In/Half

by Jasmin B. Frelih

  ‘How old are you now?’

  ‘You really don’t know?’

  ‘I know the year. I’m calculating.’

  ‘Forty-eight.’

  ‘Of course, two less than Kras.’

  ‘Less than Kras, yes.’

  Magda and Svetlana have stopped at a corner. Their headscarves are as beige as their skirts, as their coats. Sometimes they blend into the background and disappear. They’re standing together, but moving ever closer in baby steps. The openings of their headscarves are anxiously fixated on the ground.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Olga.

  They make fists of wrinkled, dappled skin. A creek, hidden from view, is plunging into the mouth of a ponor and there’s the muffled sound of water falling onto submerged rocks. The forest’s belly begins to rumble. The veil of fog persists over the tops of the spruce trees like a lookout constructed by man-eating spiders. Bernard inspects the trunk of a chestnut that a storm has ripped from the ground. The roots, fingers of a beaten hand, protrude into the air. Side by side with all this indifference there are people. And

  ‘A house!’ ‘A house!’

  They don’t dare look and their whispers barely make themselves heard among the whistling wind. Olga puts one hand on her hip and runs the other through her hair, right across the forehead. She bites her lip. When Bernard sees the slate roof, cut into a V that matches the palisade of trees, and the chimney made of bricks, with cement oozing out between them, his anguish gives way to relief. His fear of cannibalism, frost and wild hunting among the ferns disappear into the thin tongue of smoke rising above the house. He straightens his glasses and grimaces when the cartilage on his nose crackles. He hurries up.

  ‘Bernard, wait,’ says Olga.

  He doesn’t hear her, the mirage of civilization has placed him in his own body again and he grows annoyed at Janez’s accident, thinks of the funeral and his widow and asks himself whether he was to blame, but he quickly shifts the guilt onto his mother, who is the one who cooked it all up. Was Janez insured? He hopes he was. The path strewn with rocks leads to the front door, Bernard lifts the latch on the gate, it creaks open. ‘Bernard!’ He glances at them. If they got lost, if they got irrevocably lost, they’d have no chance at all. He strokes his beard and for a moment envisions a jawbone picked clean by ants and left to moss. It’s kicked by a hiker, a mushroom-collector, a herbalist, the pile of bones is poked by a big black dog that can’t believe its luck, and in the family crypt there’s an empty urn under his name and and a question mark etched in where a year should be. The mirage is so strong that he does not get scared by the dog that is assuming an aggressive pose on a pile of branches in front of the door.

  ‘Sultan!’

  Bernard stops. The muffled snarling is steady and continuous. He’s in the line of fire of its bared teeth, eye to trembling nostril. The women fall silent. The dog’s stiff tail is aimed straight at the ground. Any moment now he will attack. Bernard’s eyes widen, he knows he won’t make it to the fence, that the mutt will knock him down and bite him in the arse, the kidney, the neck, which is why he stands still, hard as bone.

  ‘Sultan,’ the voice is strict, reassuring. The dog becomes somewhat less attentive.

  ‘Here, boy.’ The animal retreats, disappointed, into the shade of its doghouse, and sweat pours down from Bernard. He listens to his pounding heart. He turns to Mother and waves for the three of them to come. He looks at the owner.

  The old man, with a thin white beard and even thinner hair, a rough face and the wild look of a hermit, and dressed in some sort of a hunter’s outfit, authoritatively walks over to the pile on which the dog had been standing, puts his foot on it and crosses his arms over his chest.

  ‘Hello,’ says Bernard.

  ‘Hello,’ replies the old man.

  ‘We’ve had an accident. We’re lost.’

  The old man nods, as if he’s already aware of this, or as if it seems like nothing out of the ordinary. Olga arouses his attention as she, with the sisters on her heels, comes up behind Bernard. Something rises in his eyes.

  ‘Do you perhaps have a telephone?’ asks Bernard.

  Now the old man smiles, revealing a line of toothless gums, blackened from tobacco, or soot. Then he nods.

  ‘I do.’

  Bernard smiles.

  ‘May I make a call?’ he asks.

  The old man stares at Olga. He’d closed his mouth, but kept the smile. Olga, who has combed the surrounding area with her eyes and found a modest little chapel inside the fence, calmly flirts with him. He finds that pleasing. He points to the door.

  ‘Come in, please.’

  Chocolate-covered cereal, hard-boiled eggs, hot milk, yoghurt, cornflakes, thin slices of bacon…this breakfast has been going on forever. Stoja stares indulgently at Mira and Mina, who are chasing bits of food around their plates with their forks and sighing out their boredom. The linden tree that a hundred years ago was hewn into the massive table they’re sitting at had seen Turkish marauders. Fork imprints keep alive the memories of past generations. The children are not allowed to leave the table until Kras gets here. Stoja is frightened by the shadows of gigantic farmers who are still playing out the echoes of their hard destinies behind the giant table. She came from other veins, different muscles. Her songs fall on deaf ears here. She has to go to the hairdresser. Tufts of her hair remained in the hands of those awful women.

  ‘Where’s Grandpa now?’ asks Mina. Mira rolls her eyes.

  ‘He’ll be here right away,’ says Stoja and looks towards the door, as if she were expecting his beard to appear at any moment. The twins also turn their eyes to the door, but when the door remains shut they soon get bored and go back to playing with the food.

  ‘Shall I turn the radio on?’ asks Stoja, who already feels sorry for the kids after an hour of sitting. The sisters look at each other.

  ‘We mustn’t,’ ‘Daddy doesn’t allow it.’

  ‘We’ll turn it off if anyone comes.’

  A conspiratorial mood interrupts the web of monotony. The twins laugh and Stoja turns the dial. A breaking-up of clouds…‘ictory in Ubang’…static…‘eivik arrived at UAK’… buzz…a wild rush of Shostakovich, which brings a smile to Stoja’s face, but turns the girls’ faces sour and they put their hands over their ears and ask her to change the channel, to silence this disorder…crackling…‘What big eyes you have!’ ‘All the better to see you with.’

  ‘Leave it there!’, ‘Leave it there!’

  Stoja stretches out comfortably in the chair and watches the innocent and charmed faces with interest, so enthralled as they listen to a story about a man-eater and a vivisection, while at the same time keeping a careful ear out, in case some threat should appear from outside.

  When they hear the stomping of steps on the staircase, their faces freeze and they turn with childish consternation to Stoja, who turns the radio off just before Grace storms into the kitchen. She has tired eyes and her forehead is stamped with peevishness. Good morning is far away from those lips. Olive comes in behind her and grabs her by the hand, hoping to defuse the situation before there is an outburst that someone would perhaps regret someday.

  ‘He’s not the first to see me naked, Grace. Please, calm down.’

  Grace closes her eyes tightly and shakes her head, indignant that the spiritual integrity of her life has suffered such a stark encroachment. And she’s not behaving unreasonably, not at all – if she really was out for punishment, she’d go straight to Kras, tell him the sort of deceptions their half-brother has been up to, and wait for the fireworks, but she understands at least that much, she has at least that much mercy that she is not out for violence and fear, but she will tell his mother, who will, for the sake of upbringing and shame, have to somehow make it clear to him that some things you just don’t do. Olive thinks that even that sort of accusation is too harsh, since she can’t see anything really contentious in the matter, it’s all human and understandable. She thinks Alan is cute, even i
f he’s pimply and chubby, and this devious side of his makes him a tad more endearing.

  Grace won’t let up.

  ‘Excuse me, Olive, let me be.’ In German. ‘Stoja, can I please have a word with you?’

  Her maternal instincts sense that someone is about to hold her responsible for her children’s transgressions. Hollowness, mild despair and a cotton wadding of indulgence wander into her stomach, while defensive prickles pop up on her skin. She gets up.

  ‘What happened?’

  Grace inhales to rattle off a phrase she’d mentally prepared on the way to the kitchen, mild in tone and sharp in the indictment, but she stops when she sees Mira and Mina. She exhales and is about to gesture to Stoja to join her in the hall, when Po quietly walks in and stands in front of her mother.

  ‘Mummy, Daddy and brother Wolf are fighting.’

  Stoja turns pale. She glances at the twins. Those two have already learnt not to hear things that would show their father in a bad light, which is why they just lazily press their lips together. She takes Po by the hand and leads her out. Grace and Olive look at each other in a torturous moment of marital discord, before following them.

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Turn it on, the radio.’

  Heeheehee.

  Alan has been busted and he guiltily awaits his punishment. He is sitting on the roof, doubled over, leaning with his back against the wall under the window. The unbearable feeling has stripped him bare. Caught red-handed, a voice barking: halt! The cheat-sheet up his sleeve, well, well, what do we have here? The bald head of a mathematician… The formulas, yes! The formulas… Or once, in his dreams, an accident, on purpose, an accident, on purpose, so stupidly irreversible, and is it true? Is it really true? Did it really happen, did it really – to me? To him. It’s probably the same when you break something made of glass or when you take a life, but then you can sweep it under the carpet or dissolve it in acid, you can somehow hide it, move it out of sight, alter your memory, and it’s no longer really true, not necessarily and always exactly what it was, and you can forget, you can move on… As long as you don’t get caught. Another pair of eyes. They open and swallow up all the fog and the obscurity, and in an instant they describe, with no change of appeal, the weight of the cause and consequence that lies on your shoulders. Me? Seriously?… And you’re not angry at yourself for getting tangled up but at those superfluous eyes that won’t let you untie the knots. And then you wait and push all your worries away from yourself, you put yourself into foreign hands, you give up because the thing has anyway got out of control, obviously, since you didn’t really really want it to be that way, just, let’s say, under cover of darkness you wanted to give it a try, to dip a finger into the boiling water, though it shouldn’t really be boiling, just so you could see if it really does burn, what kind of a scent, taste, feeling that is, until the howling began and you really did burn yourself. And then you wait to see what will happen. Somehow it becomes sweet when the world comes crashing down around you. You’d like to show it that you’re prepared, grown up, that you know what it’s all about, and that you’ll bow down to the intractable truth, now, when it turns out this way and there’s actually nothing left for you to do, but why, why then, why is Alan’s face now lit with such an honest, such an inscrutably pure, and completely involuntary smile?

  Unusual sounds spreading in waves across the courtyard coax him out of his numb resignation. Conflict is in the air. The trial has begun. Curiosity vanquishes his desire to remain hidden, and to avoid all eyes even if he can’t avoid the wagging tongues. He walks carefully along the wall and peeks over the edge of the roof, but there’s nobody on the ground. Not until the branches shake and he sees the twitching movement of two figures up high in the tree, each too portly to be having any business up there, does he begin to feel that the incriminating evidence had already been submitted, even before the witness testimonies.

  Alan didn’t see how Raven had jerked the magazines out of Wolf’s hands and risked his neck getting to the top of the tree where the branches are so thin that the old guy is held aloft only by the walnut tree’s good will, but now he has a fine view of Wolf lunging at his father’s feet which are squirming and kicking and stepping on his fingers. If the seriousness of the show hadn’t been so obvious one would have to laugh. And so Alan laughs at the fact that he has been busted for the second time in just a few minutes.

  Raven has fended off the first attack. Kras has retreated to the platform of the little house, where he is now staring in the direction of his father and clenching his teeth.

  ‘Give them to me!’

  ‘Up your arse, spawn of Satan, I sacrificed two fingers for them, so they’re mine now.’

  ‘Then why are they here?’

  ‘I can keep them wherever I damn well please.’

  ‘Give them to me, right now!’

  ‘No, I will not.’

  ‘I’ll shake you down, dammit, I will!’

  ‘Did you hear that, Walnut? Patricide!’

  ‘Did you hear me!’

  ‘Kras…’

  ‘This instant!’

  ‘Kras, calm down.’

  ‘No chance, not until you give them to me!’

  ‘Kras…’

  To top it all off, the girls have come to watch. When he sees Grace, Alan skittishly hides for a second, attracting Wolf’s attention. When he lifts his head again, Kras is yelling at him.

  ‘Alan, get off the roof!’

  ‘Alan, don’t listen to him!’

  Alan freezes, he clings to the edge, and surveys everything, looking beyond the meadow to the woods, where life, he imagines, is much, much simpler.

  The father’s cries and Alan’s recalcitrance rile Kras, and just like that he and Raven are once again in a dangerous dance of stamping legs and aching fingers. Grace yells, Kras, Kras, Kras, repeating his name like a mantra or a lament to some petulant divinity, the tone gambolling between scolding reproach and a curse. Stoja, meanwhile, slips into the role of a heroine from a big fat Russian novel, grabs Po by the armpits and lifts her up, high into the air, with her face turned towards the unpleasant scene, like a camera which will, through its own gaze, set a mirror to the evildoer, while severed incantations gush from her throat, without it being entirely clear who they’re meant for, Kras, Po, nobody or everyone – look, look, look! That inspires even Alan to feebly shout out, ‘Let him go!’, though it doesn’t look like anyone heard him.

  The second attack also fails. Kras measures the length of the platform with drawn-out steps, like a beast before its prey, with his eyes boring into the old man’s face. The noise that’s being created around him doesn’t bother him (he’s rather experienced at disregarding public opinion).

  ‘Kras…’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Kras, I’m sorry, but we agreed…’

  ‘Agreed! You vouched for it, said that the children would no longer be exposed to this filth!’

  ‘Kras, come on, remember back when you went to high school, how you were bursting with energy…’

  ‘We’ve been through this before! Unless you want to be eating through a straw, shut up! And give them to me!’

  ‘Screw you, Kras, I won’t say anything about my grandson, but I can raise my kids any way I want. Don’t you threaten me!’

  Kras’s upper lip snarls. He bares his teeth. He huffs and puffs. The mills in his head are humming with the metallic sound of weapons. Mitja’s anti-artillery notebook is on the floor. He boots the broken drawer, which flies into the courtyard and smashes into pieces. He throws his head back and howls!

  ‘Give them to me!’

  The moon, palely outlined in the noon sky, is used to such addresses. It gives no indication that it has heard him. Raven doesn’t move either. Kras has had enough. He gets out of the little house, jumps down to the ground, even though he’s pretty high up (something goes crack in his knee), and races past the excited voices into the garden shed, where
the tail-wagging dogs await him, upset by their master’s howl. He calms them with a scowling it’s ok, it’s ok. He returns from the shed with murder in his eyes and an axe in his hands.

  Grace blocks his path, opens her mouth and waves her arms about, makes sounds, expresses her will. Kras circumvents her without having heard, actually without having even seen her. Stoja sticks Po into his face, and Kras averts his eyes, which is probably a good thing, since Po’s look could most easily be described as a challenging one – well, try if you dare. Grace grabs him by the shoulder but he shakes her off and threatens her with the blunt side of the axe, which makes all hell break loose. Olive comes through the door and immediately turns around and disappears back inside. Let the family work things out themselves. Alan’s blood pressure soars as he observes the feverish stirrings of bodies. His father is meditating up in the top of the tree, face resting against branches, magazine clutched in his hand, listening, moving his lips, whispering. Grace runs into the shed and, amidst growling dogs, grabs a spade. At the base of the tree Kras has assumed the position of a golfer teeing off. His legs spread, he wiggles his arse, grabs the axe in both hands and lifts it high above his head. Alan feels dizzy. He’s cut off from the sources of power, there’s no way he can change anything, and for the first time in his life this bothers him somewhat. Grace runs towards Kras, ready to smack the back of his head if he doesn’t stop. The harrowing scene puts Po on edge and she has to close her sullen eyes.

  Then, the tyres. Meslier is squeaking up the old village path on his fold-up bicycle, coming to save the souls of his favourite family (or at least to share a coffee and a chat with someone), and into the courtyard from the main road file the car containing Katarina and Edgar and Mila, a military police car in which sits General Globocnik with his young, square-headed aide, and then an ordinary police car, with police officers – one male, one female – who have come for a certain Olga Wolf, born Krolik, on suspicion of causing bodily harm to a minor.

  The wife, the priest, the rifle, the baton. Welcome to Bodičava.