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V

The year is 1960-something; summer vacation in the Adriatic town of Poreč: Marina and her new husband (a very tall and insufferably suntanned guy, no great intellect, but, thank God, of very gentle disposition; when these two little things come together, when one giant meets another, although they are terribly at odds, the result obtained with gastronomical, that is, divine, skill, is dullness, a minor dullness or optimism, things that are six of one and half a dozen of another, in an unpleasant dosage) along with Danilo and I, of course; what a group! According to Marina’s amazing plan, after our stay in Poreč we were supposed to make a four-part (there were four of us) hop over to Ljubljana, where Jaglika had moved after the arrival of the new husband; to live with God knows which relatives. The most straightforward exchange on God’s green earth: Jaglika there, and the new fellow here. On the fifth day of the vacation, however, an incident took place that dispersed us in three different directions. The fault for our first (in our new composition) multilateral quarrel (all against all) lay in equal measure with two things: Marina’s fantastic ass and the book Netochka Nezvanova – bound in navy blue linen with the title in gold letters; plus a man’s hand, the one and the other like intervening factors in a large number of visible, invisible, and half-visible important and trifling phenomena. Actually, Marina and her new husband had a predilection for readerly perversions: one of them would read books aloud to the other, in the most varied situations, in varied bodily positions, weather conditions, or various states of mental anguish (it was way better than any of those ridiculous pills or psycho-relaxants). Accordingly, it was in one such circumstance (positioning of the body, weather, time) – the preparation of lunch in the kitchenette of the rented house in Poreč, with Marina’s husband reading the aforementioned Dostoyevsky, when he let his other hand slowly work its way across Marina’s fantastic ass. Her husband with Netochka, bound in blue covers, in his hand, and his other hand in exactly the right spot, as far as literature and the book were concerned, and life, too, Both hands in the right locations; the large oval protruding surfaces beneath the thin fabric of her bathing suit, coupled with Dostoyevsky; Marina, however, was gainfully preoccupied, focused on stirring with a wooden spoon, and holding dishes, which meant that the stove was on – besides the heat of the summer, electric heat – and, to be sure, listening to what her husband was reading, loudly and distinctly: ‘Yes – said B. thoughtfully.’ But no: he will wake up immediately. His madness is stronger than truth, and he will think up some excuse or other, right away. I was already in the kitchen, to which I had come not because of the reading or my mother’s rear end: which was truly the whole event, but because I was terribly hungry, having just woken up a few minutes earlier. ‘Do you think so? – remarked the prince.’ (I was being completely quiet, enraptured with this scene; I hesitated in confusion for only a moment, and with both hands on my mouth: Oh, God, they’ve got a little burlesque thing going on here, how witty of them). The husband, appearing to skip over part of the book (Dostoyevsky, such a bore), continued reading in a raised voice: ‘At last, Karl Fedorovich came running up, out of breath. He was carrying a sign. I tried very hard to hear everything…’ Danilo came in (straight from swimming) and interrupted the magic. At first he was fuming with rage, and in the next moment he said very loudly (it was not screaming quite yet): ‘Whore.’ Marina’s husband shut the book (secret sign) as if to catch a tossed ball (first gesture-reaction) and calmly placed it on the table and just as calmly (if not even more so) exited the kitchen (second reaction-protest). Then Marina (she was always last at everything) started towards Danilo (you could tell by her face, her extended fists, and her gait) with pugilistic intentions. Meanwhile I threw something out there – I’ve forgotten what, but at any rate it was something minor, a word of no consequence, but judging from everything it must’ve been in a nasty voice, for Marina, who had not noticed me at all up to that instant (it only seemed that way) turned around and hissed: ‘It’s always you…You’re at the root of allllll of it!’ Danilo, I presume, thought that all of Marina’s pugilistic fury was going to shift to me, so he boldly, incautiously (doubtlessly) said through clenched teeth: ‘You whore.’ Then Marina’s blow landed, from the side – on his neck, his ear, his temple. Everything was wrong: this whole trick: Marina had a right to her life, to her husband’s hands, to Netochka, and, to be sure, to her own ass. But in the very next moment the two of them were going at it for real, yanking each other’s hair and shoving each other towards the stove (what fiery desires!): I wasn’t needed; but I, apparently, was affected: I dashed out of the kitchen to look for Marina’s husband; I found him down at the beach (getting a tan) and for the next half an hour I tried without any success to convince him that he needed to make use of his influence over Marina.

The next day, Danilo took off for who-knows-where. I went back home. But Marina and her husband still went over to Ljubljana to see Jaglika and those relatives. That was just the beginning. The remaining year that the four of us lived together in Svetosavska Street saw daily fights. Typically, Danilo would say something about Marina’s husband – something so insulting that the latter, following long-established habit – would disappear that same instant (second or third bedroom, the balcony, or the street), and then Marina and Danilo would exchange a few words before finally actually having it out. I behaved the same way Marina’s husband did, with one difference: I didn’t leave right off the bat, but I also didn’t get involved. Later, Marina claimed that everything was my fault. That summer, while on their visit at Jaglika’s, Marina managed to get several things done: everyone believed that my influence over Danilo was both obvious and sick, they knew very well where that came from, that is, from which side of the family and from which people within our family; furthermore, they all believed that my malice bordered on madness and that this was all connected with Marina’s bottomless unhappiness. When they departed for Milan a year later, Marina and her husband, Jaglika came back from Ljubljana as fast as she could. It was on account of Danilo, as she said later: ‘Don’t imagine that things were bad for me there. They took care of me like I was the apple of their eye…Everything revolved around me…with every one of them offering favours…But I came back because of Danilo…You’re a bullshit-nik just like he is…That much I know for sure.’

The ‘he’ here was my father; Jaglika would always talk like that. It was simpler: he, him. And by the way, those relatives in Ljubljana could hardly wait to have Jaglika off their backs.

For the first few months, Danilo spent a lot of time in Milan. I was also rarely at home; and Jaglika picked up a brand-new pursuit: she played cards day and night with this strange old man on the ground floor. Later on, the old guy died, and Jaglika was angry that I didn’t go to the funeral with her. She got to know his relatives (who turned up on account of that ground-floor apartment), lost her marbles and kept inviting them repeatedly for coffee, and for this, and for that. These folks (husband, wife, and niece) regularly accepted Jaglika’s invitations – in fact they didn’t ever leave the house, I ran into them all over the place and at every time of the day – in the morning, in the evening, in the middle of the day, in the bathroom, living room, dining room, kitchen, in front of the front door, next to the door …

One night when I kicked them out, and things got all theatrical: shouting, oaths, curses, raised arms, it turned out that they knew everything about me: both the seen, and the unseen, the fictitious and the real; and more of the fictitious: the whole building hummed with various little stories. In fact Jaglika slandered me to the old man’s relatives. This pure phantasmagoria: my hundred-year-old grandma, and those folks with their primitive physiognomy and needs to match, and me, their only connection, their reason for existing. Naturally, just this didn’t frighten off Jaglika. She simply moved to the ground floor; and my threats to send her to Milan to be with Marina, or to Ljubljana to ‘those super-duper relatives of yours’, came to naught. She didn’t stop chewing the cud with those ground floor dopes, for months, and even the building next door lived and breathed various little stories about morality and immorality. Then one day, these folks (the husband, wife, and niece), simply vanished, and I assume it was because they lost some court battle about the apartment. Jaglika came back depressed, and quarrelsome, and jumped all over me whenever I uttered a word; once again nothing was good enough, I was a bullshit-nik, a gypsy, a bum, and a ‘super-whore’ and ‘that girl’ and so on and so forth …

In the year 1970-something, everything was the same, or similar, which is the same thing when you’re watching from the side-lines. My isolation was supplemented by letters from an anonymous author, about whom nothing was known: sex, age, inclinations, desires, origin, occupation, and the rest, but especially the rest – as is the case with all unknown authors, despite which everything appears to be authentic, so the only thing that’s questionable is the fabrications of all kinds of (anonymous authors in all epochs; in all lands) in essence trivial people, although it is customary to think of these people (anonymous authors) as paranoid – which means danger, and to think of shutting them away, for example, in a prison or in a hospital or in both. Vespasian’s letters appeared like a bolt from the blue; I don’t know any other way to explain it; it’s not necessary to explain it any other way; after all, Vespasian was himself a heavenly figure, and as for what objects become intermediary (postal-postmanly) there’s no use racking one’s brains about that! Doubts and, generally speaking, various outbursts of rationality and scepticism in regard to divinity, the heavens, heavenly figures, and letters, are not advisable, even if a letter is unnecessary; even if Vespasian is a pure fabrication. In any case, my reading of his letters, (which always arrived bearing no signature, with crumbs, fingerprints, and stains on them), can’t be anything but superfluous to the same degree. No more or less so, exactly the same amount: identically so.

The Roman Vespasian was probably given his name by his mother; my Vespasian got his name according to some sloppy principle of association, occurring at the same instant, that is to say, when the letter arrived. It was so imbecilic and without imagination, like when someone unexpectedly gives you a Maltese terrier. What’s the point here, and where are we going with this obvious insufficiency of imagination? One night (around the same time that this first imperial letter came in, if it wasn’t that exact same night) I slept with a guy I’d picked up when I was wasted, in a café or on the street, I can’t remember anymore. For the most part guys like that weren’t so awful; however, when you take into account criteria of a more serious nature (which assumes that I rule out all sentimentality aimed at myself), he was incomprehensibly bad; but despite that, and some other things (sweat, stink, and stupidity) he was simpático, with his little pale red member, his large, protruding lower teeth, and his eyes that bulged just a touch; he was charming, despite being a dimwit, and after all what would intelligence mean to him in life – a big dick or at least a thick one, maybe, but brains? And that’s how this name came to be, not because I thought that night that I was sleeping (I imagined) with Vespasian of Rome, by means of mysterious powers, but simply like this: a cheerful bucktoothed pope (the newspapers were chock-a-block those days with news about the pope) and then all at once boom – Vespasian.

I had found a solution to my paranoia: at the bottom of every letter I placed the signature: Vespasian. Sometimes in Cyrillic, sometimes in Latin script; I was thinking that in that way anyone (but then again, who?) who might be searching with the pedantry of the police through my drawers, folders, and boxes, might get confused and thrown off the scent for at least a moment; he would have to wonder, at first, whether this ‘Vespasian’, sometimes Cyrillic and sometimes Latin, in both printed and cursive letters, now in red ink, now in blue or black, whether this wasn’t some code and a subcode of that same code, and, then, whether or not I myself had written these letters to myself, or whether I’d written them (me again) with the intention of sending them to someone, and so on and on …

Roman Vespasian had received, at the start of his imperial career, pulled out of a drum, like on a game show, Africa; later he fell on hard times and dealt in mules, but I’m willing to bet that at that point he knew an empire awaited him; he could tell everyone to fuck off. My Vespasian is an invalid; in his restricted province of life he has issues with his daughter, his wife, and himself, which is incomparably harder: the arc is smaller and, logically, the prospects are too. That other Vespasian had firm, short limbs, while this one of mine mentioned in several letters that as a young man he was tall, slender, smart, and handsome. Neither one of them should be believed.

Vespasian’s letter:

Dear Lidia,