Читать книгу The End. And Again - Dino Bauk - Страница 5

MARY

Mary walked around the flat again, observing the emptiness he had left behind. Most of the things were still here; he hadn’t taken much with him: his clothes, quite a few books, disks, and records – nothing of the sort that would be sorely missed and provide a loud reminder of his departure. She agreed with it and contributed a good deal to it, but she nonetheless feared the parting moment. It had been a long time since she was last alone. If it still seemed to her a month or so ago that they were constantly in each other’s way, depriving each other of air, that if one of them didn’t halt the downward spiral they would be at each other’s throats, she was now asking herself whether they had really tried everything and perhaps had thrown in the towel too quickly. As he was leaving, he carefully packed paperback copies of Kerouac, Roth, and Auster into his suitcase… he had patiently built his collection over the last few years, finding the books exclusively in small, barely surviving bookstores. He had already read them all, and she could hardly believe he would pick them up again. On the other hand, he didn’t take any of the photo albums from their trips. That hurt. As if he was afraid the photos, in which they were almost without exception happy, would shake his resolve to leave. Those frozen moments of happiness taken in different parts of the USA were now all hers, to instil in her nostalgia and doubts. Despite their plans, they never made it to Europe. Not together.

A photo taken on a trip to California two years ago came to mind. They were standing in an embrace on the large, dark rocks under the Golden Gate Bridge. A young surfer in a wet suit of whom they had asked the favour just a second before he waded into the very uninviting sea bloated with waves, had pressed the shutter the instant Mary was trying to tame her long hair, which the strong bay wind had tousled like bunches of unmown grass. She had just managed to remove them from her face, allowing the picture to capture her smile, which had always attracted male as well as female attention. Lately, looking at the photo, she would often wonder how their relationship could have gone downhill so quickly that they weren’t able to seize on it and save it, although they both certainly believed it was worth it. That windy day in San Francisco they went to visit the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, which was the heart of the hippy world at the end of the 1960s. They walked uphill under a thick net of tangled trolley wires past the colourful facades of townhouses and tried to catch traces of the summer of love that after forty years might not yet have completely gone cold. They found a bit with a street guitarist who was playing all the hits you would expect from the time with the silent accompaniment of an aged Afghan wolfhound stretched out in true hippy style next to an open guitar case. Mary was moved by nostalgia, despite the fact that she had not even been born when these hills teemed with colourful hippies. They stood at the small street concert long enough to hear Janis and her ‘Bobby McGee’ and Scott McKenzie with flowers in his hair. Then, after throwing a few coins in the open case, for which they got a casual wink from the guitarist, they headed back to the hotel. After a few beers in the hotel bar and a joint at their room window, they made love long into the night before falling asleep in an embrace, exhausted and perspiring from successive climaxes.

‘So, I guess this is it,’ said Mary.

‘Yeah, I guess so,’ he said.

And that was that. She closed the door and was left alone. A month before she had turned forty. There was a totally failed attempt to celebrate, which was the final, plain-as-day sign of their sinking relationship. Today was evidently the first day of her life’s second half. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her handbag, but a touch told her it was empty. She ran her index finger through it to make sure, then let out a loud ‘shit’, crumpled the empty pack, and threw it on the table, only a small part of which served for eating. Carefully stacked issues of the New Yorker and other magazines, a lot of envelopes that had clearly been opened without a knife, and two books of Leonard Cohen’s poetry covered at least half the table. She would have paged through one of the two had she found, instead of emptiness, a cigarette in the pack, and lit it. Most people enjoy a cup of coffee or tea with a cigarette. But Mary usually enjoyed a poem or two by Cohen with her dose of smoke and nicotine. She always read poetry her own way, without making pencil scratches between the lines, without searching for the meaning of individual verses. She simply let herself go to the rhythm and mood of a poem, as if listening to Wes Montgomery’s smooth jazz, while the cigarette burned down. Since she was missing those several minutes of Zen that she so needed after the farewell at the door, being without cigarettes sent her thoughts in a completely unexpected direction.

Just as the small paper clump of the crumpled Lucky Strike pack rolled towards the edge of the table and then down to the floor, so too did a door, closed for many years somewhere in the attic of her memory, slowly open, and from the dusty vault of the past released certain long forgotten pictures. Pictures of her missionary year in Europe when she was barely seventeen, in a country that not long after her departure (preceded by a series of almost unbelievable events) exploded and blew to pieces. Like the majority of teenagers and adults in Mormon families, she had decided to spend a year in one of the missions the church had founded around the world. Unlike some of her relatives and friends, she didn’t decide to go on a one-year mission out of a desire to convert people or out of charity, which are supposed to be missionaries’ two fundamental aims. No. Her two motives were much more secular: to travel and gain experience. To live. Her mother tried to convince her to delay leaving for at least a year, but she didn’t want to heed her mother’s warnings that missionary work was hard and that you have to follow very strict rules that permit little free time. She could hardly wait to get on the plane that would take her over Utah’s high mountains and across the Atlantic to Europe, which she dreamed of as some sort of wonderland; an amusement park in which adventures and experiences would follow in such a wild rhythm that she would barely be able to deal with it. When she dreamed of Europe, she naturally dreamed of fields of lavender in Provence, Ireland’s green coast, hidden beaches on the Greek islands, Paris coffeehouses, and London pubs. She first heard of Ljubljana, a city in a country with the difficult-to-pronounce name of Yugoslavia and supposedly only several hours by car from Vienna and Venice on the evening of a large meeting of future missionaries, where they told her the location of her mission. She and Noah, the son of family friends of similar age, together with three other missionaries, were to try and start a mission under the supervision of an established Austrian one in the neighbouring socialist country. Since she knew nothing at all about Ljubljana, she couldn’t really be disappointed. Nonetheless, she somehow envied Vondra, who was setting off for Lisbon. Lisbon… Lisbon sounded a lot more colourful and fun. That evening Mary’s parents bent over a map of Europe and put their heads together. In her room just before falling asleep, Mary heard her father’s worried conclusion that his daughter was going to live with communists.

More than fifteen years must have passed since she last thought of him. Denis – what could have happened to him? Had he been swallowed up in the fire of war? Fortunately, the war had not lasted long in that westernmost part of Yugoslavia, only a few days, and as she recalled, his father was a member of the Federal Army, which had to withdraw south from there very soon after. Had Denis stayed in music, or had he grown up and found some serious job? She could hardly imagine the latter; the seventeen-year-old she last saw in a Ljubljana police station was still before her eyes. He was straining to look back at her, while the two detectives pulled him in the other direction. It was a scene that hardly predicted an illustrious, if any, career in the civil service or large company. She couldn’t remember his last name. She wasn’t even sure he had told her. Yeah, if she knew it, she might catch up with him now, Google him, or search for him on Facebook. But at the time his last name seemed to her an unimportant piece of information.

Her head full of dusty memories, the walk to the closest shop for cigarettes and back to the one-room flat passed without her noticing. It was the time of year in New York when the cold could really be miserable. When she closed the flat door behind her, took off the woollen cap, coat and scarf, and leather Canadian boots with leather soles, she opened the fresh pack of cigarettes, took one out (the first one is always hardest to extract), went to the stove (not really wanting to look for a lighter), and with a practised move lit the cigarette from the gas, having moved her long dark hair to the safe side of her neck with the other hand. As she moved it away from the flame – actually just for a second, but even so – several grey hairs showed in the dead light of a dull, classic light bulb. She didn’t do much with them even the first time she noticed. She accepted them as a fact she couldn’t much control. Finally holding the lit cigarette, she visibly calmed down and took another, very slow walk around the flat, as if wanting to be sure that he really had left and she was still alone. On the way she grabbed the laptop, put it on the kitchen table, sat down, moved the ashtray closer, and put down the cigarette. Then, both hands on the keyboard, she started entering different search words. The search ‘Denis from Ljubljana’ didn’t yield encouraging results: a link to flight schedules between Ljubljana and Saint-Denis and the website of some escort agency that offered a date with an attractive Denise from Ljubljana. Things like that, nothing solid. Of course, neither could Mary recall, in fact she never knew, the last names of Denis’s two friends in the band. It was as if all of it had taken place two hundred, and not twenty, years ago. If it had taken place now, they would have exchanged mobile numbers on the first evening, the night of their first date they would have become Facebook friends, and a firm connection would have been established that almost nothing could interrupt, no matter how far from Ljubljana her Mormon group director would have sent her after the newsstand thing. As it was, they moved her a few hundred kilometres away, to a small city in Austria, and contact was lost forever. Denis wasn’t her first love, but he was somehow almost her first beloved. A lot of things happened with him for the first time, irreversibly awakening desire in her young body, although they never went all the way. From the first touch of their hands at some local band’s concert and whispering verses in each other’s ears…

‘Hey, wait!’ she caught herself on that thought. ‘What was the name of that band. C’mon, Mary, try to remember. Russian queen or something… Anastasia? No, no, no… What was it? Fuck!’

She dug the fingers of her right hand into her hair and steadily drummed the table with those on her left. She took the cigarette from the ashtray, inhaled long and strong, put it down, and again drummed the table…

‘Catherine, Catherine the Great! Yes! That was the band’s name!’

When she excitedly searched ‘Catherine the Great’ in Google, all of the results were connected with sites that actually had to do with the eighteenth-century Russian ruler; not a trace of any rock band. In the next search she added ‘rock band’ and bingo!

Wikipedia result:

Ekaterina velika (English: Catherine the Great, initially called Katarina II).

‘That must be it! Alternative rock, years 1987–1991, yes, that’s definitely it!’

A click on the result.

Ekaterina Velika (Serbian Cyrillic Екатерина Велика, English: Catherine the Great), sometimes referred to as EKV for short, was a Serbian and former Yugoslav rock band from Belgrade, being one of the most successful and influential music acts out of former Yugoslavia.

Initially called Katarina II (Serbian Cyrillic Катарина II, English: Catherine II), the band had built up a devoted following that greatly intensified and expanded after the death of its frontman Milan Mladenović in 1994, which resulted in the dissolution of the band. The group’s core consisted of singer and guitarist Milan Mladenović, keyboardist Margita Stefanović and bassist Bojan Pečar, with other members mostly remaining for comparatively shorter periods.

At the side was a black and white photograph of the band.

She, the young woman on the keyboard, and three young men. Just as she remained in her memory. It says she’s Margita; it also says she died. Actually, three of the four in the photo were dead. This fact unpleasantly surprised her. Three of the four people who that evening in Ljubljana so assuredly sent their pure, youthful energy into the crowd below the stage were no longer alive. Just like then, at the concert, she now directed most of her attention to the female member as she looked at the band’s photo. Even now, something in the young woman greatly attracted her. Maybe the story of how she turned off the road from classical music that others had planned for her. Maybe she was just attracted by the idea of a dark, gentle woman (at this age, she too fit that description) in an alternative rock band made up of men.

Evening fell as she was watching recordings of the band on YouTube. The street lights came on, snowflakes started drifting from the sky, and at a twentieth-floor window of a red Brooklyn building the silhouette of a slender, long-haired woman not looking out the window at the street but across the Atlantic and twenty years into the past, at old recordings she never had time to organize either chronologically or by topic. And so they appeared before her eyes that night with no logic to the successive scenes, as if she were opening some short video files that had been lying in the archives of her recorder for years.

Recording 1

It’s hard to run across a macadam parking lot at night in heels and a long skirt. An ankle twists at almost every step. Despite this, she keeps going, because she heard him run after her, and the loud rhythms of the concert were still coming out of the hall into the foggy street. She doesn’t want him to catch her, least of all does she want to fall like some weak game in deep snow, so she tries to run even faster. He doesn’t follow for long. She knows he could catch her in just a few steps, but he clearly got the message. She hears his steps slow, how he says ‘Damn!’ (later she often heard the word because Denis, Peter, and Goran used it almost like a full stop). She still feels his eyes on her back, and she wants to run away as fast as she can. She doesn’t know which way to run, because the fog hides all the landmarks, so she decides to go in the direction from which the loudest sound of night-time traffic is coming. When she gets to the main road and the bus stop where she and Denis met, she knows that she’ll make it home on foot in less than half an hour, to her room in an old building right by a city park. A worried Noah, who imagines he is her custodian or something, is almost certainly waiting for her. They’ll continue the argument from that afternoon, when he unsuccessfully tried to convince her it wasn’t wise to go alone on a date with a stranger whom she met by pure chance on a city bus a few hours before. She tried to lend the reasons for her insistence on keeping the date some deeper meaning, citing her missionary calling, although she didn’t sound convincing even to herself. Noah threatened that he would have to inform the supervisor if she was really going to stick to her plans, and her parents too, but she was sure he wouldn’t actually do that. She knew he liked her too much; he wouldn’t want to hurt her. Now, having escaped Denis’s embrace and the concert hall, returning on foot through the thick fog, she thinks about how Noah was probably right. It was a bad idea. It’s not good to set off on a trip knowing in advance that you won’t be able to finish it. All the same, she won’t put up with preaching. When he waits for her at the door to her room, she’ll push him away and go to sleep as quickly as possible. And that’s what she did, convinced, actually determined that that was all she would have to do with Denis; a little hand holding, some whispering in the ear, and a lot of goosebumps. But he found her the very next day, at the same bus stop where she had got on yesterday. He was sitting with earphones on, reading a little book. He raised his eyes at exactly the right instant to catch the smile she sent him.

Recording 2

They’re sitting in a park beneath the wide crown of an old tree. It’s already dark, especially on that bench, because the street lamps don’t pierce the branches thick with leaves. The warm spring evening already smells faintly of summer. The distant, steady sound of city traffic is all that intrudes on the almost complete silence. A romantic view on the city illuminated by innumerable lights opens up beneath them. It draws their attention for only a short while, as long as they sit next to each other holding hands. After a few gentle kisses, Mary decisively moves into his arms. Denis’s right palm now travels across her side and up towards her breasts, slowly, like the first scout on enemy territory. After each centimetre covered, it stops and checks if the way is clear, then cautiously continues on to the next piece of untouched skin that with every breath moves away from his palm for a second before immediately returning to its firm grip with the next. Denis’s left hand occupies the forbidden territory of her smooth right hip, and the closer it is to its goal, that gentle curve where her leg rounds into her ass, the more pronounced the goosebumps rising under the pillows of his cautious fingers. Exhilaration, a slight twinge, and Mary’s ever slower and deeper breathing excites his; he presses his face closer, they wrestle more, taking turns nipping mouth, tongue, and neck. He feels a hardening; they’re both a little embarrassed. He tries to move off a little, but she pretends she doesn’t notice. When after slow, centimetre moves he finally reaches his goal and touches her breasts for the first time, they quickly retreat and hide, as if frightened off. As if she didn’t know what his palm is coming for. It, too, jumps away because of her reaction. She sighs and takes him by the hand. He slowly withdraws his palm from her grip and again occupies the same place, smiling and whispering some words in his language before again burying his head in her neck. When she takes his hand once more to remove it from an excited nipple, her grip has no strength. Her reserve, which church, school, and parents had built up over all those years, crumbled almost without a fight, and her passion burst forth so powerfully that it surprised them both.