away from decoding what at first looked like a chaos of random threads of information, I’d stumble and seize up, drowning in merciful nothingness, with my body sinking in behind.

  As if that wasn’t enough, the pangs of remorse became more frequent and abrupt. To defend myself from those feelings of guilt would have aroused an even stronger sense of remorse in me because I considered my condition rightful punishment, and evading that punishment seemed unforgiveable. It all climaxed one day when I ordered my favourite roast duck at the Amarcord…and then realised I couldn’t live a second longer in a world kept in motion only by death. I was inundated with images of hundreds of millions of feathered animals lying on conveyer belts and having their heads sliced off by razor-sharp precision machines. Their cries – through which I clearly discerned the triumphant, self-contented tones of a Black Mass – stabbed into my mind like steely knives. Billions of chicken’s legs jerking in their death throes grated at my brain. Cows’ heads were severed from their bodies and blood gushed from the necks, bespattering the faces of rubber-suited figures that dragged the carcasses down endless slaughterhouse corridors. Pigs grazed on vast pastures by the sea, only to throw themselves off the cliff one after another, as if at some invisible sign. Lambs were separated from their mothers, whose skulls were then crushed with sledgehammers, and the little animals were herded from their pens to a tract fenced in with barbed wire. There they were gassed to death and mountains of their bodies shifted by bulldozer to restaurants and cafés for our consumption. The thought about how much death was needed to maintain just one human life, my life, made me bolt from the restaurant like a wayward maniac. They didn’t find me until evening – wandering aimlessly through the marshes of Lobau.

  Marushka will never forgive me for the choice I made. I know she searched for me in all the hospitals in Austria, but I’d covered my tracks. I’d reached the end; she has to keep going. But she can only keep going if she forgets me and forsakes me. I know what she’d wish: to care for me and give me more and more of her unconditional, almost maternal love, the worse my condition became. That would cure me, she believed. She’d lay her life at the altar of my illness. But I can’t bear a single sacrifice more for my sake. Instead, I decided to erase myself from her life and liberate her from me. I divided my inheritance into two trusts: one which I manage and use to pay for my luxurious confinement here with a view of the willows and the lake, and a second, which she’ll manage when her children are born. That’s the closest I’ll ever get to fatherhood. I realised that during the first of our fruitless attempts at physical love. Each and every one of them ended in my complete incapacitation, such that we ultimately gave up. I’ll never be capable of giving life – but at least I can give money and all that money can buy.

  When my mother died, Hedvige handed me a slim book bound in red leather, which she announced as my mother’s diary. And, in a way which had become habitual, she added in a conspirative-cum-demanding tone: ‘This has to stay between us.’ My mother turned out to have kept this diary in the period between the separation from you – forgive me for being so direct – and her marriage to the man who would play the role of my father through until the end as well as could be expected under the circumstances. The diary told me nothing about my mother I didn’t already know. They never concealed from me that papa wasn’t my father – a fact underscored multiple times in the diary. But it did reveal the greatest secret: the name of my real father. First you withheld it from me, then my mother; I doubt that papa was involved in the decision, although he’s sure to have gone along with it in his good-natured way, as with everything else my mother insisted on. Now, thanks to Hedvige, it’s become my most precious possession. You may take the mails you’re receiving from me as interest on the value you’ve renounced but which I, nevertheless, will duly reimburse.

  PS

  We’ll see each other soon. At last, I’m coming. Dr Schulz has approved my visit to you: he considers it could be of the greatest significance for my recovery.

  Chapter Nine

  which tells of an ugly awakening, the devastating power of sincerity, the End which has not come, and the heralding of a long-awaited
advent

  I woke up in the cold amid a vile stench. I’d vomited in my sleep and made an absolute mess in the car. Before I’d gone to sleep I’d started the motor and turned on the heating, determined not to go home. The fuel ran out during the night and the motor died. Fortunately, some whisky shimmered yellow at the bottom of the bottle.

  The snow kept falling. The streets were still empty. Everything just went on: the story about the End concluded like so many others. My head was heavy and still ringing with last night’s confessions. Never again would the penitents be able to stand in front of each other. They wouldn’t be honest with one another or themselves. Even if they went out drinking together again, nothing would ever be the same. Everything they’d once buried had now risen up out of the deepest dark, the densest forest and the thickest ice to plague them. How many love affairs, friendships and families were destroyed in one moment of nightly candour…How many secrets of the dead were released into the world to rob the living of their peace…How many husbands and wives are sitting at opposite ends of the cold kitchen table this morning and staring into their steaming cups of coffee because they no longer have the strength to look each other in the eyes…How many sons and daughters are staying in their rooms this morning because they don’t dare to face up to their parents…How empty the confessionals in the churches are this morning after the whole planet turned into one big confessional last night…yet in the churches, the truth was spoken in such a way that it remained secret: the priest heard it under oath that he’d keep it confidential, and this prevented it from becoming public and destructive.

  The non-occurrence of the catastrophe was a catastrophe which ultimately made the world impossible to live in. The Apocalypse had been a kind of solution, after all. The truth was an incident people had waited for: a comet colliding with the earth, a wave inundating the land, a bomb destroying a tower…One drop of the truth and this world became impossible.

  The truth is that I ‘fathered’ him and then deserted him, albeit unwittingly. He ended up in a mental hospital. And even while confined there, he sought my help in vain. He didn’t receive a single word from me, nothing but the address to which he could send letters of confession. He won’t receive absolution for the sins he committed and the confessions he made to the one whose sin he is.

  People are born as sin, a product of sin, and their whole life is a struggle against sinfulness. Sin is unavoidable and undeniable, and the only means of correction people have is death. Yet they consider that if they produce more life they’ll help fill the gaping hole in front of them – a hole they don’t know what to do about except to learn to ignore it, if they can’t manage to plug it in some way. That’s why people have children in an ultimate egoistic act, as if it was going to fulfil their life. They cast their children into new emptinesses in an attempt to cover up their own. Then they’re overcome by worry, which they think will redeem them. And so the tragedy goes on without end, and generations are sacrificed in vain because their birth was a blunder which rectified nothing. So many generations, so much reproduction – and not the slightest change. Only the same human drama which has been played from the first day on, a play which remains the same old tragicomedy however much scenery and technology is put on stage, however many actors and supernumeraries are involved.

  The power to give life is far more destructive and sinister than the power to take away life. Every living creature has that power, however dirty, ugly and stupid it may be. Every father is a father because he was unable to withstand that power. His child will foot the bill for that paternal potency until the end of its days.

  In the end, to top it all off, you’re stricken with remorse. I have nothing to say to my son other than: I’m sorry. But everyone is always sorry. He’s sorry too. Instead of feeling anger because of what they did to us, we end up feeling guilty for what we’ve done because we unfailingly feel that our inherent nature is even more corrupt than the circumstances we were born in.

  He sent a letter, and with the letter the snow came. His breath has found a way into all the fortresses I had built around me, and crept in beneath all my locked doors. He has followed me like a bloodhound down all the paths I’ve fled.

  What else can I do now but end my flight: to turn around and meet him face to face, like facing a mirror? What can I do now but look down the road and wait, even today, especially today, when all flights have been cancelled and the trains and buses are stranded in snowdrifts?

  And an anger rose up inside me like a storm surge, like a black ocean pounding down on my chest. I opened the side window, shook out all the heart pills and threw the jar into the snow. Taking a big swig of whisky, I pressed myself back into the seat and my numb hands gripped the steering wheel. I breathed with difficulty. The pain became unbearable – my chest felt like it’d burst open any second and a stranger would spring out into the world. I shut my eyes: now I just needed to wait. There was a rushing sound that seemed to be coming from afar, coming ever closer. I wasn’t sure if it was the bus Emmanuel was coming with, the final storm which would flatten everything along with the tidal wave which would immerse us all, or my blood seething. Come, I thought. Yes, come.

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  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter One of The Coming was first published in Best European Fiction 2012, Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign/Dublin/London, 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Andrej Nikolaidis

  Translation © 2011 by Will Firth

  978-1-4804-6857-3

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