Читать книгу Dogs and Others - Jovanovic Biljana - Страница 9

IV

Jaglika has stopped walking; of course I didn’t doubt that Satan himself had knocked nails into her from her hips down; in all truth. I was forced to call up Marina, our household god, who always knows everything – especially when it’s a matter of missing leg-power, doctors, cemetery clerks, politicians, connections, and money. And so, Madame Marina telegraphed this in response to the long and totally helpless letter that Danilo and I wrote: ‘Find someone, will send money!’ That was it. What divine simplicity and efficiency! But even gods, especially household ones, have been to known to fly off the handle (the divine head through a wall of plaster) if they haven’t thought things through thoroughly: a couple of days after the first telegram, a second one followed, completely Epimetheus-like, and even sympathetic: ‘I will pay half the costs and Lidia half love you all mama stop.’ Whatever else she was (and she was a lot of other things) the household god was a skinflint, a miser, a tightwad, a piece of shit, a scum-bag. I believe that my life would have been five thousand times easier if Madame Marina had already just gone ahead and died there in Milan, of a severe (once and for all) heart attack (from which there’s no return) and emancipated me (sweet Jesus!) from her efficiency, her villainous joie de vivre, her money, and other stupid shit like that. Efficient people, regardless of whether they have political power or that of a prostitute, and that’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, are the lowest wretches that tread on the surface of this earth, many, many times more miserable than those miscreants who dream of this power, who desire it. And then (if my mother died from that severe attack of her heart), I would telegraph to Marina’s husband there in Milan: ‘send money for funeral stop’ or, for example: ‘I will pay half and you half, down payment necessary, cemetery admin does not work for free, expenses for transport for you to pay, stop.’ But I know, I know very well, that my mother’s husband would read this telegram with a scornful grin, one of these two completely hypothetical telegrams, and he’d see everything through to completion himself, and then afterwards make conspiratorial comments along the lines of ‘the daughter takes after her mother that way.’

I ran an advertisement in all of the existing city newspapers; I inquired of several people whether they knew of some fool who would, for minimal pay drive, walk, and clean up after a hundred-year-old creature who is worn out but eager to live. Naturally enough no one answered the ad. Danilo began to panic: he searched, he turned the whole house upside down, removed all the drawers, shoved all the boxes out of sight, to find the non-existent addresses of non-existent relatives. Then a guy turned up, Čeda of Rečica (Little River). He nodded his head, kept saying ‘No sweat’, addressed me as ‘Miiisss’ and called Danilo ‘the young fellow’; but he was the sweetest of all to Jaglika (but good Lord, there’s no comparison to the sweetness of the sales clerk downstairs in the grocery store): ‘How is the lady of the house todaaay?’ (He always drew out the last word, and the penultimate one, too)… ‘How’s granny doooing?’

As soon as they got to know each other, Jaglika told Čeda from Little River that all women are whores, especially those who don’t look like it, and that he should be careful, and watch his back. Čeda nodded his head, rubbed his palms together, and exited Jaglika’s room without saying a word. Later, pretending to be a troublemaker, he said to Danilo, ‘She’s a dragon-lady, that one.’

He came three times a week, always right at the agreed time; this Čeda the Flow got on my nerves. He’d wait and give indulgent little laughs, sweating, his shoulders always hunched over, while I combed out Jaglika’s five hairs, put on her shoes, searched for her scarf, glasses or purse. And on it went like that, exactly, for a month; the little ring at the door, Čeda’s hunched shoulders, a smile like posing for a police photographer, Jaglika’s shoes, her coat or her glasses, whatever. On the same day that he’d done everything for the short, fat (if only in her legs) and spoiled Jaglika and then left (he always hunkered over her, with his shoulders hunched up), he would also call up on the telephone after an hour or two and say: ‘Miss Lidiaaa, know what I forgot to tell you? Our charge had three servings of apricot juice today, and she went to the bathroom twice, and afterwards, you know, she forgot and left her glasses in Košutnjak where we had been, and I had to go back. That’s going to be more petrol for you all…’

And so Čeda of Little River demanded, received, calculated, thanked, hunched his shoulders, retracted his head, and repeated pointlessly: ‘No problem whatever you say Miss Lidia, everything is just fine, goodbyyye.’

Then he disappeared; he wasn’t around for an entire week; Jaglika complained to Danilo about the dirty house, the closed windows, the hideous food, poison in the coffee, and how she was strong and would somehow manage to survive it all, I mean the poison and the stuffy air and the stink and all the other nonsense – ‘and whatever else occurs to that no-goodnik of a girl’. She convinced Danilo that I drove off ‘that fine upstanding boy’; so that once Danilo actually came up to me and asked, in earnest (it was just after I’d woken up), if I’d hooked up with Čeda the Flow – ‘Baba says guaranteed you attacked him’; she told him that I wanted, I really really wanted, to pluck that drawn-in head off his shoulders and then pluck out whatever else on him was drawn in. Danilo, who was naturally unconvinced that my hands were clean in the matter of Čeda’s disappearance (how had Jaglika turned him?) kept on asking me, the whole blasted morning: ‘But tell me, Lidia … Do you hear me Lidia – how come you won’t tell me?!’

A Picture from Childhood

I’d just come back from school; I remember that period for two significant things: I was unfathomably small in stature and I had the skinniest legs of anyone on our street, or in the whole school; Marina was actually honestly afraid that my legs would break, and she took me to twenty doctors and told me to be careful how I walked, and not to run at all. As for my growth, that was simply fantastical, like the little girl in this or that fairy tale, and I was the smallest girl in the entire city, and perhaps in the whole country – there aren’t, you know, any stats about height, the average height of children in those days, but I do know that in the fourth grade I still looked like I was in kindergarten. So here’s how I conceived of this story from childhood: I came home from school and found no one at home; I didn’t have a key; they never gave me a key – everyone in the house (and this included Marina’s pestilent dog) was afraid of bandits, informers, thieves, and other marvels – and, thinking that a key, once fallen from Danilo’s or my satchel, would surely, instantaneously be found by someone who would destroy us, kill us, rob us blind, Jaglika and Marina used to make us wait for hours out in front of our building. The other children carried keys knotted onto string, and their mothers put the string around their children’s necks or around their wrists, but most often around their waists. Marina shook her head and said, ‘That can be broken in a heartbeat and then … that’s all she wrote’ – whenever I demanded a key from her and a string to go around my neck or wrist. Her utterance ‘that’s all she wrote’ was unadulterated magic: in the same second I would imagine a whole horde of brutal people who thanks to my key (the broken string) broke into our home, smashing windows, the door, the dressers, beating Marina, Jaglika and Danilo, kicking the dog (I, of course, was spared, and none of these people touched me, and it even seems to me now that one of those imaginary guys gave me a wink, back then). Later I’d imagine how the neighbours would carry out a completely dead Marina, a battered and thrashed Jaglika, and Danilo, with a broken leg. And so out of fear of Marina, and not of these imaginary images, I utterly stopped asking for a key and a string. I waited more times than I could count in front the door; there was one time when it was terribly long, and I didn’t know what to do, and I felt like an entire day had passed without anyone turning up. I walked back and forth, around in a circle, back and forth again, with my hands deep in my pockets. I was trying my hardest to punch through my pockets (I was angry and totally powerless); sometimes I cried, most likely, like a superstitious grownup would do, because of Marina’s ‘that’s all she wrote’, and I rode the lift up and down thinking that one of them, and it would be Jaglika, had already shown up and was now hiding in the dark. She didn’t turn on the light in the apartment, so I couldn’t see her from the street and she was doing that on purpose because I bore a resemblance to my father, and she simply could not abide him, and she was constantly, constantly saying that she knew only one complete idiot on this planet, and she’d cross herself and thank the Lord that he was no longer with us. At that age I didn’t win any prizes for outstanding intelligence; I even looked a bit stupid – and I was, for instance, convinced that there were at least five entrances to our building, but only two actually existed – one off the courtyard and one from the street, but the one through the courtyard was, in addition, seldom unlocked. Such hesitations and similar bagatelles were readily visible on my face. It seemed that I, truly, was not capable of grasping that actually there was just one single entrance, and I kept thinking that someone, Marina perhaps, was definitely upstairs; having used one of the five entrances, and now she didn’t know that I was hunkered down in the lift wiping the snot from my nose on both sleeves. It had already grown dark; I was hesitating about where I should spend the night: the lift or the stairs, just to the left of the entrance. Finally they did come, but it was only after two days. I slept in the lift both nights. And when I ran into Marina’s arms, dirty and snotty, into an embrace in fact, because of that slight, thin electrical current running out of her palms, she pinched my cheek roughly, in the roughest way you could imagine, like a bandit, actually, and she said: ‘Don’t make such a fuss! You weren’t even waiting for an hour.’ Then I started snivelling even more than before, all over the existing smeared and pasty snot on my face: ‘I spent the whole day there and the whole night and then the whole day again and a whole night I slept alone in the lift and nobody, nobody came.’

Marina looked at Jaglika (encoded family glances) and said softly: ‘This child’s never going to stop lying. We’re taking her to the doctor.’