Читать книгу Seeing People Off - Jana Beňová - Страница 5

The neighbor living next to Ian and Elza is an older man. For years he’s been thinking that Elza is Ian’s son. He greets her genially with “Hi there,” or sometimes a friendly thump on the chest.

The neighbor can’t stand firecrackers. When the children start setting them off, he runs out onto the balcony and yells: “You motherfucker!” Over and over again. This is how the new year begins in Petržalka. Youmotherfuckeryoumothefuckeryou!

The neighbor’s not a person—he’s basically a peculiar firecracker. A bullet. The next night, Elza makes a pilgrimage to his door so that she doesn’t have to listen to TV shows through his wall. She asks him to turn it down. His eyes are shining: a combination of alcohol and tears.

“I’m not sure,” he says aloofly, full of positive energy. “It’s a program to support the Tatra Mountains, so I thought everyone, everybody…” whimpers the neighbor.

Elza leaves, enters her apartment, the television isn’t blaring through the wall anymore. Now the neighbor is blaring: “Hungarian whores!” Over and over. Elza is lying in bed, tears rolling down her face. Over and over. To support Petržalka.

Petržalka is a place where time plays no role. There are creatures here that the rest of the planet thinks are extinct, died out. Good and bad. The faces of cockroaches remind us of dinosaurs, and the neighbor’s voice doesn’t come from his throat, but from the eye teeth of a wildcat.

Elza runs out onto the balcony, takes a bottle from the waste basket, and leans over onto the neighbor’s side. By the wall stands an empty aquarium. She throws the bottle into the middle of it, runs back in, and hides in bed. She hears the neighbor go outside, and it’s quiet for a moment. Elza is shaking.

“Pinot noir,” reads the surprised neighbor from the shards after a moment. Then peace settles over the land.

In Petržalka apartments, all the walls play music and talk. You’ll be reminded here of songs you thought the world had long forgotten. Time stands still. Radios are tuned to the same station for years. The needle showing the stations has sunken into the bowels of the machine. To the bottom of the theme park. Elza found out that they still play the show Birthday Music. She remembered it from childhood. During socialism they played it in every hair salon.

Elza asks the neighbor not to listen to songs and birthday wishes so loud. The neighbor stands in the doorway in his underwear, barefoot. Weeping. While listening to the brass band, he was reminded of his dead mother.

His two sons visit him: “Get a hold of yourself, Dad! You’re losing it! What’s wrong with you? You call me on the Czech mobile network when I’m in Austria! I pay for all that. Look at yourself! Jeez! Get a hold of yourself! I tell you something and two weeks later you’ve forgotten.”

“Don’t talk to me about details! I don’t want details,” the father beseeches.

Elza decides to wait in the street outside their house to catch them and ask them not to broadcast their family affairs so loudly until three in the morning. After standing in front of the entrance half the day, she finds that she can’t tell the neighbor’s sons from other young Petržalka men. They’re all tall and beefy with shaved heads, and their faces look like pancakes.

Elza. In my childhood, the land on the other side of the river seemed dangerous. My parents and I lived in the Old Town. The Old Bridge is the beginning of an unpredictable road— the walkway on the left side is suspended over an abyss with a brown river rushing below. This is the border, where a Sunday stroll changes to a fight for one’s life. That’s why only adults over eighteen should walk along it.

From the city side of the river I often look at the Luna Park— the gateway to Petržalka. I try to avoid the scorching eyes of the sphinx. They guard the entrance while feigning playfulness. Horses, ducks, and swans of monstrous proportions and colors turn in a closed, airtight circle. Twirling in a devilishly defined track. Above them, jumping, screaming children whirl around. The relentless turning movement absorbs the landscape.

There’s no escape—the circle can’t be breached. A few children have chosen badly—now they’re clutching the necks of the plastic horses and crying.

“This is what I call life,” says the man running the merry-go-round, and lifting his face to the sky, he turns up the speed.

Some days the Luna Park looks like it’s closed and broken. Only a couple of merry-go-rounds and a shooting range are operating. The guys who run it wander around the muddy complex. Their tragic figures remind me of England in times when they used children as chimney sweeps.

Driving a blue car in the bumper car arena, I crash into a red one and get the wind knocked out of me. Whenever the subject of merry-go-rounds arises, my father always talks about the swan that came off while two little kids were on it.

My grandmother accompanies me into the hall of mirrors and when we can’t get out—no way, no doors, the mirrors aren’t windows, nothing, just me and Grandma, Grandma and I, and our faces in the mirrors getting paler and paler—after a half hour we begin to yell for the man who sold us the tickets to lead us out. To show us the way.

A few years later Mama and Grandma get lost in Petržalka. They get on the right bus, but going the wrong way. Instead of downtown, it ferries them deeper and deeper into the high-rise housing blocks.

When they get off, terrified, it’s already dark and snowing. They’ll never get home, never find their way out. “Miss! Miss! Excuse me, how can we get to Bratislava?” Mama blurts to a young woman at the stop. “But you already are… You are in Bratislava,” says the woman, surprised.

Mama smiles helplessly. “I mean to the city. To the city of Bratislava!” When they finally get across the bridge, Mama asks Grandma if she noticed what an odd face that girl had. Like a pancake.

When Ian and I want to make love for the first time, he tells me that he lives in Petržalka. I don’t even shudder. (I realize that I still haven’t shuddered.)

The bridge is dangerous, especially if you cross it on foot. The river is too close. The boundary between the water and the air calls you. I’m afraid I’ll just suddenly jump. Without warning, without one sad thought, without saying shoop, no drama or decisions—regular steps along the bridge will just be replaced by a jump.

The strongest urge to jump I have in winter. In those layers of warm clothes, a person feels impenetrable and inviolable. And longs for a change. Like a nomad longing for a change of scene—in winter I long for a change of state. Instead of unsure, sluggish steps along the icy surface of the bridge, a jump would be flight. Then the moment of transition. Prolonged for a little while when I’m already lying in the water but it hasn’t yet soaked through the layers of clothing to my body. It gets through slowly, heavy, green like a menthol candy—it fills the pockets, gets into the shoes.

The pancake got on the bus. He shoved his fat tattooed shoulder in my face. I closed my eyes. So I wouldn’t have to look at those figures writhing in flames, or the pancake’s face framed by a moonlit landscape outside the window. I let myself be driven and jostled with closed eyes.

Perhaps it was because of these Petržalka scenes that Ian went blind for a time a few years ago. He decided it was better to see nothing, not look around, not watch, not have to observe—Petržalka.

Ian remembered how once, after years, a childhood friend who had emigrated to Canada in ’68 came to visit. He stared out the window of the Petržalka apartment for a while and never returned to his birthplace. “So this is how you live now,” he said. He clapped Ian on the shoulder and left for home without a trace. He never called again. Petržalka had taken his Canadian breath away.

I’ve never liked tattooed people. They remind me of criminals and pirate ships. And a drunken worker on the summer tram. Mama and I were riding home from the swimming pool. “What are you lookin’ at?” a worker boomed at Mama. He had a mermaid, a heart with an arrow through it, and the word ‘Carmen’ tattooed on his arm. “I’m not looking at you,” said Mama and we moved to another section of the tram.

Sometimes I think that Ian didn’t go blind for Petržalka. Maybe it was for me. He couldn’t stand to look at our life anymore. Like looking at a tattoo. He went to the other part of the tram.

And his Canadian friend never came back to Slovakia because he realized that he couldn’t save anyone from Petržalka. Not even his first friend and former commander of their child army.

After Ian got his sight back, he hated things that reminded him of blindness. Slippery stones at the bottom of rivers, lakes, and the sea; mud; the films Dancer in the Dark and Ray; swimming goggles; and dark-colored groceries (beef, Chinese mushrooms, turkey legs).

He could only see out of one eye, though.

The pancakes are worshipers of the cult of death. Bald skulls are a sign of necrophilia. They hate everything that seeks the light, that sprouts, springs forth, breaks out of its shell. They are impressed by a naked, shining bone, a skull, pure calcium. Pancakes’ hair gets a chance to grow only when they’re already six feet under. Then, for the first time, it timidly sprouts from their skulls like feathers.

“Aha! Look, what’s this?” shouts a little boy on the terrace in Petržalka and waves his arms in the air like a bird.

“Nothing,” his friend answers.

“It’s called Heil Hitler,” says the boy and continues to wave his arms.

He takes off a bit.

Elza and Ian were Bratislava desperadoes. They didn’t work for an advertising agency and weren’t trying to save for a better apartment or car. They sat around in posh cafés. They ate, drank, and smoked away all the money they earned. Like students. (Slogan: only genuinely wasted money is money truly saved) They joined that carefree class of people who buy only what they can pee, poop, and blow out—recycle in 24 hours.

It was because of those desperate people that the cafés and restaurants in the city, where everything costs a hundred times more than it should, could stay open.

Once in a while, they would happily enjoy living in other places— in B&Bs or hotels. It didn’t matter which city. It was a pleasure to live somewhere other than Petržalka. When they came home from traveling, they were always afraid to open the apartment door again. What could be waiting for them on the other side?

Elza. Some people get the runs when they go to Egypt. We always got it when we came home. To Petržalka.

Elza and Ian were making love. The voices of child führers playing their games in front of the building wafted in. Shouts. Cursing. It was autumn. Almost dark. The pleasure of man and woman mixed with the vulgarity of the children’s shouting. They made love quietly and modestly. Gazing into each other’s eyes. Like Jews hiding in a cellar.

Every famous city has views. You look out and suddenly it’s lying at your feet, you see it as if in the palm of your hand, everything squeezed together. At some panorama points there are cafés where you can buy the most expensive bottled water and wine in the city.

At every lookout point there’s an old man. Usually with white hair. He stands stealthily in the corner watching those who come to look. He has them in the palm of his hand, everyone squeezed together.

He approaches the defenseless ones, looks into their faces for a moment, and quickly his hands fly into the air as he begins to fire off names of well-known structures and monuments. He points from building to building, as if he were playing chess with the city and subtly moving them around. He continues despite your signaling that you know the city well. All the buildings and monuments too. That you’re not a tourist. That you were born there and you only leave the city during the hot summer months.

Then he holds out his hand and asks for three euros for coffee.

Elza. I’m the Bratislava old man. I wait up on the castle hill. Here you get the best view of the tourists. I look around and choose. Then I approach my victims, look them in the face for a moment, stretch my arm out far in the direction of the other bank and point to the white city beyond the river: Petržalka, Petr-žal-ka.

As if I were an exact copy of old white-haired Freud at the moment the Gestapo summoned him. They moved in directly opposite his apartment, Berggasse 19. Their windows looked into his. Before they let him leave the country, he had to sign a paper saying that they hadn’t done him any harm. The old man signed and added a sentence. “I can only recommend the Gestapo.”

Voices were approaching. They thudded from the other side of the wall, came down from above, throbbed in the soles of our feet. The rhythmic singing of the Petržalka muezzins. They woke Elza up early in the morning. Before dawn.

In the apartment below lived an old woman with her invalid mother. They were always home and both were nearly deaf. Their never-ending conversation started before sunrise. They woke up early, couldn’t sleep. Every morning the two old ladies examined existence—theirs and that of other people. From the beginning. They clung to their gossiping as if to life itself.

Elza lay in bed. The voices rising up from the apartment below disturbed her. She felt like the old women were croaking right inside the pillow under her head. They were there every morning. Since forever. Their old-woman household pulsed under her head.

“Mama, you are a really grumpy patient,” screeched one old lady at the other.

“You’re always nervous. You complain—about the doctors, nurses, the dialysis. You’re horribly dissatisfied all the time. And in that room too—the other grandmothers just lie there quietly, not saying a word…”

“Because they’re stupid,” quacked the second old lady back. And as the sun rose, others joined in.

I can only recommend Petržalka.

The shrieks of a girl brought up on porn films, who screamed while she was fucking as if they were slicing her open. From the apartment to the left the monologue of a disappointed woman. “You got me drunk and then you secretly sold my antique watch, vultures. But this apartment is my property. I’ll kick your asses. Get out of here, bastards. They keep everything from me, steal towels, bang up the pots. The main issue is that none of their stuff is damaged!”

The apartment was filled with loud music. Piercingly loud. The furniture and Elza shook. Someone ran out onto the balcony: “That’s it! Do you hear me? The two of us are done! I loved you very much, but you’ve really offended me this time. But this time you don’t have to deal with it anymore. I love you, but I don’t need your involvement anymore. And it shouldn’t matter to you at all how many dicksinmycunt!”

Elza ran out of the apartment and thought she would never come back. Home!

She walked around town for eternity, making loops around the posh neighborhood. Looking into lit-up windows. The streets echoed with the sound of her own muted steps. The silence radiated. Her breathing was deep and regular.

As soon as she crossed the threshold of her own apartment, it involuntarily quickened. Her belly was bloated with a mountain of muddy, slippery stones. It was quiet in the room. She waited. Like a deer in headlights. Like a rabbit ready to bolt.

The muezzins reminded her of bats. Blind mice with wings always making noises. They find their way, set their azimuth, their position, know where they are by how their voices ricochet off things around them. They orient themselves in the world by how their voices bounce off things, beings and landscapes around them. They give off sounds, looking for their place. They are amplified beings following the echo. Like people forever babbling into telephones glued to their cheeks. Quickly and continually blabbing, listening to the echo of their own yacking. They’re looking for where they’ve gotten to. Where they’ve settled in the net.

Like blind people afraid of the dark who sing quietly to themselves. Like people who live alone in dark apartments and turn on the television first thing in the morning just to give the place some life.

Like a rapsodist who constantly tells the same stories over and over again. Stories that force themselves to be constantly told. Improved. So that they don’t lose their place. So they have something to bounce off of. So the thread isn’t broken.

Elza. Voices are so bewitching. They bore into the body. Gradually uncover all the paths. Some of them shut the gates forever, burn bridges. Close openings.

“What kind of fucked-up country is this?” yells the neighbor and laughs like a lunatic. I sit on the toilet and try to pee. The neighbor is laughing and yelling. His voice encircles me like a strap that’s too tight. Like a harness. It digs into my flesh. As long as I have to listen to him, I can’t pee.

The neighbor is an emphasized character.

You can’t hear the Petržalka muezzins in the city. The river stands in their path. It doesn’t carry their shouts. It swallows their calling with its own silence. Silence without competition.

The muezzins are powerless under the surface. The water swallows their words, stories, shouts. The earthly noise, meaning, and intensity. They back up from her. A few steps back— home—to Petržalka. Retreat like rats.

A city with a river running through it has an advantage over one without a river. It doesn’t have to be exterminated all at once. A city without a river has to be exterminated all in one day. So that the rats don’t get out of the poison zone into places that haven’t been treated yet. A city with a river running through it can be poisoned in two steps.

When Elza left the apartment in the morning, Ian was sitting naked in a chair, writing. In the evening when she returned, she opened the door to the living room and was surprised to see him still sitting there naked, writing, in the same position. When she points it out to him, he slaps his belly and thighs with joy as if he were seeing them for the first time. He likes the lively sound of it.

That spring Elza and Ian started living in their city as if on vacation. Like being abroad. Reading for hours at Café Hyena. They listened to and watched the people around them. Maintained a state of wakeful hunger. Spent lots of money. As always, on the edge of being broke. Pissing it away. Always writing something.

They met at the café twice a day and shared the table with another couple—Rebeka and Lukas Elfman. It was obvious that this was a Quartet of artists. Rebeka was Elza’s friend from childhood, and Elfman had married her just before it ended.

At the Hyena they were on a stipend. That’s when life slows down to the pace of a ship cruise.