In/Half

by Jasmin B. Frelih

  Ludovico pushes away her encroaching hand. I am the prey of shadows. Your isolation, your disintegration. Her words lick the midget ears of those seated around. Ludovico is trying to catch her eye. He doesn’t know whether she can even see him, gazing as she is at the bulb of the spotlight. That irritates him utterly.

  I am the real thing. You in your worst moments. When you want to kill, I’m with you. When you rejoice at misfortune, I’m in your hidden smile. When you hate a stranger, I’m in your bitter gaze. When you are making sweet love to all your addictions, it’s me whispering in your ear more. More. When you take off your cloak of kindness, when you seize the whip of your selfishness, when you would like to put your pain into flesh and word, at that time I am by far, far the kindest.

  ‘What is she doing?’

  Semyona pulls down the edge of the tunic. On Ludovico’s shoulder blade a corner of a tattoo appears.

  Zoja has undone her bra and in a carefree movement whipped off her shirt. She went on stage barefoot. She’s in denim shorts. Nothing else. What is she doing? Why is she doing that? The people are breathless. They did not expect such disclosure. She covers her breasts with an arm. What is it that her face is trying to tell us? Is it cold? No courage. No fear. Not a single thought-through emotion. Ludovico’s muscles tense up. Semyona is hanging on to the tunic, moving slowly, inch by inch. Ludovico’s hand slips behind the fabric over his belly and reaches down to the inside of his thigh where he has taped a knife. He feels its steel against his wrist. A little higher, the loose touch of his castrated sex. Her face looks so damned charitable. He wraps his palm around the handle, grips it and pulls.

  ‘What’s that on your back?’

  Show me your back, if you dare. I’m a monster on a stake-out. Zoja turns around and the shock that the audience had till now found attractive disappears. We have created a world that was not created for us. Her back is an orgy of hacked-up flesh. The scars have accumulated, overtaking each other in long furrows, the torturous pulls of drunken ploughing cattle. If she managed to get through that, think of everything you, you, sheltered people can do. And Zoja doesn’t consider it the price of presence. Suffering can’t buy anything, suffering only increases the value of beauty. Those who never put a price on the most valuable things will always find buyers. That’s why they’re here, all these people. They came without being forced. Fine people, constantly on the lookout for the source of beauty. Like moths to a flame.

  That offends Ludovico. Nobody has suffered more than he has suffered. He has a monopoly on pain and he can’t bear to see it given away so freely. Is nothing sacred any more? Is there anything they won’t throw to these gluttons? Did he suffer all those days for nothing? And his life, his shredded life, will he just let them take away everything he spent years clutching to his heart? Were all those cats sacrificed to uncaring deities? He was the only one facing the storms. The only one devouring anxiety. The only one kicked in every last soft wet rag of his body by the passing of time. And that bloody criminal up there now wants to offer these things to everyone for free?

  I am the rage of the one who was scammed.

  Even Semyona, who has seen the ugliest of things, is shocked at Zoja’s back. She leaves Ludovico’s alone. What’s a simple tattoo compared to this butchered skin?

  ‘That woman must have seriously insulted someone.’

  Ludovico’s very bones glow.

  I am the wrath of the universe. A tempest of gravity. I’m a black hole, a magnet of galaxies. I am a quantum Gatling gun, the tomb of stars. Light doesn’t dare approach me, I drink up all light. I am the greed, the gluttony of all things. I am primeval, elemental, the Pre-prophetic!’

  Quietly, silently, though he is yelling at the top of his voice, he climbs on stage and, knife in hand, makes for her.

  ‘I’ve got terrible stage fright,’ the guitarist says and squeezes the neck of his guitar like he’s strangling a duck.

  ‘Why?’ asks Zoja.

  ‘I’ve never seen a crowd like this.’

  Standing by the stage exit, he fixes one eye on the audience and then immediately looks away. His whole body shivers. Zoja takes a step towards him and to him this feels like a tacit threat. He’d like to concentrate on the music, on its autonomy, its independence from the instrument, on its effect, and not think of its cause, its human origin, which is why Zoja’s body – which from his perspective is growing bigger and bigger – unsettles him.

  Max smiles benevolently at the old man who is resting in the only armchair they have backstage, his legs stretched out over the velvet edges, his arms dangling, his palms facing upwards, and giving the air of a man who has cheated death. His face gradually turns the colour of living skin. He’s utterly calm. He keeps watch over the situation through slowly rotating eyeballs. His breathing is deep and steady. Now is not the time for rushing.

  Zoja is by the guitarist’s side. She takes him by the upper arm, then envelops his hand in hers and squeezes his electric response.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ says Zoja. His lips form a frown, he looks down and exhales sharply.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she repeats. ‘There used to be no end to the crowds. These few hundred people are a drop in the ocean compared to the intertwined bodies that used to flock to see far more awful things. Nobody has come to judge. They’ve come because they’re lonely. Because they’re afraid nobody understands them. Because they have it hard.’

  ‘That doesn’t really help me much,’ he says softly, pale in the face. ‘My music is just sound. It can’t do anything for anyone.’

  ‘There are no demands here. They’ve just come to convince themselves that somebody, anybody actually still believes.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I believe.’

  ‘It’s not your job to believe for them.’

  ‘But when you said…’

  ‘You just have to do your magic.’

  ‘Do magic?’

  ‘When you’re up there on stage and you’re running your fingers over the strings, just forget where you are. Forget about all that wood and all those stones and all that glass and all that nylon and steel and all those hearts and all those eyeballs, forget that time is passing, beat by beat, forget that everything true is true. Step into the void that’s floating unseen in space somewhere beyond our galaxy. Don’t sing to the people. Sing to that empty space. There’s nothing there but your sound. Your sound is the only thing that exists. Your whole life is your sound. For as long as you’re in this place, for as long as this place is your sound, you were never born and you’ll never die. You have no parents, you have no children, nobody knows you. Nervousness? Nervousness is something you feel on the train when the conductor comes to see whether you’ve got a ticket. When a stranger asks you for a favour. When you’d like to say I love you to someone you don’t love. Nervousness is when you’re hungry. But you came to create. You came to light up the emptiness. You came to work magic. Leave the nervousness to them.’

  ‘To them?’

  ‘To those people who came for something.’

  ‘What have they come for?’

  ‘For something that nobody can give them.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Get out there, lose yourself, sing.’

  A kaleidoscope of emotion washes over his face, his muscles twitch every which way before stiffly resigning themselves to their fate. But you know that face. It’s the one that floats in the mirror on all those difficult mornings. Zoja gently nudges him, and his stride as he moves out onto the stage, into the space, is almost calm.

  ‘Lupe!’

  The hardwood floor squeaks under her steps. His fingers smart. It goes slowly with just one hand. The handle moves silently downward. The door opens. She wedges her head into the slot.

  ‘Lupe, please bring me a glass of water.’

  ‘Water?’ Her voice is dry and smooth.

  ‘Water, yes.’

  ‘Would you like something else?’

  ‘Just water.’
/>   With a rapid swing of the forehead she points at the type-writer keys and nods. Then she disappears.

  I took my shoes off. Now I’m barefoot. I nudge the shoes under the dirty cloth hanging from a little table bestrewn with flyers that are encircling an almost empty plastic bottle of water. We used the water to moisten the diabetic’s forehead. Max observes me with bated breath. Mr Ž—has wandered far, far away. I don’t know whether the guitarist heard what I told him, but he seems to be enjoying himself on stage. His eyes are closed and he’s turned his face skywards. Forget about them. Become sound.

  Life sometimes makes you feel like it’s taken you in its hand and moved you closer to the sun. And sometimes it seems that the fingers around you have formed a fist and turned off all the light. In total darkness, it’s easy to forget the light. Did they lie to you? Did they take you for a fool? Did they try to sacrifice your soul on the altar of their failures? Did they conspire against you because prisoners of shadows hate people with rays in their eyes? It’s so simple to surround yourself with the drowned. But that is only an illusion. It’s so simple to convince yourself that you live among a crowd of gluttons. Then you hide yourself and set up walls, you defend yourself against attacks by imagined armadas and you can no longer tell the difference between an offered hand and the thrust of a knife. That’s the worst thing that can happen to you in life. Love should never be allowed to lose its transparency. It should never be allowed to wrap itself in a veil of threats. Love me, otherwise…otherwise…otherwise I will unmask my love as a complicated pulley which I use to try to draw my fears from the well to the light. Under the heavens. To the scarlet fields of our steps. Love me, otherwise…otherwise you’re not a part of the community of lovers of life. Love me, otherwise you’re a horrible, forgotten, cursed thing. Eat me. Devour me. Love me.

  Love is not greed. If someone demands it, he doesn’t deserve it. If someone bets on it, he’ll lose the bet. If someone uses it as a rope to pull himself free from quicksand, it will snap in his hands. Love will never save anyone.

  And it’s true. We live among hungry people. They devour everything from memories to respect. But nobody knows the taste of love. With stretched-out tongues they chase after it, and just because they devour everything else, they are convinced that it is the same with love. They will eat beauty and they will eat eternity. They will eat poetry and shit politics. That’s the reality of people. But it’s not all the same. I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here. I’ll crumple the piece of cardboard in my pocket and throw it in the corner. I’ll find a way out of my mouth.

  The guitarist pushes past Zoja, with his guitar in front of him, and enters backstage as triumphantly as if he’d just broken through the Ubanga front. The broken string hangs from the instrument’s neck like a loose, bronze spring. He couldn’t finish his set. He’s out of breath, beaming, flushed and exhausted. His chest is tight and he’d like to smile, but then he senses Zoja’s gaze in the back of his neck and again turns humble, so as not to ascribe too much importance to his fifteen minutes of flourishing. Still, he’d like to keep on feeling proud of himself. They listened to him and they didn’t all seem turned off. True, some were chatting, but attentive ears could hear past those surely important conversations that were serving as a backdrop for his sound. Music for the masses. Of course they’re going to chat. After all, they’re only people!

  He wipes his face on his arm and walks over to Max, who has moved towards the seated old guy, laid his hands on the backrest, almost touching his hands, and pushed his face forwards, into his. In profile he looks a little like a pear-shaped mole. The reddish hair on his forehead has congealed into a sweaty wire. Now, when Zoja has gone on stage, Max doesn’t even look at the guitarist any more, so it’s up to him to convince himself of the niceness of his performance. The pop of the string and the awkward flight from the tolerant gazes buoyed by smiles has robbed him of the applause that he perhaps, or perhaps not, deserved. In the moment before he disappeared from the stage, he felt a kind of restlessness in the air, but he’s convinced that it wasn’t caused by him. He sang to them of loneliness. What else is there to sing about?

  ‘I’ve never told anyone this, to be totally honest.’

  Max’s voice lowers. His nose is dangerously approaching the face of the old man, whose eyes have sunk back into their sockets. His jaw is slipping back and his neck is pressing back into the hard chair to escape the progress of the pale, freckled face that suddenly desires contact.

  ‘But my whole life I’ve been suffering from a very aggressive form of dissociative identity disorder.’

  The guitarist, who has placed his guitar on the floor and taken a last sip of water from the bottle, suddenly feels as if he’s inadvertently barged in on something very intimate, so he purses his lips, raises his eyebrows and tightly clenches his fists. He looks around to see whether he might find something interesting in the space with which he could distract himself and stretch some sort of none-of-my-business cling film of privacy over the painful scene. There’s nothing. He turns slowly, takes three quick steps, and leans a shoulder against the wall, making sure that the audience won’t see him peeping at Zoja’s relaxed form.

  ‘One moment I’m fully present in the secondary order of human existence. I have a past and I am part of history. I am also a collection of my consequences and a shaky node of the consequences of all other people. Where I’m going to be placed and where I will place myself depends on my hand and mouth. I cannot deny myself as an artificial being. My family is my family and those edges of its story that touched me became the edges of my story. When I look at my skin, I see it’s sewn together from rags. I know where each rag came from. There are no holes, no empty spaces. I’m composed. My inner feeling is a mere drive to make sure I don’t stay in one place. I’m not a stone. I’m not a statue. I am a scarecrow of human things, stuck in the field where ravens come to peck at the seeds of beauty. I know that the word beauty triggers in me a semantic drift that facilitates my presence and existence. I know that that’s the path to the other side. But as long as I’m not there, all the other words wreck me. I know that it is other people who say when you’ve succeeded. Success. It makes me sick. I know that there’s no other way. That there are no other people other than these. That they are dead, or that they haven’t been born yet. I know that contact with emptiness does not outweigh contact with living beings. Emptiness is attractive because it doesn’t have a single determinate form. Emptiness is attractive because it’s not proud of being itself. I know that human is a technical term. I know it’s courage when you transcend this. I would like to believe that I will succeed sometime. I hope. I know that without people things would be harder for people. But I am not happy for them. I know that nobody wants to deny what he’s been told he is. I know that this is violence. And I know that nobody deserves it. I know that I’m better off, that I’m worse off, that I am. I know that everything I know is real, because knowing is the only thing I know can appear to me as real.’

  Zoja undresses.

  ‘And then…wait, is that really my voice? Do I really speak like that? Your eyes are avoiding mine. What does that mean? The muscles in your hands are retracting, to escape the touch of my hands. What are you afraid of? Do I want something from you? Didn’t you come here because you wanted something? What did you want? Would you like to see them? Would you like to see her? She reads. She reads aloud. That’s all. Look at me!’

  Zoja undresses.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you. Then, without motive, without reason, I land in the primary order, at once, all at once, I just am, and all the crap peels away from me, the entire human lineage, and the letters slip from me, they rinse themselves off, straighten themselves into a point without dimensions, and my self-awareness, my self-knowledge and my self-esteem stretch across the membrane of existence, they make nothingness and light disappear and I become a being. Then everything becomes a moment, and it’s deadly serious, and it’s deadly funny, and the tongue c
an only scribble, swing stupidly over all the grated bits that want to show us life as something that has to constantly lie to itself. Then I see what violence is in reality. Violence is people who have built an entire world out of words just to briefly escape what cannot be escaped.’

  Zoja is naked. Some guy has climbed on to the stage. He’s holding something very empty in his hand.

  X

  He rushed her and she had no idea he was so strong. For so long he had been sitting there completely still – so utterly had he been merged with the clacking of the typewriter keys, with the restless quiet sliding of his feet across the hardwood floor, with the calm, contemplative shifting of his eyes – that she’d have laughed at anyone who tried to warn her of danger. He’s an old man, she would had thought, he’s already forgotten his desires. A sort of nobody without anybody, just a black hole for the letters flying from his fingers into nothingness. He is our captive. Our dry-haired captive with a dead smile on his lips.

  She didn’t expect him to be so fast, so relentless, so unlike everything she had learnt to expect from him during the years of his imprisonment. Years of routine vanished in a single moment; long, long periods when he hadn’t even moved from his chair, when all of him went onto paper, his every last bodily need, and she had to burn the sheets in the rubbish bin behind the house, where the stench would ward off the homeless coming into the courtyard to warm their hands. They had to find other fires, other company, other paths to warmth.

  She no longer expected anything from him and was so shocked at his wild leap, at the vicious face into which this new occurrence had carved wrinkles that she had never even seen before and whose existence she had never even suspected – convinced that this man had only one face, one everlasting face, slightly softened through boredom, with a mischievous hint of despair, and fat, black eyebrows that gave off the sole remaining trace of confidence – that she was left with no other choice than to remain calm and wait for him to tackle her to the floor.