Читать книгу Absolution - Aleš Šteger - Страница 7

I’m Not Cold When I’m with You

‘Nothing is as it seems. Everything is what it is, yet at the same time it’s something entirely different. When I was young I found this city beautiful. The park, summer at the Three Ponds or on the Drava, sitting around in front of the secondary school, growing up in the old city centre, which back then was still alive, full of people and hope. But today I see just what a mess it is. Sixteen years ago, all of a sudden, my city turned into my executioner. But today the roles have changed. All these people, all these destinies, clumped together into a single filthy ball. Sixteen years ago I was endlessly overwhelmed with anxiety; today I’m only endlessly apathetic,’ says Bely.

He opens a tiny bottle and shakes it a little. A pair of blue pills land in his palm, then vanish behind his lips. Rosa stands beside him. She is dressed in her black hooded fur coat. She takes Bely’s hand in her own and looks at the scar.

‘Does it still burn?’

‘A little, but it doesn’t matter,’ says Bely and pulls his hand away.

‘With a wound like that it’d be impossible to read your palm. Your lifeline has been interrupted, and it’s unclear.’

‘So fate has no power over me? You mean I have time to change my future, at least until the wound has healed?’ Bely laughs and puts on his grey winter coat.

Mounds of snow lay in front of the Hotel Eagle. Leaking gutters, voices from Castle Square, shoes drowning in slush, a few people hiding out under a rusty canopy. Udarnik Cinema, a poster for Cinéma Féministe. High-school students in front of McDonald’s. One of them throws a snowball; the girls giggle; an upside-down rubbish bin, a relic of Yugoslavia, dented all over from having been kicked so often. Overhead, plastic wires, small rings, mangled snowflakes hanging in the air, teddy bears, stars that won’t light up, not even at night. The New Year’s decorations haven’t been taken down yet; they still hover over the streets of the old town like a cobweb in the sky, holding captive all who walk beneath it.

‘The façades were so hostile I wanted to kill myself.’

‘How come you’re talking about façades and not people?’ asks Rosa.

‘You don’t get it; façades are people. But, unlike people, façades never lie. Even well-kept façades can be hostile, at times even more so than the dilapidated ones. It’s not about how well-kept things are, it’s about what the city radiates. See these bricks, the concrete, all that glass? There’re souls who live behind them, night and day, who keep them warm with their presence. Sixteen years later I look at this city and I know that, no matter how hostile it is, it can’t break me. Back then I felt threatened; I found myself in a life-threatening situation simply because I didn’t understand. Today I understand. We’re surrounded by possibilities, energetic potentials, dormant reservoirs of history and human fate. In the end it’s up to us to decide whether we want to activate these reservoirs and make use of them. But keep in mind that everything around these possibilities is subject to constant reconfiguration. The constellations never cease to change. Today will never come again. That may feel like a huge relief or a huge responsibility. The only thing to do is to persevere and wait for the moment that promises transition. A transition from one state into another. That moment has arrived.’

‘You never regretted leaving?’ asks Rosa, kicking at an empty can.

‘Never. Rationally, we never know for sure what we were chosen for. Why me and not somebody else? This knowledge is greater than us. Just think about it. Sixteen years! Who were you sixteen years ago? How have you changed since then? In the course of sixteen years I’ve learned about structures I hadn’t a clue about before. I’m talking about structures from the distant past that determine our present and future. I was desperate before I discovered this knowledge. Nothing I did, no matter how well-thought-out or well-intentioned, had the desired effect. Just the opposite. Before I left Maribor my life was a mess. Regardless of what it was, I never accomplished what I set out to do. Everything seemed to be against me, and I sank deeper and deeper into the sewer of this city.’

A skating-rink next to Revolution Monument on Freedom Square. Some fifteen children, behind them a large mound of snow. Next to the rink, a stall serving honey schnapps, a pair of drunks, a group of workers in blue workman’s overalls and woollen hats; further on, three men in coats and ties. At the back stands a wooden pedestal; above it a huge inflated balloon, embellished with a black circle and a sign: MARIBOR – THE EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE. In the brief silences when Radio City stops blaring, the sound of balloons inflating and children shouting can be heard.

‘Look at them,’ says Bely. ‘There’s your typical Maribor Mikado. You know that game of pick-up-sticks, right? Where the person who moves first loses? There’s a good chance they’ll waste their lives like that.’

‘I don’t know,’ replies Rosa. ‘They seem completely ordinary to me, the sort of people you meet in every city.’

‘I told you, nothing in this city is what it seems. I don’t want to moralize; I don’t know them. But if they’re from Maribor, and if they manage to remove a stick from the pile without anyone noticing, they’ll immediately stab the guy next to them in the back with it.’

Rosa looks at Bely. ‘Don’t you think you’re exaggerating?’

Bely shrugs his shoulders and gives her a forced smile. Rosa walks off to buy cigarettes. Bely waits, observing the people around him. It seems like it was only yesterday that he was standing behind this very bar. It was morning, before things got going in the theatre. Talking about performances, making megalomaniacal plans that were clearly unfeasible from the start, street chatter. Isn’t that man next to the stall one of the theatre technicians?

Bely slips. For a moment he glimpses the yellow bulge of the sun, a rotten egg in the sky, then tumbles on to the compressed snow. When he looks up again, an old woman is leaning over him, her breath smelling of onions and alcohol. Bely looks around in confusion. No one cares that he fell. Only this old drunk woman holds out her grimy woollen mittens to him, her enormous mouth looming behind them. The black hole of her mouth is missing most of its teeth, with only a few yellow ones remaining on the sides. Bely shudders with fear. Death and putrefaction emanate from the chasm of the old woman’s grimy mouth, as if through it he could catch a glimpse of the other side, the dark side, where there is no life. In his confusion Bely takes the old woman’s hand. But instead of helping him, she pushes him away, so he falls once again on his back.

‘Alms for the poor, for the poor, sir.’

Bely quickly gets to his feet. Realizing she will get nothing, the beggar woman spits at Bely’s feet and limps away. As he watches her go it hits him – his black briefcase – but it doesn’t seem to be damaged. Relieved, Bely dusts the snow off his coat. Rosa is back again. She lights a cigarette and loops her arm in his.

On nearby Leon Štukelj Square a cold wind sways the lights that hang, slightly lopsided, overhead. The scaffolding of a concert stage. A woman leads a boy in a ski suit by the hand. The boy has a pair of enormous mouse ears and a mouse nose pasted on. Bored, he drags his feet as he walks. The woman is in a hurry; she is wearing a black hat pierced with an arrow. She drags the boy against his will towards the office building of the local newspaper, Večer. The boy resists, sticks out his tongue, but follows her anyway. Bely feels his chest beginning to itch, at first barely noticeably but soon so intensely that he unbuttons his coat and begins vigorously scratching himself between the buttons on his shirt.

City Hotel. At the reception. The receptionist points them to the lift, fifth floor; the hotel smells of fresh paint and plastic.

‘You’ve got a stain here,’ says Rosa and cleans a mud stain off Bely’s coat with her glove.

‘It only seems that way,’ replies Bely. ‘My soul is clean.’

Rosa looks at Bely in disbelief. ‘You know, sometimes you make it really hard. You turn every ordinary conversation into some sort of secret message.’

‘Rosa, I know this may sound messianic, but when you experience what I have, when you’ve seen your own fate with the clarity that I have, then you don’t want to waste your time with meaningless phrases any more. When I said that my soul is clean, I meant to say that I can see clearly who I am and who you are, the reason we’re here and what task lies ahead of us. Listen, if I weren’t clear, cleansed of my past, I’d never be able to grasp the task I’ve been entrusted with. The here and now is no different from what it was back then in the distant past. One of those ancient souls had a different programme from the rest of them, do you understand? When the souls of our ancestors were destroyed and overwhelmed by darkness, it was the soul that survived. One thetan preserved its memory and has waited until now. Look, today seems like any other day, but today offers us a historical opportunity to free ourselves and cleanse ourselves. The filth on my coat is nothing compared with the filth that once darkened our souls, Rosa. Now it’s over, once and for all!’

A waiter takes their coats. Rosa keeps her gloves on. They are shown to a table. The restaurant opens on to an outdoor terrace, bar tables and patio heaters. Rosa steps outside and lights up a cigarette, huddling against one of the heaters. The cigarette smoke billows in the direction of the snow-capped mountains behind them.

‘They’re called the Pohorje Mountains. They say here that everything, good and bad, comes from Pohorje. That’s the Pohorje ski resort,’ says Bely.

Bely points at an area in the form of the letter Y on a treeless, snowcovered slope.

‘If you look down you’ll see the old and new bridges over the Drava River, the industrial part of the city is just across the river, and what surrounds us is the old part that stretches out into dormitory towns and nearby villages. Welcome to our capital, the capital of Lower Styria.’ Rosa slowly blows smoke from her lips and stubs out the cigarette with her gloved left hand. Shuddering with cold, she presses against Bely and lays her luxuriant black hair on his chest.

‘So this is where you’re from,’ she says gently.

‘This is where I’m from,’ replies Bely, standing still. ‘Although we all have many places we could call home.’

‘Or none for that matter,’ replies Rosa and adds, ‘The thought of having no home makes me happy. It’s horrible to have a home. I like being at home nowhere. I like being a guest, a tourist, a traveller. The idea that I might one day return to where I came from is devastating.’

‘I understand,’ says Bely. ‘When I left sixteen years ago I swore I’d never come back. And now look at me. I’m back. But there’s a difference. Sixteen years ago, as I was leaving, I remembered the words of a Yugoslav entertainer. The man had escaped the ravages of war in Sarajevo and took refuge in Maribor. He liked to joke about how, on his way up, he’d prayed to God to take him to Austria because he so wanted to go to Vienna. And just outside of Maribor his tyre blew out.

There’s something malicious in this city. Sixteen years ago I didn’t know what it was. Now I do.’

Bely stares at the swirling currents of the Drava beneath them. Big plates of floating ice move through the grey of the day; a puzzle being solved by a strong current. A handful of trumpeter swans on the banks of the river mingle with pigeons. A big shopping mall across the river, signs with brand names and tired New Year’s decorations leading people into temptation. Beside it a construction site, a huge sign on the fence enclosing it: YOU, TOO, ARE ONLY ART.

‘What rubbish. “You too, are only art.” What’s that supposed to mean?’ Rosa whispers and presses harder against Bely’s chest.

‘Self-proclaimed artists, I’m sure,’ says Bely catching himself indulging in the warmth emanating through his shirt from Rosa’s body, leaving a heat mark on his skin. Bely steps away. ‘The sign should say: “You, too, are only past.” These days everything is so easily proclaimed as art, but in reality there aren’t many people who have fresh ideas.’

Bely puts his hands on Rosa’s shoulders. He gazes into the depths of her brown right eye and her glassy-green left one, into her small Cuban face, at her mocha skin and her snowy-white teeth. He gently touches a lock of her hair, moving it to the side.

‘Our goal here is for everything to change, for the past to become the future. For as long as I can remember, people here have lived in the past. You see, the past is an infinitely large net that they drag behind them; they get tangled up in it, and it’s not long before they fall, swaddled in the past like mummies. Only a few succeed in saving themselves, or they appeared to.’

Bely lets go of Rosa’s shoulders and searches the pockets of his jacket.

‘What are you looking for? Your pills?’

‘I think I left them in my coat. Brrr,’ Bely blows on his palms. ‘Should we go in?’

‘I’m not cold when I’m with you, but if you’re cold …’ says Rosa and looks at the ground shyly, like a little girl.

Bely scratches his chest nervously and readjusts his shirt. ‘Rosa, since I met you, you’ve meant a lot to me. Really, a lot. We’re on course. We’ve got the list of eight names; we’re still after the other five, but it won’t be long, I’m sure. Once the entire Great Orc is absolved, everything will be different. Look, my whole life I thought I had to fight, to resist, take an eye for an eye. It’s true that nothing comes from nothing, but it’s also true that everything is already here, we just need to ask ourselves what we are, what we see, what we recognize and what we make out of it. The world is infinite, and still we’re blind to everything it offers us day after day. And the road to that moment of recognition is a difficult one. Sometimes a person has to relinquish everything and be a kind of hermit just so he can see.’

‘I’m not exactly an ascetic, let alone religious,’ says Rosa, lighting another cigarette.

‘This has got nothing to do with religion, nothing at all. But it does relate to the past, the truth about where we come from and who we are. Mostly it relates to the truth of who we might have been if we hadn’t constantly been hypnotized, confined and boxed in within our very own boundaries. Which, by the way, happen to be even more confining, even more airtight in this city than anywhere else in this part of the world. Maribor is a truly unique city in this sense. There’s no other city anywhere that is as narrow-minded as this one. And that’s not a coincidence, just as it’s no coincidence that we’re here, you and me, today, in this moment. Coming here means entering the pyramid of mud. Its guards will bury you alive, and you won’t even realize it. Instead of burying you in sand like an Egyptian pharaoh, they’ll bury you in useless stories and intrigues. The spirits of the past will bury you, and not for the sake of some local folklore. No, you’ll be buried for a reason. They’ve got a damn good reason for putting us out of action, Rosa, a damn good reason!’

‘The Great Orc,’ repeats Rosa, taking a deep puff.

‘That’s right. The Great Orc, the guardian of the past, its secrets and energy. We’ll incapacitate them in order to give the future of this city a chance. The Great Orc is made up of thirteen people. We’ve seen two, so there are eleven more to absolve. We’ve got a lot more oyster crackers left in the compact, but we’ll get there. But Rosa, you’re shivering all over. See, you’re cold, even in my company. That must mean something. We’d better go back in. I’m hungry, and I’ve heard the food here is excellent.’