Читать книгу The End. And Again - Dino Bauk - Страница 4

For Maja, who, since I was of Denis’s age,

smiles at me from the passenger seat and

for Urban, Gašper and Uroš,

who are, one over the other,

constantly taking to us in the rear-view mirror.

“There were six of them: four men and two blond girls. They stood, seemingly scattered across the hill, but Kate recognized the pattern. She walked passed one of the men and saw nothing in his eyes. Another step and she found herself in her place. At that moment she heard the silence. And she started singing the silent song.”

David Albahari, Silent Song

DENIS, 1989

He liked foggy autumn evenings when he could see only what was very close by. In that small world of a metre radius, bordered by walls of condensed moisture with no room for anyone else, he could pretend he was alone: on the street, in the city, in the world. He could see only a step or two ahead, and his small world moved with him, as if a round cluster of yellow lights were following him across a dark stage. At first, he heard only the quiet, dull steps of other people approaching him. They become gradually louder, and then for just an instant, black shadows cut through the foggy wall and fell aside. He could even pass by people he knew in the fog without having to say hello or strike up boring, polite conversations. To be honest, most people got on his nerves. He was sixteen: old enough for cigarettes, alcohol, and evenings out, but not enough for genuine independence. He had long grown tired of being accountable to his old man and mum. The one-and-a-half room flat on the thirteenth floor of a twenty-floor high-rise on the North Side seemed smaller to him by the day. It was only bearable when no one moved about much, when his old man drowsed in front of the TV, his mum busied herself tidying up the kitchen and lit a cigarette at the big dining table, and he was in his room listening to music with earphones, reading, or inaudibly, so to say, fingering chords on his guitar without really strumming the silent strings with his right hand. Most of the time he felt the flat was unbearably crowded, even though there were only three people living there. It was as if each day the ceiling dropped another millimetre to the floor, and the walls came a millimetre closer. He lacked air. He had an urge to go out, onto the street, into the cold evening, into his foggy refuge. Evening after evening, he and his old man played out a set ritual to the last detail like two veteran actors. They staged the one-act street theatre for themselves and for his mum, when she didn’t work second shift. When he was almost to the door, after having pulled on a worn field jacket, black cap in one hand and the other on the latch, his old man called from the living room in his native Serbo-Croatian.

‘Denis! Where you off to again?’

‘To town.’

‘Why the hell are you wandering around town like some bum? You want to be in trouble with the police again?’

For his old man there was no real difference between the police giving him a warning during a routine patrol and them seizing him in front of a burgled duty-free shop with a bag full of imported cigarettes, whiskey, and chocolates. Having anything to do with them meant being guilty of something – if nothing else, of wandering about aimlessly and uselessly in the evening, which of course cast his parents in a bad light even more than him, being that his old man lived in a world that respected all manner of authority. This had been his old man’s new, constant worry ever since two policemen had stopped him on a walk around the North Side, asked who was writing the graffiti on the walls, and carefully took down his details. Someone (and of course Denis knew full well who) had written ‘Fuck off Poland’ on a white wall. The graffiti, hastily written in black spray paint, seemed to the policemen, not to mention to the concerned citizen who reported it to them, and probably to most adults on the North Side, as like something aimed against the government, or at least against a friendly socialist country, a complaint. In fact, it was a wholly innocent and senseless piece of slang that had caught on among North Side teenagers at the time. One evening, someone had probably tossed it off at some gathering, a second and third person used it on some other occasion, repeating it in some gathering, and it entered into general use. Kids on the North Side now said ‘Fuck off Poland’ instead of the boringly simple, ‘Addio’. Of course, Denis didn’t start explaining this to the two men of the law. In a certain sense, he was amused at how terribly dangerous the quickly scrawled lettering seemed to the two of them. Its author probably forgot about it the day after conspiratorially applying it to the wall in the dark. On the other hand, it was really pretty careless to tell his parents about his talk with the men in blue, thinking he would share with them his rage at the gratuitous harassment, and he damn well regretted it the instant his old man exploded in agitation, shooting from the living room couch into the kitchen.

Since then, his old man, who was mostly worried about possible troubles at the army base on his account, reminded him almost every time he went out in the evening to be careful not to get a warning. He was convinced that every such entry in a vigilant policeman’s notebook would be preserved forever somewhere deep in the state’s administrative bowels, and that if it turned out to be needed, it could be spat out into the daylight at any time. Yeah, the world his old man lived in was a world of constant surveillance that wasn’t carried out by some big brother’s all-seeing eye with the aid of the state security service’s cameras and microphones: the whole thing was much less sophisticated, actually quite simple, and thus the more effective.

‘Don’t worry about it. I’m going to a concert, be back by twelve.’

He pulled the door and it closed much more loudly that he expected. The light in the hallway always went out when he was waiting for the lift to reach the twelfth floor. He never turned it on again so through the crack he could see his shadow on the steel doors in the shaft’s darkness just before it was filled with the lift car’s neon light. From beneath the basement stairs leading to the shelter to which not one of the building’s residents believed they would actually flee in fear in the near future, he took his cigarettes and lighter from hiding, and as was his habit, opened the building door with an elbow, having already lit up, and exited with a kind of half circle step. The cold evening air, to which smog and cheap coal lent a characteristic Ljubljana charm, filled his nostrils and mouth, and then his lungs, along with the first draw on the Winston. He thought of it as the smell of freedom: a mixture of gloom, cold, fog, and cigarette smoke. He was alone on the street, blanketed with a thick cloak of fog that hid him from familiar and unfamiliar passers-by. The walk to the bus stop lasted one cigarette. A scrawny young man with glasses, a little older than him, and a girl, were already there. Must be some student, Denis thought – only fucking students wear black sweaters and coats with badges that announce they care about things, that they’re ‘active’. They care about free speech, they care about dolphins, they care about Tibetan monks, they care about the Amazon rainforests, they care about the Kosovo miners, they care about Chinese students, and they care about Janša, the local journalist who supposedly swiped some secret documents from the army and published them. He remembered the skinny guy from school a few years ago as one of the punks in leather jackets fitted out with chains, cigarettes always in their mouths. They seemed pretty scary to Denis, who was several years younger, like some kind of ghouls from below ground. He was scared of them, even though they never paid him any attention. Now, having returned from the army, the lanky guy looked more like a wildly unkempt hippy than a punk. The good old Yugoslav National Army had clearly somewhat castrated him too, something Denis and his classmates in the neighbourhood often noticed with those who returned from the service. When Denis came up next to them, the guy was in the middle of explaining to the student how disappointed he was with the turnout to the benefit concert for Janša and his three co-defendants. All the while he nervously puffed on a cigarette, as if labouring to finish it before the bus came. There was no sign that the student was interested in what he was saying. Maybe the topic would have drawn her in, but the accidental acquaintance was obviously more than getting on her nerves, so she just nodded, very attentively looking down the street for the bus to finally arrive. They hadn’t come together; the hippy had obviously ambushed her unawares when she was waiting at the stop. Denis was amused by the fact that the student wouldn’t evade the burden of the guy in glasses even when the bus came, since the character would surely stick to her and torture her for at least another eight stops with his theorizing.

The bus that would take him, the hippie, and the student downtown drove up empty. The hippy and the bored student sat somewhere in the middle and he kept up his boring monologues, while she, resigned to her fate, waited for her stop to rescue her.

Denis always sat in the back of the bus, in the last row. That way he had a view of what was happening. He like watching total strangers getting on and off, guessing their occupations, and imagining their stories. He was sorry for some, because they obviously were destined for a statistician’s role in life, and others he envied, because it seemed to him they were more fortunate than he when roles were assigned, although he thought he was playing one of the leads. He believed he wouldn’t pass through life unnoticed, though he hadn’t the faintest idea how he would rise above the ordinary. Perhaps the underground band with Peter and Goran, that was taking more and more of his free time would make it, although they were long hours of practice from their first performance. He never dreamed that several years later, upset by the crowd, he would leave the line at the window for getting citizenship and become completely invisible. And that several years after that he and those like him would be called the ‘erased’.

His mind went back to earlier that day, when he was sitting in the same back seat of the bus, and watching people come on. A blinding sun, that for a short interval after the morning fog dispersed, and before the afternoon fog would fall in an hour or two, reigned over Ljubljana and pierced the large, spattered windows. The bus filled only through the front door, by the driver, who had just taken off his green winter uniform jacket and was slowly rolling up the sleeves of his striped shirt as he carefully checked passengers’ monthly passes through his sunglasses. Since it was not yet the hour of mass exodus from downtown towards the suburbs, only a few school pupils and retirees got on. And then Denis spotted her: at the end of the line getting on, in a group of four uniformed young people. She got on last, after two young men and a girl in white shirts and dark coats. He recognized them by the black tags on their chests.

‘Hey, morons.’

He had noted their arrival in the city not long before. Young Americans his age and a little older started ambushing him sometimes on the way from school, on the pavements downtown, which they clearly chose as ideal traps. Until now he had only met male representatives. They seemed like a joke to him because of their polish, the complete opposite of his image of young people from the cradle of rock ’n roll. They lay in wait – flawlessly parted hair, pressed pants, and fixed smiles – for passers-by and tried to explain Jesus Christ’s final days or something like that in fairly good Slovene, if tinged with an American accent.

Dropping a few coins in the box by the driver, she first gave him a smile, and then turning and heading through the bus, she did the same to all the other passengers, including Denis. He could have watched her, like many people before, and tried to guess her story, maybe catch her eyes for a moment, even smile at her, and then, after getting off, march away from the whole thing with yet another pleasant sketch in the collection of moments that wouldn’t immediately be wiped away, but float there for some time, and every once in a while elicit a melancholy sigh. But she was a Mormon: contact with her should like as not be avoided, not sought. A quick look in her direction, which one of the young men also caught, was enough for the entire Mormon platoon to approach him. Although she was still in the back, he tried to catch her eyes, as if not noticing the other three, and not responding to their well-rehearsed introductions, ‘I’m brother so-and-so, he’s brother so-and-so.’ Only she interested him.

‘So you must be sister something?’

‘I’m Mary.’

‘Of course, the Virgin Mary, who else?’

He felt that his childlike laugh didn’t anger, but amused her. She rewarded him with a changed, teasing smile, which fuelled his courage. He rose from his seat to take an equal place among the small group and push closer to her as she stood behind her two brothers and sister. One of the two slick assholes tried to guide the conversation, but Denis was communicating with her only, turning the other three Mormons into useless appendages, which they themselves understood after several stops, and gradually retreated into their own conversation.

He was finally one on one with the playful smile that betrayed curiosity and at the same time, like a raging river, easily overflowed its defensive levees. The bus engine, fortified with the hissing and groaning of the well-worn brakes, wrapped their conversation in an airtight sound curtain that rose for a few seconds at every stop, making it audible to the other passengers, especially the remainder of the Mormon expedition.

‘I’ll let you tell me all about your God, but first you have to let me take you to my church’, he said at one of the stops, once the bus completely halted, and he caught the questioning look that one of the brothers sent to Mary. The bus set off once again, and the continuation of their conversation was drowned in the roar. The brother’s attentive eyes were on Mary all the way to the stop where the platoon got off.

Back in the present, the student pronounced ‘I’m getting off here’, at the same stop at which Denis had agreed to meet with Mary at the end of their unexpected mutual commute. Denis wasn’t fully convinced that she would actually show up. When in the morning he had invited her to meet, she responded with open interest and quiet assent, followed immediately by a quick guilty look at the brother who was watching her with most concern during their conversation. Because of that brief reality check, when for a moment she broke eye contact, Denis later wondered whether she was serious or not.

The hippy along with his hurt because of the premature interruption drove off further into downtown; Denis and the student got off. He lit a cigarette on the last step of the bus and looked around the stop while buttoning his jacket. Was she there? Just as he was deciding quite disappointedly that he was going to the concert alone, Mary stepped into the light of a street lamp from the darkest corner of the stop, from beneath a tree growing, as it were, straight out of the asphalt.

‘So, where is this church of yours?’ she continued his metaphor, though she knew where they were actually going. When that morning their conversation again safely sank beneath the roar of the bus engine, Denis put one of his Walkman earphones to her ear and explained that it was a concert and she really had to see the band. Leaving the stop, he offered her a hand, but she didn’t take it. She put both hands in her pockets to warm them, and he did the same. Although there were still quite a few people outside the hall, you could hear the concert had already begun. He again saw the student from the bus on the steps by the entrance: of course, she had been on her way here. Most of the band’s fans were probably female university students who cared about things. Mary seemed impressed by the impressive stairway adorned with large stone columns and sculptures rising towards the hall entrance; it looked more like a museum or opera house entrance than an entrance to a rock venue. The stairway conveyed the image of a dim passage between two worlds in counterpoint to the somewhat mournful and melancholy rock ’n roll pouring down on them. She slowed her steps a little, as if suspecting that when she crossed over and entered the hall the needle on her compass would completely change the direction it had steadily held for all those years; Denis had to wait at the top of the stairway for a moment or two for her to overcome her hesitation and move on. Just at that point, the opening riff of a song Denis immediately recognized reached the high ceiling. The instrument sobbed as if the guitarist was choking it. ‘Let’s get closer to the stage!’ he yelled, grabbing Mary by the hand, and making his way through the swaying bodies. They stopped somewhere in the middle, where they could clearly make out the figures on stage. Her eyes fixed on the woman at the keyboard.

‘That’s Margita! Once she was a piano prodigy, but on the way to the conservatory in Russia she joined a rock band!’ he yelled in her ear.

‘She chose freedom over people’s expectations.’

He sensed how the woman on stage, and especially her story, which Denis had telegraphed to her in hollers, captivated Mary. She didn’t take her eyes off of her for even a second. He noticed an uncanny similarity between them.

‘What’s the song about?’ It was Mary’s turn to yell in his ear.

He stepped behind her. With his left hand he moved her long hair from her ear. It slipped through his fingers for an endlessly long time. Then he took her by both hands and translated the words into her ear.

‘The shine in our eyes is deep and unreal, we’re travelling in words and thinking in steps, you and me, you and meeee! Stand by me, stand by me…’

He sensed how the words he was sending into her ear shot through her body and reverberated in her finger tips, intertwined with his. The charm ended with the final beat of the song. She dropped his hands, turned, said, ‘I’m sorry’, and started making her way through the crowd to the exit. He went after her, although he in fact didn’t intend to stop her. When she got out of the hall, she ran off into the fog. He ran after her a few steps, then stopped, said, ‘Damn it!’ and turned back to the hall. Mary the escaped Mormon was all that interested him from that point on, even though the Berlin Wall was already in ruins, students lay dead on Tiananmen Square, and the east of his country was in threatening convulsions.