‘Let me out!’
He’s settled into a rhythm. Three bashes with the fist, then a shout. Wait. A dozen beats of the heart. Order takes the edge off the terror. Slaps at least a pinch of sense over the anxiety.
He has no detailed visions up his sleeve. Anytime now, adrenaline will drag him into a state of shock. Claustrophobia. Tense expectations of change. Slim chance of it turning out well. Kras told him he’d most probably lose his freedom, but he didn’t expect that to happen so soon, so suddenly. When he heard the creaking of the bolt, he took it to be the synaesthetic experience of Kras’s words. But sometimes things get caught up in reality. Knock. Knock. Knock.
‘Let me out!’
When he hears the snarling dog on the other side of the door, he jumps back and almost tumbles down the stairs. He struggles to catch his footing. He retreats with slow, tentative steps. The musty smell of sticking soil, openings of white light caught under the ceiling, a stone on the tips of the toes – all sensory perceptions pass unnoticed, everything in Bernard’s head is focused on the large steel door handle that will go down any second now, and the iron sigh of the bolt that will allow the door to open… He knows that’s his only hope.
He must throw himself out of the hole like a bullet from God, rely on surprise and alarm, on old age and the dog’s tameness, but… No starting gun had told him when it was time to run. Life yawns. The dog’s head pushes through the steadily widening crack. The old man is holding the dog on a leash and containing its thrusts with fierce yanks, so that the dog’s front legs are mostly dangling freely in the air. Bernard retreats. His lips are trembling. Sweat drops from his forehead. He can’t speak.
He’s blinded by a reflection that finally draws at least some sound from his lungs. The old man is holding a long kitchen knife.
‘Sir!’
‘Don’t you sir me, Wolf.’
How did he find out? Did Mum tell him? Was he listening in?
‘Can you please tell me…’
His voice breaks into a stretched-out peep.
‘I’ll slaughter you like a pig, Wolf.’
‘What did I…what did I…’
‘You were born to the wrong brother, Wolf.’
‘I wasn’t! I’m not a Wolf!’
This stops the old man for a second, then he smiles bitterly and continues to make his way towards Bernard, who has now arrived at the bottom of the stairs, the floor, the cold floor, and is retreating with his back facing the corner that’s farthest away.
‘I’ll do you for Lovro Jr, for Suzana, for Marjana, and I’ll do you for Mihaela and for Evgen…’
‘I had nothing to do with it! I had nothing to do with it!’
Bernard is yelling hysterically and pounding his chest. The old man opens his mouth and presses out the names of the dead. The dog is strangling itself on its collar.
‘For the Gričars, for the Krajcons, for Milč and Trudi I’ll slaughter you two times…’
‘Please…’
‘For…, for…’
‘ ’
‘You know the police came looking for you?’
‘The police?’ Olga’s baffled. ‘What do the police want with me?’
‘Alenka,’ says Grace.
‘Alenka what?’ asks Olga.
They’re driving. It’s not far now. The fog won’t let up. There’s no visibility.
‘Because of Voranc.’
‘It’s high time that child learnt what the world is really like. And she’s a ditz if she thinks she can hide him away from it.’
‘Mum, still…’
‘Don’t call me Mum!’
Silence. Grace takes her foot off the accelerator. She can’t see a thing. Olga looks at her.
‘What… Are you crying? Andreja! What have you got to cry about? Don’t cry now. Don’t cry!’
Grace is trying to hold back her tears, she catches her breath to calm down, but she fails. The jagged crying issues from her lungs in jerks, and for a moment you can see little saliva bubbles on her lips. Olga raises her nose.
‘Andreja, come on…’
‘It’s not fair!’
Olga folds her hands over her chest.
‘It’s not fair…’ repeats Grace between sobs, ‘that in the end I’m the only one who can’t call you that…even though all the others were ruthless, not me, even though the rest of them didn’t give a shit about what was going on, they just wanted peace, just so that Kras could lock himself in his room, so Bernard could laugh at you both, so Alenka could…whatever Alenka was doing… I’m the only one who cared about you, about the both of you, I’m the only one who cared about what was going on… I’m the only one who tried to…’
Olga has had enough of the accusations. She smacks her hand against the dashboard.
‘What did you do! Go on, tell me what you did!’
‘…only I knew… Why did I hit myself with the belt then? Who traded away our land for the bottle? Who beat you all of those days? That’s why I did it…so you wouldn’t be alone. That’s why! And it’s not fair!’
‘Oh, please, Andreja, spare me the who owes what to whom. I am finally at peace. I’ve finally reached a state of equilibrium. I don’t owe anybody anything and nobody owes me anything. It took a long time,’ her snickering is unusually dry, ‘God knows it took a long time, but now I’m finally here and I have to tell you I feel great. At some point you have to say – enough. Enough was enough.’
Grace’s crying does not lessen.
‘But…then why can’t I…?’
‘What can’t you what, Andreja?’
‘My name is Grace!’ she yells. In the fog in front of them appears, for a second, a dark silhouette of a figure, just for a split second, not long enough for them to react other than with a momentary dilation of the pupils and an embryo of a sigh on the vocal chords, before the silhouette, with a loud bang that they feel through the seats, unites with the front bumper and bounces off. Grace instinctively hits the brakes. She manages to keep the car on the road.
‘What was that?’
Olga looks over her shoulder, but immediately waves her arm.
‘Probably a deer or stag.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘Who cares what it was,’ interrupts Olga. ‘Drive on so that bastard doesn’t abuse our Bernard. It’s not far.’
Grace looks at her in amazement. Olga motions for her to drive on.
‘It looked like Berdo’s Janez.’
Olga rolls her eyes.
‘Give me a break,’ she says, ‘I’ve already seen him die once today.’
Grace drives on and before a minute has passed Olga squeezes her shoulder and yells for her to stop. Grace strains to see through the fog but all she can see are the hints of shapes. She doesn’t know what Olga can see. They stop.
‘Open the trunk, please,’ says Olga. ‘Left button, at the bottom.’
Grace searches for it, Olga gets out. She presses it. Coolness crawls into the car as Olga is opening the trunk, lifting the cover of the spare-tyre well and extracting a silver revolver. She opens the drum, checks whether it’s loaded, spins it, and closes it again. Hearing this, Grace gets out of the car and goes to see what her mother’s up to.
She turns speechless when she sees her there with purpose on her face and a gun in her hands.
‘What is it, Grace?’ asks Olga in a dead tone, ‘Did you think it would really be so simple?’
With her foot Grace traces a line in the sand on the ground. She shrugs. Her gaze does not waver. They each seek courage in the other’s eyes.
This damned life gives you no peace. It doesn’t matter how much you give, how much it takes, for sacrifice, for a joke, for a bit of time… It doesn’t stay around long. It always finds something to interrupt it, so that it can get back to its old hurdygurdy, now, now, now. The possible worlds are disappearing. The real world is turning into a different one. It can’t find equilibrium, and it never will. It’s not just things that change form in the s
tomach, it’s also content, and desires morph into the means of struggle. Life is a tank tread. An insatiable beast. It constantly pulls itself by the arse and pummels onwards. But you don’t know… You don’t know, is it driven by birth or by death? Are the thousands of upset explosions in its digestive tract what’s pushing it, or is it being pulled forwards by the gravitation of entropy, the final collapse of all things? Do you always have to persist, create, even destructively, in order to, if nothing else, remain at the outset, or do we have to leave and let others set new points where equilibrium will be balanced? What’s my life called? Hey! What’s my life called? Abraham? Fuck that. In half? That sounds more…fitting.
Because we killed half of all the politicians, half of all the bankers, half of all the craftsmen, half of all the industrialists, half of all the directors, half of all the managers, half of all the shareholders, half of all the priests, half of all the generals, half of all the soldiers, half of all the secretaries, half of all the workers, half of all the poets, half of all the postmen, half of all the drunks, half of all the writers, half of all the bakers, half of all the pirates, half of all the high-school kids, half of all the students, half of all the hunters, half of all the believers, half of all the artists, half of all the nudists, half of all the waiters, half of all the dressmakers, half of all the tailors, half of all the hungry, half of all the full, half of all the cows, half of all the dogs, half of all the cats, half of all the horses, half of all the pigs, half of all the innocent, half of all the guilty, half of all the good, half of all the pesky, half of all the women, half of all the men, half of all the adults, half of all the children, and expelled all foreigners.
The family idyll had never seemed so close to the touch.
And if the schemer, life, is now again setting them in motion, and they will soon again find themselves on spiral orbits whose paths will never again cross, and will fly off from the solid core of idea into space – does that in any way diminish their meaning? It’s true. Everything falls apart. But what about that which was never put together?
Kras had already tied his tie when he looked at himself in the mirror and laughed at his own vanity. He stuck a finger into the knot and unravelled it. He took off the tie and threw it to the floor. He doesn’t have much in his suitcase. An extra pair of shoes, a few shirts, underwear, socks, pants. If his path leads him north, or very far south, he’ll buy a coat at the airport. There’s nothing he really needs. Definitely not a tie.
He has no intention of saying goodbye. In any case he won’t be away from home for long and he doesn’t want to answer questions. Their presence is still alive in his head, gathered as they were in celebration the day before, a family snapshot in living colour. Now they are once again dispersed into their frames, which is why he won’t visit them just to make sure before he leaves… Why does it seem like he’s running away? He’s never run away from things. Not even when he probably should have. When the world became unhinged and when dangerous oaths were taken and hatred called for its pound of flesh. Nowhere was it written that he would be the one to succeed, that he would be the one to survive, and if back then he’d found himself on the wrong side, there would be nothing but silence from him. So he is not running away. He’s just going for his son, wherever he is. Just for his child. Though he’s no longer a child. He’s as old as Kras was when he still had a choice.
The sound of a suitcase zipper. The shudder of doubt on his face. When he still had a choice. He made a choice for himself. He also made a choice for everyone else. How could he leave a free path for his son, if he was born of a choice that set out and closed off the path for Kras? Fathers are selfish. Kras is well aware of this. There are some things a man must hold on to. Those are not just words. Those are not just memories. And freedom means nothing if you have it only in order to avoid what was chosen – for you.
In the courtyard a taxi honks. Kras heads down the stairs, goes outside, where he glances up to his father, way up there, and snarls at the priest who comes running over to hear confession. He’s not interested in what’s going on here. He and his father dealt with it a long time ago. Everything else was just a dull variation on a theme. Kras inherited the desert. To make something grow, he had to water it with blood. The truth of history presses down on the sense of justice. It bends it in the strong, it breaks it in the weak. Nobody can see innocence, which is good, since there is none.
He sits in the back seat and doesn’t look at the driver. He stares out of the window as they drive. A few drops of rain disturb the cover of dust. The clouds are flaunting their fatness. There’s no sun. Evening is a long way off. Everything is captured here. His restless knees jump up and down, the leather heels and the rubber mat squeaking each time they come into contact. Everything is captured here. Kras won’t let his eyelids interrupt the view, so his eyes begin to water. The landscape curves over the edges of teardrops.
‘Is there something…’ he mumbles, and though the driver hears him, he has enough common sense to remain silent. ‘Is there something here that’s larger than me?’ asks Wolf. The fields bend. The forest at the edge merges into the sky. ‘All this and something more, at least something, at least a little over it?’ The colours of sand and blades of grass blend into a dirty green. ‘Or is there always a hole,’ he clenches his fist and presses it slowly and deliberately against the glass, ‘which sucks and sucks and does not let the world be filled? And no matter how much you throw into it, it still wants more and always takes away the fullness of things…!’ He bashes his fist against the glass. The driver shifts in his seat but remains quiet.
‘What should I fill it with?’
‘Come again, sir?’
‘I said, what should I fill the hole with?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
Kras nods, crosses his legs, loses sight of the horizon and closes his eyes.
‘Mr Wolf. Before we get to the airport, we have to cross the checkpoint. I can tell you right now that you will have to take your shoes off.’
Kras bends down towards his laces.
‘Will we be there soon?’
‘In a minute, Mister Wolf.’
Just one more minute.
POETRYLITICS
A sliver of moon peeks through a crack in the clouds and a person, desperate, becomes convinced for a moment that he came into the world for a purpose he has yet to discover, but the next moment again buries his head in his hands and whispers to himself, it’s hopeless.
At a height of thirty-five thousand feet, circling like a bald eagle, is death with steel wings, sensitive thermal sensors and the sentence GOD IS NOT DEAD…YET written in red spray paint on the fuselage. This is Avenger, a crewless combat plane that has been airborne for twenty-five years. Its wings bear a tonne and a half’s worth of K01-7025 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles. Without it, no story comes to an end.
You damned bull! Don’t give up now, just before the end! You will make it. I believe in you. Love is not greed. Love is not greed. I promise you. I promise
look…
…at this street and all the people in it. And this branch, floating freely in the air just an inch away from his window. In windy storms it taps lightly on the pane, as if it were seeking refuge from the weather. In rain it dresses in black and makes a silent bow to the procession of drops. The tree itself cannot be seen from here.
Look at the clash of shadows on the streetlight’s yellow canvas. Listen to the typewriter keys. The constant clacking of their teeth. That herd of wild horses galloping across an embankment of rocks. The people under the window make all sorts of sounds. They have called out all the names, summoned their children and screamed astonished greetings at people they haven’t seen in centuries, they have laughed loudly, with no choice, almost under duress, at the thousands of hostile jokes from the mouths of foreign travellers who have arrived here from the primal forests and deserts, underneath broad hats, with cracked lips, and cracked skin over their thumbs… They have dragged metal barbecue
grills right out into the street. Bodies are rotating over the flames. Sweet smoke creeps through the tiny cracks between the window frame and the wall. The smell of meat halts the sound of the keys. The chair screeches when the body in it leans back. The things you do to escape trap you inside. He remembers a story about a guy in a prison cell who built a cage out of his bunk bed frame and enclosed himself within it. He was trapped under his own conditions and therefore, so he told anyone who would listen, he had made himself completely free.
It was not in vain.
The pile of typed papers in the corner of the room grows and grows. The people under the window are setting off fireworks. You can hear the whistling rockets and observe the blushing façades. It’s a holiday. The windows have been freshly washed. The cleaning lady was going on and on about an anniversary as she scrubbed with a brush, but he couldn’t make out what it was an anniversary of. Her accent was too thick and for half of the words she’d switched languages. She also scrubbed the floor and swept away the cobwebs. He didn’t have to move, he could keep right on typing as if she wasn’t there, only once having to lift his feet, which he did without much enthusiasm and without complaint. Now you can see the reflection of the fireworks in the hardwood floor.
It’s been twenty-five years since he left home to settle among the cannibals. They’re not choosy. They’ll eat anything, from memories to respect. As long he’s typing, they leave him alone. But as soon as his typewriter falls silent, they come to inquire. Girls with black hair and translucent lips swarm around his body. He’s already too old to succumb to their charms. Once they almost cost him his fingers. Back then it was a matter of courage. What has remained? The men are even more annoying. They want to know everything. Who he is, where he’s from, who his parents are, what he does. Just draw his lot from the drum and he’ll take it.
The smell of meat won’t leave him alone. His machine remains silent. He tilts his head towards the door and listens intensely, to hear whether the hardwood will groan under the steps of an intruder. The house remains silent. All of its ghosts have flocked together in the jambs of the front door, waiting to pounce on the first one to enter. The bell at the reception remains silent. Is there really no one there? With his index finger he pushes his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose. Sweet smoke. He doesn’t want to lead anyone by the nose. In three quick steps he’s at the door, which opens to a hallway of tumescent wallpaper with a pattern of pale-pink flower buds (one floor higher, a year ago, fat Shat fell asleep in the tub with the tap running and drowned – the wallpaper separated from the walls in a display of mourning), and timidly peeks over the staircase railing to the floor below. There’s no one. He puts the inside of his wrist against his ears to convince himself time hasn’t stopped. Om. Sssk. Om. Sssk. (Try it)
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