Читать книгу A Handful of Sand - Marinko Koscec - Страница 6

* * *

For as long as I can remember I’ve been a magnet for weirdos, both for those who are kept at a safe distance with that label, as well as people who live among us peacefully and pose no danger until something in them erupts, for no apparent reason, and seem to need my proximity when it starts. It’s as if they recognise some kind of essential stimulus, like kindling needs a lighter; then afterwards they stop seeking me out and don’t approach me again for years, if at all.

It began with Jelenko. I met him on my first day at school and immediately realised, with an instinct for danger like that innate to small animals, that it would be best to avoid him. He stared in front of himself, as pale as a ghost, almost transparent, obviously asking himself what he’d done to deserve such terrible punishment, as if he was carrying the world he’d been thrust into on his shoulders. Over time, this ceased to be dramatic and diminished to a melancholic resignation, but his air of absence never went away. He emanated it like a saint wears a halo–an absence so real that it was visible to the even slightly sensitive eye, as irrefutable as the body of a normal person.

He did much better at school than all the others, but you could tell how little it mattered to him, and you could forget about the earthly application of whatever brilliance he had. Therefore he didn’t provoke any great envy or disappoint his parents’ ambitions: everyone sensed he was useless for any practical purposes and left him in peace.

Jelenko’s lyrical dimension, the ethereality of his being, was where we differed; I’m rooted in the ground and only achieved good marks with great effort. But I am able to listen, and from time to time he had to speak his mind; early in secondary school he started dropping in and meditating about suicide. I would listen carefully, in trepidation, neither agreeing nor attempting to dissuade him, aware of how much his argumentation set him apart him from the kind of teenagerish ravings which make the enigma of death enticing, of how far he was from those who hang themselves because of a bad report card, breaking up with their girlfriend or being fat. Simply put, it was as if he’d been born not into this life but into an adjacent plane, which by some freak of nature turned out to be a dead end, and as such it was all the same to him if he was to cut his life short or wait for it to end by itself; he always had one leg in the other world.

He could discuss death endlessly. These were actually dialogues with himself, because I had nothing to say on the topic. Death is something certain and eternal, everywhere and at all times; it’s damn hard to forget that but even today I don’t have anything to add. Maybe he came to me with his endless monologues because no one else took him seriously; but how can you dismiss someone when they show so much passion, when they only seem really alive when talking about death?

One year after the summer holidays we had to write about an event we remembered fondly. Jelenko, in a solemn and moving voice, with a wealth of poetic detail, described the burial of his rabbit and the dignity and reverence with which his whole family consigned the body of this beloved being to the earth. While he read, and for some time afterwards, the classroom was oppressed by heavy silence, and the relief was almost palpable when the teacher stopped him from reading on, without a word of commentary.

Still, the next day she suggested that he round off his composition with a story about the rabbit–about the feelings which had connected them and those which the loss of the rabbit aroused in him, with the aim of entering him in a national competition. Jelenko gave her an anxious look, but she persevered, thoroughly mistaking his reticence for modesty, until he shrugged his shoulders.

In the extended version, the rabbit was an exceptionally sweet creature, hungry for love and capable of returning it. It hopped freely around the house, stood up on its hind legs and held out its little paws wanting to be picked up and scratched on the tummy; it even ate from a dish at the dining table. An albino with red eyes, it seemed to be aware of its own uniqueness and was only waiting for the day when it would start speaking. There was a special bond between Jelenko and the rabbit: it would always wait for him at the door and knew when he was coming; whenever Jelenko was sad, even if he was out of the house, it would curl up in its cage, no longer caring to be stroked or given any attention, and would fill the house with sadness. The composition made no attempt to explain why the boy decided to kill the rabbit, be it as an experiment or because he was deranged; it was simply presented as a fact. But the description of the act was exhaustive: when it proved too much to do it with a knife, he took a knitting needle and loosed it from his slingshot. He had to do this several times, but the rabbit didn’t budge or utter a sound. It waited patiently, as if with relief, for its destiny. The description of the funeral ceremony which followed now appeared in a different light and no longer had much prospect in the competition.

After secondary school, Jelenko surprised everyone by deciding to become a priest. I personally think that, rather than ‘hearing the call’, he devised it as a way out–a ruse for avoiding both earth and heaven in a refuge halfway. In any case, he never got in touch with me after leaving for the seminary, and his family later moved away. I never saw him again.

Goran, by way of contrast, was every parent’s dream: delightfully undemanding but not autistic enough for the psychiatrists. The kind of child you want to pat on the head, one to be seen and not heard. You could give him a lollipop and he wouldn’t ask for anything else for hours. Disinclined to tantrums even in puberty, there wasn’t a shred of rebelliousness in him.

We didn’t have anything much to do with each other until we were sixteen. He called on me at home, shyly at first, with various pretexts, but soon he came every day and stayed for hours. What connected us was mainly that we didn’t have any friends; each of us in his own way enjoyed the reputation of a freak. But our conversations went into just about everything sixteen-year-olds can talk about, mostly books, especially those which were too complicated for us or where we only knew the title. And about sex: insights into the best ways to bring a girl to orgasm, the most intriguing places to do it, the most exciting positions, the comparative advantages of a virgin or a mature woman, and the secret inclinations of brunettes and blondes. Having exclusively theoretical knowledge of such matters was no hindrance to us. In other things, too, Goran liked to go into juicy details, smacking his lips like a connoisseur and pausing after spicy remarks to leave space for my admiration. I was well on the way to accepting him, if not as a replacement for my father, then at least as an elder brother–a kind of spiritual leader.

And then, without any warning or any subsequent explanation, he broke into the Chinese embassy. At that time, I should emphasise, an ambassador wasn’t someone you could just bump into on any street corner like in our Croatian metropolis today; you had to go off to the then capital, Belgrade. It already exceeded the comprehensible that he got on the train one morning like he otherwise got on the tram to school, after one of the identical evenings we spent together, and I don’t remember us then or earlier having ever, even obliquely, mentioned Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mao Ze or feng shui, or travelling to the end of the night, or an acte gratuit. According to the version which leaked through despite his parents’ secrecy, he roamed the unfamiliar city until midnight, climbed the iron fence and silently crawled in through a window left slightly open, as if just for him. Today, the media would zero in on that act of pubescent stupidity and blow it up into an incident between the two countries, but back then one had to hide every eccentricity and white out the decadent blemishes on the moth-eaten garb of self-managed socialism. Besides, Goran hadn’t given rise to any suspicions of spying; apparently he didn’t touch a single document or try to open any of the drawers. He just sat on the floor and waited for the Chinese bureaucrats and then, without resistance, let himself be taken away by the police, who briefly and unsuccessfully questioned him before returning him to his parents.

Time stood still for Goran after that. He was briefly institutionalised and then discharged for treatment at home, which proved unnecessary; he never ran away again or was a risk to anyone. He neither went back to school nor engaged with the world any more, although a few years later he started leaving the house again. Today you can still see him when he goes out on his walks, twice a day, sometimes in the middle of the night: he’s become the walking landmark of the neighbourhood. His walks are different to those where a person is accompanied by a dog, or takes a trip into the countryside, or has an issue to ruminate on. He’s become a phantom with empty eyes and mechanical movements, and he stopped returning greetings long ago. Sometimes children throw stones at him. When he gets hit, he stops for an instant and a spark of surprise flickers in his eyes, a kind of smile, but then they disappear around the corner in a flash. The years have left their mark on him in a ragged beard which clings to his cheeks, and grimaces which distort his face, but sometimes it seems you could catch a glimpse of something enigmatic inside, perhaps truly Taoistic.

There were others similar to him, thank God, and I may mention one or two later. Them recognising me as one of their own was largely thanks to my mother. According to generally accepted opinion, she was one of the loonies of the benign sort whom people like to run into in the street because they’re sure to come up with something interesting you can share with your family or flatmates and therefore allow all of you to feel better, more normal, and convinced that the Almighty has had mercy on you after all. You don’t let people like that into the house, of course, but they only turn up on your doorstep rarely anyway, for example with the diabolical insinuation that you’ve poisoned their cat, which they don’t dare to speak openly but just shoot at you with their crazy eyes. To shoo them away you just need to reply in a calm, ever so slightly raised voice: Lady, just move along now. You don’t hold it against them because you’re compassionate and will soon forget the incident; you’ll continue to greet them on the street and inquire after their health, although you know more than enough about them already.

I’ve never seen a more good-natured, grateful creature in my life than the cat. I found her in the meadow which the neighbourhood children used as a playground and the households as a disposal site: a bristling black kitten with clotted, scabby fur, which for hunger and trembling couldn’t even miaow. It opened its mouth in vain, crying out with its frightened eyes. Mother very nearly jumped out of her skin when she discovered her beneath my bed, but that was the first of only two things where I didn’t give in to her so often extravagant demands: I wept and blubbered and rolled on the floor until I won permission for the cat to stay. Cat was her name because Mother refused to call her anything else, so in the end I accepted it. She slept on my pillow and brought me mice and little birds; I didn’t know how to explain to her that I didn’t want to share them with her. Periodically there was the problem of her offspring to deal with. The first time, while I was at school, Mother incinerated them in the woodstove. You can imagine what it must have sounded like because disconcerted neighbours called the police, and the rest was written in Cat’s eyes. For days she whined softly on the floor by my bed and didn’t care for the food I brought her. With the other litters, Mother categorically refused any discussion: What am I to feed them with? What?! she cried in such a desperate voice that I fell silent. At least she didn’t burn them any more. But she took them away in a sack and I didn’t dare to ask where.

It would have been an exaggeration to say that Mother ever took a liking to Cat. But when she was poisoned with something which made her vomit yellow mucous for two days before dying, she cried together with me. Cat used to visit the neighbours’ houses, and she particularly loved children. A week before the event, our neighbour Mr Kruhek gave Mother a telling off: the dirty animal had given his daughters fleas, he said.

On my first day at school, Mother made a name for herself by introducing herself to the teacher as my father. Classical Freudiansm; those aware of the situation might have seen their theories confirmed. For others it served as my first labelling, an indication of what kind of family I came from.

Father was a concept bound to rear its head sooner or later, precisely because it was so painstakingly suppressed, swept out of everyday use and pulverised–it was meant to lose all meaning. With exemplary obedience, I accepted Mother’s explanation that I was the fruit of momentary weakness, what she called an ‘adventure’, with a Gypsy who had only been in town for a few days with his travelling orchestra. When I started asking questions as a child, that story seemed as convincing as any other, but over time I felt there was too much nebulousness in it to want to correct it. The neighbours also accepted it, although they knew full well what I found out ten years later: that my father wasn’t a Gypsy at all but a man who had led an orderly life alongside them, had bought a little plot nearby and was building a house; but as soon as his wife’s belly began to bulge he chickened out of both challenges overnight, never to be seen again. Mother’s family–there was never any mention of the other side–had no ear for her version of the truth and soon all contact was severed; I didn’t meet a single relative from one side or the other until my grandmother’s death.

And so my mother’s romantic inspiration gave me the nickname ‘Gypo’. It was underscored by my astonishingly dark complexion, bristly black hair and deep, almost black eyes, which tended to arouse unease in people, the instinct to look away, more than the desire to explore what was inside. I was never ashamed of that nickname, least of all in front of those who used it to demean me and exclude me from their games; for the latter, in fact, I was grateful.

Mother’s Gypsy was not merely a caprice, however, but also a form of penance. For reasons which were never elucidated, she blamed herself for her husband’s disappearance and intended to expiate it. The collateral damage to me was of no concern to her. In one of her hysterical states, as frequent as they were arbitrary, she uttered with blithe ignorance of the consequences that I was a sorry case; she’d never wanted to have children and everything could have been different if she hadn’t got pregnant; and me turning out the way I did–the cross she had to bear–was God’s way of punishing her. Oh, the curse of my behaviour… That word embodied one of the root evils, which no gestures or avowals to the contrary could dispel. However much I tried to please her, and although my extreme self-consciousness in early childhood severed any inclination to escapades, her use of the term your behaviour designated my certain descent into a career of substance abuse and my predetermined, inevitable matricide.

God arrived in her life at the same time as me; until then she’d been involved in purely worldly pursuits, but thanks to my birth she found her God. From that point on she never missed Mass and worked tirelessly to equip the house with little holy pictures, statuettes and olive branches. She even lit candles and gave alms at church as soon she had a few coins to spare and our most pressing needs had been satisfied. At work she was rewarded for her spiritual zeal with a demotion–the Yugoslav state frowned on any religious fervour–although cause and effect were not spelt out. She was replaced as municipal cultural officer by the typist, a woman who never finished high school, and Mother was made her assistant. She bore that blow heroically, not flinching from her beliefs despite the objections of others. Her response was to opt out of any effective activity and spend the rest of her working life on go-slow, practicing quiet sabotage, until this was interrupted by the democratic changes in the early nineties; and her job was immediately terminated. Aged fifty-three, in the middle of the war, she found herself on the dole. The only other thing she could do, being a graduate accordion teacher, was to try and make ends meet by giving private lessons, but her skill was anything but appealing at that moment in history; in oh-so-refined Croatia, few things were considered as barbarously Balkan as playing the accordion.

Mother didn’t even try to arouse my musical talent, but God was number one on the agenda. I went through the complete torture of confession, communion, confirmation, saying the Lord’s Prayer before bed and going on pilgrimages to Marija Bistrica. The merciless woman even managed–undoubtedly through the magnitude of her sacrifice–to have me accepted as an altar boy. But that didn’t last long, thanks to the unavoidable difficulties caused by my sooty black head jutting out of the angelically white habit and my dark hands wrapped around the candle–it reeked of a Satanic diversion.

When I think back to my childhood, my first association is with smoke, not only from censers but also cigarettes. Mother smoked so much that layers of haze constantly hung in the house, around one metre from the ceiling, which no airing could dispel; she always had at least one cigarette burning, frequently more. She would forget them in the rooms and light a new one as soon as she noticed she had one hand too many. She got up for a smoke at night, too, woken by the lack of nicotine. Smoking merged with her being to such an extent that you no longer perceived a cigarette in her hand as an object; it could only be seen as an absence in the rare moments she wasn’t smoking–then Mother lacked something.

Towards the end of her religious phase, her devotion escalated to the point that she toyed with the idea of bequeathing the house to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That was the second and last time I stood up to her, threatening that I would go away and that she would never see me again. But soon afterwards she broke with churches and all taints of religion; it being a time when people started pushing and shoving to get in the front pews, when those who had once persecuted the Lamb of God now eagerly held their mouths up to it at communion, and religious devotion shifted from being a reactionary stigma to a guarantee of virtue and patriotism. Ostensible piety inundated Croatia to such an extent that even garments, massage chairs and luxury yachts were renamed with a Christian epithet. The Jesus figure on the cross at the bottom of our street repented for our sins day and night; his fans soon had him gilted and put up a little tin roof so he wouldn’t get wet. Really, hardly anyone had taken any notice of him before, and now almost no one passed by without instinctively crossing themselves: not even the drunkard who lived somewhere near the top of the street and left his bicycle there every time his heroism only sufficed to lug himself up the hill, nor the other Jesus fan, a tea-totaller who beat his wife so badly that she had to be rushed to hospital on at least two occasions.

After the changes, new traffic regulations were introduced in our quarter and a one-way sign was put up next to the crucifix, not a metre away. It’s at exactly the same height and has an arrow showing which direction to drive. I don’t know if the local authorities and their staff are aware of how fraught that semiotic combination is. Coincidental or not, you have to admit the message is powerful: passers-by are confronted with a crucifixion–a drastic reminder that the rules of the road are to be observed; and immediately next to it, following the stick-and-carrot principle, is an upward-pointing arrow showing what is in store as a reward for obedience.