Читать книгу Dogs and Others - Jovanovic Biljana - Страница 7

II

A famous Yugoslav poet, a woman, well known in those days, in my house, in my room, while Danilo and Jaglika were sleeping; she had hung her polyester panties on the highest hook on my clothes-tree; she lifted her skirt part-way up (exposing her huge flabby thighs) and headed off to the bathroom; her lover lay on my bed, a man twenty years younger than she was, and hence a little older than me, with a low brow, a conspicuously low brow, and with long, bowed legs (that’s all I was able to see since the rest of his serviceable body remained under the blanket); the poet hadn’t shut the door, neither the one to the bedroom nor the one to the bathroom, and thus Danilo, who, judging from everything, hadn’t slept a wink since the two of them had entered the house, found her bent over the sink, with her legs spread (maybe under the sink!). There he stood, thunderstruck, and then he sprinted into his room, embarrassed, frightened; he stared at me, goggle-eyed (I was seated on the floor) and at the poet’s lover on the bed, and then back at me, and slamming his door shut, he ran into his room without uttering a word, not even one letter of a word, not even a sound, without anything really (God, it was as if he’d been struck dumb by horror). In a little while the poet came by with her hitched-up skirt, asking for a towel.

That night I slept in Jaglika’s room, on a mattress; on the floor; right up till morning I listened to Jaglika’s diligent snoring, whimpering, and the grinding of her teeth. I was convinced that all this wasn’t coming out of her toothless mouth. Instead, the noises were souls, the souls of her Montenegrin-Hungarian ancestors, which, like all species of Hymenoptera, obdurately, annoyingly, the whole blessed night (the lamp on the table near the head of her bed was turned on – Jaglika was afraid to dream in the dark, and incidentally so am I) flew circles around her head, and from time to time around mine, probably remembering that I am Jaglika’s descendant. In view of the fact that my grandmother, with her Hymenoptera, the lamp she left on, the quinces beneath the radiator, the sputum in the old newspapers four thick under her bed, was in the other part of the apartment, I couldn’t hear Danilo’s creeping about or his pacing, clearing his throat occasionally (like the kind in movies about fear and terror) in front of the door to the room in which the poet and her lover were sleeping. They were going to tell me all that the next day. Among other things, that Danilo at least ten times during the night (so the poetess said, but poets, male and female, love to exaggerate of course) opened their door all the way and just stood there, every time, in the door-frame, immobile, for several minutes (that’s what the poet said: several minutes) and, she said, for that reason the two of them couldn’t sleep a wink. At first they called out to him to come in, they turned on the light; the poet said she had not seen such a beautiful and spectral boy for ages; I told her that he would be twenty-nine this fall and that he wasn’t a boy, but she reiterated: ‘The little guy stared with those enormous eyes of his and he stood there, just stood there so awkwardly!’ Danilo does have bulging eyes, but otherwise, cross my heart, and cross something lower if I have to, there were a lot of things about this that mattered to her, but that doesn’t matter.

That day they left at noon; the lover rubbed his watery eyes, offering me at the same instant his other hand, small and perspiring, but warm; the poet was visibly angry, and she didn’t say goodbye, but Danilo said, from the doorway when the two of them were in the lift, happily, serenely, like he was hitting a ping-pong ball their way: ‘Why didn’t you go to a hotel? It definitely would have been more to your liking there!’

But then, in the very next minute, I hear the poet’s voice from the street: ‘Lidiaaa! Lidiaaa!’ I ran down the stairs (I could have broken both of my legs). There was Danilo, dear God he was down there, how’d that happen so fast, just a moment ago he…

He was standing there clinging to her chubby upper arm like a little child as he said over and over, stuttering, with spittle on his lips and an incomprehensible plea in his bulging eyes: ‘Why don’t you come by for a visit… Why don’t you drop in…’ and then, catching sight of me: ‘Lida, tell them, tell her, Lida…’ The poet smiled, a touch maliciously and a little bit like a bad actress; the lover stared at Danilo like at a rabid (dangerous) but pathetic dog.

All that day Danilo kept on asking me, at short intervals, ‘Why didn’t you tell them? Why didn’t you say it, Lida?’ Not completely certain of myself, and pretty much exhausted, I replied that the poet and her lover had just left, a moment ago, or two hours ago, but for Christ’s sake really recently, and what could he want now, anyway, he had walked them out, he had seen them off all nice and proper, the poet and the lover with the officer’s cap pulled all the way down over his low forehead, and now they’ve probably gone to a hotel, or on to another city; ‘For God’s sake, Danilo, you told them to do that yourself!’

That’s when Danilo’s feelings of abandonment started to grow: he ran after unknown people in the street, he turned people back as they left our building, he called out to them from the window, beseeching them, making them swear, acting like a cry-baby to get them to return, to drop in on us; and all of them save Marko (Danilo’s friend from senior and primary school) shook their heads (as if they were sages), swaggered about and thought and stared the same way the poet and her lover did: this boy is ill (pathetic dog), this boy is dangerous (mad dog), and they stopped coming by. He asked the taxi driver who drove us to Mira’s place (she was Danilo’s pretend girlfriend) whether he loved him, to which the taxi driver wisely replied that he basically didn’t have any reason to hate him, and that for him Danilo was a customer just like any other customer. Danilo insisted that the man come up with an answer about loving him or not, which was for heaven’s sake nothing if not appropriate, since the question had been whether he loved him or not, and not whether he had a reason to hate him. Later, when we had arrived (after a few minutes), as I was rummaging about in my purse looking for money, Danilo said to the taxi driver: ‘I should introduce you two. This is my sister Lidia.’

He locked himself in his room for days and nights on end. He didn’t go out, at least during the time I was at home. Jaglika, near the end of her days and on the verge of dying, with thoughts and memories that were twenty years old, or fifty, and then twenty again, asked: ‘Where has my Dankitsa gotten to? I haven’t seen him since he was only this big, you know?’

And then came a switch: for the whole day, when I was off at the library, he sat with Jaglika; and when I came home he didn’t budge from my side, until late in the evening – he’d fall asleep in my bed with his head squeezed up against my back. In the morning he’d be awake before me, and a long while before Jaglika would start to shout from the other side of the house: ‘Lidiaaa!’

As if he hadn’t slept at all, his eyes were opaque and yet again, too big, prominent.

‘In which bedroom can I take cover?’

‘Huh? Danilo, you’re in a bedroom.’

‘You don’t get it at all … Anyway. What room do I go to? Don’t play the fool here.’

‘Danilo, I’m in a rush to get to work. Go to sleep.’

‘But really, Lidiaaa… I’m asking you. What’s wrong with that fat old bag-lady in there?’

‘What are you ranting about? What fat lady?’

‘Don’t even pretend like you don’t know, Lidia!’

‘Listen, Danilo, I’m gonna be late for work.’

‘You’re always urging me to love people but I can’t love them and that fat woman can’t do it either, just so you know. Not even grandma can stand it anymore, in case you were wondering.’

‘I’m in a hurry, Danilo. Good grief. I’ve got no time.’

‘Why are you shouting, why are you always shouting, Lidia?’

‘Put a sock in it, you idiot. Go see what Jaglika’s doing! Off you go now.’

‘Hold on, Lidia. I told you, and Baba will tell you, that she’s not going to put up with that naked fool any more, just so you know. You’re always dragging them into the house and nobody can stand it any more. And by the way that woman’s a whore.’

‘Stop it you jerk that’s enough!’

‘Why are you screaming…Why are you screaming?!’

‘Go check on what grandma’s up to…’ and with that I slammed the door behind me; Danilo’s yells followed me to the front door of the building, and as I was running across the street, I could hear him, probably from the balcony now (I didn’t turn around) as he roared and cursed.